The Destruction of Austria-Hungary

by on March 20, 2012 at 10:54 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark came over on Sunday for a day of gaming. He’s been busy lately, and this was arranged on a fairly ‘last moment’ basis, but we had a good time with Paths of Glory, which is on the list of ‘familiar with, haven’t gotten a good feel for it’. We’ve both played Pursuit of Glory, so we know the system (with occasional lookups to make sure the two don’t do one particular thing differently), but he hasn’t played PoG at all, and I just have one partial game with Jason under my belt.

But things went very smoothly, and we got through 5 1/2 turns in one day with neither of us being familiar with the cards, or what we could expect from turn to turn. Mark wanted the Central Powers, and lead with the standard Guns of August opening.

When I played Jason (also as the Allied Powers), he suffered from shifting his focus around too much. He started trying to crush Serbia, and I managed to keep generating crises on all the other fronts that kept him shifting troops around and never finishing off any particular project. Mark did not suffer from this, but I’m not sure any coherent direction ever emerged.

The main action tended to be on the Western Front, but I would guess that with more activity and determination, this could have turned into quite a problem. Certainly, the first turn ended with destruction of the BEF and a flipped Belgian army retreating from Brussels. But I had made sure I had an Allied RP, and the Belgians moved back at the beginning of turn 2, soon followed by the British 1st Army. The “shot trap” of Sedan has proved quite deadly indeed, I pushed Mark out of there twice, nearly destroying a full stack in the process the second time.

Meanwhile, he had more luck at the southern end of the line. Belfort fell midway through the day, and Nancy a turn or so after that. Of the initial fort line, only Verdun remains. At least it is the site of my only successful entrench attempt, and so has a level 2 trench.

Meanwhile, the Russians had been steadily pushing on the Eastern Front. I had been trying to keep Mark somewhat off-balance and worried about RPs, but the Germans just generate RPs too easily (especially now that he’s played Rathenau). So I’ve been slowly sliding over to a policy of trying to drain the Austro-Hungarian army. The Russians advanced into Czernowitz fairly early, and played Romania early to extend the front line. After taking Lemberg and advancing into Przemysl (haven’t managed to destroy it in two siege phases so far), Mark finally reshuffled the entire AH army, abandoning Cluj, which I had been threatening to cut off for some time. As it is, AH is still thin on the ground, and is out of reserve corps, with 9 corps and 3 armies in the eliminated pile.

I got Italy on turn 4, and had quite a decision to make. Mark was not making particularly fast time towards Total War, and I contemplated burning it for 5 Ops and trying to cycle back to it in a hurry before going to Total War myself. However, this being Mark’s first time, there was nothing on the borders beyond the at start AH corps. So I played the neutral entry and besieged Trent and Trieste. A German army was hurried down and kicked me back out of the former, but Trieste has been taken. The GE 6th Army may become a major problem, but so far he can’t advance for fear of being out of supply.

And that’s about where things stand. I’ve copied everything over to Vassal, and we plan to continue in on-line sessions every Wednesday.

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The History of Central Eurasia

by on March 6, 2012 at 4:43 pm
Posted In: Books, History

Late last year, I picked up Empires of the Silk Road, as it looked very interesting.

And it is, I highly recommend it as an extremely well done history of a part of the world that most people just don’t know about from pre-history to the current date.

But—this book is not for the faint of heart. If you want some light informative reading, you will find the book overwhelming.

This especially holds true in the prologue and first two chapters of the book, where the footnotes and endnote references fly thick and furious. With all the flipping back and forth, and integrating the three different bits of text together, it can take over a quarter hour to get through two pages.

The reason for this is that for the early parts of the book, Beckwith is an expert holding forth on the more obscure parts of his field of expertise. He is well aware that almost everything he has to talk about hinges on specialized knowledge, and the footnotes and endnotes contain clarifications, and when he argues against the conventional interpretation, the general line of logic that leads to his conclusion.

That said, he does make some assumptions of knowledge. If you don’t know about linguistic reconstruction (and I’m lucky that I’ve run across it before), you’ll be wondering just what he’s talking about at many points, and what all those stars in front of words mean (which is a symbol for deduced, but not attested form of a word). As it is, many of the notes, and all of Appendix B, go pretty heavily into the field, and there are pronunciation glyphs I’ve never seen before.

Speaking of Appendixes, there are two of them, to go with voluminous endnotes, a Prologue, and a Epilogue. Appendix B goes into the reconstruction of the names of various peoples from Chinese sources, working out likely earlier forms of the names, and where those names can be equated with names in non-Chinese sources. Appendix A goes into his reconstruction of the initial diaspora of the Indo-European people, and the initial branching off of Proto-Indo-European into daughter families. I recommend reading it before Chapter 1, and Appendix B before Chapter 2, as they are heavily referenced in those sections. The Prologue is concerned with the “First Story”, which is a story cycle common to many Indo-European cultures (including the Romans) as a hero/foundation myth. The Epilogue is about the concept of ‘barbarians’ and how the modern conception of such is not only inappropriate to an understanding of the peoples of Central Eurasia (as he takes pains to point out during the book), but is inappropriate to an understanding of the original term, and some of original sources, but is especially inappropriate to use with Chinese sources, where several different terms for ‘foreigner’ that have little or no pejorative implications, are usually translated into English as ‘a kind of barbarian’.

The main part of the book is a history of Central Eurasia, or, more properly, the “Central Eurasian Culture Complex”. This history is delineated by broad cultural borders that change over time, not geographical ones.

I have to admit that there are large sections of the book where I am an unarmed man against some of his assertions. In general, I think his construction of pre- and early history are sound, but I don’t know enough to raise many objections. My main problem is that he seems to be a bit too strong of a Diffusionist for my tastes, asserting that the chariot was only invented by the Indo-Europeans, and allowed them to impose themselves on the various peripheral cultures.

The bulk of his book spends some time pointing the importance of trade, and the fact it is generally the peripheral civilizations that try to restrict trade, and the Central Eurasian civilizations often attack with the stated demand of opening up trade again. The Age of Exploration is looked in the light of one trade system (the Silk Road) being replaced by another (the Littoral System), with the current backwardness of the area resulting from the collapse of trade in the area.

The last couple chapters turn into a screed against Modernism. Again, I’m largely mentally unarmed against his assertions, but I judge he paints with entirely too broad a brush. He sees Modernism not just as a new movement that overthrew previous traditions, but as a movement that relies on overthrowing the old, and therefore has led intellectual life down the blind alley of continual revolution without trying to move forward with the results of any of those revolutions. He then ties that into to efforts of “Modernist” regimes to destroy the cultural past (as examples, the Soviet efforts to destroy religious community and the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan).

Again, I do highly recommend the book. I have some potential problems with it, but it is far more important than those problems. I would certainly like to hear from people who can talk to my concerns better than I can, but in the end it’s biases are fairly clear, and the value of a history that ties together the events of such a large area ranks very high, also the bulk of the most interesting points of the book have not been touched on by me here. Finally, the notes do a valuable service in pointing out places where further scholarly study are desperately needed, and I hope that some of these gaps are directly addressed in the future.

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R vs B Alliance Turn 7 in Review

by on February 22, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Posted In: BvR - The Wind

The Coalition failure in the Second Battle of Hydrax has left me a lot more breathing room than I expected, but there’s still a number of serious problems.

First off, the Coalition is in the middle of upgrading three BATS to SB in Alliance territory. This really surprised me, because of the expense involved, but while I can’t afford letting them all go up, because of the expense of killing them later, I wasn’t sure I could afford to take care of any the BATS now.

The Kzinti front was especially troublesome. Two of the three SBs were going up there, and there’s another BATS behind them. The real problem is that they’re all on the ‘west’ side, towards Lyran space, while my offensive has been directed towards nailing down the ‘east’ side, adjacent to the Federation.

In the end, the major Kzinti effort went to smashing the Klingon BATS/SB at 1202, though I made a stab at 1504, aided by Federation forces. On the Hydran front, another attempt sallied out to challenge 0416, and once that was pinned, several crippled ships transferred from the capital to the off-map area.


Kzinti Theater


Hydran Theater

The Klingon presence in Hydran space has become very attenuated, if I wasn’t desperate to stop the SB upgrade, I would have cleaned them out of Hydran space.

Combats:
1705: Klingon: crip F5L; Federation: crip CA
1402: Klingon: crip F5L
1506: Klingon: crip 7xE4; Kzinti: crip FF, capture planet
1105: Klingon: dest F5; Kzinti: capture planet
1504: Klingon: crip 4xD5, dest D5; Federation: crip 2xFF
1603: Klingon: crip F5, dest D6; Federation: crip NCL, FF
1202: Klingon: crip D7, D6, D6M, AD5, 2xF5, F5E, E4A, dest 2xD5, BATS; Kzinti: crip CV, 2xBC, 4xCM, MEC, CL, CLE, FF, EFF, dest BC, CM, CLE, cap D5
0216: Lyran: crip DD
0918: SSC, both sides retreat
0818: Klingon: crip D7
0416: Lyran: crip CA, 3xCW, dest BATS, CA; Hydran: crip LB, dest DG, HR

Altogether, things are going well. Two BATS have been destroyed, and a lot of EPs have gone down the drain in the form of incomplete Starbase upgrades. The Kzinti have taken neutral zone planet 1506 again, and reclaimed 1105, all of this should start contracting the Klingon budget, as the EPs from conquests is fading. However, the Kzinti fleet still took a fair amount of damage, and there’s only so far they can push before catching up on repairs.

A quick look at the numbers shows that Alliance ships are up from 191 to 214, but only because of released Federation ships being counted toward the total. The Kzinti are up 6 ships and the Hydrans are down 7. Meanwhile, the Coalition total is up from 333 to 346. This is entirely due to the Klingons; the Lyrans are down 12 ships from 100 to 88.

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Lost to the West—A Good Light History of Byzantium

by on February 21, 2012 at 2:20 pm
Posted In: Books, History

Lost to the West is a very good readable brief history of the Byzantine Empire, and I recommend it as such to anyone who would like to familiarize themselves with the subject.

However, the subtitle “The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Saved Western Civilization” suggests a particular thesis for the book, which it does not follow. Byzantine culture is brought up on occasion, as well as the rise and fall of education during various periods. However, ‘saving Western Civilization’ only comes in at the end with the population fleeing the Ottoman Empire, and bringing copies of various Roman and Greek works that had lost in Western Europe.

I’d kind of like to see a detailed look at just how certain works have been transmitted down from ancient times to today, but that is a specialized subject, and not part of this book. Similarly, there is only passing mention, at the beginning and at the end, of how ‘Byzantine’ history has been ‘lost’ to Western culture, not least because of how it has been somewhat artificially removed from ‘Roman’ history.

But it is good, light, general history, and if you enjoy it, I highly recommend the author’s podcast, 12 Byzantine Rulers, which was done to go along with this book. Conversely, if you enjoyed the podcast, you will enjoy the book.

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Out With the Old, In With The Old Republic

by on January 29, 2012 at 12:46 pm
Posted In: Life, MMO

Once upon a time, this blog was new, and I was just beginning write my thoughts for the benefits of posterity and anyone else who happened by.

Around the same time, something else was new to me: MMORPGs. I’ve been a gamer of various sorts for a long, long time now, but MMOs were something I avoided. And then a roommate got into WoW, and I fell into the trap a month later.

So, anyway, a lot of the early portions of this blog are posts talking about what was going on with me and WoW. As time passes, the number and frequency of these posts declines, until I stop talking about WoW at all. However, I didn’t stop playing WoW, or at least, not for years later. Meanwhile, the other major component of my posting, talking about the board games I’m playing, continues straight through to the present.

While I did not officially discontinue my subscription to WoW until December, I pretty much did not play it at all during 2011 (with some very limited exceptions). During last year, I did talk about WoW with Smudge a lot.

Both of us were unhappy with the game. This was probably harder on Smudge, who had invested more time and emotional energy into it than I had.

One of the things I wondered about was how much of what I liked about WoW had to do with novelty. For me, there will never be a ‘first MMO’ again. There will never be the process of discovery of how to go into an instance and be a productive member of a group. There are certain things where I can’t go back again.

A lot of that latter process is what my early blog posts on WoW are centered around, which is actually the second wave of enthusiasm for the game. The initial wave, was the general exploring the large expansive world, and all the different options the game presented. The wheels came off the wagon when my main hit about level 40. The world was too big, and I found myself struggling to remember where I was, what I was doing, or assimilate any new information, and getting very frustrated in the process.

Ordinarily, I would think that I probably would have backed off, and come back and poked at it as interest and spare time revived, and someday worked through it. However, Smudge and I were regularly playing together, and Dunain and Blanc were adventuring and questing together, and Smudge was pressing us on past my ability to keep up.

The arrival of some of our friends on the server, and the resultant activation of the guild, followed by steps into a lot more instances and group play, brought my interest back. Shortly after that, the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out. In retrospect, this was probably my favorite era. Some of the storytelling was coming together, the environments were great, and many of the dungeons were stellar (I still have fond memories of Sethekk Halls and ‘Fun Time!’, and heroics…).

After this, my enjoyment starts falling off. I spent a fair amount of time with Wrath of the Lich King, but I never got as involved. Dunain was there every week, he and Blanc spent forever going through all the questing (as normal). But I spent almost no time on my alts.

My primary alt for about three years at this point was Farmishi, a paladin who had always had something of a split build in back of her idea. Dunain had ended up as a Marksmanship hunter (even all through BC, when Marksmanship was largely ignored as not doing competitive damage with the other two skill trees—he still did well, and had the utility of various special shots), but with Farmishi I split between Protection and Holy, and found later that I had independently discovered what was being called the ‘Survivadin’: doesn’t do a lot of damage, but is extremely hard to kill.

I was proud of Farmishi. She could solo things that Dunain couldn’t consider. She soloed an instance boss once when the rest of the party fell over at the start of the fight. Really high damage she couldn’t deal with, but anything that relied on lots of low-level attacks was right up her alley.

And they pretty much killed Survivadin and, likely, all other reasonable cross-specialization builds in LK. Not directly, Cataclysm did that, with it’s insistence that most of the points you’ll ever have will be put into one tree before you can put anything anywhere else. So, I hardly played Farmishi at all. Everything that I’d spend years building up had been taken away. And I think it stopped me from doing much on the rest of my constellation of alts.

So LK was just the Dunain Show. (Or really, the ‘Blanc and Dunain Show’.) And there were a lot of good things in that expansion. But, it was harder to be happy with it.

Cataclysm ended up putting the problem into stark relief. Hunters were radically changed, which affected the last bastion of my WoW time. Now the general idea of creating yet another mechanism for how special abilities work (along with rage, energy, mana, and whatever it is that Death Knights use) is cool enough, and it is kind of odd that Hunters should be using magic… so conceptually, the idea is fine.

The problem is that Hunters went from having a system that required long-term management, to one that needed constant attention and management. If I wanted that, I’d already be playing a Rogue. Hunters went from a fairly satisfying class for me to a very unsatisfying class. Worse, my damage was awful, and I never did figure out why.

Not that doing less damage at higher level was much of a problem in most situations. Balance in Cata seems to be way out of whack, with world questing being insanely easy, tough dungeons being slightly tougher than world questing used to be, and heroic dungeons almost as tough as they used to be. The middle ground of challenging, but not insanely hard has disappeared right out of the game. This is a trend that started earlier, but really became egregious at this point.

Which is a shame, because the writing can still be pretty good.

While off of WoW, Smudge and I talked some. I have plenty of gaming interests, and spent some of last year catching back up on some of my primary interests in computer gaming. However, we were trying to find something to play together. There were a few possibilities, such as Trine, but there does seem to be a lack of multiplayer RPGs out there. (We tried playing Baldur’s Gate that way ages ago, but it started having blue screen errors where it was not recognizing that the disk in the drive was in the drive. I was tempting to try it again with the GoG version, which being pure download, should not have that problem.)

Over the years, we had tried out various other MMORPGs, mostly the free-to-play ones that have come over from Asia. None of them were very satisfying, and all tend to have okay combat engines, no real effort in plot or role. Kitsu Saga (the last we’ve tried of that sub-genre) was kind of interesting, since you generally pre-planned combat by setting up combos that would automatically cycle, and the crafting was done by giving little fox-spirits (Kitsu) jobs to do in gathering and crafting. You would also choose one to accompany you and provide bonuses in combat. For someone who doesn’t want a bunch of key-mashing (like me) it was somewhat attractive (and the fox spirits helped that!). The writing, however, was… not present.

Age of Conan went to a free-to-play model in 2010, and it did turn out to be surprisingly good. The art style works, the environments felt right, the writing was good, and the quest giving was especially nice, since it was all fully voiced, and you’d go through a conversation where you’d get plenty of choices on where to steer things, dig for more information, be rude, whatever. It really made the world come alive. Sadly, this is only true for the early part of the game (which I have yet to get beyond), after that, the voice acting stops, and the writing goes downhill. Also, the combat can be pretty button-mashy, since in melee you have to decide what direction you’re attacking from; surprisingly, I gelled with it fairly well (at least the lower level versions, it gets more complicated later).

Rift had a free weekend to celebrate the six-month mark of the game. They also offered the game for $5 that weekend. If I hadn’t been in the middle of the really tight part of the financial cycle, I might have bought a pair as a “just in case” measure. As a game it was very good, resembling a very polished and worked-over version of early WoW with extra options. The writing was ‘ehh’ at best, the quests were nothing new, and the monster design never got above ‘beaten with an ugly stick’. But, we were very tempted to switch over to Rift purely on the strength of the game engine.

And during much of the last year, Star Wars: The Old Republic was getting closer, and promising to be wonderful. Of course, we’ve heard those promises before. So, Smudge was staying cautiously excited, and I was looking on with a large dose of cynicism.

The best marketing campaign I’ve ever seen is BioWare’s open beta stress test. People got to play the game for free, and see just what it was going to be like. Smudge got in on it, enjoyed the early parts, hit the first instance and immediately said, “I’m getting this!” She got me in on the next (final) weekend, and yeah, it was good, it was fun.

I ran out of money at the end of the year, so I was a bit late getting the actual game. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it is very good, and I’m certainly going to get my money’s worth out of it.

Part of what makes it interesting is that it is an RPG first, and an MMO second. Much of the experience is very plot-driven. Each class has it’s own story, which you follow through to the endgame (or so I assume, I don’t know anyone who’s gotten there yet). You’re guided through the same locations (at least on a particular side), so there’s a lot of content that is the same, unlike some JRPGs where if you’re given a character choice at the beginning, each one probably only intersects with the others instead of paralleling them. This causes some trouble for going through several different characters (and their stories) at once, but it allows for you to group with friends (this is an MMO afterall), and experience it all together, which is one of the places where TOR shines.

Almost all the quests are given in voiced conversations, and I have to say the amount of work for various cues is impressive. There’s a lot of ‘yeah I see where this decision tree is going…’, but at the same time, NPCs will (occasionally) react to the character’s gender, or will acknowledge that he’s talking to a group. It’s some very impressive work, the bulk of the voice acting is quite good, and unlike AoC, it continues all the way through the game.

There are a number of places where the game is ‘just another MMO’, but at the same time, there’s a lot of ‘fun’ in the design. Going around with lightsabers is fun, playing a smuggler is fun (I understand that Sith/Jedi are the predominant classes, but whenever anyone talks about the classes, it’s ‘smugglers so much fun!’), the conversations are fun. Watching someone else’s combat from a distance is visually interesting (as opposed to just an exercise in recognizing the special effects going off).

So, I’m spending more time and thought on TOR than I’ve spent on WoW in years…. And I might talk about the ride some from time to time again.

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