What a Week it Was

by on August 16, 2010 at 10:29 am
Posted In: Life

It all started on Monday. My dad called Monday night with a computer problem. This, quite thankfully, is quite rare. It was also in the middle of me being online with Patch finishing off my latest defeat in ASL. >.<

Anyway, he had picked up a really obnoxious scareware program, that had also locked off access to the internet. It was very easy to find out which one it was, but the recommended cures did not get it back on line so the program could rooted out with a dedicated utility. (The settings that it changed were easy to reset, but it still didn’t get back online.) Eventually, I thought to have him revert to recent restore point, which put the system back in a state before the scareware was installed. This thankfully worked. Two hours gone, I stayed up a bit late, and really dragged on Tuesday.

Getting home, there was good news, packages from Amazon and NewEgg had arrived. Amazon was a couple of books, which I don’t get to buy too often. NewEgg was my new mouse (I have been struggling with a mouse with an intermittent left button for entirely too long) and Smudge’s copy of Windows 7. About four days is a nice improvement over the three weeks that the last package from NewEgg took.

And then Smudge’s machine, Micca, died Tuesday evening. It was technically operating, but suddenly it was taking forever to load programs, and there were a lot of slowdowns inside of programs (like changing zones inside of WoW); all the while, the CPU was sitting at 1 or 2% activity. The file system had finally blown up again, and it was taking forever to retrieve data off the drive.

Micca had died less than two weeks before I had blocked out time to rebuild Micca—hopefully into an all new machine. I had recently inherited some some parts (motherboard, processor, RAM) from a friend at work, and about I knew about them is that they were on a more modern platform than Micca’s (Socket 939 to AM2). Sadly, the parts had spent some time just hanging from a doorknob in a bag (on an active door…). So, I traded out the parts (including a more modern graphics card that we inherited elsewhere) and started it up. The power came on, the fans started up. But nothing else happened, and I could hear a fan constantly spinning up and down.

Something was wrong.

Trading out video cards for a more primitive one got rid of the problem with the fan (was probably the video card fan, then) but still nothing else. The motherboard was quite likely dead. I contemplated just buying a replacement board, but the first thing to do was to find out just what kind of CPU was under that heat sink. Sadly, it turned out to be a single-core Athlon 64. It’s a more modern chip, but at a lower speed, and with half the cores of Micca. So, it’s back to the old hardware. What to do with 4 GB of DDR2 RAM…?

So, Micca is back with a new video card and Windows 7. Same hard drives, with a wipe and rework, so that will bear keeping an eye on. Win7 did mention that the data drive (the one with all the blowups) had an unsupported version of NTFS. Yeah. Okay, no more third-party partitioning software, even if the OS is refusing to see the entire drive (the original problem that led to all this frustration).

The hardware took up Wednesday, and Thursday was the initial install of Win7 on Micca. Friday night was raid night on WoW, which went smoothly, though the microphone wasn’t working yet.

Friday was also when we found out our rent check bounced. Everything had gone exactly as it should, except my deposit into the house account had gotten a 10-day hold on the check. Saturday had a fair amount of time wasted with me going back and forth, trying to figure out what happened, and getting a money order made and delivered to the landlord. Wells Fargo says the money went out of the account on schedule on the 4th. Chase is saying that Wells held it. >.<

Considering that I saw the money go out of my account on-line during this period, and the records are in accordance with Wells, I’m believing them over Chase at the moment.

Oh, and I spend three hours on Saturday trying to get Smudge’s Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro to work properly. I eventually found someone on the Creative forums has been working with the installers and getting all the old driver packages to install properly on modern systems. That got a lot of more detailed control panels, and some utilities I’m not familiar with active. The ports on the external box are active, but the controls, like the volume knob are not working. *sigh*

But the rest of the hardware is active and working now. The software install is still going on. And I need to find time (real soon now) to get her Mozilla profile fully active (including email).

Sunday was wargaming with Mark. Partway through the morning, my dad called again. Internet access was out for both my parents. Thankfully, it was pretty simple, and a reset of the cable modem and router sorted it all out.

This morning, I’m dealing with the fact that my work has moved from Outlook to Gmail en mass. I can’t say I’m happy with it, but there are some logical reasons for it. Hopefully, this will be the end of the computer emergencies.

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The Great Illyrian Empire

by on August 9, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Got the gang over for gaming yesterday. Had a full house—6 people! Went for the group’s fifth game of Advanced Civilization, which is always appreciated.

I had considered taking Babylon, as I haven’t played that position yet and Patch has been doing well there. But I drew fourth for pick order, and it went to Jason. The northwest was unoccupied, pushing me towards Thrace, Illyria or Italy. I took Illyria to grant Africa (Patch) some room, while making Italy untenable, while they might show up if I took Thrace. Mark took Assyria and Zjonni (running slightly late) took Crete; Dave had taken Egypt first thing.

I went my usual grow to maximum potential and delay the initial cities style, which is aided by the late Early Bronze Age barrier for Thrace and Illyria. I headed south into Italy, and east to the Black Sea early, expansion into Greece took a while longer. Crete split its attentions between Cyprus, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Greece, so that worked out well for me. Jason ran Babylon on a dense, small model that stalled territorial expansion and left a lot of area up for grabs. Africa sailed north and took Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, while we battled for control of the southern half of Italy for much of the game.

I was the first target of calamities, drawing Volcanic Eruption first, and then getting hit by it again a few turns later, where it killed Rome a second time, and Patch got in to build on the site for the third try, which stayed there for the rest of the game.

I was free of the big disasters after that, though I was the primary on Famine twice and Epidemic once. I got up to eight cities early on, and then stabilized at seven for most of the game, getting back to a fairly stable eight right at the end. This was just behind Egypt, which built up well, and was stable at nine cities for a good number of turns. Seeing Dave as the primary threat, I picked on him with disasters for a couple turns, which weakened him nicely. Then he drew Flood which kept him down for the rest of the available time.

The previous Flood hit Babylon, which was still centered on the starting flood plain, and this knocked him down enough that he never recovered fully. Everyone else did okay, mostly staying at around six cities. I did fairly well by trade, and was one of the first into the Late Bronze Age, despite a relatively late barrier for it. At the end, I was starting to turn up the discount machine, having gotten Engineering and had really good bonuses in orange and green to power my way to nine cards. I still needed to get a red Civ card though. Zjonni bought Architecture, which we haven’t payed much attention to, and was showing the value of building cities from out of the treasury.

In all, most things went my way, no real major fighting (good, because I was in the half of the table that didn’t have Metalworking), and none of the civ-destroying calamities came down on me. For once the emergencies more-or-less stayed with my ability to keep on top of them. Dave was doing even better in that department for most of the game until the three turns of disasters, ending with the Flood caught up with him. Assyria, Africa and Crete were all in a tight little pack, with none of them able to get a true advantage going.

Final Scores:

Side Player AST Cities Civ Cards Cards Treasury Total Place
Africa Patch 1000 200 365 0 5 1570 3
Illyria Rindis 1000 400 530 21 6 1957 1
Crete Zjonni 1000 250 260 7 6 1523 5
Assyria Mark 900 300 320 14 15 1549 4
Babylon Jason 900 200 215 9 3 1327 6
Egypt Dave 900 300 470 17 6 1693 2

Dave’s been on a good streak lately. He often worries about not being as good as the rest of us, but he won in Blackbeard last month, and put in a very solid performance for second as Egypt this month. I’m happy because I finally got a win after four straight seconds. Now I don’t care if I fall on my face next time, I’ve got my win. ^_^

We hope to get another game in in a month, before school starts up again for Zjonni. No real idea what we’ll play yet though.

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Tiger Leader

by on July 20, 2010 at 9:01 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark came over Saturday for gaming. It was his turn to pick the game du jour, and he for a game he’d gotten some years ago, and never got a chance to play: East Front Tank Leader. By John Hill, it is a late ’80s design focusing on the command and control aspects of tactical warfare, with platoons for individual units.

We went with the first scenario, which is supposed to be representative of the German drive on Prokhorovka. The set up is a little odd, with the first Russian force setting up within so many hexes of the victory city (determined by 2d6 roll), and alternating formations after that with the dice roll determining how far away from enemy forces you could set up. We ended up with one Russian brigade in the victory city, most of my forces south and slightly east of it on the same side of the river, the rest of the Russians in an arc around me to the east, and my last force on the road west of the city, needing to cross the river to get in.

All formations (companies and above) have a card, which is used to activate them during the turn. When a card is put down, it can be interrupted by another one with a better C3 rating. Somewhat oddly for game turns that are ~10 minutes, a platoon can either fire or move. This led to some early caution, since I wanted to move into the victory city, but was worried my PzIVs would be vulnerable in close range city fighting before they could attack.

The secret was the company of veteran Tigers that I had set up on a rise outside of town. Not only are they good tanks, but the veteran and morale bonuses allowed them to really dominate the action as Mark tried to move up to reinforce his company in the city. He was losing platoons at a rate of a little under three a turn, while it took a couple turns for me to lose anything.

I had expected that my two PzIV companies would get chewed up in the fighting against greater numbers of equivalent KV-1s and T-34s, but the Tigers had so much attention that this did not happen. I eventually lost one platoon of them, and two platoons of Panthers (oddly there was no special rule for the poor performance of early Panthers). One was lost guarding the ‘back door’ around the south end of the hill, while the other, and the Tiger, were lost to rolling a ’12’ on morale check, which puts it out of the game. (Actually, both of us got 12s more often than expected.)

By the end of the game, there were only about three Soviet companies left (out of eight), and more losses were taken on the final turn as he tried to charge in to claim some hexes of the city again for victory purposes (rules were just ‘occupy with an unsuppressed unit’—didn’t say there couldn’t be an enemy unit as well), and a final total of 3-1.

It’s not a bad game at all, and we’ll either have to give it another try, or go for one of the other games in the series (West Front, and Desert Steel). Though Mark just got in the reprint of Wilderness War and an AH copy of Hannibal, so the backlog is growing again.

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The Riches of India

by on July 12, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had the gang over for the monthly gaming meet yesterday. The arrangements went very smooth considering that we got it put together in less than a week….

Jason has just gotten his own copy of Blackbeard and was itching to play that. I insisted we go for the long game, as I found the short version disappointingly too short to get anything done. Things went a little slowly at first, as it had been a while since our last go-round, but it finished right on time for a full day of gaming, with no danger of it going overtime.

Three of us, me, Mark and Jason put two pirates on the board at the start. I specifically did this as I put one pirate off the very lucrative coast of India, and wanted to have the other to use until merchants actually showed up there. Dave on the other hand only put out one pirate, and kept to one pirate at a time for the entire game.

With a fair amount of attention in the Caribbean, I shifted up to the New England area, and caught a prize before anything turned up in India. The problems of limited actions caused me problems all game, but in this case meant the merchant went away before I could spot him (due to the reset in Natural Disaster). But another immediately appeared, and I took a 4000-gold cargo and a… Dutch noble. The latter was a small problem, as he was valuable, but there’s only three Dutch ports, and the only without an anti-pirate governor was in west Africa.

On the way there, I cashed in my prize in the Madagascar pirate port, undergoing involuntary Debauchery & Revelry… and as soon as I got it taken care of, I was hit with it again! (Going to spend all the booty before they get out of port….) It was a very happy crew that set sail to ransom the noble. After that, I set out for a nice retirement home in the Caribbean (there being a shortage of friendly governors anywhere else in the world).

That also had problems. I had arrived in west Africa about the time the deck ran out and was reshuffled. By the time I got close to my goal the deck was already getting dangerously thin. Right before I arrived, I drew the Finger of Fate, which wrecked my plans to get a Letter of Marque and retire by forcing me to discard one of them, and hand the other to Dave. So, I could bribe the governor. Then Jason went into the port, and bribed the governor ahead of me to get a Safe Haven. So, I had to set sail and find another governor, finally retiring a turn ahead of the end of the game.

If we had remembered how the General Pardon card worked before hand, I would have saved the effort and just turned myself into the local English governor in Africa when the time came. I did get a couple extra points for turning in a last cargo at a Safe Haven and getting the 10% bonus, but it was not worth all the pain of chasing after this for pretty much the entire deck of action cards. For the entire last 3/4s of the game, I only ever spared one action point for my other pirate, and couldn’t even spare an action for him to accept the General Pardon.

In the meantime, everyone else retired their first pirates about the time I was setting out on this saga. I had managed to get a King’s Commissioner out, but missed Mark before he retired, Jason retired before I could try to do anything about it. I did, however, manage to block Dave’s pirate in, and catch his ship as he attempted to slip into port. The ensuing battle was furious with good modifiers and die rolls on both sides, with Dave winning by a point.

My anti-pirate career did not do well in this game either. Dave got the notoriety of defeating a KC: 2 x 11 combat factor, driving him up to a Notoriety of 30. He decided to bribe the governor and retire on the spot.

I think both Jason and Dave managed to retire further pirates, but no one equaled the fame and riches of the first ones. At the end of the day, Dave won with 113 VPs, Jason was in second with 97, I made 85 (I had been worried I’d be stuck at 8…), and Mark had 53.

The single pirate method seems to be the way to go—with the possible exception of my plan. If I’d remembered the pardon, I would have avoided a lot of pain (at some risk to losing my pirate…). But sailing from one side of the board to the other is just too long a process to be contemplated.

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Here Comes the King!

by on June 21, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Well, uncertainty and schedule shuffling led to gaming this Saturday with only three of us. A little hemming and hawing led to us trying an old, little-known game Dave has on loan from his dad: The Warlord Game.

The idea is that each player is a Baron of a fief in a kind of generic European Middle Ages, and you are attempting to conquer further lands until you are crowned King, and can make it stick for a year.

As a late-’70s self-published game, there are numerous difficulties in the rules that show they were probably written without any recourse to blind playtest. However, the production values are pretty good, and it’s not too hard to figure out what to do. All of us found it to be a more interesting and fun game to play than we has suspected.

The map looks like it is meant for four players starting at the corners, but the rules say 2-6 players and to draw randomly for starting fiefs. This caused a problem as Dave and I ended up adjacent on one edge of the board, while Patch was in the center. More important than his relative remoteness was the fact that it allowed him to wall off the middle of the board and then start grabbing the far side of the map in peace.

After the first year’s campaigning, we were starting to come in contact with Patch, and the first battle of the game was where Patch destroyed an army of mine, routing me out of the rich province of Lippstadt near the center and taking it for himself. Dave however, managed to take Soust from him in a quick campaign, while on the opposite flank I found myself slowly driving forward towards Grounau as I tried to turn his flank and get into the backfield areas Patch had not yet claimed. The combat chart is quite chaotic, as I demonstrated when a 1-1 attack wiped out Patch’s defenders in tough terrain.

An interesting facet of the game is that your initial growth is very powerfully powered by taking fiefs. Not only do they help provide you with future income, but you receive money and new troops for each of the first 12 fiefs you take. The new troops are very important, as not only will they make the bulk of your early troops, but you can only hire troop types you already have access to. Want some archers? Sorry, but you have to get eight fiefs to get one. This accentuated Patch’s advantage as he gobbled up territories on the central road network and the size of his army swelled. But it’s a great mechanism to produce forward momentum and punish the tendency of players to ‘turtle’ in this type of game.

Also, your personal unit upgrades as your power expands and your rank goes up from 6-6 (combat-movement) Knight (really, a Baron), to 8-6 Duke (both Dave and I ended the day there) to 10-6 King and 12-6 Emperor (optional to victory). Patch managed to crown himself King with 12 fiefs (out of 17 needed for victory), which comes with a fairly massive royal army which was hurrying down the road towards me. I had a few turns to continue to solidify my position, but it was going to become a problem. We had to call it a day partway into the third year, and figured Patch would have won, though we were giving him a much rougher time than it had seemed we could for a couple turns and the fighting was far from one-sided.

All in all, it’s an interesting game of empire-building (always a good subject), with a few flaws that could be polished off with some effort. As is, it’s a pretty interesting game that we’d like to give a workout with the rest of the gang.

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