The First Punic Skirmish

by on March 27, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Well, ended up putting this one off a bit, mostly because I’ve been having shoulder trouble, and have been avoiding the computer.

But, last Sunday, had Mark over for our usual monthly FtF. It was my month to choose, and I decided it was time to tackle the big First Punic War scenario from Carthage. Thanks to the fact that it’s been a year, and it’s a bigger scenario, we only got through three turns. I had been hoping for a bit better, but we will be continuing this through Vassal

Since I had Carthage in the last go-round, I took the Romans this time. Carthage started with the usual opening of blocking the Straights of Messana, but the Roman consular army in Rhegium made it across anyway.

I then proceeded to fritter away my good luck by staying in the city of Messana when Hiero of Syracuse came up and accepting the siege. With the Carthagninian fleet blocking the harbor, my siege attrition was pretty nasty the first turn. The second wasn’t as bad as the Carthaginian navy didn’t put in an appearance, but two of the three siege attrition markers came up before any Roman LAMs did at all. Eventually, Hanno’s Carthaginian army came up after taking a string of towns on the north coast of Sicily, assaulted the walls of Messana, and slaughtered the starving defenders. He has since landed at Rhegium and taken it. The south of Italy is in a state of serious crisis.

The Romans aren’t doing nothing. They spent 263 BC building an 8-squadron navy at Cumae. This is larger than the entire starting Carthaginian fleet, so in 262, Carthage built an 18-squadron navy at Carthage. The good news for me is that any secondary port can handle my force, but Carthage is the only place the Carthaginian fleet can winter in. He’s more susceptible to poor die rolls, but until then… I need to stay out of his way.

Also, second Consular Army headed north to subdue cities that were friendly to Carthage. I took Genua, and have been besieging Massilia for the past year. Sadly, there are Carthaginian reinforcements in Massilia, so it has not been an easy matter.

I attempted to build a new Consular Army to replace the one lost in Mesanna, but only got permission to raise one legion from the Senate. A second legion was authorized during the year, but it was forced up to Arminum to deal with troublesome Gauls, and to settle the region with good Roman citizens [random event].

So, in two more turns, the automatic victory conditions kick in, and at the moment, it would be a Roman loss. It’s a loss that part of the Senate would not be too unhappy with, since the control of northern Italy is being assured, but that wouldn’t do me much good. My best bet at the moment is to finish up in Massilia and cause problems in Corsica. In the mean time, I need another army….

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Updating the File Server

by on March 22, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Posted In: Life

Well, I’ve been using Windows 7 for a couple weeks now, and I’m happy. It has fewer compatibility problems with older software than I’d been led to expect, the UI is (mostly) better, and so far it’s been as stable as a rock.

It’s also nice using an OS modern enough to know what all your hardware is on install.

The UI is nicely cleaned up. Some/all of this presumably came with Vista, but I haven’t really dealt with it. The min/max/close trio of buttons look far better than what XP did, and go to the top of the window (I find it interesting that this is the place I consider the major failing of OS X, since in any version I’ve seen, they ignore their own advice and make these tiny little gem-buttons that are hard to distinguish from each other or select). The taskbar now just shows program icons, instead of going for the window title. Not quite as handy, but those titles have been becoming less relevant over the years. Extra windows on a program are shown with kind of ‘pages’ symbol with the main icon. The neat bits are that hovering over one of these will show a miniature version of the window(s), and you can click on them to switch, or even close a window without switching to it (handy for ‘pop-under’ browser windows >.<). Now if they could just get those undeclared dialog boxes to show up there (I’m looking at you Adobe Updater…).

I’ve never been entirely happy with the double-pane style of start menu that came in with XP, but it’s not bad. The one thing that has changed this time that I’m not happy with is that hitting Start and then ‘up’ does not take you to the Shut Down command. More to the point, I’m not sure how to get there through the keyboard at all.

When I first installed it there were a few ‘compatibility patches’ in Windows Update, and last week another showed up. I looked at the info for that one, and it was a list of all sorts of older software that they improved Windows 7 (and other versions) ability to run. I noticed some productivity software, older educational software (which tends to have very long life cycles), and some games, a couple of which I recognized as being pretty old. This is dozens of titles in that one patch, a lot of effort is going into this, and it’s really nice to see.

The one thing that didn’t go well is that Win7 cannot talk to a Win2K system on the network. It’ll see it, it’ll see the various shared items, but the password protection/log in will not work. However, a Win2K system can talk to a Win7 system just fine.

Our place had three Win2K systems, Goriki (my old system, now replaced by the Win7 Horo), Micca (Smudge’s system, due to be put on Win7 in a few months), and Argentum (the house file server). We also have a NAS, which works fine with Win7, but migrating all the data from Argentum to Alexandria seemed too much like work. The other option was to get Argentum off of Win2K before Micca was upgraded and Smudge could no longer talk to it.

Since it didn’t need anything fancy, I figured that XP would probably be enough to get the network talking correctly, and I might be able to score an unused copy cheap. I mentioned this to, since I figured he would be a good bet at scrounging up something.

I didn’t expect him to drop an unopened XP box on my lap as soon as I mentioned it.

So, on Saturday, I worked on modernizing Argentum, which drove home just how old he is. Dual processor Pentium II with an absolutely creaky CD-ROM drive and the last InWin A500 case left in the house (my favorite, it has a slide-out backplane that I just can’t find in modern cases). I had already contemplated doing something about the hardware when I found a problem. The BIOS is too old to know what to do with a USB keyboard, so I couldn’t tell it to boot off the CD drive.

So, I pulled out Goriki and and rearanged his drives. At first, I tried using a leftover drive that had been skunked when the drive controller on Haruhi went, but the BIOS stopped seeing it after some initial success. A dive into the parts box came up with the old main drive for Utena (still tried to boot Win98), which I reformatted and turned into the new boot drive. Everything went fairly smoothly (some trouble getting Windows Update to agree to work with XP SP 1), and I plugged in the Library drive from Argentum.

I also renamed Goriki to Argentum, so none of the existing network mappings even realize there’s a new machine on. Since this is a fast Pentium 4, I think power usage will be up a bit, even from the two-processor system, but the fan noise is way down, which is nice.

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Windows 7 compatability

by on March 7, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Posted In: Design and Effect, Life

I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories about Vista and Win7 not supporting a bunch of older stuff, notably early versions the productivity software we use. Thankfully, it hasn’t been that bad, though I’ve got a bunch of Win95 and 98-era games that I don’t hold out much hope for.

Here’s everything I’ve found so far (for Win7 64-bit):

Current, free/open source software (should all be strictly up to date, and none of them have given any trouble):
Adobe Reader 9.3.0
Firefox 3.6
FreeCiv 2.1.11
FreeCol 0.9.1
OpenOffice 3.2.0
OpenTTD 1.0.0-RC1 (has a 64-bit executable)
QuickTime 7.6.5
SeaMonkey (nee Mozilla) 2.0.3
TeamSpeak 3.0.0-beta16
Thunderbird 3.0.3 (I just upgraded from the 2.x series, a lot of changes)
VASL 4.8.1
Vassal 3.1.13

Productivity Software: (the truly important stuff)
CorelDraw 8 – Installed fine. Need to test, and try updating. – Update: Went crash-happy fairly quickly and started crashing on launch. Now updated to X4.
Dreamweaver 8 – Installed and runs fine.
PhotoShop 5.5 – Installed fine. Have had one hiccup, looks like the system was just being slow.

Games: Organized by year of release….
1996
Age of Sail – Will not install *1
Command & Conquer Gold – Will not install *1,3
Command & Conquer: Red Alert – Will not install *1,3
Star General – Will not install *1,5
1997
East Front – Installed and runs fine (!!)
Heroes of Might and Magic Compendium (I & II+expansion) – Will not install *1
Imperialism – Will not install *1,2
Panzer General II – Will not install *1,2
Total Annihilation – Installed and runs fine – However, the two expansions refuse to install *1
1998
Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds – Installed. Game only works a lowest resolution (640×480) – otherwise it crashes when it changes modes. And it did crash once during play.
People’s General – Installed, has graphics problem where map does not display, only controls *4
Warlords III: Darklord Rising – Will not install *1,5
1999
Heroes of Might and Magic III – Installed and runs fine. Though it did advise I needed NT 4 SP 2.
Imperialism II – Installed and runs fine.
SimCity 3000 – Installed and runs fine.
2000
Starfleet Command II – Installed. Will not accept keyboard input for entering CD-key. (USB issue?)
2001
Europa Universalis II – Windows 7 warned of compatibility problems. Need to check on latest patch.
2002
Master of Orion 3 – Installed. Seems to run fine, Win7 was worried that it didn’t install correctly.
2005
Civilization IV – Win7 warned of compatibility problems. Installed, ran fine, and then I used the in-game patching service, whereupon it died. I need to reinstall without patching and try it out.
2008
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade – Had trouble with initial patching the first time, but a uninstall/reinstall sorted it out. Runs fine.

(This list will be updated with more titles for a while yet.)
1 cannot start or run due to incompatibility with 64-bit versions of Windows.
2 Error: Didn’t work: Result:216
3 The program, INSTALL.EXE could not be found
4 Win2K had this issue
5 Hitting ‘Install’ on the autorun menu causes it to go away, and never do anything again. No error is presented.

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A Year in the Making…

by on March 7, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Posted In: Life

Okay, I should have given this tale in installments instead of saving it up. But then I would have had posts with little more than complaining, which I detest doing.

It all started nearly a year and a half ago. During my 2008 trip to my parents, my machine, Haruhi, started acting up. You can read about that here.

I did get some warning, and received much-appreciated parts of systems from two people. Drew came through first with parts of a system a little more advanced than Haruhi had been, and I completed it by looting Haruhi’s parts and creating a temporary back up system, Goriki.

Goriki (It is surprisingly hard to find images of him.)
Intel D875PBZ motherboard
Pentium 4 3.4 GHz processor
2GB PC3200 RAM (looted from Haruhi)
eVGA GeForce 6200 (looted from Haruhi)
Sound Blaster Live (looted from Haruhi)
CD-ROM drive
WD1200 120 GB hard drive

That temporary back up system ended up being my machine for more than a year….

The other collection of parts came from Brian Delaney, and were much more modern… and as it turned out, much more problematic.

There was an Intel Core2 Quad and motherboard combo (nice…), a good, manufacturer-overclocked video card, a case, a power supply and two monitors.

As a quick time out, we had another computer adventure in December 2008. Smudge’s beautiful 24″ widescreen Acer monitor, which we paid $900 for died. For the second time. In three years. In fact, it seems to have had the same problem as the first time, the chip that controls the signals that propagate across a LCD screen to provide an actual image died. This time, it was just outside of warranty, and after a long phone call to Acer after an email went unanswered, it turned out that they had just stopped servicing monitors out-of-warranty. In their defense, my guess is that this is because they’re too busy servicing the ones under warranty to have any sort of decent turn around time. I got the clear impression from the people I talked to at Acer that they were seeing a lot of monitor issues, mostly dealing with the control chip. So: I don’t care how good it looks, do not buy Acer monitors, they’re made of fail.

With that monitor dead, Smudge was using my (17″ LCD) monitor, and I was on the emergency backup. Which functions, but but is very dark and has color issues. So, we went out and got a new LG W2241T 22″ widescreen monitor for Smudge (she does graphics for a living, she needs the better monitor, sigh) for a third of the price of the Acer.

And then two months later we got two monitors dropped on us. If only I had known…. One of them was a 22″ widescreen LG of the generation previous to the one I bought. I used it for a bit, but found it had color issues. Namely, some important light green and yellow colors were wanting to blend together on me (which happened to be a big issue for me because of my peculiar gaming habits: VASL boards use light green for normal ground level, and yellow for roads…). Eventually, I snagged the LG I bought from Smudge and put her on the 24″ widescreen Dell that also came in the deal, and it has been doing fine for her.

So, computer parts. The plan was to build the Core2 Quad system for myself, but put the new more powerful graphics card in Smudge’s Micca. Since it needed a a lot of juice, I put the power supply in the nice insulated tower case provided and transferred Micca from his old case to the new one.

Or tried to. This turned into a 6-month saga. The case uses drive trays and drive bays, and not all of that came with it. No problem, it’s made by Antec and they sell spare parts. The power supply has a thick rope of power cables for all the motherboard connectors, and then four plug-in slots for the rest of the power cables. It didn’t arrive with any of those. No problem, it’s made by Antec and… they don’t sell spare parts. I contacted them with what I needed, and made offers to pay, and they were willing to send it out to me free, when suddenly the rep I’d been talking to shut up, and I never got another peep out of him. Eventually, Drew came through with a spare cable of the right type he located, and Kris fabricated a couple more off of other parts. But that took a while to happen, after I’d had a couple other tries at solutions shot down.

But in the end, it worked, and Micca now has an overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS. I could now concentrate on building my new system, using the case that Micca used to be in.

Except that Micca had been having boot issues, and general software crankyness. So I did a reinstall of Windows 2000. That was a disaster. I had recently gone in and repartitioned the main hard drive, taking advantage of a bunch of space that Win2K did not want to take advantage of. What I didn’t anticipate was that while Win2K operated just fine this way, the installer became unhappy, and I lost the bulk of the file system on both drive C and D. The D drive (with the data files) mostly looked intact, but the files were worthless crap that would not open properly.

That made me think a lot harder about the fact that we were going to have to get off of Windows 2000 someday. The problem is that we have a lot of essential software that is nearly 15 years old now, that we can’t afford to replace. Especially while paying for new copies of Windows. Another motivator is that Smudge now has a dual-head graphics card, and we have a spare good monitor. But we can’t get both monitors on at the same time. My guess is that the Win2K drivers have never been updated to support it.

I built out my new machine (relatively easy, I just had to buy new RAM), installed Win2K on it (which proved it worked), and then let it sit. This was right as Windows 7 was coming out, and I decided that I’d wait for my next three-paycheck month, get a copy for myself, put it on the new machine, and find out just how bad our compatibility issues were. If we could work our way around all the essential software, we’ll get a copy for Smudge, and update Micca.

Affording it was made easier when I found out you could buy the OEM version direct from NewEgg. My copy of Windows 7 showed up last Monday.

So, at long last, meet Horo:
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Intel DX48BT2 motherboard
Intel Core2 Quad Q6950 3 GHz
3 GB DDR3 1333 RAM
GeForce 8600 GT graphics card
WD WD600AB hard drive
ST380811AS hard drive
Asus DRW-2014L1T DVD-RAM drive

I’ll be doing another post soon that will be filled with what is, and isn’t, working with Windows 7.

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Once I Had an Empire…

by on March 1, 2010 at 6:55 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Yet another successful game day yesterday. Got everyone over (6 people total) for Advanced Civilization on Sunday. Overall it went smoothly, and a great time was had. Someone really needs to reprint the darn thing.

In the initial picking, I was fourth and took Africa. I know I’ve played Africa before (in the dim time), and have vague memories of being pretty squeezed. So I played to an aggressively expansionistic policy, which went pretty well. Jason took Egypt, and maintained a compact, if dense, civilization the entire game.

Dave took Italy (he had the final choice), and was squeezed between me and Mark’s Thrace the entire game. Early on, he had more than enough trouble with a very aggressive Thrace that I easily settled Sicily first, and he didn’t try anything there until my first wave of disasters, and in the long run ended with control of much of southern Greece.

Zjonni took Crete and followed a course that I suggested might work (it had popped into my head the night before). I’m only used to seeing Crete build a ship on turn 4, sacrificing population to spread off-island. Building a city instead sacrifices more population, but there’s enough to maintain the city, and the taxation pays for the ships, meaning that there’s no continuing drain on the population for more shipbuilding, and you start building up trade cards slightly earlier. It’s probably best to migrate on 4 and build a city on Crete on 5, but I hadn’t thought it through, and was surprised when Zjonni actually did it. Any rate, after a slow start he went into Asia Minor, mostly staying out of the Italy-Thrace war.

Patch took Babylon, and spread far and wide with no immediate neighbors. We really need to stop letting him do that. However, he was a little slow building the initial cities, and got slammed by two Barbarian Hordes during the game, which slowed him down.

I note with some amusement, that except for trading out Assyria for Crete, this is exactly the same set of countries as our last 6-player game. It seems to me that having Assyria/Asia & Illyria instead of Italy & Thrace might be a better balanced set.

Between Sicily and the bulk of Sub-Saharan Africa, I established the first dominant empire, generally keeping one city ahead of anyone else, and getting some good trade sets to get set with good advances and make it into the Late Bronze Age. I dodged the first calamities and got up to seven cities for two turns before they caught up to me. I had been successfully cycling tokens in and out of stock, taxation and population, I was exerting pressure on the Nile valley, my attempt to colonize Cyprus failed, but I ended up with small colonies in Greece and the Sinai.

So I was the perfect target of the first Civil War of the game. Crete got a valuable shot in the arm, but the resulting possessions were too scattered to easily manage. After that, I recovered some, but then kept taking calamities that kept me off-balance while Egypt finally got its act together. I still had some high-value cards that allowed good trading opportunities, but I ended up keeping a Resin card until near the end of the game. Right at the point where my fortunes were lowest (soon after a Treachery and a Slave Revolt), Crete was hit by a Civil War… and I was the beneficiary. I got two cities (one of which had been mine…), and scattered possessions in th

Sadly, that happened a little too late in the day for me to get some real momentum back. After being the one in the lead of Civilization cards for much of the day, others were catching up. Patch got his eighth (out of nine needed to enter the Early Iron Age) on the last turn. So did I, because it was the last turn; otherwise I would have been better served to sit on my poor trade cards, used the Grain I had to soak up some of the Famine I was dealt, and hope for a real hand to buy two better cards on the next turn.

Final Scores:

Side Player AST Cities Civ Cards Cards Treasury Total Place
Africa Rindis 1000 250 580 3 1 1834 2
Italy Dave 900 300 300 25 5 1530 5
Thrace Mark 1000 200 410 1 0 1611 4
Crete Zjonni 1000 300 205 0 1 1506 6
Babylon Patch 900 400 590 13 0 1903 1
Egypt Jason 900 350 375 18 8 1651 3

For the fourth time in a row, I came in second. Patch has won three out of four games. The one time he didn’t win is the one time I had a civilization on his border. I think he’s been getting lucky with non-aggressive neighbors.

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