King Heracles

by on December 3, 2008 at 9:14 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

Well, I let my Dad talk me into trying a two-player game of Successors. I was hesitant, because I could tell that it really needed four players to work right. However, he’s much more interested in the Diadochi than World War I, so we eventually went for that.

It does actually work decently for two players. It isn’t as good as with four, but it is still a worthwhile game. Since we had to start with pretty much a full explanation of the game, it took a while to get going, but play accelerated nicely as we went along.

We did the four generals option, and I got Perdiccas, Ptolemy, Antigonus and Craterus. This gave me a fairly nice starting position, mostly towards the center and south. My Dad got Leonatus, Antipater and Lysimachus giving him a very solid block in Europe and Asia Minor, as well as Peithon, out east in Media.

The ‘extra’ cards your supposed to draw to make sure that certain events happen with enough regularity only did something twice during the game. The relative positions ensured that I was the Usurper (thanks Egypt, that 6 points does a lot for that). Most all the fighting happened in Asia Minor. I claimed the King of Asia title fairly early, while my Dad nailed down the Hellespont.

From there it was mostly a slow retreat eastward for me. I could (and certainly did) win battles, but it was hard to keep the same concentration of force in the area as he could easily manage. The later parts of the game featured front-line armies of 8 units (the maximum before attrition sets in) with a combat value of 16. I generally had a bit more to spare, and was working a scheme to join one army with another, and then hit him with the combined force all in one move, but it had yet to happen by the end of turn 3.

The battles see-sawed back and forth a bit, but I lost Perdiccas in the first turn, which in turn led to losing Phyrgia (as it turned out, for the rest of the game), as I didn’t trust a minor general to win against the remaining enemy forces, and it took some effort to get Antigonus up there (everyone else was busy), as well as taking on Demetrius early in the second turn. I generally ended up defending behind the pass in Cilisia.

However, the threat I generated eventually led him to abandon the low-level sparring that was happening in the east (some movement and a lot of worry on both sides), and march Peithon west to Asia Minor. This led to me eventually abandoning Champion status at the end of turn two, as I besieged Ecbatana and took it, eliminating all of his influence in the east from isolation.

Turn three was a desperate race against the clock for my Dad, as I had control of the heir, Heracles, and we were nearly equal on Prestige (I was three below him due to Condemnation, but that was it), and I had a comfortable eight point lead in Victory Points (which was narrower than it had been…). This led to a risky battle that he lost, but was about his only chance to open things up enough to destroy my VP lead, even temporarily. As it was, I barely won, and he couldn’t come up with much else during the turn. So as of the beginning of turn four, I declared Heracles King of Macedonia, with myself as Regent.

Again, it worked surprisingly well as a two player game, and I’d be less adverse to playing it that way in the future. It was a good time, and, I think, a good introduction of Card-Driven Games to my Dad. (Not that I’ve played any of them other than Successors.)

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Philip the Lionhearted

by on December 1, 2008 at 9:40 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

…And we ended up playing the Third Crusade scenario for Onward yesterday.

After playing the small 2nd Crusade scenario twice in a row, it was almost startling to see the system back in it’s full glory. It really pointed up just how limited of a scenario 2C is. As it turned out, we both wanted different sides, and I ended up with the Crusaders again. (My Dad wanted to be on the defensive, and I wanted Richard.)

At any rate, the scenario picks up in medias res, with Richard I just arriving off the coast of Cyprus, Philip II having just arrived near Acre while the combined armies of Guy and Leopold sit and besiege Acre with Saladin encamped nearby.

Historically, Richard took Cyprus (from the Byzantines), landed at Acre, took over the siege while ill, fought off a couple minor attacks, took the city, headed south, won a deservedly famous victory at Arsuf, but was unable to take Jerusalem when Philip and Leopold left him to return to Europe; nor was he able to secure a peace that could guarantee the long-term viability of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Not wanting to disturb a winning formula, the major event of the first turn was Richard taking Cyprus. However, instead of proceeding directly to Acre, Richard then landed in the Holy Land at friendly (but neutral) Tripoli.

Richard eventually decided that the siege of Acre was well in hand, and moved north up the coast, taking Jabala as he went before stopping to assault Lattakiea. Saladin moved north, worried at the possible loss of Antioch and Edessa. In two pitched battles Richard defeated Saladin, allowing him time to take the city, and Saladin retired to get more troops and perhaps face someone a little less energetic.

Saladin came south, gathering a mighty host from various garrisons and arriving reinforcements along the way, and hit the Frankish army lead by Philip at Acre, where the siege was slowly grinding away. Philip was forced to retreat with moderate losses, ending the threat to Acre.

Fate intervened at this point, with a revolt in Hamah, which forced Saladin back north in a hurry with a minimal force. Richard would have liked to test him again with nearly equal armies, but was held up at Antioch. Saladin was, however, able to fly back south and resume control of his army fairly quickly.

Faced with an army too big to safely fight, and with Richard far away and with too small a force to face Saladin, Philip gambled: He marched around Saladin and down to Jerusalem as the rainy season started, which was defended by a small force under Taki. Too small for Philip’s combined force, however. Philip established a siege.

Richard tried to race down the coast to help, or at least do something while Saladin was distracted, but was stymied by the rains and the need to support his armored knights (3 AK + 1 army size +2 weather—soon +3—really slowed him down, even with a ‘5’ campaign rating to continue with). Saladin staged out of Jericho and attacked the Crusader army.

Saladin, however, was not up to his usual mettle, and Philip’s army stood its ground. In a second battle, things went even worse, and Saladin was forced to retreat. He had, however, accomplished his primary goal: Philip’s army was now too small to besiege Jerusalem effectively. Philip grimly determined to continue to ravage the countryside and assault the walls, to force Saladin to continue bleeding his army against him, while the other scattered factions of the Crusaders collected themselves.

And then fate intervened again. Saladin launched a third attack against Philip and again failed to dislodge him from Jerusalem. However, Saladin himself took an arrow in the eye during the battle, and died shortly thereafter. With no effective Saracen leadership left nearby, Philip was able to carry the walls of Jerusalem during the winter of 1191. This ended the game, and no doubt left Philip as the primary figure of the history books.

It was a very good game, and exciting all the way through. I considered my move to Jerusalem to be very risky, but worthwhile if I could avoid any true military disasters, as Saladin’s larger army would bleed down faster than mine, and would allow time for Richard to collect a slightly more effective force as Saladin was pretty much forced to react to the game-ending threat. Continuing after the siege had failed was a gamble I was pretty sure would backfire, as if I took the city, Philip would either have to defend outside it anyway, or let Saladin assault when the walls were still only worth ‘1’, making it easy to loose the entire army. Saladin dieing was extremely unexpected, especially as both Saladin and Philip had rolled ’11’s for the leader loss check in the previous battle.

Anyway, the next game will probably be on Tuesday, and I’ve been pressuring my Dad to try out Pursuit of Glory—we’ll see though.

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Forward to Glory! (But Not Victory)

by on November 30, 2008 at 10:25 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

Well, the annual vacation with my parents has started out well. Weather on the way down alternated between sunny and warm, and overcast and threatening. But, no actual rain, and traffic was pretty good other than along I-210.

Took care of the main tech support duties yesterday morning, helping a neighbor with her machine, and getting the wireless network up and running again here. No big projects, thank goodness.

So, yesterday afternoon, me and my Dad played the 2nd Crusade scenario from Onward, Christian Soldiers. It’s the smallest, shortest and simplest of the scenarios, and therefore a good introduction to the two-player play of the game. Since my one other play of the game was as the Saracens, and I consider the Crusaders to have the tougher lot in the scenario, I took the Crusaders this time.

I deliberately opened with the same move as my opponent’s last time had been: Move the combined armies of Jerusalem, France and Germany up from Acre to Tiberias. It’s possibly slightly cautious, but it helps keep the Saracen player worried about Damascus without possibly triggering a shattering confrontation right away, insuring that the initiative in the south stays with the Crusaders, and hopefully keeping the Mosul Turks from spending all their effort in the north.

From there, things ran quite differently. In the north, things looked pretty good for a little bit. But I was unable to roll well, generating a horrific number of ‘1’s for formation in the opening battles. Meanwhile, the Saracens rolled well; the classic tale of a western army falling for a feigned retreat and getting smashed in a counter attack played itself out all too often in this game. Still, I kept the armies largely intact into the second turn, slowing things down a bit.

Down south only saw limited maneuvering at first. But Unur of Damascus eventually headed north to help with the situation up there. As a couple more battle reduced the armies of Antioch and Edessa to a point where they weren’t much of a threat to anyone, he ended up heading south again. By this time, Baldwin and Philip VII had moved to the gates of Damascus and were besieging it, and Conrad was holding Tiberias, planning to move up to Tripoli and joining the small army there. However, he got off to a late start (last chit in the cup), and was defeated by Unur (still couldn’t roll a good formation, it was a fairly even battle otherwise).

The final turn and a half was mostly clean up for both sides. The Turks spent their time trying to claim the rest of the County of Edessa (and barely made it), Unur made a try at Jerusalem, but when he realized he had 4 chances in 36 (needed really good assault rolls), he headed to Damascus to get rid of the French army there. For once, the Crusaders stood firm, and Unur was unable to do anything. However, I had screwed things up, and the siege had ended the turn before due to the army strength going too low (largely due to desertions–the only event roll that did anything during the game). Meanwhile, Conrad and the other leaders had been busy with ravaging cities and taking Homs, Hammah and Shaizar.

So, at the end the score was 7 to 22. I had nearly gotten another 10 for Damascus, and Samosata had nearly held out (good assault roll at the end of the game), which would have given me another point, and lost the Saracens 3 for a possible 18 to 19…. I’m definitely convinced that the Crusaders have a much harder position in this one, not least because it’s much easier for the Mosul Turks to shift between the two different theaters than for the Crusaders. If I hadn’t so consistently lost battles that were winnable, it might have been very different, as Edessa and Antioch have just enough forces to be a problem for the Turks, with careful handling.

Anyway, I’m down here for a bit, and I think we’ll end up playing the Third Crusade scenario soon.

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Breakdown in the Fast Lane

by on November 24, 2008 at 11:44 am
Posted In: Life

A few days ago, I was gifted/donated a computer. It would have been thrown out otherwise, and featured a better processor than I have, so I was happy to take it.

Examination waited for the weekend. Physical work waited for Sunday, as I had to get a longer-shaft phillips as the heat sink was screwed into place, and I needed to thread through the fan blades, and on one side needed clearance for an adjacent support bar of the case.

Mostly it’s a wash. I haven’t been able to determine the type of video card it has (has an nVidia logo, but none of the various serial numbers or part numbers have turned up anything in a search). The board is direct from Intel, and should be pretty solid, but it has no SATA ports that I can observe, and only 1 GB of RAM on board (my system has two). However, my current processor is an early 2 GHz Pentium 4 (second generation, the first Socket 478 chips), and this had a late-model 3.4 GHz Pentium 4. As my motherboard is comparatively recent (bought new when I built Haruhi a couple years ago), it is capable handling the chip (which is still on the same socket).

Or, at least, its supposed to be able to take it.

The swap out of chips between the two systems went very well. The only problem was that when I tried swapping out the graphics card, to identify the new one, I got a bunch of errors. I figured it was just a problem with that, deferred it to a later date, and started testing the new chip.

It’s surprisingly good. WoW has never been great on Haruhi, and as Blizzard has been adding more flash to combats and upgrading the graphics engine, its been getting slower. After getting the boost to 2GB of RAM, the primary culprit was the aging GeForce 6200. But with the new processor, WoW was looking pretty good. I still need to try out some of the places that were really causing problems, but some initial tests in places that had lots of NPCs around (the practicing swordsmen in Shattrath have been the bane of this computer) looked really good.

For about 5 hours. Then WoW crashed.

I’ve had crashes like this one before. In fact, I had them about 3-4 times a week at one point. But WoW crashed again a few minutes later, and the system rebooted.

BSOD on reboot. Screen full of errors on boot to Safe Mode (failed). BSOD on boot to the Win2000 console straight off the CD.

At that point I knew I was in big trouble. I tried all sorts things: disconnecting the hard drives, swapping out RAM…. BIOS reported the chip was nice and cool. The original error is pretty rare. The only references I could find to it were on sites in Japanese or Czech. Other errors (it started cycling through a number of BSOD errors) were clustering around the primary buses, and made me worried that I might have actually blown my board.

One thought was that I might need a BIOS update for the board to handle the new chip. However, MSI has put all their updates under a new updating system that means you don’t have to go through the entire process of flashing the BIOS through a floppy (which is exactly what I wanted to do), and it does a nice job of auto-detecting your board and current BIOS version. But you have to be able to boot the system for that, and they don’t let you at any of the support materials for other equipment….

So, finally I swapped the chips back. Maybe Haruhi would work again. If not, I could get the other box running and transfer my data hard drive over to it.

Haruhi booted.

This was a relief, if still annoying. Checking with MSI showed that I had the latest BIOS, but my chipset drivers were old. Since that would impact the types of things going on here, I updated them, and pulled Haruhi apart for one final try.

So far, so good. Considering the amount of time it took for the original collapse, I’m only cautiously optimistic, but with any luck, I’ve got it beat. I’m a little concerned about if I ever need rebuild the install from scratch…. And the plan is to build the new machine (with the old chip) into a backup machine, and then I’ll get rid of Utena, which has been sitting in a corner in case anything bad happens to one of the main machines.

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Three Paradises For the Price of One

by on November 10, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had the gang over for gaming yesterday. Mark, Patch and Zjonni came over for another go with Conquest of Paradise. While it had taken an entire session last time, the plan was to play the basic game the first time (as Zjonni hadn’t played it before), and start using the advanced rules assuming we managed a second game.

For the first round, I drew Raiatea, and got to watch the struggle in the main island area while getting pretty good draws for myself. Zjonni as Tonga did a very nice job of assembling a good military force, and slowly working his way west, into the preprinted islands with native defenders. However, they also have villages to start with, and he was quite willing to sacrifice units to keep them all up. Patch as Hiva had trouble finding much good land, and I put a few small stacks on the border to guarantee that any adventurism would at least be expensive.

Mark, as Samoa, had some very good exploration and was emerging as quite a power. I kept up with him for a while, and then starting falling behind. I had to continually keep reminding myself that it was because Mark was generally turning up his culture cards soon after he bought them, and I was keeping mine face down. There were a couple of turns where I thought Mark might hit the magic 23 and end the game, but his growth finally slowed down as fighting erupted. I finally ended the game by hitting 19 and then revealing 5 VPs worth of cards (three 1s, a 0, and one that was worth 2 to me).

I don’t think they’ll let me do that again.

After lunch, we started a second round with most of the advanced rules in play. I drew Samoa this time, with Mark opposite me as Tonga. To a large extent, the game was dominated by the fact that Mark drew New Zealand early and laid the free second tile down. He managed his little empire quite well, and built up faster than I did, pushing me off Samoa late in the game, which also helped seal his victory.

That went quickly and we still had a fair amount of time left, and so proceeded to a third game. I drew Samoa again, with Patch opposite me on Tonga, Zjonni out on the edge as Hiva (for the second time in row) and Mark on Raiatea. This game had some of the most lopsided chit and tile draws of all three games. Zjonni found the bulk of the 1-knot open ocean chits, and did not encounter much land until the north edge of the board, where I was expanding.

Tonga (Patch this time) once again found New Zealand early. It is interesting that in the two games where we’ve used the second-tile rule, it has appeared near its historical location. I found a decent number of small islands, and had some trouble juggling between colonizing them, building up a military and keeping in the card race.

Part of the plan was to work my way into the western areas, and develop a route into the back area past the traditionally well-defended Tonga. By the time I was getting in range, Patch had Tonga and each of the hexes of New Zealand defended by stacks that were about as big my entire possible force. Considering that Mark was also trying to find a way to break this up, he was pretty determined to stay on the defensive, and kept us from risking anything big until the end of the game. I came in second, but my position was coming apart as I just couldn’t manage the resources I needed in that area, and Zjonni was starting to eat into my undefended north.

There was some around the table talk about balance and other issues (including speculation on how good my poker face is—not something I was going to answer at the time…). It seems like the tile draws should be reasonably even in the long run, but today the west side of the board was consistently doing better geographically. When your entire area is poor it’s hard to afford the ability to take much away from anyone else, and the east side can get really isolated.

Personally, I’m wondering if the two-tile New Zealand rule is too powerful as not only do you get a four-spot island, you then guarantee access to a three-spot island. It seems like it would be a great focus for conflict, but both times today it appeared in the south-west corner behind Tonga, which really limited the possibilities.

The current plan is for a day of two concurrent games of Commands & Colors: Ancients. This will take a bit of juggling, as we’ll only have Mark’s set available, but with a little creative scenario picking it should work out. If Jason is available (giving us five), we’ll try a five-player Soldier Kings.

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