The Battle of Cygnus VI

by on January 29, 2006 at 11:14 am
Posted In: SFB

After the failure to seize the Cygnus system because of the unexpected size of the Cygnan navy, the Kzintis started a campaign of consolidating their gains and cutting off the system from all outside help, while the lead fleet elements were repaired. To aid in this campaign, a raid was planned against the major ore-extraction facility of the system, located on an unusual moon of the major gas giant of the Cygnus system. Federation personnel in the system were just as aware of moon’s importance as their own repairs depended on materials that traced their origin to the same place. So the Kzinti raiding force was surprised at the size of the patrol visiting the installation when they arrived….

This was attempt to write-up and play a scenario featuring some ships shown in CLs 20 and 24, particularly one of the Cygnan designs, which only saw action in the opening stages of the Second Federation-Kzinti War. So, it was an assault on a fixed defense, as a home-brew scenario. Since I’ve never done any sort of base fight before, balance was unlikely. But it was fun. Worried that the Kzintis didn’t necessarily even have to engage the enemy ships to win, I put on a time limit as well as BPV balancing without including what needed to be shot up (do 200 points to one side of a moon). Besides, that made sure that it wouldn’t turn into a long siege (which would be an interesting project), and with the last couple of recent sessions dragging out on-line, I wanted a chance at getting this wrapped up.

Mark and Mike took the role of the fixed defenses and the defending squadron (a Fed FF and two Cygnan YDDs), while I had the Kzinti force with a CLC (Light Command Cruiser), 2 CLs and a DF.

The first turn was mostly approach, which happened at a much higher speed than expected. This put me in a good position to pepper the defenses and moon and have a decent double-wave of drones. (They should have been tighter, and I can think of how to do it better, but I’m still learning the basics.) The main problem is that I had not realized the insane number of ph-3s that build up once you get ground bases and defensive satellites into an area. As it was, some of the drones got pretty close, even without fleet support. If I had it to do again, I’d concentrate more on the DefSats during the first round instead of hoping I could get around them. I killed one, and could have easily killed a second (of 5), if I had decided that’s what I wanted to do instead of trying to score points.

So, the fleet ended up turning away at the last moment (after firing as close as they dared), and moved away with no more than a couple down shields and a couple ships with light internals. I turned and prepared to try again, with little hope of being able to do everything that needed doing with the limited time and drone stocks.

Then, the defending squadron put itself in the way, with the moon to far away to support it. The Cygnan ships turned off and towards the moon, which was really where they were needed. The FF ended up going toe-to-toe with the CLC. The initial exchange was okay. I ended up crippling the FF in exchange for moderate internals, but it wasn’t quite as dramatic a difference as I’d hope for with a FF absorbing fire from two ships (a CL being just a hex further away).

Mistake: I had forgotten at this point that the CLC uses the expanded phaser and disruptor arcs of the later Kzinti designs. I should have pumped an extra ph-1 and Disr into him, which would have really gutted the FF at that point.

After that, it turned into running a gauntlet of drones (which the Cygnans use) and shuttles left behind by the squadron, while I tried to position myself for one more salvo at the moon. At this point the CLCs wounds became terminal as various things pot-shotted through the down shield. If not for the time limit, it would probably be possible to cover it as it puttered away from the moon, as the two CLs were not so damaged as to be unable to keep YDDs cautious.

And the DF? Almost untouched, it bravely followed some of its drones in for a final shot at the defenses before turning off. A salvo at the beginning of the next turn barely brought it down to the point where it couldn’t disengage and could be run down.

So another failure for the Kzinti. Two ships gone, and two damaged, in exchange for one DefSat, crippling the FF, and some other minor damage. I’d call it better than Tug of War, but that’s about it. The scenario is agreed to be extra-tough on the Kzinti, but not bad as a first try.

With this, we move the clock forward again, and the next fight will be happening in Y138. We’re going to be doing a frigate squadron battle, as everyone is convinced that we need some practice with handling the smaller ships.

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Con Crud

by on January 24, 2006 at 10:03 am
Posted In: Conventions

Well, Further Confusion has come and gone…

Thursday was, for me, mostly hearing about eBay being slow about getting out of the hotel, and causing all sorts of havoc to FurCon’s schedule in the process. Me and Smudge‘s biggest contribution was getting BackBreaker’s custom set of panels set up for use as the charity auction’s display.

Friday started poorly, I just didn’t want to wake up properly, and my nose was a bit drippy. This got worse throughout the day.

That night was the first of three nightly panels featuring me, Smudge, Baron, and Dave. Friday’s panel was Getting Ready for the Con, or as the schedule renamed it, Con Prep. Overall, it went well enough, but attendance was very low. We narrowly avoided panel-itis. By the end of it I was doing pretty poorly, and I did my best to hold together through the night.

Saturday, I planned to stay home for the morning, get extra rest, and then come in for the rest of the day without totally KO’ing myself. I realized I was running a fever, and did my best to stay warm. However, I just couldn’t get truly warm, my toes insisted on sending ‘I’m freezing’ signals. Around 3:30 I awoke from a nap, cold, with a sore throat and slightly achy. I decided that the sore throat was probably from laying on my back and coughing. It was also possible that I was overheated from being in a warm bed next to a heater. So, I got up got on WoW with another heater nearby (and bundled up) to see if I could pull myself together. The sore throat faded, showing my diagnosis was right there, but I was still extremely hot when feeling my forehead and cheeks. By five I had admitted I wasn’t going anywhere for the day. Around about nine, I realized I was warm. Too warm. My toes weren’t cold. My forehead felt normal. Half an hour later I realized I was hungry.

The real bad news about the above, was that at seven we had another panel. This one on medieval history (our title, Between the Ancient and the Modern, was dropped). A subject I could really discuss, and not feel like I was a panelist because I knew all the other panelists. I had spent the last few months rereading books to try and have a few things more current in my head. And I was too sick to go. T_T I understand it went well, and I had been missed.

Sunday I took the morning easy again, and went in just after noon. I grabbed the two books I’d meant to get the day before (one from each bookseller present), and helped around the table. I carefully avoided promising that I’d make it to tonight’s panel, because I was still stress testing myself. Breakdown of the table and the associated workout didn’t slow me down at all, which showed I was pretty well recovered.

Sunday’s panel was Coffee, Tea and Memes (Smudge’s idea) where we sit around and yak about a subject (supplied by the audience) for about a quarter hour and then move on to another subject pulled out of the hat, while everyone in the room nibbles on cookies, coffee and tea. The last step of getting ready was picking up the order Baron had placed with Starbuck’s. Baron called to tell them we were on our way and we set off. When we got there, we didn’t even get to the door before we were intercepted by an employee and told ‘your order’s waiting’. That’s service.

The rest of the panel went just as well. The audience was a little small, but still a good size. They all reported being very happy with our experiment, so we will offer to do it again next year. The bad news was that Smudge has come down with what I’m recovering from.

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New Computer Excitement!

by on January 17, 2006 at 9:44 am
Posted In: Life

Well, Smudge finally got fed up, and determined a whole new main work computer was in order.

Not that there weren’t good reasons for this. The current incarnation of Desert Rose was put together from parts looted from a system given to us by a friend who had about a dozen of them sitting around after a boarder skipped out, leaving an impressive amount of computer equipment behind. The resulting system was pretty good, but not quite optimized, and maybe two years old at the time I put it together. Worse, the main hard drive was acting up, and causing system lock ups/BSOD during boot.

While shopping for a suitably impressive replacement HD we noted some impressive looking cases (with 500[!]W power supplies) and motherboards at MicroCenter for really nice prices. So we picked up a hard drive and IO card to prepare for the future with SATA, and pondered.

Having hooked us, BackBreaker’s credit was suitably reeled in shopping for processor, RAM, and Video card on Saturday (returning the unopened IO card). I took the credit-gotten gains and started assembly. The first sticking point: power. The motherboard came with four SATA data cables for all the on-board ports. The shiny new SATA hard drive came with one. No one thought to provide a converter cable for traditional power cables to SATA power connector. Ironically, I almost bought one initially, but realized the IO card came with one, and hadn’t thought about it afterward. Maxtor talks about some drives having a legacy power connector, but not this one. Chatting on WoW, Lance came to the rescue, and we dashed over to his place for the missing part.

Sunday morn, I finished off the new system by looting Desert Rose of required parts. Initial power-up and install of Win2000 went smoothly. This is something I’m not as used to as I’d like. When I’m dealing with collections of cast-off parts, I generally run into something that doesn’t want to behave. When everything is something I/we bought, it typically behaves. I haven’t had the money to truly build my own system since about ’99….

So after christening the new system Micca, Sunday was mostly dedicated to getting the system up and transferring files (via network) from Desert Rose. Initial WoW testing is very impressive. We’ll have to run it through the pit o’ lag at peak time (Friday evening) and see how it holds up. Oh, I also ended up going out for a couple of power connector Y-splitters. The power supply may have good wattage, but (other than the extra motherboard connectors used these days) fewer connectors than any other power supply I’ve seen, and I used up everything during the initial build. Considering it’s slated to get an auxiliary HD and an internal Zip drive….

Essential Stats:
Athlon 64 XP2 4400+ (Toledo core)
2GB RAM (they wouldn’t sell us 1! waaah!!)
GeForce 6600 (256 MB)
Gigabit Ethernet (if only there was anything else in the place to talk to at that speed…)
Audigy 2 ZS (taken from Desert Rose)

So today is my first day away from the new machine, and probably the day where Smudge tries using Hash (the real point of the system) on it. I hope he’ll play nice while I’m gone….

Once Micca settles in, and we finish finding and transferring odd bits of data off of Desert Rose, it is slated to be the new Sunshine, our Win98 legacy machine for the scanner.

Last night, I discovered a problem. The new Sunshine (not trapped in an <explicative deleted> funky HP case) will get the old Live Drive audio bay. The SoundBlaster Live! card that goes with it is missing. I have a sinking feeling that, against all intentions, it got thrown out (by me) in The Move.

Utena (my system) currently has what my spreadsheet says is a Live! Value. I’m going to see if that still has the correct connectors for a Live Drive. If so, Sunshine gets it (it’s MY FAULT, so I pay). If not, I either buy a modern equivalent(with internal front bay), or find an old Live! (non-Value) card… somewhere.

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And I Thought I had a Busy Weekend…

by on January 12, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Posted In: MMO

Not compared to nylan. He’s part of a group that spent the weekend on Uther doing the chain of mega-quests to re-create the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, which is what is needed to open the Gates of An’Quiraj once the War Supplies are gathered. Here’s a description of it for those not worried about spoilers. (I doubt anyone reading this will be doing these quests, nasty!)

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War Materials and Instances

by on January 9, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Posted In: MMO

It’s been a busy weekend.

First off, one of the interesting (in a good way…) parts of the new patch is a pair of brand-new related raid instances. Well, okay, only intellectually interesting to me, but to get at them on any particular server, the players on it have to turn in staggering amounts materials, as part of big event to open the gates that block access to half the area of Silithus. Better yet, Alliance and Horde have their own goals, and the flavor text explicitly state that both sides are working together for a large offensive to do something about the Silithid infestation spreading throughout southern Kalimdor.

It was a little disappointing to see Uther way behind in the standings. I mean, it’s an old and (over)populated server, I’d figure it’d be up near the forefront, not at #108. But that’s all right, it gives me and the rest of the crew time to help out and get a share in the rewards. And as of today, Uther is #20, more like what I had expected. It interesting to note that the high-level stuff is mostly going first, I figure at the end, the low-level items will just blink from about half-way to 100%. Also, the fact that the Alliance side is going faster than the Horde, might encourage a few people to start up Horde characters on an imbalanced server.

I think it would be very interesting to see this process on a new server where most everyone is still working their levels up, you could see progress of the population as the harder items start getting turned in.

On Friday, Coppercheetah and Jareth held a small WoW party, and we ended up putting a couple “third-tier” members (Shrimpette & Jariedthe) through Gnomeregan. Jareth was worried about being too high-level to bother, but once in, had a good time. The other three members, all being “second generation” members, made the party way overlevel (52, 45, 36 I think). We still managed one party wipe when we managed to get the entire final trench on us (Shrimpette, barely in range for Gnomergan, seems to have aggroed one, and, well, the rest followed him around to us). Other than that, we got quests done, saw the sights and had a grand time in one of the finer instances.

The other thing scheduled for this weekend was a Sunken Temple run. Most of the quests for Sunken Temple are the ends of involved chains, so most of Saturday was taken up by various high-level guild members running around trying to get all the prerequisites out of the way. For me, this included a lot of time on a hunter-specific quest that goes down into Sunken Temple, but relies on an annoyingly rare drop first. The good news was that Dunain finally has a decent source of Thorium from this, and not only is his Blacksmithing starting to go forward again, but his Mining has finally maxed out at 300.

I’ve gotten this idea that high-level instances, and much of the high-level game, just isn’t as fun as say, levels 20-40. Scarlet Monastery felt a little empty to me. Zul’Ferrak fell a bit flat. Last night proved me wrong. We had a grand time. The top five guild characters went in: Blanc (57), Dunain (55), Dejek (54?), Gottesfaust (53), and Blondiewood (52). The temple is indeed sunken, sitting on the floor of the Swamp of Sorrows. The front entrance is flooded, but the rest goes down an air pocket under the water level, and is suitably ‘damp’ feeling.

It was atmospheric, large (we got lost a couple times), and reasonably tough. This particular group has done a few instances now, and I think it’s showing. There were some very tough bits, and some fights towards the end that were… too exciting for healthy living. But we generally made them go right, and pulled through. At one point towards the end, we had a death, and Blondiewood got her second combat rez, so that ended well. The penultimate boss, the Avatar of Hakkar fight (whose temple this was), went very well. During all of this, Lance (the pet) had leveled, along with Blanc, Blondiewood and Dejek.

So we went on to the final fight, the Shade of Eranikus, picking up my Hunter quest on the way. Eranikus was the Green Dragon that is charged with sealing Hakkar, the Troll’s blood god, out of the world. He’s insanely tough, but we knew what to expect (thank you for online guides), and we had a plan. We were about as prepared as we could be.

We wiped. Eranikus was about halfway down. For me, things went wrong when he decided I was the second biggest threat instead of the rogue, Dejek. Considering I was avoiding any special abilities, that was a surprise. His first hit taking me down by two-thirds was also a surprise, since in mail armor I can off-off-tank on occasion (poor use of a hunter, but it means I can survive long enough for the pet to get control of the situation again). Long story short, I didn’t think to feign until two seconds after I was dead.

So, run back in, modify the plan, and try again. We tried an even more cautious approach. As long as the priest and druid could keep things somewhat under control, it worked. But it was not a stable situation, and they did run out of mana, and we wiped after getting Eranikus down by two-thirds and I had feigned three times.

By this point, we’d been at it for about six hours, and it was getting late on a Sunday night. There was serious talk of thinking things over and trying again on another night. We decided that the last fight had taken too long, and went in for one more try with a much heavier hitting approach.

Well, that wasn’t so stable either. The fight wandered all over the chamber with various characters trying to keep up. I went for rare Aimed Shots instead of a constant stream of normal shot, hoping for a critical (about 1000 HP these days), and ready to feign if I did. Control of the fight was lost early and the healers went down. But before Eranikus could get rid of any of the rest of us… we got him instead. (Dejek commented “So… the winning strategy is let the healers die.”)

I also noticed that somewhere in the final parts of the instance, I’d missed seeing a golden glow. Yes, that’s right.

Lance leveled twice last night. After having fallen behind some from bunches of quest turn-ins, he’s now back at my level.

Dunain started the night really early in 55, and is now well over half way. I had to quit last night before doing most of the quest turn-ins, so I’ll see the final tally tonight. But at a guess, I won’t level from the quests either. I’ll just be really close.

Eranikus also generates a little quest that it is believed will lead to more, but they haven’t been created yet. However, it does explain something about all the Green Dragonflight world-encounters that were put in a while ago. Also, Zul’Gurub is the original capital of the Trolls and where Hakkar was originally summoned to Azeroth, and where some are trying again. So both of those things are, content-wise, sequels to this instance. Unfortunately, they both require large raid parties, so I don’t expect to do anything with them.

But, I think I’ll read up on them anyway.

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