Onward to May!

by on April 8, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had Patch and Mark over yesterday for another round of Onward Christian Soldiers. We definitely have a much better handle on the rules now. Got about as far through this time as last, but yesterday was a short day, since Mark had another engagement that called him away, we were really going much faster. Things are definitely looking interesting enough that we’ve written down where we are and will be continuing the same game next time.

For this game, I took the Muslims, while Patch and Mark split the Crusader factions. Their general plan was to march south with the North and South Franks, while the Germans and Normans stay behind to clean up the North. I’ve been benefiting from having a better understanding of how troop assignment works to gather my armies into forces that stand some sort of chance against a crusader army. Sadly, even my best leaders just aren’t very good, and most of them don’t have a chance against the better Crusader leaders.

An interesting dynamic of the First Crusade game, is that the Muslim leaders are generally cheap to activate, which means they get lots of activations in a compared to the Crusaders. On the other hand, they generally can’t do as much during an activation, and there’s only three leaders who can even possibly get a good formation in battle, which is about as bad against the incompetent Crusader leaders as against the good ones.

I have been abusing some good die rolls, and gotten myself into trouble. The North Franks sent Robert of Normandy down the coast past Tripoli, presumably to seize a base to take Jerusalem from (which is the only thing in the south that’s truly defended). I managed to surround him with a couple armies and cause some losses. Then, Adhemar (of the South Franks) trapped Duqaq (my better leader, who had moved against Robert from the north) between him and Robert. It’s going to be… interesting to see if I can get myself out of that. But while the size of my army is dwindling, I haven’t suffered any outright defeats(!), which is keeping me from having too big a disaster (yet).

Meanwhile, Both Antioch and Aleppo are under siege. Aleppo is a bit more worrisome, as one of my better leaders is trapped in there. Kerbogha, my best leader is set to arrive this turn with a large army. There’s a lot I’d like him to do…. Namely rescue Ridwan in Aleppo, break the siege of Antioch, and rescue Duqaq from the armies surrounding him, but he’ll probably only have a shot at one of them.

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I’m Burning with the Crusade Again!

by on March 19, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Posted In: MMO

Well, Burning Crusade‘s been out for about two months now, and there’s a lot to talk about, so this is likely to get very long. ^_^;

First off, our guild currently has four 70s in it. I am at the back of the pack with Dunain at 64 and Farmishi hitting 63 yesterday. (An interesting kind of ‘check-uary’ there, everyone’s so used to thinking of the final run up to 60, that it’s natural to say “54” when you mean “64”….) Admittedly, I am slowed down some by the fact I have other hobbies (like playing ASL with Patch).

Overall, I like Burning Crusade. Blizzard has done a wonderful job with all the new content. I do have some overall minor gripes. The hardware specs got pushed up with the expansion, and there’s no real acknowledgment of this anywhere in the promo material, leaving me to be surprised when my machine practically falls over dead the first time I go in Zangarmarsh (turning everything down to minimum has allowed it to be tolerable…). Beyond just the number of people who had marginal systems to begin with, I’m sure there’s a fair number who needed to adjust settings, and I think a little warning of this fact would have been prudent. Anyway, the other gripe is that I think they notched the item quality in Outland up too high. I understand that they want offer something to all those in their Tier 2/3 epics short of the new endgame content, but the random base world-drop/quest reward greens beating most of the blues our guild had seems a bit much to me.

I realized shortly after the release of BC, that I would probably prefer to switch to Farmishi as my main instead of Dunain. Along with this came the realization that the time to make the switch was a month before BC came out, so that I could position her properly. So, Dunain’s still my main… for now. The real obstacle is that they are both blacksmiths, and Dunain still has a good lead on her.

The guild as a whole is still getting the various crafting skills up, and we’re mostly entering the time when the recipes start actually wanting unusual items. Material du jour? Primals. Primal Earth, Primal Fire, Primal Life, Primal Mana… you name it and there’s something to collect of it. Last night was largely spent by the guild at large in collecting these types of materials to make Riding Crops for our high-levels. Dunain has just hit this type of thing himself, and the nice little store I’d built up isn’t nearly enough. But it looks like a little effort will keep Blanc in new armor nicely.

We’ve done a number of instance runs, though they’ve dropped off a bit lately. The highest one I’ve seen so far is the Mana Tombs in Auchindoun. Very nice, and we did pretty well, especially for a first run. Sadly, Dunain was too low level to get any quest for the place, so we need to do it again for him.

On the way to new endgame equipment, there’s a few options. There’s some small sets in the crafted items, a good number of very nice greens, and then there’s recolored versions of Dungeon 1 items. These last are generally nice socketed blue items from instance bosses geared towards the particular class who’s set it looks like. They start dropping in the first instances of BC, and are generally also the first socketed items you’re likely to see.

Anyway, I happened to get the breastplate for Farmishi’s set early, and thought it looked really nice. After finding out about the full set, I decided to get them all. So we ended up in our second round of Coilfang Reservoir runs about a week ago. Naturally, this is where the next pieces drop, and I figured Farmishi would be spending a fair amount of time in there getting all three pieces available. The runs went very well, and we did both of the low-level wings in one evening.

…And it turns out that it was Pally Night at Coilfang, as everything she wanted dropped, including some Warrior gear she can use for tanking (Smudge was on Shrimpette, so Farmishi was the only one present who could even use it). All told, Farmishi got five new pieces of equipment… only one of which she could immediately use. The other four all required level 63, and she was still part way through 62. Last night she finally made 63, and is looking quite snappy.

So now Farmishi wants to go to… the Mana Tombs. However, given the equipment and quests, she’s going to wait until she tips over into 54 64.

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Onward to Antioch!

by on March 4, 2007 at 11:38 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

I really need to catch up on WoW stuff now. But yesterday was another round of gaming at my place. As we had decided last time Patch, Mark and I tried out Onward Christian Soldiers in the multiplayer 1st Crusade scenario.

It comes with a “Quick Start” booklet that I handed copies of to everyone last time. They do help, some of our rules questions were answered by Patch looking them up in his copy, instead of my in the main rulebook. We only got four turns done, but were starting to get the hang of things, and some idea of what we’re doing. The current plan is to try it again next month, or back to Soldier Kings (which is much simpler) if we actually can snag someone else for the get-together.

While I don’t think there’s anything completely new in the game, the package is not one I’m used to. You can move as far as you want, but the further you go, the more attrition you suffer. Considering the Crusaders have no ability to get reinforcements, this is a big problem. Some attrition can be reduced by spending resources, but you need to have a city in the region to get those resources from. Figuring out what is a good way to take a city, and what is a poor way is something we’re still figuring out.

The two main Crusader factions (Northern and Southern Franks) were cursed with drawing low activation numbers all game, which meant they could barely move their armies around. Despite this, most of Mark’s Northern Franks ended the day under the walls of Antioch, trying to take the city. My Southern Franks had ended up at Edessa, not quite getting in the poorly-defended city before we ran out of time.

My other faction, the Germans, had been much more active, and skirmished their way to Aleppo. The untimely appearance of Patch’s large Mosul Turk army under Kerbogha may have been the end of them in another turn, but they had fought off several smaller attacks quite well. I hadn’t even looked at the charts before the game, but now I’m learning not to be scared of the less capable Muslim leaders, the combat system is pretty punishing on them.

Post-game notes; found a couple interesting things on BGG:

At the last second, they decided to cut down on the number of “Draw Event Card”s in the activation deck, and have each side draw one. Sadly, this isn’t in the rules or on the cards… -_-;;

I still can’t find the rule, but we should have each had an Event Card. Ah, there it is, at the end of the intro section on Event Cards, but not mentioned in the scenario setup.

And more:

Armenian bribery is during movement, there’s a couple passing mentions to the Diplomacy phase, because it was done there in early drafts.

Ravaging Finishes your activation, the Quick-start rules erroneously say you can Continue.

Independent factions can undertake their own actions against a city that’s already under siege. (Anyone can Assault, only one Siege can be on-going.)

I also need to re-examine Stops, Finishing and Continuing. I *think* you may need to roll to Continue when you arrive at a city before you do anything like start a Siege or Assault. That would tend to slow down the Crusaders even more… so I’m not sure there. Of course, with all those low-Campaign leaders, it might hurt the Moslems even more once you hit the middle game.

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Escape From the Holdfast

by on February 3, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Posted In: SFB

In Y149, the Tholian Harassment Squadron entered the Tholian Holdfast to steal web technology. Having captured the PC Solitude, the Klingon task force turned back to the border, but was herded into a Tholian trap.

Patch, Mark and I played this scenario from CL8 Saturday. As with many of the larger pre-published scenarios, it didn’t stick with the script. The general idea is that the Klingon force has to thread its way through asteroids and webs, protecting its prize, or perhaps grabbing a different one (the ship isn’t important, just the technology on it). Meanwhile, the Tholians get reinforcements, and if the Klingons hang around too long they just might get a force that can deal with the Klingons on something approaching even terms.

The problem with this is that the printed asteroid field map, is more of an asteroid belt, with a nice maze running down the middle, but clear areas on each side. It was too possible to get to one of those areas and run through the empty area. Me and Mark actually partially stuck to the script and stayed near the middle for a while.

The second problem was that it was too easy for the Tholians to snipe at the captured ship, and destroyed it after about three volleys. I kind of wonder if the idea is for all the asteroids (and the firing penalties they cause) to protect the captured ship, but it certainly didn’t work that way for us in practice. If we’d been thinking, we should have had the scout protect it with loaned ECM.

At any rate, it was destroyed near the beginning of turn 2, and we didn’t have any good ways to chase down one of the other web-equipped ships. Patch decided that was good enough and disengaged everyone near the beginning of turn 3. That ended the scenario, and keeps the Klingons from just siting on an entry point for reinforcements waiting for someone unlucky to come by to get captured and towed off the board.

The scenario counts as a solid draw, as the Klingons have to get an intact web generator off map to win, and the Tholians have to prevent that and destroy a Klingon ship to win. Historically, it was also a draw, but a lot bloodier on both sides. The most successful part of the exercise was probably setting up a laptop to run a spreadsheet on web strengths (which has me wondering how we can set up everyone with Excel for EA)….

Since we did manage to end a bit early, I showed the both of them Game Kastle, a game store that I had found a while ago. Mark ended up buying Commands & Colors: Ancients, which he’ll have to tell us about later.

It looks like the next SFB session will be Selected Attack from Module C1 in Y152, and the next gaming session will be us trying out Onward Christian Soldiers (though we are still looking for more for Soldier Kings).

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New expansion, new challenges

by on January 29, 2007 at 9:23 am
Posted In: MMO

I’ve been a bit slow really getting involved in the new BC content. I’ve done some questing in the first zone, and am starting to get somewhere with that. The obligatory new draeni, Aldisha, hit level 12 yesterday and is finally moving on to the second starting area. Merisan, a night elf warrior I’ve had for a while now, looks to be my contribution to the now level 20+ team of new characters that’s forming. I expect she’ll go the same way as Farmishi, that is she’s going to see a nice rise in levels as she helps everyone else get through instances. Considering that most, or all, of these won’t be mains either, she’ll probably keep up with everyone else for a while.

I’m keeping Farmishi on continuing lvl 60 instance duty at the moment. I’m sure there’ll still be runs for a while to come.

Though, the last two were in places that Dunain is still trying to finish up with. We did a Upper Spire run, that only got eight people. However, everyone went in with something from Burning Crusade, and most were over 60. The only death was me, as I tried to lead Drakkisath around. I did, however, get a better idea of how I might do it in the future without getting caught.

Most of us then went off and did a dead-side Strathome run. Actually, we did a 45-minute Baron run, with the idea that the newly-increased firepower would make it easier. Which was correct, we actually got through, and did the run with three minutes to spare, and Blondiewood finally got her Dungeon 2 upgrade.

Last night, though, was our first instance run in BC. Hellfire Citadel is a multi-part instance that you get directed to pretty quickly once in Outland. We went in with Blanc, Dunain, Thermidor, Blondiewood, and Asclepius; the only way to get any more classic Muse would be to replace Asclepius with Brunev or Jariedthe.

The Ramparts, the first part, or wing, of the Citadel is pretty simple with three bosses, there’s one quest going in, and another generated by the final boss. Apparently, everything through the first boss should be doable with 60s in vanilla greens. And I’d say that’s about right, the normal stuff certainly gave us no real trouble. The main part was just getting used to what they could do. The final two bosses (well, three, one’s a pair) were decidedly tough and generated multiple wipes between them. A good plan and group is decidedly needed going in, especially if you’re at about level.

That said, they’re quite doable. The main thing is there’s a lot of wide area of effect going on, and our resistances still aren’t where they probably should be. The last pair is exceptionally nasty since a relatively fast fight changes modes a couple times, and certainly left me struggling to keep up with what was going on. Most of the team got something good from the run. Dunain didn’t, but he did finally get to level 61. We have another three active main 60+s who need to do this, so we’re going to have to plan for that as well as doing the sequel wing, the Blood Furnace.

The video is decidedly more demanding on BC. Zangarmarsh (the second area in Outland) has seriously bogged down Haruhi when I’ve gone there. Oddly, Micca does well there, but Smudge reported that Hellfire Ramparts was really bad for her, when I didn’t have any trouble. Upgrading Micca is fairly straightforward if it comes down to it (though I had hoped for another year before even needing this), Haruhi is another matter. I’m already at the limits of what I can do without replacing most of the system.

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