Blessed by the Potato

I’m excited about Civilization 4, it might be just the game I need to quit WoW and burn out my eyeballs once and for all. I’ve heard very little about it (I only learned they were even considering a Civ4 after it came out), except that it has multiplayer and supposedly better AI.

In anticipation, I played a game or three of Civ3 while I was recouperating from my kidney stone (speaking of which, I’m so wiped lately from my caffeine withdrawl). While Civ3 was a great game, there were some really annoying things in it, primarily with the AI.

First, and least annoying, it never seemed to have any sort of logical order for taking you through your units that were waiting for orders. You’d set up a fleet of say 5 warships, and would try to coordinate shore bombardment and landing operations, but it would take you to one ship, then whip you to the other side of the world to tell a worker which bit of pollution to clean up, then zoom to another group of warships on patrol, then back to your invasion force to move one unit, then woosh, off again to garrison a newly produced infantry unit. I found it made it hard to get battle groups to work together, since you couldn’t work with your units geographically.

Next, the enemy AI was just screwy sometimes. This is a problem with many games in the genre (MOO2 as well). You could have fair (sometimes even excellent) relations with another power, and maybe station some troops of yours in a neutral area (perhaps to defend against the known irrationalities of the AI, or perhaps on the way to fight a 3rd party). Then, your friendly power would begin a new colony, and the formerly neutral area would fall under their sphere of influence. Suddenly, you’ve invaded their territory, and they’re not going to stand for it! War! It’s particularly troublesome when it happens just after you’ve made peace with someone. You’ve got your fleets blockading their colonies while you’re actively at war. You manage to forge a peace agreement, and before you’ve had time to move back out into neutral territory, the presence of your fleet sparks an international incident. Also, and this one is particular to Civ3, it really helps to have “show enemy moves on”, otherwise it’s all too easy to miss a troop buildup. However, the AI doesn’t just plop its garrisons down in a city or a hillside fort, they run them around the map constantly, so every turn you have to watch however many dozens of enemy units are within your detection range mill about mindlessly.

Third, I could never use many of the automatic control options (e.g.: for workers) since they were so dumb. I’d usually manually improve the conditions around my cities at first, aiming for a balance of irrigation and mines so that I would get maximal production from a decent city size (for most of the game, 12). This would have to be balanced with the population size that could be kept happy (if I only had a temple and one luxury available, then I often couldn’t support a city that big until I managed to research colleseum or cathedrals). An overpopulated city has a high chance of rioting and potentially splitting away to join another empire if it can’t be kept happy. So naturally, when set loose to do its own thing, the AI-controlled workers destroyed all my mines and irrigated to get the cities to grow, causing me innumerable headaches.

I’ve been talking with Rez, and he’s got me hooked, so I’m going to get the game going here soon.

Rez: The AI has improved a lot. And some micromanagement AI has been added that I use a lot (I never liked having to tell workers what to do since I’d always forget what I had planned for them in the first place). The enemy combat AI is pretty good too. They build units to counter those that they see you using.
You can specify what you want each city to concentrate on (production, population, food, gold, etc) and it looks to me like the workers cooperate, building whatever is necessary to achieve those goals.

Potato: That’s good. I wonder if “usurping the empire” is an option, just in case I get nostalgic.

Hmm… multiplayer Civ… Anybody have Alec Campbell’s email address?

Do you have a working fire extinguisher? It might be a good gift idea for the person who has everything. I got one for my parents (and one for myself) last year. They’re reasonably cheap (starting at $20 for a tiny kitchen one) and odds are no one else will think of it… unless they’re reading my site, too. They’re also easy to find if you don’t mind asking a store clerk for assistance: most Canadian Tire and other general merchandise stores do sell them, though they may be hidden (hence asking the sales staff — our local Canadian Tire hid them in the back with the sandpaper).

While it’s not usually a good idea to try to fight a large fire by yourself (if a whole room is going, just call the fire department and get out, and not necessarily in that order), smaller fires, especially kitchen ones, can be handled on your own. I remember on the news a month or so ago a story about a woman whose dinner was set ablaze and just lost her head and started screaming in the hallway of her apartment. A man came to help her, putting the fire out by pouring instant pancake mix on it (baking soda would probably work better, since with pancake mix there’s a risk of just having the flour & sugar ignite and making things worse).

One thing that I really want to go to is a short fire safety session the hospital puts on here; hopefully they’ll do it again this summer. It involves hands-on use of a few fire extinguishers: the fire department will light some fires on the hospital lawn and let people put them out. It gives you practice with pulling the pin and aiming, and also gives you a feel for the size of fire you can handle with a fire extinguisher (it’s probably smaller than you might think).

Switching topics, I took a look at an under-development game called Sword of the Stars. It’s a turn-based deep space 4E game (along the same lines as Master of Orion) and it looks like it might be really good. One thing that has really tickled my interest is the concept that different races are really fundamentally different, right down to the way they ply the space lanes. One race gets faster-than-light drives similar to Star Trek’s warp drive: they go anywhere they want in any direction, and are detectable in normal space the whole time. Another uses sub-space lanes, restricting travel to directly one star to another (presumably one star to its next few closest neighbours, preventing you from leapfrogging systems), but while in sub-space is separate from normal space (can’t be ambushed, but also can’t be redirected). Yet another uses a hyperspace gate system similar to that from Babylon 5: while in normal space, they are restricted to slower-than-light travel, but once they make it to one of their gate locations, they can instantly jump to another gate. Sounds like a great concept, and hopefully it’ll follow to a good game. Sadly, I’m reminded of MOO3 which was also a decent concept (we really didn’t need the sub-versions of the popular MOO2 races) involving truly 3D-space and intelligent governors to handle things for you (actually restricting micromanagment, since as the emperor you only have so many ways to split your attention)… that in the end just wasn’t much fun to play.

Wow, I haven’t had much luck with raids in the World of Warcraft lately.

Let me start you in slowly, just in case you’re one of the few people left in the world who hasn’t given their money to Blizzard: most of the content of the game is inside dungeons, which you run in groups of 5-40. Most of the dungeons you can just find any group of yahoos online, run through and do just fine — and I’ve run all of them hundreds of times, except for LBRS, which I’ve only hit a few times, and Scarlet Strath, which I’ve never done. It’s cursed: my groups for it always fall apart before we even zone in. For the larger, harder dungeons (which also have the best loot), you need a really big group of reasonably well-coordinated people to pull them off. To add to the requirements, you can only do them once a week (or once every 3 days for Zul’Gurub), so you don’t just grab any group of 40 people and go: you wait to do it with your friends.

Having gotten a little bored of the 5-15 man dungeons I’ve been signing up for some raids into ZG and Molten Core. Fortunately, my priest has much better luck getting into those sorts of things than my Pally did last winter. So, in order to get a group of 40 people together for a MC run, you generally get a larger group of 50-60 players interested, and then have a signup on your forums. That way you can have some people opt out, or forget to show, and still get your raid going. Unfortunately, it also means you sometimes have people get stuck on the waiting list (which is made more unfair if they play a Pally who isn’t needed so much).

But I’ve just had rotten luck in there. I haven’t gotten any loot yet (except for a bit of Dark Iron Ore), although I did almost win a roll on the fancy epic crown for my priest (I had the highest roll and the loot master was about to give it to me when one more priest was like ‘Oh yeah, me too!’ and rolled 99. Grrr.) And to make matters worse, I haven’t even gotten to go on the last few! I was the 2nd to sign up for our guild’s foray into ZG, but I made the mistake of saying I was sick and might have to AFK a lot (see kidney problems below), so the GM put me on as the first alternate. The raid was supposed to start at 7 pm, so I got on a few hours early early, collected the quests, parked my priest in front of ZG, and started playing on an alt. I was waiting for a whisper or a message in the channel that the raid was starting, and kept an eye on where everyone was located. Suddenly, at 6:50 I notice a few people leave the major city of Ironforge and start to zone towards ZG. So I switch back to my priest and ask for an invite… the GM says “LOL, you’re late, I gave your spot away.” Turns out two people on the list never made it, so I should have been in there as first alternate, and I was still 10 minutes early, but for whatever whacko reason someone else got in anyway (turns out it was a RL friend of theirs — more on that later). No apology, nothing. Fortunately, it sounds like that raid went to hell anyway (ironically, from a lack of healers). Oh, I should mention that this isn’t the first time this has happened. While it was a few months ago, I also got left behind on an IL raid I signed up for because I was on a different character waiting for an invite (that time, I signed up for an alt and was sitting on my main!).

And now, as I’m typing this, I got left out of a MC raid with DAOC. We go with them every week, and even though their guild master tends to automatically sign up the regulars (including me) every week, I still go to the forums and am sure to say that I’ll be there (or, if I can’t, to tell them not to expect me). Again, I was logged on an hour before the raid (this time not on an alt since it’s a different guild), and doing a bit of PvP. We’re supposed to start invites at 6:30 and the raid at 7 (it takes a while to get 40 people up and going), but in practice the invites don’t come until 6:45. So I’m in a PvP instance, which finishes at 6:35. I figure perfect timing. I drop my group and whisper the raid leader for an invite.

I get a DND message from her.

No problem, I fly to MC so I’ll see who’s standing outside and get an invite from them… oh, the place is swarming with a Horde guild waiting for their run, I can’t pick anyone out of the crowd. Again, no problem, I go through my friends list and start asking people if they could invite me or know who has invite privledges, and since it’s 20 minutes before the raid, everyone’s AFK. Finally I get someone who’s on teamspeak (a voice communication program similar to Roger Wilco) who gets the raid leader to turn off her DND flag so I can talk to her. She tells me she sent me an invite at 6:30, but that I was in a group so she went and got one of the alternates, and that the raid was now full, being 10-to. I mean seriously?! You couldn’t have whispered me to see what I was doing or told me that the raid was forming and that it was time to drop groups? At least she was sorry about it.

Anyhow, I mentioned that the person who replaced me was a RL friend of one of the officers, which brings me to another problem I’ve been having in WoW: our guild. We started off after release in House of Llyorian, a guild full of great people that Netbug knew in closed beta. And I mean great people: of the ones who didn’t quit, most have gone on to become some of the top players on the server. But unfortunately, it was too small a guild to even do the 10-man endgame dungeons without getting pickups (at least at the time, since a few people raced to 60 pretty fast). So we found another group of good players with Infinite Luck, and started merging away. The merger was a little rushed and sloppy (boy, were some of those people desperate to run Stratholme!), but it worked fairly well.

While Infinite Luck was also fairly casual and friendly, it was not a guild of people that primarily knew each other from WoW, but a multigame guild and moreover, a guild of people who know each other in real life. This lead to some problems. First off, there was an inordinate amount of resistance to the idea of making anyone formerly from House of Llyorian an officer. There still is, which baffles me (after all, the more officers you have, the easier it is to recover if one of them does something stupid, and the livelier the /o channel becomes). This actually, and sadly, was part of the reason my good friend Reggie decided to leave the game. He played far too much to be healthy, and in the mornings too. The guild needed a morning officer, so they promoted Myzerie, a nice enough girl I’ll grant, and one who did spend her playtime in the mornings… but one who has something like 7 kids and is only on for a half hour at a time (and who, a year later, still doesn’t have a single character at level 60). That was a bit of a snub to poor Reggie, who was one of the driving forces behind the HoL merger in the first place.

So then, a real-life couple who formed two more of our officers left the server for the more exciting world of PvP, and it was admitted that we needed some to replace them. Despite the larger size of the guild, they wanted to stick with just 5 or 6 officers (and no amount of arguing on my part changed their mind). Not wanting to split the “HoL” vote, we rallied behind Bug and Abe (again, poor Reggie didn’t even get nominated). Bug won… and promptly left for Neph :)

Then we realized we needed yet another guild merger to do the endgame, so we got together with AoV. Neither guild wanted to disband and join the other, so instead we formed an alliance (as I had originally proposed for HoL). Oddly enough, the reason given for not merging was that since IL was a multiple game and RL friend guild, we couldn’t lose the name since people wouldn’t be able to find us (which is a load of crap, since people will need the website or their friends to decide which of the over 100 WoW servers to create their character on). In the end, we absorbed some AoV members, some stayed where they were, and others got sick of the whole thing and joined 60’s only guilds.

A bit later, the former guildmaster had to leave for RL reasons. We had another round of officer voting, and Cyberblade, formerly of AoV, was elected an officer and then promoted to guild master after the former one left. This was a bad choice. Sure, at first Cyber did a fairly good job… but Cyber had something like 4 level 60 characters, only one of which was in IL. He had better things to do, and since he was already doing MC runs with one of his characters, he had no motivation towards helping IL form alliances or recruit more members (even after I pointed him towards two guilds that had broken up or hemmoragged members after internal scandals: lots of good people looking to help build a guild were out there just waiting for a chance…) Eventually, Cyberblade decided to change the guild tabbard without telling anyone, just to experiment a little. Unfortunately, he left his experiment at the end of the night on a horribly ugly colour, which caused our own internal scandal, and some overly harsh words were said, and Cyber left.

Once again, IL had a power vacuum. We elected some more officers, and that time around I made the nominations (but I lost by one vote — ironically, I chose not to vote for myself). Nightvision was elected the new GM. I’ve had bad experiences with Night in the past, but for the most part he’s a good guy, and had been nothing but nice for the month or so leading up to his GM status (though it seems to have gone to his head afterwards).

We got some end-game stuff going with DAOC (the group that just forgot to whisper me to break group so I could go tonight), and things have been looking up. There have been some downsides to our MC runs with DAOC: since they’re a new guild, and since the roster isn’t quite the same week to week, we’re rusty. We make lots of mistakes, lots of stupid deaths, and we haven’t gotten nearly as far as many other guilds have, even given a few weeks’ learning curve. We were talking about this one night in guildchat, but since only at most 10 people from IL go to MC, we decided to take the chat to the officers’ channel. I was promoted to officer temporarily so I could participate.

After that night, they forgot to demote me, and I stayed an officer for a few weeks. People came to accept it, and the guild could use more officers anyway (especially since Myz is essentially gone now). Then last week, out of nowhere, they demote me, saying that it was an oversight that had been corrected. Fair enough, I guess — except that the real life couple I was talking about earlier, who left for PvP? They came on right afterwards and even though they had been replaced as officers, they were still left with full privledges. Personally, I wouldn’t worry about the guy who’s been helpful & loyal and an officer for 2 weeks and caused no trouble… I’d worry about the people who left and have fully established characters on another server. While none of us have the reason to be petty and spiteful (kicking newbies from the guild after hours when noone else is on or somesuch), they have the means to get away with it.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit over-dramatic here, so I’ll unstaple my hand from my forehead and move on. I suppose the reason I’m getting into all this is that I’m just not very satisfied with WoW right now, so little things are bugging me more. I’ve been playing on the test server a bit, and the Pally changes don’t look good at all. Everyone’s going to need to farm new gear, since the old stats you valued (stam, int, and strength, in roughly that order) will be changed (to int, stam, and +spell damage/+healing). It will involve more button-mashing, so I suppose that’s more interactive… but we’re spending more mana just to get back to where we were before. Farming/grinding is still fairly slow, except now we have downtime, too.

I’m feeling quite a bit better today (unlike yesterday, where I started to feel better, then felt worse, then better again). I’ve gone 3 solid days without throwing up now, and I think I’ve had something close to 6 meals in the last 3 days, too. Kidney stones are awful, and there’s only like 2 people I would wish them on.

So in the time that I’ve been sick, I’ve mostly been strung out on pain killers playing computer games or sleeping. In addition to World of Warcraft, one game I played for a bit was Starscape. It’s a small shareware game that I got hooked on by following an ad from Penny Arcade (and while I do check the site weekly, it’s not in my links section since they’re probably the last folks to need a link from me!). Just download the game, pay your $30 registration fee by credit card, and you’re good to go! Perfect for the immobile gamer.

The gameplay is very simple: you fly a ship around in a top-down view and shoot asteroids for materials to haul back to your space station to research and build further upgrades for your ship. Every now and then you shoot enemy fighters, too. It’s very bare-bones: there are 3 types of energy weapons, each with 4 levels of refinement, blandly named “ion cannons 1-4”, “blasters 1-4” and “beam lasers 1-4”. Oddly enough, the ion cannons have the reflect ability I would expect from a laser. Even the different types of minerals you collect are simply referred to as “resource 1” (or in my head: yellow, green, and purple). The graphics are nothing to ooh and aww about, though the cartoony sprites are fairly well done.

So you collect your minerals, perform your research, and pimp out your fighter (you can also add mines, drones, and missiles, but there’s so much shooting involved that it all comes down to your beam weapons). You can tweak the components (generators, engines, shields, and a neat addition of batteries so you can put on more energy weapons than your generators can handle and just go for short bursts of brilliant activity), and again, each has 4 levels of refinement to research.

Then you set out and follow the loosely-scripted linear storyline, killing the various enemy motherships one component at a time (the weak points even flash when you shoot them!) to recover the stolen dimensional hyperdrive your space station needs to return to Earth.

Overall, it’s a fun little game, despite the fact that all the while you’ll be wondering where you’ve played this game before (it reminds me of a cross between R-Type and some other top-down space shooters). I’d love to recommend it to everyone, except for what boils down to one problem: it’s hideously overpriced. At $30 for a download (over $40 if you get them to ship you a CD), I don’t expect much. The graphics and basic interface are fine for me… but there’s no replayability. There’s no random galaxies to take over, and there’s no multiplayer. You play through the storyline (killing a grand total of 5 enemy motherships, and upgrading your basic fighter 4 times), and then you’re done. There’s an instant action mode, where you jump in a fighter and try to survive for 5 minutes (or set it to unlimited time!), getting automatic upgrades as you collect minerals. That only goes so far — another hour or so of replayability. We’re still not even cracking 8 hours here, which is pretty bad for this genre of video game.

I also find their self-promotion on the website is spawned from pure insanity (or just wild fancy), touting features I don’t believe exist. For instance, on the reviews page, they have some choice quotes about the game, including:

“3D effects you would expect from a top of the line space sim”
“you can also play the game again… and again”

It’s a 2D game with sprites, so I’m not sure what top of the line 3D effects they’re talking about (unless it was the way the sprites were rendered in the first place?), and I’m pretty sure that the second quote is a reviewer, such as myself, being sarcastic about the lack of replayability.

And don’t be misled by the features:

Make alliances with friendly aliens and trade technology

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SPOILER WARNING
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There are only two alien races, one that you fight, and one that you are automatically allied with, who unlock new trees for you to research in each zone (ion cannons, beam lasers, mines, and shields). You do all the research once the tree is unlocked, and there’s no diplomacy involved: it’s a simple script that you watch your “Captain” recite when you bump into them. So while I suppose the promotion is technically true, it is really misleading if you’ve played other games similar to this, such as Protostar (is that what it was called? I know I have the floppies for it around here somewhere…) or Master of Orion where you can make real alliances (or choose not to!).

This is a small game from a small company, so maybe they’ll fix some things and let me download a new version. I’m positive if they even just add a multiplayer component, it’ll be an underground hit. For now, I’ll tell you this: it is fun and it is addictive your first time through, but when it’s done, you’ll be sure to think you’ve been ripped off.

Edit: Found Protostar!