Min-maxing the Blogosphere since 2008

Yesterday I played Power Grid for the first time and was not massively impressed by it.  Mistress S, myself, and some other MIT grad students played a 5 player game on the map of Germany, which added a bit of spice to the game for me since it meant I got to flex my geography muscles and practice my German pronunciation. I found the game itself to be a bit too dry for my tastes however, despite our particular session having a very close ending in which I was pipped at the post by a mere 4 Electros.

I think that ultimately what it comes down to is that I didn’t dig the theme that much, and the fine game mechanics couldn’t make up for this fact.  Another turn off was the constant mental arithmetic.  I don’t mind the odd spot of mental computation, but when I’m adding up slews of numbers written on the board, rather than simply tallying up the number of abstract pieces or resources that I’m going to get, the math becomes a bit too intrusive for my tastes.  That said however, the game really is quite elegantly designed and has interesting mechanics that advantage players whose board position is relatively weak, with the result that to play optimally you’re sometimes better off making worse plays than you otherwise might in order to make sure you avoid the “shaft the winner” mechanics.

I’ve been avoiding playing this game with the more experienced folks at Pandemonium and MIT’s Strategic Gamers because my suspicion was that it is not newbie friendly, and from reading BGG on the topic that sounds about right.  The game is all about making optimally efficient decisions, which strongly punishes players who can’t anticipate things like what a certain power plant will really be worth to them in the long run.  As such I’d happily play again with people who’ve only had one or two games like myself, but wont be playing it with more experienced players any time soon, and didn’t enjoy it enough to want to get my skill level up to the point where I’d be competitive with experienced people.

I recently gave Mistress S Left4Dead for Christmas and she finally got an opportunity to play it this week. She had a great time playing it and I had a great time watching her playing it. She’s the kind of person that gets very tense during zombie movies and flinches when the zombies lurch out of the darkness to chomp out the delicious salty brains of the protagonists. She’s also the kind of person that gets very tense in FPSes and moves her body left and right slightly as if she were dodging the shots being fired in the game. Combine zombies and FPSes and you get a situation where when zombie hordes attack she gives cute little shrieks and sometimes finds herself firing frantically at the ceiling, floor, or her teammates as natural anti-zombie panic responses kick in, then laughs at herself afterwards for being skittish.

This reminds me of something that I noticed in FPS gamers a long time back; that there is a spectrum of affective responses to being placed into this weird simulated combat situation and that part of becoming a skilled player is to desensitize yourself to the shock of being virtually shot at and the general mayhem in which you find yourself. Often people who play these kinds of games for the first time move their meat selves instead of their virtual selves as they try to duck and cover to avoid getting smacked in the gob by rockets, whereas really pro players like DA and Kharn, friends of mine who are veterans of various FPS clan matches, just cooly track their crosshair over their opponent’s polygonal form regardless of the psychological pressure. I’m somewhere in the middle, and have been for a really long time now. When I’m fighting people at medium ranges I’m cool as a cucumber, but when people are up in my face I get flustered, my arm becomes very stiff, my mouse movements jerk around, and I catch myself flinching a little as I try to track them at point blank range. I occasionally wonder if people have a limit to the degree that they can be desensitized and if this is part of the natural limit of people’s skill levels in FPS, just as much as their hand-eye coordination. If so, then maybe it’s actually good for my mental health that, even after so long, I’ve not been able to desensitize myself to virtually blowing my friends’ brains out at 3 paces.

DA, Em, and Biodecay have all been trying out Eve Online recently.  As big fans of classic space games like Elite I could see how it would appeal to them.  They all were concerned with quickly raking in as much cash as possible to be able to fly battleships and blow apart NPCs.  I was more interested in experiencing some of the PvP that the game is legendary for, but ultimately I didn’t even get up to the end of the first run of storyline missions.  Why?

These days when I approach an MMO I’m doing it with several games under my belt and a game really has to grab me to make me willing to commit to it.  I have relatively little time and a commitment to my weekly WoW game, so something would have to have a very strong pull on me right of the bat to convince me to give it more than a cursory glance.  Eve is not that game.

Eve is notorious for having a very steep learning curve.  The interface is absolutely jam packed full of menus and subscreens that let you access different functionality and customize your display.  There is a load of information available on every piece of equipment in the game accessible through inspection panes.  There is also a whole slew of tutorials to teach you how to read and use all of this stuff.  The thing is though, that I want to be able to sit down and play the game to see how I like it without having to commit to hours of dicking around trying to work out how to get stargates to appear on my overview.

It’s not that I am unable to work it out, it’s more that it’s hard to work out what even needs to be worked out!  The utility of the interface is entirely obfuscated to the beginner.  You get the feeling that there’s something chunky under the hood, but you can for the life of you begin to work out what’s important to look at.  Indeed, even once you start doing things like inspecting the statistics on items you still remain relatively unenlightened as to whether one type of autocannon or another is better, particularly given that I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to view the details of two items side by side.  My friends and I managed to get the fleet controls set up, but in 4 hours we never did manage to work out how to form a gang with other people.  The whole experience made me reel from infodump.

I know that this level of up front complexity appeals to people who consider themselves hardcore and in the past I myself may have embraced such a learning curve as a deterrent for unworthy n00bs, keeping the gaming environment pure and full of hardcore gamers.  These days though I find it a turn off.  I want to be led gently into the experience.  I want to quickly get a taste of what the game is all about, preferably within the first half hour.  The tutorial was helpful in this respect, but in all honesty my feeling is that WoW just does it better, with its quest series that organically lead the player through the game experience and advancement that layers complexity relatively slowly.

I don’t doubt that Eve is a good game once you get into it, but for the time-strapped ex-powergamer it combines the evils of MMO time-suckage with the need to wade through an encyclopedia of game information just to get started.  I guess that since I’m not willing to commit the time to grinding NPCs or asteroids for cash and am reluctant to grind my eyeballs through the documentation that I’m not the target market.  More’s the pity for my dreams for interstellar piracy.

When I was originally playing World of Warcraft I had nigh unlimited time to waste on grinding my way through tedious instances.  These days as a casual gamer, I really appreciate Scarlet Monastery, that mercifully short and well designed instance in Tirisfal Glades, and wish that more of pre-BC content were like that.

The sweet spot for casual WoW content for me is 1.5 to 2 hours.  That’s enough time to feel like I’ve had a good fix and about equivalent to the time that a miniseries episode might run on TV, which is a reasonable amount of time for an entertainment fix.  My regular Monday night group has 4 hours to play, so if the content we’re bashing at takes 2 hours it means that we can do two major things a week with a short break in between, which is usually enough to gain us two levels and the new abilities that come with them.

Scarlet Monastery is great for casual gamers.  The fact that the instance is broken up into a series of mini-instances means that you don’t have to worry about fighting against the clock to get everyone to the end before they have to log off.  You can just assess how long things have taken you once you pop out of a section and then work out from there whether you have enough time to do the next bit.  Compare this with a dungeon like (shudder) Stratholme, where it was a huge 3-4 hour grind at the best of times, even if you only want to do half the instance, and pulling out before the boss fight at the end is painful since the effort you put into getting up to the point you were at before leaving was at best inefficiently spent and at worst wasted.  I avoided it like the plague even back when I had more time because it was so tedious.  Even low level instances like Wailing Caverns and Gnomeregan are terrible at getting to the meat of the instance, requiring you to grind your way through hordes of filler to get to the really interesting fights.

In my MMOG gaming, my roleplaying, and my film viewing I’ve really come to appreciate good pacing.  I like a well edited experience, that cuts off the fatty bits and gets straight to the real meat of the thing.  I remember that I also used to have great patience for endless haggling with NPCs over prices in RPGs and waiting around for my fellow players to get their shit together.  These days I want a streamlined experience where we advance the plot, have a really engaging fight, or act out a compelling scene.  I prefer haggling with Gregor the blacksmith to be abstracted away to an off screen hand wave.  Scarlet Monastery delivers a streamlined instance experience, with multiple interesting boss fights and good loot available with only minimal amounts of trash clearing fights, which given the 3-4 mobs involved in each pull are often interesting in themselves.  I wish that the next 20 levels had something equivalent to offer, but I know from experience that it doesn’t.

Dungeons and Dragons is the barometer of the roleplaying world; it’s the gateway game that leads people into the hobby, so I’ve been keeping a keen eye on what Wizards of the Coast have been doing with the brand. I was cautiously optimistic about the previews that I’d seen online and had followed the latest developments in the lead up to the release of the new edition on ENWorld, but the proof is in the pudding, so I ponied up 30 bucks for Keep on the Shadowfell, the first module to released for the new edition, and ran it for two separate groups, as well as turning up as a player for a game run at a midnight release of the core rulebooks.

For me the game felt more fun than 3e, both as a player and as a DM. My first game was with a group of non-roleplayers that I normally play V:TES with: DA, Em, Biodecay, Ves, and Mistress-S. It was more than 5 years since I had played with people who were completely new to the hobby before, so I was anxious about how they’d receive it.

We opened up with my favourite method for quickly developing a sense for everyones characters, which is getting everyone to take turns around the table asking a player about their character. On several occasions I’ve found this to be great for getting people to relatively painlessly flesh out their character concept on the spot and getting people in the mood to roleplay. The mechanics of the characters were already spelled out for my players, since they were using the pregens that came with KotS, so they just had to flesh out the personalities and backgrounds. My newbie players came up with a very typical group of misanthropic, quasi-psychotic, treasure seeking, pseudo do-gooders, which showed that they had a good intuitive grasp for what D&D is all about. There was the borderline megalomaniacal Dragonborn paladin, the cheery halfling rogue in dire need of a moral compass, the grim and driven undead-fighting human wizard, the alcoholic dwarven fighter with a shady past, and the half-elven cleric trying to keep everyone from each others’ throats.

After having established the characters and a linking in some plot hooks with a bit of back story we got right into the adventure, which, appropriately for D&D, started with a fight scene. Two things were quickly clear: Firstly there are many more combat options for first level characters and secondly said options would be nigh on impossible to arbitrate without a decent combat map. Luckily we had the maps that came with the module and a load of minis that I’d grabbed out of a board game, so we had the latter issue taken care of. The former however caused a fair bit of analysis paralysis for my fledgeling roleplayers, but all agreed that once they’d gotten a feel for what was going on their choices were interesting, meaningful, and easy to grasp. The combat took a little under an hour to arbitrate, with the kobolds trying and failing to beat their way through the paladin’s high AC, while the wizard blasted away at them with his at will AoE power and the rogue dealt out stonking amounts of damage. The warrior and cleric ended up playing second fiddle due to their attack bonuses being quite low relative to the other characters, which resulted in a slew of anti-climatic misses, frustrating the players. It was much like the old edition in that respect.

From a DM’s perspective I enjoyed the tactical elements of the game much more than in previous editions. I feel like D&D 4e is a game made for people like me to DM; people who have a good mind for strategy games and have a raconteurish bent. Combat has always been an integral part of D&D, but it struck me as I was playing running the fight that up until this edition it had never really been done all that well. In 4e everyone seemed to have interesting choices to make, there were more monsters in play than in any other edition of D&D that I’ve played, and first level characters were much more robust than in previous editions, so you don’t have to worry as much about TPKs randomly happening. I particularly liked the inclusion of minions in the game, 1hp mooks that go down with a single hit, which bulked out the encounter and added a greater sense of heroic derring-do to the fight as they let the players rock out with their AE powers. I ended up going easy on the players, given that it was their first roleplaying experience, but combat still felt tense and exciting.

After fighting their way through the kobolds, interacting with the NPCs in town, and deciding on a course of action for the next session we called it a night. Everyone had enjoyed themselves and I thought the experiment a resounding success.

I later ran the same game with a group of more experienced gamers: Mhacdebhandia, Lexait, Nekobakagaijin, Cutenfluffy, and Heli. This time around I persecuted the PCs a lot more, specifically targeting the weaker characters in combat to see how teamwork from the party can mitigate smart monster play. The fights were tougher as a result, with the wizard and the rogue bearing the brunt of the damage, but the new healing surge system and the versatile healing abilities of the cleric class in particular kept things together. The fighter’s ability to force enemies to attack him or risk drawing attacks was less flashy than the minion blasting powers of the wizard or the huge damage output of the rogue, but Cutenfluffy used it cunningly and pinned down some key enemies, which in combination with similar powers from Lexait’s warlord really restricted the options of the bad guys. I managed to surround Nekobakagaijin’s rogue with a swarm of kobold minions in one fight, but Mhacdebhandia’s wizard blasted them off him, killing almost all of them in one attack, but knocking ironically knocking the rogue unconscious. It was nothing that the warlord and the cleric couldn’t fix though, and between their healing powers they got him back on his feet. The battles were tense, tactical, and a lot of fun. We pushed through 3 fights plus light roleplaying in the village before finally succumbing to player fatigue just before the first boss fight. The general feeling from this more experienced group was that the combat system was greatly improved and that although a lot had changed, there was still a definite D&D feel to the game.

After running two games i finally got the chance to play in a game. It was the midnight launch of the core rulebooks and I found myself in a very RP-light game playing a cleric of Pelor. As the only person that had played the game at my table, other than perhaps the DM, I was able to help out the other players and keep the game moving along at a reasonable pace despite the below average focus of the other players. My cleric was the pregen from The D&D Experience and was IMO better built than the KotS cleric. I was particularly impressed with the rejigging of the cleric’s core healing power to be a minor action, which when combined with encounter powers which grant healing and temporary hitpoints as a side effect of making attacks meant I was able to get in there and mix things up with the rest of the front line fighters whilst still being able to keep on top of healing. IMO this is a further improvement upon 3e’s innovation in allowing spontaneous casting for clerical heals. The game was very light weight, but it was a lot of fun.

My overall impression is that 4e has taken steps in the right direction. By focusing on building a system that robustly handles action oriented gaming Wizards have played to the D&D’s core strength. I am keen to see how combat scales to higher levels now that there are no more save or dies and the overall power level of abilities seems to be somewhat lower, apparently to force more teamwork and strategic play. I’m interested in the new skill challenge system, which I kind of got to try out in the launch night game, but which was subverted somewhat by the attitude of the other players. It remains to be seen whether it will make a good system for handling non-combat encounters, but I’ve read reports that it’s mathematically untenable. It’s been a long time since I was so interested in running games and I’m glad that 4e has been able light the DMing spark in me again.

There aint nothing better to do on a lazy Sunday than to game your little heart out. Things got rolling with a visit to City Hunter Bondi Junction by myself, Mistress S, Fluffy, and MadA. There we had the awful and typical experience of finding none of the stuff that we wanted set up on the computers and it taking a good hour of our paid time to establish that it didn’t work. We ended up complaining bitterly to the manager, who decently gave us free time, but it was still damn annoying. We switched tack and played Unreal Tournament 2004 in Mutant mode, where one player is the mutant who has to kill everyone else but gets souped up with speed and partial invisibility. I turned out to be in the FPS zone and won a good deal of the matches before we switched to Bombing Run, where teams compete to take a ball and put it in their opposing team’s goal. The instagib mutator made it ridiculously fast paced and a hell of a lot of fun. It hearkened back to the good old day of gibalicious deathmatch action.

After computer gaming I headed over to Cura’s for some board gaming action and got in another game of Starcraft with Danoot, MadA, Cura, and Illya. The game took 5 hours to complete including learning, which was largely due to Illya’s analysis paralysis and difficulty with the rules. The other caught on really quickly, but for some reason it just didn’t stick with Illya. Cura rushed Illya’s base but was repelled by a solid force of Zealots. Danoot expanded twice and so did MadA, taking advantage of the fact that Cura and Illya were not going for their naturals. I was too far away from everyone to do anything other than expand to my natural.

Z-axis switcherooing saw Cura and MadA suddenly become neighbours, with MadA’s home base totally undefended. MadA managed to pull his troops back home in time to stop any of Cura’s shenanigans. I snuck in a Zergling to kill random some workers, annoying MadA in the process. Danoot managed to hold a ridiculous 5 worth of control points and put himself neatly within 2 turns of winning, which I pointed out to Cura, who helped me punish him for his overextension, but not before he had managed to rack himself up 10 VPs.

With Danoot subdued, MadA was still in control of 3 planets with a large ground force. Illya attacked his baseless outpost and wiped out his expeditionary force. MadA streamed units into my home planet and assaulted my home base, killing my defenders but losing a lot of attackers in the process. I then counter-attacked and took back the base before the end of the turn, avoiding losing it. The final phase 2 event was drawn, putting us into endgame with both me and Illya achieving our special victory conditions, but I with more victory points I took the win.

The game was interesting because it was a lower tech game than any of the previous ones we’ve had, with much more constant fighting from start to finish. I managed to get to Ultralisks, but not until the final turn, and MadA managed to get Mutalisks, but they weren’t decisive since I had Hydralisks to counter them. As a result the combats felt a lot less one-sided than the Battle Cruiser vs Zergling fights that we’ve had in the past. I really want to try more mid-tech builds, in particular Dragoons and Reavers seem like they would be great. I still don’t see the point in building Scourge.

Mistress S and I had our second round of games in the unranked DoW rooms tonight. We played three matches, winning our final match through a take and hold victory! Hooray for our first win!

We played all three games on Biffy’s Peril, which is the map with 4 relics and a critical location in the center. I still feel hugely incompetent controlling my guys and make large numbers of unforced errors. I’m discovering that the secret to being slightly less overwhelmed is to set up automation for some of the niggly stuff, like giving my cappers way points to go and take points one after another without me having to micro them or setting my barracks rally point to be my Tau Commander. Putting my barracks and vehicle beacon on overwatch proved handy for keeping down my float and getting an army up with little effort, but I’m guessing it’s not how the pros do things. I also found out that you can set the default stance for units produced in the Barracks by pressing the hotkey corresponding to that stance while the building is selected.

I’ve been trying to do the classic Tau opening of TC + Vespids, but have screwed it up every single time. My Vespids have rarely lived beyond their first few feeble attempts to kill a generator. It takes a pretty serious amount of micro to get your guys into the enemy base and smashing things up within 45 secs of the game starting, but it can be done and I’m determined to get it down pat.

In the first game my Vespid rush went okay! I managed to hit the Space Marine player while he was (unbeknownst to me) teching up to Grey Knights and managed to take out a generator and an LP. Shortly thereafter he chased me out of his base with Grey Knights. At that point I realized that I’d spent way too much time microing my Vespids and not enough time building my economy, meaning I was behind in capping and unit building. I pumped out a squad of Firewarriors which proved to be completely useless against Grey Knights. In the meantime Mistress S had been harassed by a Stealth Suit decapping one of her strategic points and had forgotten that she needed Guardians with Warlocks to see them, rather than a Farseer. Before realised her mistake the damage was already done and her economy was on the back foot. From there we wilted under pressure from Grey Knights and massed Firewarrriors. It was a bit of a debacle.

In the second game I futzed about and got my Vespids killed without really doing anything. I spent the rest of the game franticly ordering around units to do nothing effectual, whilst simultaneously failing to build my economy or tech up. I basically ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, got pushed back into my base, then ended up putting my Vehicle Beacon and Barracks on overwatch to suck up the huge amount of req and power that I was floating and pushed back out to the middle. Our opponents held the center point and got a take and hold victory. We thought we’d been completely outclassed, but when we looked around the battle field after our loss it became clear that all their stuff was dead except for the dregs holding the center.

In the third game we pulled a similar trick to that which our opponents had pulled on us in the last game. My start went a lot better and so did Mistress S’ tech. I still lost my Vespids in a hostile Necron base, but at least I got them in there really fast! My Stealth Suit expansion turned out much better than previously, capping 2 relics in the center plus the middle point, which ended up winning us the match by default. I even manged to get down LPs on most of my points. The low points were my Vespids repeatedly dying and my Kroot suiciding onto mass Fire Warriors. I could barely keep track I what I was doing myself, so Mistress S’ troops turning up to support me seemed positively miraculous.

I gave Starcraft: The Board Game another spin today. Percy, Valenos, and I were starting up a three player game, when Cura called and said he wanted in, so he scooted over to my place and we gave him a super condensed, front loaded rules explanation and then jumped into it. Rules explanation went much faster this time round, and I used the time honoured tactic of getting the person who has most recently learned them, Percy in this case, to explain them to the newbie, which helps firm things in for the teacher too. It turns out we’d been playing things wrong in the last game, where we exposed the top order on a stack, when it should actually stay face down until executed, so this time around we made sure we did it right.

I was hugely favoured by the set up, which gave me an uncontested planet and buffer planets between each of my closest neighbours. I was also playing Arcturus Mensk, who has to control 2 planets for a victory, so with my inaccessible planet and my home planet things were looking good. Valenos had buffer planets, but no safe expansion, and was connected to Cura by a Z-axis link. Cura started out right next to Percy, also joined by a Z-axis link, and charged into him right off the bat. He succumbed to diplomacy however, refraining from attacking Percy’s base and possibly ousting him, instead choosing to deny resources. All thing considered, he should have punished Percy’s incautious play and ousted him, but it would have made for a boring game for Percy.

As the game progressed, Percy expanded into the buffer planet between my home and his. Valenos expanded towards Cura but was harassed by Cura’s Zerglings and Hydralisks, losing control of the planet’s resources. I power boomed my economy, ignoring units and triple building in turn 2 to get to Battle Cruisers by turn 3. Valenos moved a Zergling in to claim the victory point location on the buffer planet between our bases and prepare the way for the third base he would need to claim his special victory condition.

Turn 3 came around and we were almost into the stage 3 events due to so many actions being blocked and players choosing to draw event cards rather than take thwarted actions, which meant special victory conditions were about to come online. I built Battle Cruisers, supported by a Science Vessel that I had built the previous turn, and flew in to blow away Valenos’ Zergling who had been considering base building. I left one Cruiser on each the planet’s two sections, guaranteeing that I’d hold it against the few AA forces that Valenos had. Valenos suffered an attack on his other front, with the lone Zergling holding off Cura succumbing to the Overmind’s swarms and his base being overrun. In retaliation Valenos invaded Cura’s now empty home planet and occupied every region, preventing him from building to defend himself. Percy built up an invasion force to push me off my victory condition planets, but it didn’t look like he was going to be able to do it in time.

By the end of the turn we had gone through half of the phase 3 event cards, which turned out to be enough to resolve both The End Is Near events, drawing the game to an end and leaving Percy as the winner, via his special victory condition. It was an unexpected ending, but I felt it was fair, given that Valenos and I were both certainly within striking distance of our victory conditions on the next turn. Event cards had been drawn more frequently in that game than in any of the previous games I’d seen, so we really should have taken into account the possibility that the game could end at any moment and pushed harder for a quick win or to crush Percy. Cura felt the game had been a bit short, but given that it took a little under 3 hours from start to finish I thought it was a reasonable length. I would love to play again and see some more of the tier 2 units being used. The final victory point tally was roughly Illykai: 10, Percy: 9, Valenos and Cura: 5.

With dual boot capabilities finally in place on Mistress S’ Macbook we were able to play our first games of 2v2 Dawn of War: Dark Crusade yesterday. We lost 3 out of 3 fights, which was fairly disheartening, but we analyzed what we did wrong and hopefully are learning from our mistakes. The last game we played was quite close and at one point it looked like we might win, so it’s not like we’re a lost cause.

I’ve decided to play Tau, because I love their aesthetic and I like the idea of smashing things with hardcore shooty infantry. Mistress S is going Eldar, because they’re strong and also they incidentally have a female leader. This means that we’re both jumping into two noob-unfriendly, micro-intensive races. Hooray! I expect us to get smashed over and over before we start to get any good.

Our first two games were on Biffy’s Peril, which has 4 starting locations linked via ramps to a central area containing relics, power, and a central critical location protected by heavy cover, all surrounded by negative cover rivers. Our basic plan was to build an army and hold the center. In game one we were playing against Necron and Chaos. Our initial push towards the Chaos player was repelled, and my Fire Warriors were constantly locked up in CC from that point on. Spending too much time trying to dance my thoroughly countered Fire Warriors left me floating a whole stack of resources which should have been pumped into building my economy and teching. We discovered at our expense that only Eldar can use Webway Gates, so I found myself stuck in Mistress S’ base at one point, trying to get back to my own to defend, but having to run all the way back when I’d thought I could teleport. It didn’t help that Mistress S wasn’t used to using her Macbook keyboard to handle hotkeys, and so kept pressing the function key instead of control, and then later wondered why her control groups were all screwed up.

In the end we got out spent, out teched, and out played. I needed a counter to the chaos CC troops, which I did get in the form of some Kroot, but it was too little too late. I didn’t expand aggressively with my Stealth Suits after taking the obvious close points. Things that we did do right are that we fought near turrets and on ledges, which help us beat some superior armies. Mistress S got Howling Banshees to help vs. CC and I ended up teching to Sky Rays with missile barrage, which would have been decent had they not come so late.

Game 2 was on the same map against double Chaos. This game went slightly better, but one Chaos player massed Heavy Bolters early, which totally countered our infantry for some time. It didn’t help that I left my Kroot on attack stance, which let them be lured into the Heavy Bolter clump and be killed in seconds. We managed to keep a presence on our half of the central area and teched up to tier 4, but we were slow in doing it. They also beat us to vehicles, which meant we were doubly on the back foot, particularly since I forgot to get Broadsides to defend our position and I learned the hard way that Fire Warriors suck pretty badly against vehicles. Mistress S’ army frequently found themselves in combat without me noticing, letting our opponents get a few 2v1 fights, which went badly for us.

Eventually I got Sky Rays, which smashed the Heavy Bolter clumps, particularly combined with Eldritch Storm. They teched into Defilers which Mistress S countered somewhat with Firedragons, but in the end they swarmed us with a better economy and pushed through our base defenses. I got out a Greater Gnarloc, but it couldn’t take on a Bloodthirster and Daemon Prince at the same time. Again we found ourselves outplayed with a lot of req floating that could have been spent on something that might have helped us.

Game 3 was against IG and Necron on a map that had a single choke point dividing the teams’ starting bases. We suspected IG would go heavy turret, and were right, so we fast teched to try and get something to deal with the turrets. Necron pushed through in the meantime, but we had enough troops hanging around to fight them since IG didn’t support them, giving us a 2v1 fight. We managed to tech well, but couldn’t work out what the heck we really needed to break through the turret wall. I suspected I needed Sky Rays, but couldn’t get a Stealth Suit close enough to target them without getting shot. I now know that I probably needed Path Finders. Throughout the game there were a goodly number of skirmishes fought in the choke point in which Missile Barrage was really punishing and out units managed to hold off several waves of attack. We even managed to push through their lines all the way to the back of their base, before being forced to retreat by a Baneblade. I teched to tier 4 and got an Ethereal with the thought of using Air Caste Strike to smash through the turrets, but I never got the opportunity.

Things were looking like a stalemate, until they got Basilisk artillery and the Necron Monolith came online, then things started looking very bad indeed. Most of Mistress S’ base had to relocate due to continued shelling, and my base was being harassed by the Monolith jumping in and out. We were able to pound it when it came in and force it to teleport back, but it did a lot of damage each time, which we couldn’t fully rebuild and became a big drain on our resources. Mistress S gave them a taste of their own medicine, jumping some Warp Spiders and Grav Platform units into their base, but their harassment was more effective. Ultimately I ought to have backed her up with Vespids and Stealth Suits.

Finally, the game wound to an end after a long fight, with us eventually losing the battle of attrition, having no real counter to the massed Basilisks that could attack us without fear. A final wave of attacks from the Monolith and Baneblade combined broke the back of our defense. I think that we played incorrectly and that we should have completely circumvented their turrets, going for a Stealth Suit, Vespid, and Warp Spider attack on their base far earlier, preventing them from developing whilst we teched up. Once they had the Basilisks online we had no real answer, which was an irritating consequence of the race match up. Also I realize now that I needed Path Finders to be able to get my Sky Rays to out range their turrets, which would have made punching into their base earlier in the game a whole lot more feasible.

Last night I went along with a bunch of friends to CityHunter net cafe on Sussex Street. I’d discovered that they have both World in Conflict and Team Fortress 2 installed there and was keen to give them both a shot. We all rocked up at around 10pm and staggered off home after 5 hours of rip-roaring video gaming fun. We had none of the problems that had often plagued us at CityHunter, such as incorrectly configured installations, although several people’s machines crashed while playing WiC. It was a very satisfying gaming experience.

WiC was the hit of the night. Several people there had never played it before but quickly got the hang of things, especially MadAdam, who was running and gunning with his infantry in no time. We tried several different formats: All vs. AI, 4v2 and 3v3 and I think that ultimately 3v3 was best, but having 2 more players would have made it gold. The absolute best thing about the game is that it’s easy for people to just jump into and play. One of the big problems with getting a fair sized group of people to play most RTS games is that you have to wait for everyone to be ready, which isn’t true of WiC since you can just fire up a server and have people jump in when they’re ready. There’s also no player elimination, which is one of the most serious downsides of most RTS games, since it means people sitting around bored whilst waiting for the other players to finish.

I racked up some serious kills as infantry, which is now without a doubt my favourite role. The fact that you can counter any units (aside from artillery) by yourself and also hide in forests makes them great fun to play, if a little micro intensive. I particularly enjoy locking down a point then sallying out across the map in choppers or trucks to cause mischief, or paradropping behind enemy lines, hiding in forests, and causing mayhem.

Team Fortress 2 was also a hit, which made me very happy. Again, we had people playing who’d never played it or the original, but had a great time. With small numbers of players a sentry gun can really make a big difference in a map. Also, the map sizes for most of the conquest-style maps are quite appropriate for small teams, particularly the maps where there’s a roughly linear route between command points that need to be captured since they channel the small number of players into the same area. The highlight of the game was certainly the medic and double heavy weapons guy defense put up by Mistress S, Valenos, and I on the final control point of (I think) Well. Both classes are so much better than they were in the original QWTF. With her healing us, we were practically immortal and managed to hold out for a good 5 minutes of frantic capping attempts before they finally snuck through and won.

We also had a crack at Starcraft, which was aulde skewl. That game has not aged terribly well! The graphics were understandably dated, the resolution is pathetically low, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what half the stuff in the game did. I remember did that battlecruisers rock though and also that there’s no such thing as too many SCVs, so I pumped out both like there was no tomorrow. I blitzed Valenos’ base and expansions before finally succumbing to a horde of carriers backed by arbiters. I’d completely forgotten that stasis totally rocks out and it effortlessly neutralized my carrier horde. IMBA!

There will certainly be a repeat performance and I particularly hope that WiC will become a staple of our gaming group.