GameLog 22

Crusader Kings (57h) - Yes, nearly 60 hours on a 3 year old game that I only started on Tuesday. I had been poking around the paradox forums looking for snippets of wisdom or at least some things I wanted to know. The after action reports were Ok, but lacking a little class compared to the Footy Manager ones. I did happen to find a link to one problem I was searching for in an AAR for Crusader Kings instead of EUIII, so being a little bored I had a read of it: Real men to it Alphabetically; an AARgau. Or, "How to conquer a game one county at a time (BTW, there's ~1000 counties) in alphabetical order". It was great. 2 hours of reading page after page of witticisms and game dynamics I was hooked. I wanted to play it more than ever and I'd learnt enough about the game and what's achievable from the AAR to make a pretty easy transition over to it. The game still lacks an intuitive interface. Well, it's intuitive once you've done it, which is Ok to move around and get to the data you want, but if you didn't know something was possible you'd never find it.

Our first run at a dynasty started at the bottom end of Ireland with Munster. it was really hard to find anything to actually do for the first part, so I let the game roll and got used to the pace of it. I then started for real with the Duke of Moray, Scottish heartland and stomping grounds of Clan Cameron. As a duke it was a little easier on the money than a small county, but rebellion against the scottish king looked a certainty. My 2nd wife is William the Conqueror's daughter, so we ally and take apart Scotland. Unfortunately the game crashed and revealed there were no saves. At all. Gone. Just like the marketing drive at work. It was 3:30am anyway so it was taken as a sign to head to bed.

We start afresh the next night as Moray but this time it's Norway that come to the party. Scotland implodes from a vengeful king with a fistful of rivals, and we hold back to the verry death to swoop in and claim the crown, just like a good game of "King of the Hill". After all the fighting the rest had gone through, I'm sure I received a few glares, but they happily put their troops away and wait for my instructions.

Norway gets uppity with Sweden and we oblige with the war, but are content with shouting insults across the North Sea as things at home look much more interesting. Sweden has Nothumberland and a few other English duchies after William's death left the country in disarray. We swoop on a vacant Northumberland claiming the rich seat of York for ourselves and vassalizing the rest. We also work on Norfolk while there aren't any troops around as well as finally putting some steel into a bothersome Hereford county.

We could easily sue for peace from our island and get to fixing up our tarnished reputation, but Norway actually looks like it might be in trouble so we venture the seas to help out. While the battle rages back and forth though Norway, Sweden is left relatively vacent for us to put our tents up and camp out a healthy peace deal.

Now we're really overboard with a bad reputation and the vassals are losing patience. We keep our heads out of some juicy battles and prepare for a civil revolt. The Dunkold family is everywhere in Scotland as proponents of the previous rule, but with the passing of the old king we get things back on track with only 2 duchies looking problematic.

Some in-fighting helps weed out the poor rulers, but my daughter's hubby (20 Martial) puts up a good fight, flooring 2500 men with only 350. We re-vassalise them instead of demanding everything so he can fight for us. They also had claim to 1/2 of Scotland and the crown, so it's a prestigous windfall to not claim back the lot.

Europa Universalis III (6h) - Advanced Scotland a little further. Trying to pick and choose our way through the battle lines.

World of Warcraft (5h) - BundyBear, 70 Warrior. Got back into it with the boys to push through Slabs. Having 5 in a room is the way to go for instances.

Trackmania Nations (2h) - Cameron's Fave.

TF2 (2h) - First time playing the game for over a week was a [QGL] clan matchup. We dropped 2 quick captures to 6P before clawing back 1 ourselves. I'm guessing we were all a bit rusty as we improved a lot toward the 2nd half, as I moved into attack and got anotehr back, only to lose ours in a great melee in the middle. We had theirs out again but we time beat us. 2-3. Very close one. Certainly don't mind losing games that intense and tight.

GameLog 21

Europa Universalis III (35h) - Played through Burgundy to get into the swing of things from a more dominant position. Annexed some of the lower german provinces and vassalised Spain before falling to a massive French army. Played as Scotland to try out the colonization features. Seems to take forever to get a colony up, and it really takes forever to build a base income for tiny nations. Pulled into 3 simultaneous wars against Novgorod, Burgundy and Poland by our allies. Thanks.

Football Manager 08 (6h) - Barrow, 14th EC, Season 2. A few more weeks under the belt to get to the December holidays. I found out that many of Sandy's relllies came from Gateshead, and I'd tried to play them at the start of this version after seeing the stadium size in the Andy Preece writeup, but they had dropped out of the conference. Seriously looking at swapping over and keepign them up as Barrow is lacking something at the moment.

Hellgate London (5h) - VRBones, 9 Engineer. A little more online with Matt.

World of Warcraft (5h) - BundyBear, 70 Warrior. Got back into it with the boys to push through Slabs. Having 5 in a room is the way to go for instances.

Trackmania Nations (4h) - Cameron's Fave. He found the driving wheel in the cupboard while cleaning up, so it's also out on the desk to give him some driving practice.

TF2 (2h) - How the mighty have fallen. Only a single session at Matt's to show them what it's like.

EU3 things I wanted to know

Europa Universalis is a pretty goood game for pure strategy fans, but it really does lack a helpful way to show what you want to do. Sometimes things aren't possible, but more than likely it is possible, just not intuitive whare the bloody button is to do it.

Here's a list of some of the things I had to google up or hunt down outside the game:

• How do you make one army out of multiple armies?
  Click and drag a box around all the armies in the same location, then you have access to the army manipulation buttons above the selected armies.
• How can you request military access?
  There are a lot more diplomacy options below the orignally viewed ones, scroll the list down. (Why is it hard to see that the list is scrollable? probably because they are proper buttons and fit the screen neatly. Bad UI)
• How do you gain back reputation?
  You don't apart from the dribble that your leader gives. (still looking though)
• How do you board boats?
  Send the boat into the sea (not at the port) then move the unit into the sea. Make sure there is a transport, not just galleys or fighting ships. Don't move more than the number of transports.
• Where can you see what maintenance a unit costs?
  Upgrade to v1.21, then it is in the tooltip when hovering over a unit.
• After a restart the trade values look wrong?
  It takes a month to apply supply / demand. Funny how it only happens after you restart the game, not a resign / load.

GameLog 20

Hellgate London (18h) - VRBones, 13 Engineer. The trip up to Matt's place meant new games to see & play. The only thing that was of interest though was hellgate London. Supposed to be like diablo, but plays more FPS. It seems Ok to play, but not gripping. Played single player though to ~13 to get the feel of the Engineer as I wasn't impressed by the subscriber model for playing online for the elite levels. Hopped online to playu a little with Matt to see if it was more entertaining. Didn't add much in the way of tactics, but it added another dimension to the fragfest. The game needs buddies and and beer to make it shine.

Football Manager 08 (10h) - Barrow, 17th EC, Season 2. Back into it mainly due to the lack of options at the moment. Played a lot of things but none gripping enough to keep me going.

Europa Universalis III (8h) - Played through some of the Irish provinces to see if I could hold England back and unite Ireland. Did it on the 3rd go as Munster.

TF2 (8h) - Still hooks me in (like to 3am christmas eve), but just less times I'm starting it up. All the updates are killing the crap out of my FPS too :/

Medieval II: Total war (3h) - Scotland now has William Wallace and a whole horde of henchmen from the north to pound the English. I"m not done with the Vikings yet, so it'll be a wintery Wallace for a while.

Trackmania Nations (2h) - Cameron's Fave.

Facebook Poker (1h) - 11147. Mixes well with other turn based games.

GameLog 19

Medieval II: Total war (14h) - Got into the Britannia campaign as Scotland. It plays almost identically to Rome: Total war, so I'll probably do a bit more then try another campaign writeup like the History of Briton one from the RomeTW series.

TF2 (10h) - Still hooks me in (like to 3am christmas eve), but just less times I'm starting it up.

Battle for Wesnoth (10h) - Finally settled on Wesnoth for a multiplayer game when Ben came over. We'd been discussing what types of games we wanted to try, but most of the games I had weren't actually multiplayer in the sense of true LAN. Most sent people online first. Civ 4 was another option, but my copy is munched. Wesnoth served its purpose though. Later I played a bit more of the custom scenarios to get back into the swing of it.

Halflife 2 (6h) - One uneventful night I thought I'd try something different and give the HL2 campaign a go. It did have a good feel to it, and even though it's incredibly linear it did a good job of hiding it. I also liked the pacing. Parts are hectic non-stop run&gun, then either a commentary section or a semi-puzzle to figure out how to get to the next room. The raven aarea is leaving a sour taste in my mouth though, I'm not big into the horror stuff and it detracting from the game. May or may not play any more, but I'm intrigued by Force's recommendation that the ending of HL2: Ep2 is a cliffhanger.

Uplink (3h) - Managed to store the link path so it was easier to play again for a while. Want to get into some more interesting missions as the ones at the moment are getting stale.

Football Manager 08 (2h) - Barrow, 15th EC, Season 2. Played enough to pull out the coaching data. Losing interest and other games crowding it out. After playing a stint with Arsenal for the coaching it'll be a long road to get to that status.

Europa Universalis III (2h) - Another one pulled out to see whether it's LAN multiplayable.

Trackmania Nations (2h) - Another one for the LAN and a few races for Cameron.

Facebook Poker (2h) - 11027. Mixes well with other turn based games.

7 star coaches (pt 2)

I've been looking at page stats and hits on this site for a while as it's in the same account as the St Luke's tracking stuff I've set up and I noticed a number of hits onto the FM08 7 star coach rankings. I originally placed it up so I wouldn't have to keep googling for it, but I'm amazed it's ranking this higher than a lot of other FM fansites. Although the initial post isn't original stuff, I have expanded on it since then and thought I may as well share ...

Back in FM07 I dug up the 5 star coach rule and deduced a function to calculate any star rating. This was really handy for LLM clubs where getting a 5 star trainer wasn't much of an option. After looking at the new FM08 7 star ratings, it was identical to the original 5 star system to get the top tier, but was it the same formula?

The original FM07 formula was pretty simple. Assuming the main attribute is 'M':

Star = INT((A+2)/4)

If there was a secondary attribute ('S') then it would be 1/4th the weight of the main attribute:

Star = INT(((M*4+S)/5+2)/4)

Unfortunately the new 2 stars are 'additions' to this basic structure to give more definition at the start and end of the spectrum. There is an additional break between a 1 & 2 and the slightly better 3,4, & 5, as well as more definition at the top end by dividing 14 & 15 from 16 & 17.


The new formulas to calculate any star rating in FM08 is simply tho old formula with the 2 new steps added as separate chunks:

Star = INT((M+2)/4) + INT((M+17)/20) + INT((M+4)/20)

As before, replacing 'M' with '(M*4+S)/5' at each point gives the star ratings for training areas requiring a secondary attribute. For Set Pieces it has 3 attributes, but it's simply a replacement of 'M' with '(M*3+S+T)/5'.

Eventually I dumped the formulas in favour of an Excel lookup to get rid of a 0 star rating at 1 skill which kept making the output look untidy. I could have added another int() division to take care of it but the formula was stretching it anyway.

My Excel sheet to calculate coaching stars shows in blue what the expected star rating will be, then changes to green if you update what the actual star rating is once they are employed. Let me know if you ever see a red calculation, as that indicates that the calculated star rating was different from the actual star rating entered. I'm pretty sure it's right though as I spent 1/2 hr trying to find out why 1 value was out of place only to find out it was me not being able to count stars properly (Doh!)

Tesla car

Been thinking about getting a motorbike for the daily commute to work, but Sandy's against the idea. The other thing that has me interested is the new electrics that don't look silly and perform Ok:

Portal Poster - 35 / 100

After singing along to "Still alive" and digging around the net for portal related stuff, the poster I ordered 2 weeks ago turned up on my chair when I got home. Valve released a limited edition of signed lithographs for Portal, TF2 and HL2 a few weeks ago and although I wanted the TF2 one, the picture just wasn't that interesting. The Portal one of GLaDOS seemed to work well and looked like it would be a good candidate for the collection.


It also came with a rather tacky authentication certificate, but the gloss print and the signing was worth it. For the record I got number 35 of 100, and seeing I went straight to the store after the announcement I guess they sold out rather quick. Went back to the site on Monday and they weren't even selling the ordinary lithographs anymore [Edit: now they are]. Should make for a good investment as one of the best moments in gaming.

For all the poo-pooing of Steam, it was a morning update message that alerted me to these being available. So all the pestering actually did get more money out of me. GG.

*Bonus cupie doll for picking up the name of the book holding the lithograph flat or finding the ghost in the machine.

"Still Alive" Diagnosis

I dug up an interesting "Still Alive" diagnosis for portal that postulates a split personality for GLaDOS and that all the stuff she said was true if you take this into account. I like it. A lot of the offhand comments from GLaDOS support a fragmented personality if viewed externally rather than accepting that GLaDOS is toying with you.

If this diagnosis is true though, that all GLaDOS comments are legitimate, then the last few lines of the song have a more sinister undertone. Maybe the "personality cleansing" you did may not have been quite as successful as GLaDOS hoped:

Portal - Song Lyrics:
...
And believe me I am still alive
I’m doing science and I’m still alive
I feel fantastic and I’m still alive
And while you’re dying I’ll be still alive
And when you’re dead I will be still alive
...

GameLog 18

Football Manager 08 (22h) - Barrow, 18th EC, Season 2. Well there's the downswing. FM has a penchant for putting your team in a downward spiral of poor performances leading to poor morale leading to even more bad performances. It's hard to break out of it, in fact it's one of the frustrating parts of the game. The time when you REALLY want to make a difference, you feel powerless to change anything. Once we got into the cups it helped kick our losing ways, but we're still rated below the majority of other teams in conference premier so it's going to be tough getting past mid-table.

Uplink (10h) - Started Sunday looking for something different. Might have to look at picking up SimCity Societies since I didn't know it was out yet, or Civ4:Beyond the Sword. I got caught siphoning a million from someone's account so I started again. With the save/load of bounce patterns it's a heck of a lot easir to get set up with a lot of time up your sleeve. I got back to the same position in only 2 hours, so it should be pretty easy to push into more interesting missions.

TF2 (8h) - [QGL] lost to both Mad Dogz (expected) and Clan A, but hurting the most was a non-entry of score that cost us 4 places on the ladder. I still reckon we're top 20 material, probably a bit more teamwork as we're all pretty rusty. I'm suprised that I'm playing far more than most other players according to steam. Maybe I'm loving this game more than others?

Facebook Poker (2h) - 8617. FM08 mixes well with other games.