Going in Friday to have my wisdom teeth removed. One of the buggers came in crooked and is busily cutting up my cheek every time I open my mouth wide... This weekend will probably be spent uncomfortably healing.

As if I didn't have enough hobby stuff going on, Steven reminded me that Civ 4 was a load of fun, so I got it reinstalled. I had always backed significantly off the video quality in order to get everything to run smoothly; with the new hardware, I can set it "max everything", -windowed-, and it runs completely smoothly.

Diplomatic strategy plays a much bigger role in Civ4 than it did earlier on in the series. Technology trading is still important, to be sure, but the religion aspect throws a monkey wrench in traditional strategies. You can help pacify otherwise-aggressive neighbors by spreading your religion to them. More problematically, most civs will declare the first religion they get as their "state religion" - there's benefits to having one, especially early on - and they hang on to that one like grim death. It can be easier for you to convert yourself to their religion instead!

Interesting week in EVE, as a new large-scale conflict kicks off; a motley group of alliances is conducting an offensive against the Northern Coalition, mostly for the crime of being steeenking rich and out of boredom. Hostilities weren't due to start until tomorrow, but the attackers were moving their main capital fleet as a single unit (and essentially unscreened - there's a limit to how many ships you can have in a single system in EVE before the server hardware starts screaming).

Somehow, either through infiltration or just good scouting, the NC got wind of the move, and dropped a strong attack fleet with a full support element on the capital convoy. Only five percent of the attacking capitals were destroyed before the overloaded system node crashed completely, and the attackers (they need to get some clever name so that it's easier to refer to them!) wisely stayed logged out rather than attempting to log back in to a busy node chock full of attacking capital ships and screen.

A note about EVE combat - since every ship in the game is fitted with short-range faster-than-light drives for in-system travel, one of the major challenges in combat is to keep your opponent from using that drive. (It's not instantaneous, and you can't maneuver in mid-jump, but by the time your opponent figures out where you went, you can be on your way somewhere else...) The necessary modules that create warp disruption effects or fields are rarely mounted on capital-class vessels (which are huge and slow and expensive as hell), since usually capitals operate in conjunction with screening elements which are more suited to that role. Without interdictors and heavy interdictors in their screen, the attacking fleet couldn't prevent the NC capitals from breaking off action when heavily damaged, whereas the NC attackers had the necessary vessels to lock down individual attacking capitals and pound them until they popped.

The corporation I'm a member of is a client of one of the major NC members, so this is cause to celebrate. It's also one hell of a morale hit for the attackers - even before things got underway, they were already faced with system overload, un-fun levels of lag, significant casualties, and a big disruption to their timetable. Morale's important in these things, because large-scale wars tend to turn into grinding attritional battles; both sides are wealthy enough to absorb big losses, but the power to continue the offensive is also largely based on the ability to keep pilots showing up on a regular basis... bored or frustrated pilots find other things to do with their spare time.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 633 words, total size 4 kb.