Accidental Historian

I'm Mostly Not Dead...

Getting a new computer is fun.  Getting a new computer is also time consuming.  There's all that building time and all that loading of important programs time and all that playing video games time...

No, really.  I made the brilliant decision to get Shogun 2: Total War, since I totally have the time to play a game that's a cross between Nobunaga's Ambition[1] and Empire: Total War.  At this point the mechanics of the game are such that I'm not sure I'll ever actually win,[2] but I'm entirely positive I will waste hours on end trying.

I just banged through Mass Effect and currently have Mass Effect 2 waiting for me.

I'm under the impression that The Mothership can actually handle the larger maps on Civ V.  The Beast crapped out late game with anything larger than the 8 player map sizes.

Meanwhile, Nvidia sent me a free copy of Mafia II and Just Cause 2 when I bought my video card.  I rather enjoy the former and keep playing the latter out of some weird sense that if I ever get the hang of the shitty controls I'll start to like it.  I mean, you're a dude with a grappling hook!

Also, Batman: Arkham Asylum was $7.50 on Steam yesterday.

So...basically...I'm a bit busy at the moment.

I've actually got some stuff kicking around at the back of my brain, so there might actually be content coming soon.  Until then, though, personal friend of the blog, Mr. Michael Mock, has been doing a series he calls "Friendly Evangelism."  It's literally an attempt to answer the question, "How can Christians evangelize without being assholes," as offered by someone who isn't an insider and isn't trying to sell his six-part video series on reaching the unbelievers.  It's good stuff.  And he obviously went to the same school of blogging I did, what with the turning a blog post or two in to a six-part series that covers any number of unanticipated subjects...

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Also, since I'm sure everyone's wondering, Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers will be in Grapevine on April 29th.  You know you want to be there...

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[1]Nobunaga's Ambition for the SNES is one of the greatest games ever in my book.  I have never, ever managed to beat it.  I have never, ever come even a little close to beating it.  Also, I'm developing a strong urge to break out the SNES and try again.

[2]If you get powerful enough, the Shogunate basically sends out a message that says, "Hey, everybody, you know that guy?  Yeah.  Fuck that guy."  At this point EVERY OTHER CLAN UNITES AGAINST YOU.  I had to give up a game as lost yesterday because even though I had three armies that were powerful enough to keep anyone from getting in to my territory and were more than powerful enough to press forward and keep taking land, it turns out that if you're fighting for a relatively small island territory, you've got coastlines everywhere.  So my undefended rear territories were extremely vulnerable.  And I was broke.  And, wait, is that a Mori invasion fleet?  Is that another Mori invasion fleet?  Did the Tokugawa just take out the Imagawa vassal territory I was using as a buffer?  Crud.

At the very least, it served notice that I won't be able to play the diplomacy card this time like I have with past games, i.e., "Make nice-nice until I can smack you around some and while I'm doing that make nice-nice with those guys just off to your left because I can't smack them around just yet."  See, the thing is, so far I have only seen the situation where all of Japan unites against me.  Why?  Because everyone was indifferent to, hostile towards, or activelly at war with me.  I don't know what would happen if I actually had a couple of good allies and was actively cultivating vassal states.  So that's my experiment for the next go-round.

AtF: Doing Something a Lot More Historically Accurate

So y'all might have noticed there was no AtF post this week.

Well, as it turns out, Civilization V has been released.  And, as it turns out, I am a massive pile of geekiness.  At the time I would have been writing AtF I was, instead, sending my armies of modern armor and mechanized infantry (and a random unit of lancer cavalry because, y'know, they were there...) in to the heart of the Songhai Empire under the cover of F-22 fighters, B-17 bombers, and off-shore artillery support from battleships and destroyers.

They were defending with Renaissance-era riflemen and cannon.  Also, their main cavalry was, well, knights.

I love the Civilization games.  The historical anachronism is just awesome.  And, for the record, Civ V is, by far, the best of the lot.  Cities can actually defend themselves even if ungarrisoned and bombard attacking forces.  Once you get the right technology your land units can transport themselves across water.  Units can't be stacked, which is kind of annoying from a logistics standpoint, but quite nice from a strategic standpoint.  Also, unlike past iterations of the game, if you have an advanced unit that is not on the verge of death and your opponent has a relatively crappy unit, there's basically no chance of you losing that battle.  That was always one of the -- shall we say -- flavorful aspects of Civ.  You'd occasionally find yourself running a tank in to a unit of spearmen and watching the tank lose, leading to a grand WTF? moment.  Oh, and the computer will actually tell you whether an attack is a good idea or not before you make it using a little graph of expected damage per side.

As best I can tell, most pre-gunpowder units cannot deal with post-gunpowder units one-on-one.  Pre-modern forces cannot handle modern, armored units on-on-one, either.  I had one situation where I had a pair of mechanized infantry units pushing forward with two units of riflemen entrenched in the mountains.  That was the only time in my fight against the Songhai Empire where I actually stood a chance of losing.  So I just bombed the units in to Bolivian...

Also, they introduced something completely new: City-States.  Well, these are new for the Civ series.  They're kind of analogous to certain factions in Empire: Total War.  Basically, though, they're non-expansionist factions that can be a real nuisance in times of war, as they'll go to war on behalf of the large faction they're allied with.  So the trick is to find a city-state that's close to a prospective enemy, buy them off, then watch them force your enemy in to a two-front war.

You can also use them as staging areas and flimsy pretexts for wars against major powers.  Hilariously, too, if an enemy power invades a City-State that's your protectorate, they'll taunt you about it.  This, for the record, might seem like a good idea if the invading power is extremely strong or far away.  If it is, however, the weakest major power left on the board and it taunts the most powerful force...

And so but anyway, that was my day yesterday.

Oddly enough, it was roughly as historically accurate as After the Flood.  And a shit-ton more exciting.

Also, I'll be doing a lot of traveling over the course of October.  So there might be a couple more of these weeks in the near future.