Author: Sleepypete

Hello everyone,

We got the news yesterday that everyone should have been expecting but really didn’t want to hear. Lockdown again. And today we have the news of people behaving very predictably and attempting to get out of where they are before that lockdown hits.

In my opinion, it’s too little, too late. I’m not surprised at all that our numbers have been climbing again over the past week, it’s about due for when the last lockdown was lifted. Perhaps :

If the lockdown had been initiated again in October when the climb in cases was starting, the peak wouldn’t have gotten so high again.

If the lockdown had been extended another week or two, we would have been in better shape now.

But I don’t want to talk about virus things too much here. You see far too much of that on the news. Advent ?

I did wonder what this was for a moment but it follows the trend of the last few days of being based on Empire Strikes Back themes and this time it’s the Hoth Echo Base shield generators. Nicely done.

That got me thinking about base building games today. The book there is an original manual from Settlers 1. The original … One of the best maybe too ? It had a pretty simple aesthetic, as demanded by the processing power of the day. But behind that, massive complexity.

You had your main castle, where your people lived, with the castle acting as a stockpile too. Your territory was marked out by guard huts and upgrades of these. Everything was linked by paths, with a settler carrying goods from one end to the other. You had to think carefully about your logistics as this game depended on your people being able to get those goods to where they’d convert from wheat to flour to bread. Or ore to iron to weapons.

There was a pretty simple ritualistic angle to the combat, where you’d send soldiers over to another player’s guard huts to take their territory. The soldiers would fight one on one.

Gosh this one took a long time though. Games would take a couple of sessions to play through.

The other game in the series that I played a lot was Settlers IV. This had similar mechanisms to the first few games but opened up a couple of different ways to play with alternate races.

One key difference here was the lack of roads. Settlers would be able to take the goods where they needed to go, direct, without having to pass the parcel along the logistic system.

This also made for massive battles too, I’d usually wait until I had a massive army together and then steamroller over an enemy area. Usually the one that had been left out of fighting that had already been occurring … One of my strategies for these games is sometimes “Punch the strong one”, because if you’re picking on an enemy that’s recovering from massive losses, then the strong one can take that as an opportunity to jump on your place while you’re looking the other way.

I mentioned above that there’s been a whole series of these games come out … There are 7 of them now. I haven’t played the others though. Maybe one to look at ?

Another one for today is Planetbase …

In this one, you land on a hostile planet and your job is to set up a self sufficient base and expand from there.

There are enemies, both in invaders that come in and attack and the planet/moon itself. The moon in the picture is an airless rock, which means if the sun flares, any colonists outside need treatment (fast!) for radiation sickness. Other moons have lightning storms. The conditions also impact things like whether wind turbines will work (not on the airless moon) or how good the solar panels are.

It’s a simple game but I enjoyed it massively.

Looks like I played with annotations while talking about the game a while ago. That’s an almost self sufficient base, with a farm for growing food, a factory for turning raw material into bioplastic and metal, a canteen, an oxygen generator and a dorm. Plus an airlock for getting to the facilities outside.

It’s a game where you had to be careful in a few ways … The initial materials had to be conserved. That’s a 2×2 farm there, you can build bigger at the start but don’t have enough people to look after the plants and it would take required materials away from other vital structures.

Almost done with that base and it was much expanded over the original there. The green highlight is for a visiting trading shuttle at the spaceport.

Planetbase has its flaws (a single minded colonist AI) but what it does, it does extremely well. It’s one of very few games where I’ve stayed around to pick up all of the objectives. Writing this, I’m tempted to go back in again now.

However … there’s another colony builder game in the library called Per Aspera that just came out. I haven’t spent enough time in that yet. My shoulder was giving my little pain jab reminders for most of today too and Per Aspera’s more hands off style should suit that.

Later !

Be well, stay safe everyone.

Hello everyone,

I have no idea what game this might be about today ! Except for another older one.

It’s a Battle Droid today, which made me think of a few things … In the movie, these guys were pretty dumb things that would be sent in to battle in never ending waves. They didn’t have to be intelligent. They just kept on coming.

The lack of intelligence is probably what made me pick out the backing picture … Ascendancy was a game that came out in 1995 and it was a pretty ok space strategy game. Or rather, that was the intent. The AI was very broken, so it was essentially more like a space sandbox game.

I remember that it had a few nice ideas in there though, including planet development and the ships. But it came out in the era of Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2 (Moo2) and a few others, like Galactic Civilisations. With severely broken AI, it had no chance against Moo2, a game so legendary that they recently remade it. I’ll talk about Moo2 later in the month.

The other genre that the battledroids represent is Tower Defense. This is where you mastermind the defence against a never ending series of waves of enemies. (The levels do usually end). My favourite of these is probably Defense Grid 1.

The levels are usually created so that you can set up a maze of towers to shoot down the aliens as they approach their goal. The more convoluted the maze, the longer it takes them to get to the goal and the more shooting time your towers have. You’ll also add in combined arms towers to do things like Boom many aliens at once, to slow the aliens down or towers that boost the income you get from them.

The challenge of these games is usually increased by having to balance keeping a certain amount of resources in reserve against having a defense strong enough to keep the baddies out. With Defense Grid 1, the more reserve you had, the more interest you’d earn on those reserves and eventually you’d get far more resources in interest than in shooting the aliens. But you have to keep improving the defenses in order to match increasingly powerful aliens.

Defense Grid 1 had a sequel … but the sequel changed a few mechanics around and didn’t hold my interest. It did come out in 2014 though, which is probably when my outsides were at their worst and I wasn’t playing the games much.

Tower Defence is a massive genre too.

That’s Creeper World 3, where instead of fighting individual alien enemies, you’re fighting a sea. One aspect of Creeper World 3 was to balance quickly grabbing territory and therefore power generation with being able to defend the territory you grab.

It’s a great genre. Very tactical. Very frustrating at times. The levels represent puzzles and often there’s only a couple of feasible solutions to beating them.

A good challenge.

There’s actually another Creeper World game out now, Creeper World 4. I’ve been enjoying watching a playthrough of it. Not sure if I’m going to get it though, I’ve tried Creeper World 3 a few times and I always run out of steam on it.

And I have a few more of this genre too that I haven’t played enough yet !

Have fun, play what you want, be well, stay safe. See you all tomorrow.