Glory To Rome!

Chris hosted the other night for our regular Tuesday game group. Since he and his family are going to New York for an extended vacation soon, this is the last time he'll host for a while, so it was nice to get the chance to game with him. Also present were Mike, Ken, and HazMatt. On the table were Cheeky Monkey, Glory to Rome, and a couple of games of For Sale. I missed the Monkey because I was picking up a stranded friend, and Mike bowed out early to miss the two For Sale games.

I'll focus on Glory of Rome, which took most of the evening to play (around 100 minutes including 'splainin'). The game is an interesting blend of civ-building and resource management, and despite the Phil Fogglio-esque graphics there's a fairly deep game here. There are elements of Puerto Rico/San Juan/RftG here, but at the same time the design mitigates the luck elements that make SJ and RftG a bit frustrating (card mining in particular). 

The entire point of GtR (wasn't that an 80's supergroup?) is to build buildings and convert materials into wealth. If you have the most of a given type of material in your vault, you get 3 bonus points for that material. In our game, which was clearly played sub-optimally, that would have been a 20% point boost had anyone gotten it (I was about three seconds away before HazMatt ended the game, literally the only way I was going to miss out on an extra five points). In our game, we focused on buildings rather than filling our vaults, and I suspect that future games will see the opposite because of the bonuses.

The game is pretty simple. Each Order card has four different elements to it, although three of those elements will be fixed for every card of that type. The first is the occupation of the card, which lets you do one of six fixed actions during a turn. The second is the material type of the card, which always matches the occupation. The third is the VP value of the card if it goes into your vault, also tied to occupation. Fourth is the special ability that the card gives you if you convert it into a building. These are also tied to the occupation, but there are multiple buildings associated with each occupation so there's more of a variety. 

For example, the Craftsman cards all have the material Wood, are all worth 1 VP in the vault. There are four or five buildings on Craftsman cards, including Palisades that protect the owner from Legionary cards. 

Each player also has a play aid mat that doubles as an organizational tool. On the top of the mat you place the Site cards (involved in building) that you complete which give you Influence (VP and allow you to place cards in other areas). The Vault, to the right, is where you put cards that will count towards your VP at game end, but you can only place two cards there until you up your Influence. To the left are your Clientele, which are occupations that you can always use, also limited by Influence. At the bottom is your Stockpile, a place to put materials until you need them. The cards are arranged graphically so that the materials are visible from the bottom, the occupations visible from the left side, and so on, so cards go under the play mat and take up relatively little space. 

The turn works as follows. The "Leader" player (really the start player, not an indication of where they are competitively) decides whether to "think" (draw cards) or play an occupation card, which determines what players can do for that turn. If the start player was thinking, then the turn is over. If they played an occupation card, the other players may either think or play their own occupation card. If they have a Clientele card in the appropriate section, they get an extra action as that occupation, and they don't even need to play a card and may Think to draw cards *and* get the bonus actions. For example, if a Laborer was led, and I have two Laborers in my Clientele section, I can draw up to my hand limit *and* select two materials from the pool to place in my stockpile of materials. The actions don't take place until everyone has decided whether they will hire or think for that turn, which is why Matt was able to draw the last card from the draw pile before I could bank my Concrete card for an extra five points. You can also use special "Jack" cards that act as any Occupation, but don't have any other use in the game.

Mitigating the luck of the draw is the Resource Pool. All discarded cards go into this pool, so if you play a Patron, that means there will be Marble cards in the pool for people to draw next turn as all Patron cards are also Marble cards. As such, the play you make on your turn will benefit you the least on the next turn if you wanted to get the card back out of the pool right away since you go from the first player to the last player. 

The Occupations are as follows:

• Patron - move a card from the pool to your Clientele, limited to your Influence.
• Laborer - move a card from the pool to your Stockpile.
• Legionary - Request cards, which must be in hand (and not Jacks) from the pool and your immediate neighbors. 
• Merchant - move a card from your Stockpile to your Vault, limited to your Influence.
• Craftsman - You may start a new building, assuming there is a matching Site card (has the same material) from your hand. You may instead add a card to a building in progress from your hand.
• Architect - Same as the Craftsman, except you may add a card to a building in progress from your Stockpile rather than from your hand. New building cards still come from your hand.

Again, if you have multiple Clientele of a given occupation, you may do that action multiple times. Near the end of the game, you might be able to build an entire building, from foundation to completion, without playing a single occupation card. Each building requires a different number of cards to complete based on the material used to build it, which of course matches up with the VP that resource would give. As such, you need two concrete cards in addition to the actual building card (foundation) and concrete site card. There are a limited number of site cards in each material, so as they get scarce you may find yourself planning to build something that you can't build because the guy in front of you took the last card. It's a surprisingly deep game.

As you can imagine, there are multiple paths to victory, with something like 25 different building types and a host of ways to build up Clientele. A few buildings seem really great until you realize that a) by building them you take the materials and associated VP out of the game (they don't go back into the pool, unlike when you play Occupations), and b) if someone else gets it, it's hardly worth your time. For example, I build a Senate that let me collect all of the Jacks that other people played in a turn. Which was awesome, until Chris (sitting to my left) did the same. Now, all the Jacks went to him unless it was my turn or if he played a Jack. 

The only downside I see to the game is that it comes in a rather cheap package - three card deck holders in a plastic blister pack that doesn't really go back together again all that well. Chris says he built a box to put it in rather than deal with that mess again. The other ding is the cartoony art that makes the game look lighter than it actually is. 

So what makes the game superior in some ways to Race? First is the resource pool, which means that you have to make your choices of occupation carefully so as not to set up an opponent, especially the person to your left. It also means that everyone draws from the same set of resources for Clientele and Materials. Second is the Jacks, which you can draw instead of from the Orders deck. That means you have flexibility as the turns progress to play any occupation, if not to get a specific material (but you have the Laborer to do that for you). Third is the pipeline nature of building, which means extra steps that require planning ahead. Early on it's not a terrible idea to get several buildings going at once so that you can add to any of them as your cards allow. These elements all mitigate the luck of the draw from the Orders deck, although it has it's appeal as well (as you might be able to get several cards at once). There is relatively little fishing compared to SJ or RftG, which I like. 

On the downside, the game takes about 80 minutes for a full playthrough, about four times as long as Race. Still, it's a deeper game that still scratches the same itch for me, and this is a title I'll pick up. Note that we played the I.V edition, which is apparently a much better production than the first attempt in 2005. That must have been something to see.

Thanks to Chris for hosting, I had a blast. Even if Hazmatt did steal the win from me by ending the game *just* at the right time. 

On Patriotism

There was a good op/ed piece by Ed Dionne, Jr in the Oregonian today (Tuesday, May 27th) talking about patriotism and how progressives should not abandon this high ground to the conservatives. In particular, he went on at some length about what patriotism is, especially in regard to nationalism or jingoism. 

Just to get our definitions straight, jingoism is defined as aggressive patriotism, particularly in regard to a warlike foreign policy (which could clearly be applied to the Bush administration). Nationalism tends to be a negative term as well, at least when applied to an existing country (or if you are Israel and you are discussing Palestinian nationalism). The key word in the definition I read was "superiority", which also seems to apply to the US at present.

Recently I was at the Charbonneau barbershop listening to a man go on about how people who didn't love America should just leave. By "love" he meant "things are going really well for me and mine right now so don't rock the boat". That's all well and good, but America isn't a static entity. Never has been, and never will be. One of the truly great things about my country is that it does change and adapt as the world changes. No longer are white male landowners the only ones in power, although we seem to be a little slower than most countries in making that change - in fact, a considerable percentage of Americans own land. Many immigrants came to this country specifically so that they *could* own land, when it wasn't possible back in their country of origin - it was a major element of the immigration waves of the 1800's, which of course were designed to put bodies in the newly expanding West as the result of land purchases or land taken in the Mexican American War. 

Other changes are equally sweeping - civil rights regardless of your race or sex (although we haven't quite gotten around to guaranteeing the latter, shamefully), social safety nets, transportation and communication networks, major scientific undertakings. Even when the underlying motivations for things like the Apollo moon landings (we can't let the Russians take over outer space!) are antagonistic, the results (imagine life without a microwave oven) are generally beneficial to us as a whole. 

The key issue here is that these were all changes. Often those changes were fought tooth and nail by those who wanted to keep the status quo for selfish reasons, even if those who fought for the changes had the same motives. Trolley cars were eliminated by the rubber and gasoline companies who wanted people in cars, not mass transit. Clearly a change that has had mixed results, but we adapt and change to change itself.

Even the very definition of what America is changes as you move from neighborhood to neighborhood. I live in one of the most progressive parts of the US, a state that hasn't voted Republican for president since Reagan, yet my neighbors who wave the flag are all conservatives, rich, and white. Clearly they want nothing to change except for the Democrats to all die horribly and at once. Many of them defend torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, invading other countries if we disagree with them, and think Bill O'Reilly is a smart guy (which he probably is - he's made a career out of screaming over the top of anyone he disagrees with, which has been very effective if not terribly useful). Drive ten miles up the road to my old neighborhood, Multnomah Village, and you'd see people who throw up in their mouths at the idea of *any* conservative having a voice in power.

True patriotism is not either of these things. True patriotism is being able to look at all arguments and come up with a solution that will make life better for all Americans, not just the ones who look like you or go to your church. True patriotism is taking a hard, honest look at what our country does in our name and be willing to stand up in a hostile crowd and say that we need change because we're better than what our acts say we are. 

It is not wearing flag pins, it is not waving the flag on holidays (or all year, as many of my neighbors do). It is definitely not claiming that if you don't like it, move to Cuba. If you don't like it, think about why you don't like it, why things are the way they are, find a solution, and work to see it implemented. Perhaps that's an engineer's view of the world, but then we build the roads and buildings and bridges and Internet and airplanes and cars. We look at the world in what should be a neutral and objective way, find compromises where necessary, make design trade offs, but in the end we get the job done. 

Perhaps we should be electing engineers to run things instead of lawyers. 

Regardless of who the next President is, I am hopeful that we will begin to move away from the attitudes of difference and fear of change and start seriously addressing the myriad crises that loom in our future. Because they will require us to forget our tribal politics and entrenched interests and look at the world differently if we are to survive as a nation and culture, if not as a species. We can't consume the world's resources at our current rate if everyone does it, so it's time to start learning to make do with less. It's time to realize that the choices we make as a nation affect the entire world, and perhaps we should be making those choices as if we lived on a planet that we're stuck on. 

Perhaps patriotism should start to move past our national boundaries and apply to our world and our species and even life in general. Because wearing a flag pin will mean nothing to your children, or your grandchildren, if they're living in caves and wearing rat skins. Patriotism is really about thinking and moving and doing in arenas beyond the self, and the sooner we wake up and realize that patriotism has been a tool to control the population rather than improve life, the sooner we can start making a future for our kids instead of making things worse.

Holy Crap

Some of you who are astute readers and willing to listen to my political/social/economic ramblings know that I have a 23-year-old daughter. You also know that my wife and I, who had been dating for about two months when she got pregnant, made the decision to give her up for adoption. In Oregon, you are allowed to get information about your birth parents when you turn 18 (a practice I'm not convinced is a good idea just yet, although I'm quite happy that our daughter found us), and so she did five years ago. 

While it hasn't always been a smooth ride, I have always been thrilled that my daughter is in our lives, although sometimes not so much. 

Now, in a plot twist made for a Lifetime channel movie, I can say that I am going to be a grandfather right around New Years Day, assuming everything goes well. Making things only slightly more complex is the fact that my daughter and the father were living together for a while, broke up for a few months, decided to get back together, and sealed the deal with a little surprise. He's moving up to Portland from Vegas in early July, and from the few days I've spent with him I have a good opinion of him. They do not plan to get married right away, which I think is a good idea. 

I am, of course, concerned about a few things. I'm slightly worried that we may end up being the defacto parents of this child for a variety of reasons, and we have no experience with such things. I'm also a little concerned that my daughter is a member of an evangelical church, and my experience has been that some members of such churches can be extremely judgmental and nasty, especially as my daughter isn't planning to get married. I do not think that all evangelical Christians are this way, far from it, but when Mel was pregnant 24 years ago (my God) the handful of people who behaved poorly at hearing this news were, with one exception, evangelical Christians. Me, I'm not terribly concerned about the opinions of the people in her church, but I am concerned that she went looking for community and that she may be disappointed when some ostracize her for being fertile. These are small issues, however. My grandchild has the world before her (we do not know the sex yet, of course, as she is only a couple of months into the pregnancy) and a support system that is ready to help when she needs and wants it.

My own reaction has been interesting. We found out on Mother's Day (apropos!), and for about a week I wasn't sure if I was reacting at all. Everything felt very - flat, which I attribute to shock. On the one hand, my DNA is doing what it's geared to do - reproduce. On the other hand, an unplanned pregnancy (at least in this case) is something that is going to have repercussions on the rest of my daughter's life, regardless of what choice she were to make. I am pleased she did not choose abortion, although I am pro-choice (technically, I'd call myself pro-planning and would prefer that women are never in a position to have to choose abortion, but consider it the lesser of two evils). I think that the emotional cost of abortion scars you for life, and it is a choice that women should enter into very carefully. At the same time, I have seen the costs of adoption from both sides, and they are high as well. My daughter is already scarred from that experience, and I often wonder if she would be happier and more stable had we kept her (although we can never know - there are so many variables). 

In all, I think she is making the correct and responsible choice to keep this child. I think that this situation is going to force her to grow up very quickly, and that she is going to be challenged on many levels, potentially to the point where she breaks down in some way. I think that the situation is going to finally give us the chance to earn her trust, as we have been where she is now in many ways. I think that I am going to love being a grandfather, and heaven help this child if she doesn't enjoy playing games with me. I think that explaining why there are so many grandparents (both my daughter and her boyfriend have divorced parents, and then there's us, meaning up to ten "grandparents", although in this case I think that genetics wins ties) will be a challenge. I think that this is going to be one loved child. 

I also think I would have preferred to be in my 50's before becoming a grandparent. I certainly would have preferred that my 60 year old brother become a grandparent before me. I'm fairly certain I have beaten all of my friends to grandparenthood, at least those who are at or near my age. Being a grandparent is a milepost that says you are old, that your life is over and it's time to hand the torch to those younger than you. That's not likely to happen, as my life is full of me sidestepping the traditional path because it doesn't make sense to me. I am a 45-year-young grandfather, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm still going to skip over my birthdays, though.

The only thing I know is that none of this (other than providing love and support) is in my hands. I can give advice when asked, a shoulder to cry on, a helping hand when needed. But in the long and short run, all I can do is those things. They are not trivial, but they are not the hard work of parenting or trying to build a long term relationship almost from scratch. This is the work my daughter will need to do, and I both wish I could spare her this struggle and exult that she has, at long last, reached adulthood for better or for worse. 

So think good thoughts for Steph as she goes through this gauntlet. It will not be denied, and we now celebrate new life into a world of chaos and uncertainty as we have for millennia, throwing our DNA into the void of an uncaring and hostile universe, and are glad. 

Things I'm Glad AoC Does Different From WoW

A short list, but since I've been critical in my first two passes (and spent a little time playing WoW), here's my list...

1) Shorter corpse walks. I got my Horde Druid stuck in the Boulder Lode Mine, getting ganked by four Venture Co. goblins. three or four minutes of corpsewalking later, I found all of the dead mobs had respawned and there was no safe space to resurrect in the mine. Not that it kept me from trying, and on the third try I actually managed to just have *one* goblin attack me. Then when I was trying to get my system back into fighting trim, another four came at me. At that point I decided to wait to finish the quest until I'd gotten cat form and could sneak in (which I did later, and died when four more attacked me right after I'd killed the boss, but after I'd gotten the Samophlage Manual Cover from him). 

At that point, I res'ed in the graveyard and suffered 10 minutes sickness rather than do another three minute corpsewalk. Sheesh. 

AoC respawns you, intact, at a safe location. You may need to work through parts of the instance you're in, but in general things seem to be a lot closer than in, say, the Barrens in WoW. I mean, all Blizz had to do was allow you to res in Ogrimmar, but since it's in a different zone you don't do that. 

So maybe they should have added another graveyard?

2) Interesting human interaction right away. By this I mean "human" as in NPC, as  you clearly have human interaction right away in any MMO. Instead of burning through three levels in a long period of time (say, an hour), AoC gets you through to the city (and vendors, safety, etc) in about 20 minutes. You're in a major city right away rather than showing up at one around level 6, as you do in WoW (assuming you follow quest lines rather than just heading straight for the Ironforge, say).

3) And the early area doesn't involve spending half the time traveling. While I don't know what the post-tutorial areas look like yet, I do know that I'm not spending half my time running. I prefer to play female characters in WoW so that at the very least I'm looking at a nice ass even if it is on a very large cow. Because I spend a lot of time watching them run from one end of Stranglethorn Vale to the other. I love Leonadril, but I was feeling like we'd spent a little too much time together, if you know what I mean. AoC at the very least avoids that early on - most things are pretty close by, and the worst thing that happens is you get lost in Tartuga (got it!)

4) Helpful icons in the HUD. The Mini-map in AoC has arrows to show you where you need to go for the next quest. In Targuta, that may mean running around trying to find which street you need to go down to get there, but it's a big improvement over resorting to an online map to find where the Temple of Conspicuously Consuming Were Rats is as you do in WoW. Now if only they would let you list quests, as I've mentioned before.

See? I like this game. I like it fine. Once I've got the magic disconnected shadows turned off and I have a frame rate in the 30's, I'll like it even more. Tomorrow the goal is to roll another character (probably a priest variant) and try to get Basti through a few more levels (15, ideally).

That, and get one of my Twilight Struggle games done on Wargame Room (I need to play twice before Monday).

Age of Conan, Day 2

Today Matt G and I spent about two hours running around Tortegu Island (I will have this name figured out at some point) attempting to group. I'd gotten two pirate-sweeping quests done when I found Matt, and after figuring out that we were in different instances we hooked up and got some questing done. Perhaps because I was helping, I only went up a single level over the time we spent, although we killed a *lot* of snakes and scorps while hunting Flesheaters. 

Some more comments on the MMO:

• Things are still a little slow and clunky. I plan to take some of the advice on tailoring your machine for better performance, just as soon as they let me into the forums. 
• I've gotten so that I just hit the '1' key repeatedly if I want a quest but don't want to have an entire conversation with a quest giver. They need a key to let you do this quickly, especially if you've got an alt and have been through this whole thing 20 times already. New newbie areas, please!
• Shadows Over Tartuga - At one point, everyone and everything's shadows became detached from their bodies. It was tres freaky, let me tell you. All of these shadows walking around by themselves! 
• Grouping - we had quite a bit of trouble staying grouped. At one point, I still had my group window up but whatever I typed wouldn't show up. Turned out I'd been bounced out of the group while Matt was still in it. It had happened before, but to Matt and I still got his messages. 
• Interface - I have a horrible time finding how to do simple things in this interface. There is no "system" button, a la WoW, that lets you quit, fiddle with settings, etc. Finally figured out it was the ESC button (or F1, hard to tell as sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't). Figuring out how to generate a group chat window was a pain too, and typing '/' to get the cursor into the chat window didn't work - I had to click on it. I expect a lot of interface improvements over the coming weeks, but for now the delta between this game and WoW will slow me down on a regular basis. 

One thing that I'm finding to be disconcerting is the whole day/night paradigm. If you want to do solo quests in your own instance of the city, you tell the bartender and off you go. If you want to play multi-player, same thing. You can't do both sets of quests at once. Fortunately, the night quests seem to be class-specific, so you're less likely to want to group for them. I guess that once you get out of the initial area the diurnal cycle is set to game time rather than the player's request, and I'm not sure that's going to be a good thing. Imagine going to a new area planning to do quests there, logging out for the day, and coming back later and finding out that you can't do those quests. Maybe I have this wrong, but it strikes me as a bit dunderheaded out of the gate. Especially as right now I have a single night quest that's a little high for me right now, so I need the daytime quests just to play. 

One good thing about the various problems is that I'm not itching to play for eight hour stretches, but rather for two to four hours at a time (probably around two in the future) until things stabilize. I hear that you can solo all the way up to around 40 without any problem, too, although I'm concerned that there will be a lot of friend's characters that arrive at that point at a wide variety of times, making it hard to group. Time will tell, as the single newb area is definitely going to limit the number of characters I generate if all I do is run them through the same freakin' zone again and again. Hopefully Funcom will have additional starting areas as the game matures.

One last thing - I'm having trouble figuring out when I'm in an instance and when I'm not. Matt and I couldn't find each other for about five minutes until we figured out that the city itself had several instances. We could still communicate, and it was easy to get to the new instance (assuming you don't mind respawning outside the city). Just more confusion, I guess. 

I don't mean to sound like I'm down on the game, I'm just used to WoW and it's extremely mature and stable world. Finding the delta between the two games will be an interesting experience, and will give me a strong sense of whether or not I want to be involved in an immature MMO in the future. So far I haven't minded too much, and I'm much more into this game than I was with either CoH or GW. Regardless, my WoW account isn't going to go cold in the meantime - I'm still enjoying it quite a bit, although Leo is getting bored with the daily quests and has 23 group/dungeon quests that he needs people to play with to finish.