Any way you want to play

I used to be a big fan of Electronic Arts. That old square/circle/triangle logo always promised good times, and their NHL line of hockey games were long my favorite.

Over the years, my appreciation for them lessened. Yearly NHL titles became little more than roster updates, and I switched to a competing franchise. Were I more of a football guy, that wouldn't have been an option, as EA secured exclusive rights to NFL titles. I didn't think that was very sporting, but if NFL was willing to sell it, and EA willing to pay, it wasn't any business of mine.

Since then EA has, along with Ubisoft, led the publishing field in the introduction of increasingly distasteful DRM schemes, which is why you won't find many recent titles from them in my PC game collection. I'm not a big fan of those things.

They managed to annoy me on console side as well, by requiring me to create an EA account to access some features of games I had already paid money for. Somehow, none of the other publishers had found this necessary. I found it not only annoying, but a worrisome development.

Requiring an EA account to play an EA game opens up some rather disturbing possibilities, like preventing someone from playing a game they paid $50 for if EA doesn't like what they're saying on forums.

The player's account has since been activated, and EA's PR people insist locking the game was 'a glitch'.

That wasn't the only controversy surrounding Dragon Age II's launch. Along with the usual rumors of a rushed release, and somewhat less common allegations of Metacritic score fixing, it was reported that DAII secretly installed SecuRom DRM despite earlier announcement it wouldn't be used. That was apparently a false alarm, though, and the SecuRom product being installed is Release Control, which BioWare had already said would be used. DAII will still require periodic online checks to play, though, which is bad enough.

The publishers will insist schemes like these are necessary to fight piracy, but making legal product less convenient, and thus less valuable, isn't really likely to work for games any more than it did for music. And when those schemes make it possible to prevent you from playing a game you bought if they don't like you, it's time to say enough is enough. It should be us, the players, who decide the way we want to play. We shouldn't be required to jump an increasing number of hoops just to have some fun.

The only way to get the publishers' attention is to vote with the wallet. How about giving EA games a miss for a while?

Zombies ate my boats

No, really. They did.

Observant readers may have noticed that the number of boats at my pier varied throughout the last post. Here are the images in chronological order:

Two boats, one boat, no boats. They're just gone. I like to imagine zombies joyriding around in them, but really, I have no idea what's happened to them. If a boat hits something solid at a high enough speed, it breaks, so maybe somebody came and broke my boats. I sure as hell can't find them anywhere.

Meanwhile, I'm beginning to suspect that the guys at Mojang have fucked around with the animal spawning code, because every time I go up to the roof of my tower in the new version, I see something like this.

There's an entire menagerie up there every time. I actually do think they've overdone the code; animals always used to spawn on lit grass, but not that many...

That's up, though, and lately I've been more interested in down. I was excavating my long staircase, from said tower roof to, well, all the way down. Here's a view up:

So I was on my way down, trying to hit bedrock here too. Eventually, I figure I'll have an epic underground tunnel connecting Twin Tower with my first base.

The thing with digging deep is lava. Apparently my co-blogger is awash in the stuff, but I've never seen so much as a single block of sweet magma. That is, until I dug deep enough beneath Twin Tower. Now, lava is both cool and dangerous; it's by far the gnarliest way to light a room, but you don't want to get any on you. I'd have screenshots of the two lava pools under my tower, if only I hadn't fallen into one of them.

Oh well.

**

Dying means I'm back where I started, and since I'm still in an underground mood, I decided to finish up a little room I'd been working on earlier. It's easy, really: just mine away anything that doesn't look like Moria.

Not that a hall that size would rate more than a closet in Moria, in Khazad-dum, but heck, I like it. I'll just build a bigger one lower down.

The trouble with mining is that you really have no idea where you are. As I went further east, I started running into more and more earth; a sure sign you're near the surface. Soon enough, I found water; it turns out I've only just cleared the hill my first base is in. I swam up and found this beautiful scene:

This hilltop will be the site of my next base. The water also provides a nice little touch to my underground lair:

Nothing like a waterfall. After a little digging, the great chasm is coming along nicely. The picture's a bit dark, though.

Right now, I'm way too tired to actually build anything, so I'll just keep digging. Next time, though, tower construction!

Bog iron in Goblin Camp

Okay, so Blogger tells me that over the last few weeks, several people have come to my blog by Googling for "goblin camp bog iron". In case you're doing this because you're wondering how to gather bog iron, here's what you do:

1. Designate an area of bog (Orders -> Designate bog for iron)

2. Go to the Territory menu and mark the bog you've just designated as part of your territory

3. Designate a stockpile to receive Metal ore

4. Order up some bog iron in the Stock Manager

Your goblins will start collecting iron. I imagine the trouble is caused by phase 2, which is undocumented.

Hope that helps!

**

If you need more pointers to get your Goblin Camp going, there's a video tutorial series on YouTube.









That should get you started!

Goblin Camp 0.14 out!

The new version of Goblin Camp is out! Get it at goblincamp.com. I had a go at it over the weekend.

Here's a lovely view of Camp Sixteen...



...just before imps attack from the charcoal burning clamp and set it on fire.



It wasn't so bad, actually. I only lost 5 orcs and 8 goblins. That is, until a swarm of killer bees and another bunch of imps showed up, and set everything on fire again.



At the end of the day, I'm down to five orcs and 16 goblins. Any way you look at it, it's way too few guys to defend a camp this size, which is conveniently proven true by two packs of starving wolves and, yes, a third group of imps. Now my camp is on fire and overrun with wolves.



After a party of kobold raiders also pays us a visit, I'm left with two orcs and six goblins, and a wrecked camp.



Having gone from a total population of 50 to eight, and with the camp in ruins, I might as well quit. It's hopeless.

Or is it?



Incredibly enough, I've managed to get the camp cleared up somewhat. At best, I had four orcs and over a dozen goblins! A fired golem later, the orcs were down to one and the goblins had taken a beating, but it looked like I might get this thing up and running again.

Until the imps showed up.



And it was all over.

**

No matter; let's try again. Here's Camp Seventeen:



And just as I was getting it up and running, guess who waltzes right in?



And this is what happened.



Goblin Camp. Harsh, but fun.

Can't explain that

As we all know, fundies say the darndest things. My personal favourite from the site is this gem by awesomestnerd:

"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it."



Yes, awesomestnerd, they certainly would.

Recently, conservative political commentator Bill O'Reilly offered his own contribution to science concerning the heavenly bodies, specifically the Moon.



From the LA Times blog The Big Picture:
"But when it comes to seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope, no one tops Bill O'Reilly, who has been the butt of a thousand jokes after confronting an atheist on his show with irrefutable evidence of the existence of God--using as his evidence the fact that the tides come in and the tides go out. I mean, O'Reilly said with great certainty, who else could possibly be controlling that?"

When confronted with the more conventional explanation of the tides, O'Reilly went one level higher and speculated on the origin of the Moon.




All this has caused much hilarity on teh internets, and you too can participate in the meme with the handy MemeGenerator.

Here's our contribution:

Camp Five

Here's a composite image of my fifth Goblin Camp camp:

Population around one hundred; click on the picture for a closer look. You can see some of the main features of the camp pretty well in this large-scale image. Your orcs and goblins muddy up the ground and leave copious amounts of filth behind; you can see the main thoroughfares outlined in brown, as well as the brown piles of filth at the south and west gates, because of the permanent guard stationed there. And then there is, of course, the giant pile of filth that is the main camp, slowly spreading outward and seeping into the river.

For security, I've gone with a concentric layout of palisades and moats. There are gates and bridges only at certain points, which channels incoming attackers there, to be dealt with by my guards. The other security risks are the improvements that occasionally spawn monsters; ants will attack from your stone quarry, golems from the clay pit and so on. You can see all of these improvements just south of the south gate, meaning that mostly (mostly) the guards at my south gate deal with the bad guys before they get into my camp.

Another notable feature are the huge lumber yards that dominate the outer two circuits of the camp. The game is set in a forest, and one ends up cutting down quite a few trees to make way for moats, workshops, stockpiles and so on. Of course, you could just leave the logs lying around, but I like my huge lumberyards.

**

Now that I have a camp this size, I thought I might weigh in on some problems I've read about people having with Goblin Camp. For starters, several people have complained that their camps get bogged down with interminable hauling jobs, especially of seeds. If you take a look at my camp here, you may notice that the fields aren't very large at all. That's because in my experience, it's very easy to destroy the efficiency of your camp through one simple expedient: overfarming.

Starvation is a constant threat early in the game, so I see the appeal of planting as many crops as possible. The problem is that the yields in the game are quite generous: bloodberries IIRC 5:1 and nightbloom trees 4:1, and with very little wastage. In 0.13, you start with 30 bloodberry seeds. Plant all of them, and by next fall you have 150. Another year of maximum bloodberry farming? 750. And so on. See where the endless seed hauling jobs come from? The size of the fields needs to grow relative to the size of the population in the camp. It's not that hard; as you might guess from the name, this is my fifth camp, and because I got the farming right from the get-go, I never had a problem with starvation.

The other point is that the day-to-day operation of a goblin camp is messy in many ways. Seeds and other things just end up lying around and if you're anal-retentive, they need to be cleaned up into their appropriate stockpiles. Another essential thing is to give your goblins time to do that. If they're constantly running around on errands and constructions jobs, the hauling jobs are going to spiral out of control because nobody's doing them. So take a break every now and then and let your goblins clean up the camp. Even with that camp, I've managed to get my jobs list down to one screen.

Managing your job queue is a question of resource management, and that is, after all, the point of the game.

Power Change

Like Sea Org, only smaller.




Cleared sailing clear!