Stronghold 3 -Not fun for me nor fun for thee...

So Jess, did you really think that last post was a declaration of me making socially-relavent-to-15-year old girls's posts?

BAHAHA

Nope that post was just Chuck Testa.

But I digress. the point is that I decided to write about what I know, and what I know is a small niche of RTS games. Last week I was silly enough to waste 50 dollars of my pitifully easily earnt cash on a game by the name of Stronghold 3. I was hoping it would be as good as it's ancient ancestor "Stronghold".

I was wrong... But to be fair it had high expectations to live up to.

The original stronghold was the first of it's kind. A medieval castlebuilding game with economic, military and aesthetic aspects of it. In free build mode you could run your castle like a medieval game of the sims, keeping peasants happy, or sad, building a nice big castle or a crappy castle with walls in awkward places. Absolute freedom. In economic missions you utilised the best tools medieval lords had at their disposal to ascertain a strong economy; food (by far the most effective; nothing motivates peasants like food) , religion, booze, torturing devices, dancing bears, highly variable tax rates and a rapidly expanding ghetto far away from the castle in a swamp because you didn't have enough room to fit all the peasants houses in the inner bailey.

And in the military missions you got to play with the most horrific yet fantastic killing machines they had at the time. Ballistae, catapults, trebuchets, crossbows, killing pits, mangonels, dogs of war and my personal favourite: burning oil. There were two delivery methods for burning oil; getting engineers to pour it from atop the ramparts or using archers with flaming arrows to light up pitch ditches. I preferred the pitch ditches.

Boiling oil was not nearly as popular though, as boiling water, hot sand and whatever else you had lying around... I'm not joking, this is actually what they did in those times.

The best aspect of Stronghold though was the story. Unfortunately computer games have a nasty habit of using monkeys with typewriters to write their plot arcs.Stronghold seems to have used regular humans on typewriters for their story. It's a classic tale of taking revenge in the midst of civil war. You play a medieval lord whose father died defending the king when he was kidnapped in a nasty cocktail of foreign invasion mixed with local treachery. The new regent to the throne is none other than the knight who killed your old man. You start with a hunting band of archers but by the end of the game command a whole army as the peasants you free from the lords you kill, mistake your thirst for bloody vengeance as an honorable quest to liberate the land and return it to the rightful divine rule of the king.

The story is rather empowering and is free from some of the other nastier tropes that plague modern games.

Stronghold 3's story was disapointing from the start. In all fairness though it was because my expectations were high. All the trailers were narrated by the "Wolf", the knight whose revenge you sought in the original stronghold and end up killing. I was willing to forego the implausibility of Wolfie surviving a sword in his stomach and a 50 ft fall off his keep under the pretension that I would be playing as the Wolf in his quest for vengeance in a glorious new segment in this saga of vendetta.

Sadly, you play that same character you did before but now he is playing the part of a typical goody two shoes. I wish the writers got their facts right. Anyone who knows their history knows that knights were not so holy and righteous and there certainly isn't anything chivalrous about rape (which was a universal activity in war amongst all soldiers).

Knights and lords had the added benefit of being able to legally rape women in peacetime too. If you don't believe me then go look up "droit de seigneur".

So apparently Wolfie has a new army and is terrorising the country again. How he managed to rise up from the grave and summon an army when he is universally disliked by his own countrymen and lost his treasury when he "died", I do not know.

On a positive note though, the story is definitely an improvement on "Stronghold 2" which had 2 bit graphics for cutscenes and characters so one dimensional that the 2 bit graphics described their personality frighteningly well.

Furthermore they did get the economic gameplay right. It has just the right amount of complexity and depth, nothing more. The military gameplay is stupid though; since when could men-at-arms kill archers on 20m towers with a thrown spear? And apparently archers can do similar gravity defying tricks. Of course it makes sense that archers could hit men on the walls, but some towers were too high to hit. Hence why they were built in the first place; so the defender could take pot shots at the attackers who couldn't hit them save with siege equipment.

The missions aren't too bad. They require time and patience. If you do not have any patience then don't bother playing them because you may find yourself vexed at losing missions for stupid reasons (eg gravity defying arrows). But if you can happily sit down and analyse and plan then this game is for you. Because rest assured, where there is a will and a brain there is definitely a way. And seeing your enemies fly off the walls with fragments of crenelations like shrapnel from your catapults?... well... that should be reward enough for your efforts.

It's not you it's me...

It's not that I don't love you readers. I do, and for the very few people who are reading this after weeks of apathetic doldrums, you are looking very beautiful tonight.

It's just... with work, and esports it's hard to find the time and willingness to cover the ickiness that is the title and topic of my testament.

So instead of prolonging the struggle of keeping life in my poor blog, I am breaking up with blogging...
...about war, religion and politics.

Instead, this blog will just become my new personal blog. A bit like my old blogs on deviantart and the now ancient myspace, but hopefully with a bit more coherency and of course this blog will continue to be rated "G" for Gman, so no naughty things will be posted. I will just write whatever comes to mind, maybe put up a short story or two. Don't feel obliged to read. This is more of an exercise for myself than anything else.

As always though, your feedback whether it be positive or utterly cruel and constructive is welcome.

The Battle of Tours

It's that time again, ladies and gents.

Time for me to stop rambling about endless political posts and off-topic trivialities and give you all a history lesson.

On this day (October 10th) 1279 years ago a major battle was ensuing. It would decide just how far Islam would encroach on western Europe and would mark the rise of a European power.

By 732 AD Spain had been consumed by the Moors. Islam was on the rise and threatening to spread further into Europe.

Remember learning about how terrible life in the dark ages was? It wasn't just terrible food, plagues, hard work and neighbouring warlords that were a problem, the Muslims had Europe in a vice grip too.

At this point in history there was no major power to stop them. The Umayyed Caliphate (aka the Moors, aka the evil forces of Islam) had already crushed the Iberian Peninsula (Spain) which had been held by feeble visigothic christian kingdoms and were poised add Gaul (France) to their list of conquests.

But as we already know, every story has a hero and today's hero, boys and girls, is none other than Charles Martel.

Stop! Hammertime!

Martel was the "Mayor of the Palace" of Austrasia at the time but don't let titles fool you; Martel was an autocrat ruling over Gaul and a rising general.

As it turned out, he had his work cut out for him. The Moors were slowly invading and ravaging the land with a cavalry-rich composition. All poor Charles had to work with was infantry, so he had to pick his battles carefully.

And pick carefully he did, he planted his army in between the Moorish army and Tours in the woods on high ground. If the Moors wanted to sack the juicy ripe town of Tours they would have to charge their cavalry through trees and up a hill. Moorish commander Abd-al-Rahman, was naturally afraid of fighting such a battle and against an unknown number (the trees made it difficult to judge the size of Martel's army), so he waited and called for reinforcements.

This was Rahman's first major blunder. By waiting for reinforcements, he gave Martel more time to prepare and call on reinforcements of his own. This was Martel's country, and so he had more reinforcements to call from in his countrymen.

When Rahman finally decided to bite the bullet and attack, the battle was already decided for him. He led cavalry charge after cavalry charge into a solid wall of trees and men clad in heavy armor. The casualties were heavy for the Moors. Nevertheless, eventually the cavalry broke through Martel's phalanx to the general himself, but Martel's liege men were quick to come to his aid.

Meanwhile, Martel had scouts sent into the Moor's base camp to create havoc. Rahman was forced to send some of his cavalry back to deal with the small threat, but his camp mistook the riding cavalry for a retreat. And so his whole camp began routing and it soon became a retreat.

Rahman attempted to stop the retreat and re-rally his troops and at this point Martel struck the killing blow, and surrounded and cut off Rahman from his retreating army. The Arabian King was slain and the battle was won.

For those of you who were too busy checking out the hot girl in front of you in Geography class.

Charles Martel's legacy continued in the form of the Carolingian dynasty. His grandson would become known as Charles the Great (aka Charlemagne) of the Holy Roman Empire.

But above all else Christian Europe was safe once more from Islam.

I for one find it interesting that for once the French were on the receiving end of a cavalry charge with an army of infantry when medieval history is littered with accounts of the mighty french cavalry. And also the stupidity of Rahman, all he had to do was continue his journey of pillaging the countryside until Charlie was forced to engage unfavourably.

(Un)Employment

Remember how last post I mentioned it would be a double post day?

I lied. Unfortunately I had ladder games to lose and coaching to endure from a Masters Zerg. And it was endurance, I lost a lot of PvZ's.

So today I shall post the post you probably haven't been waiting for.

Once upon a time when I was still leaching off my dad in their seemingly upper-class conservative house I believed all that came from my Dad and hell even my stepmum's mouth was gospel. And when they ranted about dole bludgers being a worthless drain on the system I wholeheartedly believed them.

In fact I distinctly recall my best friend Shane and myself (Shane came from a similar socioeconomic background) discussing ways of eliminating this wastage. Like forced labor death camps. Or killing the dole bludgers, cooking their remains and feeding them to all the starving kids in Africa. Thus killing two birds with one prion-infected stone.

In time however, I learnt that my old man and my stepmum harboured unjust and harsh prejudices.

Nevertheless I couldn't help feel like I WAS a worthless drain on the system during my brief jobless stint. Among other things.

If you are unemployed and you do feel like this then... just don't. Because any well thought out socioeconomic analysis will tell you that you are in fact of great and vital importance to the economy.

 Consider the three main states the general labour market can reside at. There can be high unemployment, labor shortages or a perfect balance where unemployment sits at 0% and there are no labor shortages. In practice though you can get both labor shortages and unemployment and the unemployment rate is very rarely at exactly 0%.  Furthermore it is nigh impossible to ascertain a perfect 0% unemployment and no shortageof labor unless the nation in question is communist and even then t still is difficult.

So if the system must either err on having some unemployment or a shortage of labor, which is preferable?

If you answered, "labor shortages" then you are completely and utterly wrong. No workers means no work gets done and even being short a 5th of a person can slow productivity to a snail's pace. Labor shortages also mean that employers cannot afford to lose a single one of their staff lest their snail pace production slow down to to a complete stop, leading to a plethora of unreasonable demands employees can make of the hand that feeds them.

Benefits like holiday leave or maternity leave become liabilities that can render small business's bankrupt when labor shortages are already crippling productivity.

Then there are the effects of governmental intervention to solve labor shortages, such as mass immigration.

I'm sure I don't have to spell it out (but if I do, post below and I'll give you some historical examples), labor shortages can be devastating.

High unemployment is bad too, but the worst effects of high unemployment are on the unemployed themselves. If there is no welfare system to take care of them they tend to starve to death along with their families. If there is a welfare system in place then they just become a drain on taxpayers.

A little bit of unemployment though (2-10%) is perfect.... in a nation that has welfare to take care of the unemployed. The reason being that, businesses can operate with the best workers at their disposal and can use the "slack" of the labor market to readily expand their business or to fire and hire better workers. In a 0% unemployment labor market this is not possible; it is impossible to expand a business when there are no extra workers available to do so.

So If you are unemployed and suffer under uppity working class plebs brown-nosing you, then promptly tell them the truth followed by some "french". The cold hard economic truth is that your nation's economy cannot grow without you and all the other dole bludgers handing in their forms to centrelink/welfare every month.

A slightly more on topic of-topic post

Seeing as some of you are bitching about my content this will be the last off-topic post. For realz.
So today's will be a double post day methinks.

It seems one of you was particularly distraught about my quest to become an even bigger nerd and the rest of you descended into boneheaded comments. Ok I get it, you don't give a dog's breakfast on my big dream to be that guy who shows up to lan parties and everyone immediately refuses to play starcraft in the same way my brother-in-law and I refuse to play board and card games with my sisters (they have a tendency to win cluedo as soon as they get into their first room and make their first "inference"). So I'll get back to yet more boring posts about BOOOORING topics, like war, religion and politics.

But before I do, I would like to share with you a miracle that happened to me yesterday. I am a labbie now.

No, not this kind of labbie

That's right I now work in a laboratory like the evil supervillain I am. So instead of using my half baked chemical engineering degree to synthesize meth and feed it to my dog I get to make life-saving drugs doomsday weapons and get money for it.

Did I say meth? I totally meant math.

As such, next post shall be yet another sociopolitical commentary this time on employment.

It's easier to write off-topic stuff than to research and write a good article on current affairs

Not that I would, given how mundane the headlines are of late. The headlines today are the same ones we had a few weeks ago. Greece is still begging for money, the US economy is still screwed and in my own country both the Prime Minister and Opposition leader don't seem to care about human rights violations performed by the federal government as long as it's not technically on our soil.

So I think next post I'll revert to my favourite topic of choice: War/History

In the meantime I'll go back to my off-topic rambling because I love talking about off-topic stuff. Particularly starcraft. I'm beginning to think even changing the blog's title and topic to sc2. At least I would post more than weekly.

See while I have been busy with life I did have the opportunity to do some laddering on the weekend before I went to barcraft.

I watched the grand finals of the dreamhack valencia invitational (a starcraft tournament hosted in europe) and then promptly played a ladder game.

It seemed like just another ordinary PvZ (that's Protoss vs Zerg, not Plants vs Zombies, which I suck at). I did an economic 2gate zealot rush and expanded behind it and then sealed the deal with 2base chargelot archon with double attack upgrades. For all you non sc2 nerds still reading this, this is like feigning a punch to the head and when your opponent raises their hands to protect their face, you kick them in the "nuts" instead.

When I was brutally raping the poor zergy, the victory felt mundane. This was a strategy I had long since perfected and used countless times to great effect. But then as the victory screen appeared I caught a glint of CGI mock-reflection amongst a metallic grey pop up.

I couldn't believe it. Was this really happening?

I was in such shock I barely ready the little pop up. But I did catch one word.

Just one.

"Promoted"

And that set my mood for the rest of the day. A few hours later I went to my first barcraft; you go to a bar, watch starcraft tournaments and drink and talk with other nerds. I was the life of the party there and possibly the only sc2 nerd there who binge drinked his way through the sea bnet invitational and the subsequent gomtv vods that played on the screen.

The games themselves were depressing and predictable; my favourite sc2 heroes were losing matches. The people there though were fascinating. In particular the races and the personalities of the barcrafters there.

My Poor Protoss heroes aren't doing well at the big tournaments of late :'(

There was a terran, who I would have expected to be as loud as siege tank fire, but instead was as quiet as a ghost.

There was a zerg by the screen name of "Ripper" who just seemed like a good person to be around. He was cheerful and friendly, tactful and had good personal hygiene. Certainly not someone you would expect to command an army of slime covered bugs.

And then there were the Protoss players. In the game of starcraft, Protoss is a race of technologically advanced aliens with a zealous code of honor. In real life, the pro-tossers were uptight elitists. Just talking to them was such a hilarious experience for me. (for any tossers reading this, I <3 you)

In the end I managed to stumble home with an unknown double digit number of drinks burdening my gait and made it to my bed safely.

But that last Sunday has got to be one of the best days of my life.

Yet Another Off-Topic Post

A universal trait in humans, or at least the sane ones is that everyone subconsciously or consciously attempts to achieve social homeostasis. Everyone wants to be in a tribe where they fit in.

That tribe may be your party hard friends that you go out clubbing with every Friday night, or your wow-friends, or your co-workers, peers or maybe just your family.

There is usually some prejudice involved in these tribes though as they subscribe to similar beliefs and ideals. Which is why I never tell girls in real life I play computer games and also why in job interviews I pretend that I do professional wrestling, rock climbing, sky diving etc

The hardest time I have ever had trying to convince my superiors and co workers that I was truly a member of their "tribe" was when I worked in construction. I would have had an easier time fitting in if I just had a lobotomy.

So when I woke up today, a bright and sunny Sunday, at 4pm to a raucous of folks who don't share my interest of pwning noobs, my natural reaction was to roll over and try to get some more naptime in before dinner.

My ex was also there which is completely irrelevant to this post because she might be reading this.

When I finally decided to get up I had a brief conversation with a WOW fan who tried to hook me up to EVE. I steered the conversation to the promotion of esports in general. To everyone else, it looked like we were nerding it up, all smiles and cheer but in reality I was swallowing an immense welling of bitterness, rage and disgust.

As a competitive gamer, one of our "tribal" prejudices is that "casual gamers r fgs lol". I cannot fathom why anyone would get entertained by killing pigs in the forest when you can methodically destroy an army utilising every little teaching of Sun Tzu using only your hands to ensure that every command is crisp and perfectly executed like a machine. And against a human opponent who is trying the exact same thing against you.

I am of course neglecting the other competitive gamers out there; the first person shooters. I bear no grudge against them, I could never do what they do. But at least they have that drive for perfection. I respect that.

In my competitive game of choice though I face a new problem. I am a rank number one gold scrub and I don't want to play for fear of losing my rank. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's just a game right?

The irony is that, if I was losing a ton of games I would play more. But alas I have status to defend.

Another interesting thing is I had a falling out last week with an sc2 friend. Her macro was terrible. She wasn't making enough workers in our games and when her response to me pointing it out was apathy. I couldn't talk to her on skype after that. I dc'd and logged out of sc2. I was so angry. Not building workers is a cardinal sin in sc2. You go to hell for not building workers.

But worse was my anger at myself for taking 2 weeks of playing with her to realize that I was carrying her. Carrying her like a baby. But I was too focused on my own play to realize she consistently took 10 minutes to get a measly 30 scv's.

We haven't played with each other since but I did make up with her. 8 hour skype conversations can do that to a man. Hell, boobs and a good facebook profile can do that to a man.