Master of Orion II is an old, old game. It was released in 1996 but people still play it and await for worthy successor. One reason why fans still play MoO II is a deep and meaningful customization. Like in AAA "RPGs" (quotes because role play games get confused with "whatever has experience bars and level ups"), before the game starts player can spend an hour picking traits for his/hers race and empire. Many traits add or remove game mechanics such as lithovore: race doesn't need food or telepathic: empire can mind control colonies. When the game starts every few turns, depending on empire's research output, player has to choose one of the two or three mutually exclusive technologies (or take all is the empire has certain trait). This choices heavily influences which tools will player have at his/her disposal, much like deck building in CCGs. And finally, player can design combat units. I can't even start to explain how much game defining it is and considering the topic I presume you, dear reader, have played the game and are familiar with most of it's feature. If you haven't played it, please do, you can get it from GoG.com for 5$.
Every now and then I find new "build" I haven't tried so far. It sounds unbelievable considering that I play the game for many years (I'm not disclosing how many :)) but I was noob back then and only used one strategy, playing turtle until I got all technologies and then unleash invincible fleet on everyone. Last few years I was trying new stuff, diplomatic race, spy race, uncreative race, empire with heavy money generation bonuses, limiting my self to only the smallest ships and so on... Recently I've tried limiting my self on using weapons other then beams. It was surprising, I had no idea interceptors are so strong in early and mid game. So in the last game I excluded special weapons too, only missiles and bombs were allowed. It was fun and tense at first but AIs were not developing well so it became too easy. They managed to keep pace with armor upgrades but by turn 350 nobody managed to get anything beyond class I shields. Still, I managed to experience new stuff. Having no beam weapons leaves ships free from beam enhancing equipment and frees up nice amount of research points. I've used those points to speed up research of chemistry (better missiles, armor and ship range) and construction, to get automated repair sooner. You see where I was going, high quality armor and self repair equals invincible ship. Unless enemy has ion cannon and it so happened that AI was good enough to get it and bad enough get any better beam weapon for a long time. I was invincible in ship to ship combat but assaulting planet required some fancy footwork in order to have shielded part of the ship facing star base when it was about to fire ion cannon.
After reaching the end of chemistry techs, I've switched to power in order to try out torpedoes. Torpedoes are interesting weapons but in my opinion too high in tech "tree". Antimatter torpedo is OK, easily accessible for mid to late game. By the time proton torpedo becomes usable the game is almost over. Same holds for plasma torpedo that is very last technology in power field. As I said I was facing underdeveloped AIs so it was not fun upgrading torpedoes when antimatter was more then enough for the job. One the bright side, researching torpedoes gives player opportunity to get energy absorber which is great addition to ships designed around taking hits instead avoiding them. Combine it with hard shields and damage reduction will be so high that all but late game weapons would become ineffective.
I've finished the game by attacking Antares and I did it twice, separately with torpedoes and with missiles. Those two roads were very different. Torpedoes were reliable on doing the job given enough time, in fact I had to attack Antares twice with torpedo ships because I reached turn limit first time. I did some bad moves and star fortress managed to shoot down 5 out of 6 ships and the last one didn't have enough fire power to destroy it within 50 combat turns. I could have brought more ships but I wanted to give some chance to Antarans :). Anyway, going with missiles was a gamble, missiles can be destroyed before doing damage and the ammunition is limited so it was possible end up in situation where ships have to retreat because they can't attack any more. I brought extra ships, just in case. With missiles it's either overkill or stalemate and aside from EMG they aren't that interesting. Unlike torpedoes, missile have no twist, they just do damage and higher missile technologies are simply damage upgrades. That is somewhat spiced by EMG, a missile modification that applies damage directly to target's engines if it's shields are down. Unlike armor, engines have very few hit points and if they are destroyed the ship self-destructs. To balance that EMG greatly increases missile size. But AI was not challenging enough to give me opportunity to try it out...
All in all there is material for another playthrough. Maybe this time with smaller ships and no creative trait. Yep, Master of Orion II is still play worthy.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Harry Turtledove - Worldwar series
About three years ago a friend recommended me the World War series. Setting is SF alternate history where aliens with modern day human's technology are invading Earth during World War II. The twist is that aliens have serious shortcoming in their character, they are very conservative, slow at accepting change and expected that humans are too. Much like Stargate TV show where humans start underdogs and work their way among big guys, the World War setting instantly grabbed my attention.
It took me some effort to find the books and it took even more effort to read them. There are eight of them! To be exact World War on it's own is quadrilogy (four books) but there are four more books (Colonization trilogy and Homebound book) that continue in the plot and it make more sense than not to include all eight books to consideration when talking about World War. So, are the books any good?
World War grabbed my attention very fast. Aliens are well thought out and their perspective on the matter is very interesting. Their culture, psychology and biology are all thought out and consistent within the story. Human plot lines are mixed bag, most are very good and few are boring though those boring ones have moments of shine. Among good stuff are political intrigues between Russians, Germans, Poles, USA and aliens. Harry Turtledove is experienced alternate history writer and student of history so it's no wonder that those are good parts. What Turtledove is not good at are religious subjects. Since the author is Jewish and first part of the story is set during the World War II, the subject of Jew is more than forced upon the reader while other religions, if mentioned at all, are depicted in bad light. Vatican has sided with alien invaders because they supposedly prefer monarchy and got nuked with a comment that they deserved it. Mind you, the Pope at the time was Pius XII who today (June 2014) holds the title of Blessed which is one step before being Saint. Even though he didn't do much to protect Jew at the time, I feel as if the author was expressing the hate against him. On top of that Colonization series depict Muslims as nothing but violent mob, so hate speech against them is there too. Why I make so much fuss about that? Because probably the strongest point of the books is unstereothypical depiction all (most) groups of people. There are good Russians and there are bad Russians, there good, grey and bad Americans. There are good and bad Nazis too, one Nazi solder even saves city full of Jews from German nuclear bomb. But the author fails to do that on groups of people and groups I can relate with: Catholics and Croats. For some reason Croats are just evil, without much explanation. Google fails me there and if anyone can enlighten me, please drop the comment. All in all Worldwar scores 7/10 for me and don't get me wrong about Jews, they get interesting when they start standing on their feet.
Colonization covers the events 20 years after Worldwar, when alien colonists came to populate what was supposed to be conquered world. Even though they are same species and nation aliens from the first wave (conquest fleet) and colonists didn't simply get along. The Earth and humans changed aliens as much as they changed humans, they had to learn to adapt, to trade and to recognize other nations than their own. Colonists on the other hand came fresh from civilization that had only one nation and didn't do any action until it was thoroughly analyzed. Sounds like good drama material but somehow this trilogy left me with the least memories. Most scenes were static where people lives played out and nothing of importance happened, there were some forgettable characters and I was eager to read the final book. On the up side, political intrigues were still present, there were a few plot lines that made up for the boring ones and alien perspective although predictable was still interesting. All in all 5/10.
Last book in the series was so full of potential. I wish Colonization was two books shorter and Homeward Bound at least a book longer. Homeward Bound covers multiple time periods starting from about 10 years after Colonization series and ending in near future where humans develop "warp drive" and technologically surpass the aliens. Like previous books it also covers a lot of topics, politics, cultural differences, how each side adopts parts of other's culture, how humans continues to progress while aliens stagnate but all of it compressed to a single book. I'd like to read more about the alien emperor's perspective and how aliens would fare with invention of FTL technology. The story has to end somewhere and it feels like the author wanted to end it there, still if only Colonization was shorter and Homeward Bound longer. 7/10.
It took me some effort to find the books and it took even more effort to read them. There are eight of them! To be exact World War on it's own is quadrilogy (four books) but there are four more books (Colonization trilogy and Homebound book) that continue in the plot and it make more sense than not to include all eight books to consideration when talking about World War. So, are the books any good?
World War grabbed my attention very fast. Aliens are well thought out and their perspective on the matter is very interesting. Their culture, psychology and biology are all thought out and consistent within the story. Human plot lines are mixed bag, most are very good and few are boring though those boring ones have moments of shine. Among good stuff are political intrigues between Russians, Germans, Poles, USA and aliens. Harry Turtledove is experienced alternate history writer and student of history so it's no wonder that those are good parts. What Turtledove is not good at are religious subjects. Since the author is Jewish and first part of the story is set during the World War II, the subject of Jew is more than forced upon the reader while other religions, if mentioned at all, are depicted in bad light. Vatican has sided with alien invaders because they supposedly prefer monarchy and got nuked with a comment that they deserved it. Mind you, the Pope at the time was Pius XII who today (June 2014) holds the title of Blessed which is one step before being Saint. Even though he didn't do much to protect Jew at the time, I feel as if the author was expressing the hate against him. On top of that Colonization series depict Muslims as nothing but violent mob, so hate speech against them is there too. Why I make so much fuss about that? Because probably the strongest point of the books is unstereothypical depiction all (most) groups of people. There are good Russians and there are bad Russians, there good, grey and bad Americans. There are good and bad Nazis too, one Nazi solder even saves city full of Jews from German nuclear bomb. But the author fails to do that on groups of people and groups I can relate with: Catholics and Croats. For some reason Croats are just evil, without much explanation. Google fails me there and if anyone can enlighten me, please drop the comment. All in all Worldwar scores 7/10 for me and don't get me wrong about Jews, they get interesting when they start standing on their feet.
Colonization covers the events 20 years after Worldwar, when alien colonists came to populate what was supposed to be conquered world. Even though they are same species and nation aliens from the first wave (conquest fleet) and colonists didn't simply get along. The Earth and humans changed aliens as much as they changed humans, they had to learn to adapt, to trade and to recognize other nations than their own. Colonists on the other hand came fresh from civilization that had only one nation and didn't do any action until it was thoroughly analyzed. Sounds like good drama material but somehow this trilogy left me with the least memories. Most scenes were static where people lives played out and nothing of importance happened, there were some forgettable characters and I was eager to read the final book. On the up side, political intrigues were still present, there were a few plot lines that made up for the boring ones and alien perspective although predictable was still interesting. All in all 5/10.
Last book in the series was so full of potential. I wish Colonization was two books shorter and Homeward Bound at least a book longer. Homeward Bound covers multiple time periods starting from about 10 years after Colonization series and ending in near future where humans develop "warp drive" and technologically surpass the aliens. Like previous books it also covers a lot of topics, politics, cultural differences, how each side adopts parts of other's culture, how humans continues to progress while aliens stagnate but all of it compressed to a single book. I'd like to read more about the alien emperor's perspective and how aliens would fare with invention of FTL technology. The story has to end somewhere and it feels like the author wanted to end it there, still if only Colonization was shorter and Homeward Bound longer. 7/10.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
IKON: human oriented JSON look-alike
So, yet another DSL/markup but please take a look:
(Brief) history
Before unleashing language/notation specifics allow me to tell you a little about brief history of IKADN and IKON. DSLs (domain specific languages) have a tendency of cropping up in almost every project. A year ago I decided to rewrite the Stareater, a strategy game and a rather big project of mine and since it was rewrite I knew that I'll need not one DSL but three: one for settings and save file, another one for assets (statistical data about game objects such as how much they cost and what image present them) and yet another one for localization. Most of developers would simply pick XML, XML and XML. I find XML too heavily oriented on describing data organization instead of data itself. It's good for some purposes but it's overkill for my needs. JSON, YAML and plain INI were options I considered but at some point I figured what I was really looking for is something that can adapted to a specific problem. Settings file would work OK general markup language such as JSON but localization files would work better with text oriented solution. For instance there is no need numbers and arrays in localization data while simplified syntax for single line text is very useful. So, I decided to make my own solution that satisfies specific needs.
The solution I came up with are IKADN, an abstract notation that can be used for making other markup languages and IKON, a general purpose language. The rest are technicalities but I'll mention that I'm actively using IKON and two IKADN derivates in the Stareater project for a year and improve them regularly.
About IKON
As said before IKON is general purpose solution so, much like JSON and YAML it features three classes of data:
About IKADN
The sexiest part of the solution is an abstract notation that simplifies implementation (and to some degree design) of your own notation. Projects wiki page https://code.google.com/p/ikon-library/wiki/IKADN contains more details but in short IKADN syntax consist of following rules:
How to get it
Official project web site it at Google Project Hosting: https://code.google.com/p/ikon-library/. There are source code, wiki pages and most recent build for .Net. Build is also available through NuGet.
Here is an example how to use the library. Let's say IKON document from the top of the post is in input.txt. This the code that would print the name of the star:
using System;
using System.IO;
using Ikadn.Ikon;
using Ikadn.Ikon.Types;
namespace IKON_example
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var reader = new StreamReader("input.txt");
using(var parser = new IkonParser(reader))
{
IkonComposite star = parser.ParseNext().To<IkonComposite>();
Console.WriteLine(star["name"].To<string>());
}
}
}
}
Parser can read form any TextReader subclass so if you want to read from string instead of file, use StringReader instead StreamReader. Also parser implements disposable patters so you can use it with using statement to ensure that input stream is closed after use.
Notice To<T>() method, it's the helper method for converting objects and the alternative to usual C#'s cast-and-get (cast an object to target type and then call a getter method). In the first case IkadnBaseObject is simply cast to IkonComposite (table type). The second case is more complex and shows true power or the method. Instead of type casting, underlying IkonText (textual type) returns it's contents as .Net string. Which types can be requested depends on the underlaying IkadnBaseObject subclass. For example, in the case of IkonNumber (numeric type) valid conversions include most native .Net numeric type (decimal, int, float, ...). In case of IkonArray (array type) one can ask for T[] (native .Net array) or IEnumerable<T> if array elements can be converter to T.
If you have any questions out the project, feel free to drop a comment. If you have a feature request or bug to report, you can file an "issue" on the project site too.
{ StarLooks like JSON. So why make up another language? Well, unlike JSON this one isn't designed with Javascript compatibility first, instead it's designed with human editor in mind. In general case IKON (Ivan Kravarčšan's object notation) looks like JSON with less double quotes but it can be expanded with domain specific syntax. Need shorthand syntax for matrices? No problem, plug it in. And even more customization can be achieved by extending IKADN (Ivan Kravarščan's abstract data notatins) but more about it later.
size = 12
x = 9
y = 4
name "Alpha Centaury"
planets [
{ Planet size = 100 }
{ Planet size = 120 }
{ Planet size = 10 }
]
}
(Brief) history
Before unleashing language/notation specifics allow me to tell you a little about brief history of IKADN and IKON. DSLs (domain specific languages) have a tendency of cropping up in almost every project. A year ago I decided to rewrite the Stareater, a strategy game and a rather big project of mine and since it was rewrite I knew that I'll need not one DSL but three: one for settings and save file, another one for assets (statistical data about game objects such as how much they cost and what image present them) and yet another one for localization. Most of developers would simply pick XML, XML and XML. I find XML too heavily oriented on describing data organization instead of data itself. It's good for some purposes but it's overkill for my needs. JSON, YAML and plain INI were options I considered but at some point I figured what I was really looking for is something that can adapted to a specific problem. Settings file would work OK general markup language such as JSON but localization files would work better with text oriented solution. For instance there is no need numbers and arrays in localization data while simplified syntax for single line text is very useful. So, I decided to make my own solution that satisfies specific needs.
The solution I came up with are IKADN, an abstract notation that can be used for making other markup languages and IKON, a general purpose language. The rest are technicalities but I'll mention that I'm actively using IKON and two IKADN derivates in the Stareater project for a year and improve them regularly.
About IKON
As said before IKON is general purpose solution so, much like JSON and YAML it features three classes of data:
- Scalars (atoms of data such as numbers or texts)
- Tables (key-value pairs)
- Array (much like tables but with values only and values are ordered)
About IKADN
The sexiest part of the solution is an abstract notation that simplifies implementation (and to some degree design) of your own notation. Projects wiki page https://code.google.com/p/ikon-library/wiki/IKADN contains more details but in short IKADN syntax consist of following rules:
- Each data type starts with a specific character (such as "=" for numbers in IKON or "[" for array),
- Notation designer defines how data it self looks like
- White spaces between data are ignored.
- Logic for reading stream
- Handling of unexpected end of stream
- Deciding which data type to read
- Helper methods for reading, skipping and substituting characters from the input stream
- Helper methods for writing nicely indented IKADN document.
How to get it
Official project web site it at Google Project Hosting: https://code.google.com/p/ikon-library/. There are source code, wiki pages and most recent build for .Net. Build is also available through NuGet.
using System;
using System.IO;
using Ikadn.Ikon;
using Ikadn.Ikon.Types;
namespace IKON_example
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var reader = new StreamReader("input.txt");
using(var parser = new IkonParser(reader))
{
IkonComposite star = parser.ParseNext().To<IkonComposite>();
Console.WriteLine(star["name"].To<string>());
}
}
}
}
Parser can read form any TextReader subclass so if you want to read from string instead of file, use StringReader instead StreamReader. Also parser implements disposable patters so you can use it with using statement to ensure that input stream is closed after use.
Notice To<T>() method, it's the helper method for converting objects and the alternative to usual C#'s cast-and-get (cast an object to target type and then call a getter method). In the first case IkadnBaseObject is simply cast to IkonComposite (table type). The second case is more complex and shows true power or the method. Instead of type casting, underlying IkonText (textual type) returns it's contents as .Net string. Which types can be requested depends on the underlaying IkadnBaseObject subclass. For example, in the case of IkonNumber (numeric type) valid conversions include most native .Net numeric type (decimal, int, float, ...). In case of IkonArray (array type) one can ask for T[] (native .Net array) or IEnumerable<T> if array elements can be converter to T.
If you have any questions out the project, feel free to drop a comment. If you have a feature request or bug to report, you can file an "issue" on the project site too.
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