Cav's Place

It’s Saturday evening, I haven’t posted anything here this week and don’t feel like writing now either, so this is just thrown here to count as a post. I’ll have to write something else tomorrow, obviously, but it may simply be something short about Ukraine, or perhaps even another very brief personal post which will largely say that I can’t get myself to say anything… Or it may be another “New Finds” post, but that would take time that I currently doubt I’ll put into it. Rants on other topics are pretty much out of the question, as they have been ever since I started writing about the protests, eight months ago.

It seems that this week was rather centered around books for me, as I read Crucible of Gold in all of three days, managed to stay just above what used to be my daily goal in terms of adding to my story for the past four days in a row, which probably hasn’t happened since the first half of September, and also actually added a few books on Goodreads. This last part is rather scary, but I still have at least 16 more to add, since I scanned the covers for all of them yesterday as well, so I’ll need to do that soon enough, to get them out of the way.
Now I was thinking to wait a week before starting Time of Contempt, so I’ll read it closer to the end of the month. That’s because the book fair will take place between May 28 and June 1 and Sapkowski may be one of the guests, Poland being the guest country. I’m not sure about that, however, since the main page about the guest country says so, but the actual news piece about the guests doesn’t, so it remains to be seen… And it also remains to be seen when I’ll actually be able to go, since on the 29th I’ll need to be elsewhere and do things I’m still trying to pretend will never happen, since just mentioning the date now almost made me need to run to the toilet. I think I need a break before continuing this…

Right. Managed to crawl back out from under the blanket and the title mentions a failed flash drive as well, so let me just quickly say that I’m referring to the one I bought five years ago to make a monthly backup of the important files that I won’t just be able to download or otherwise obtain again in case of a failure that will somehow affect both HDDs. This happened last week, a few days before it actually turned five, and I have no idea what caused it, but after seeming to copy everything there were a lot of errors while checking and it suddenly seemed to become read-only. The files appeared to have been written just fine and seem to still be readable, albeit with some difficulty, but I can’t write anything else to it and can’t format it either.

There may have been something else to say, but right now I just need to cry and want to cuddle with someone I care about even more than before and there’s no way either of those will happen, so I’ll leave it at that. It doesn’t look like I’ll be adding a fifth to those four days in a row I mentioned before either.

The author seems to have become rather weary of the series after five books, but this does at least mark a welcome improvement over the sixth. The length and the issues noticed may have made me go with three stars, but I’ll stick to four because the dragons and the main human characters are still pretty much themselves, their interaction continues to be interesting, occasionally amusing and, if perhaps less than in earlier books, every so often even raising a few important issues, and the few surprising moments are used well enough.
Admittedly, I read with a critical eye in recent years, so I tend to notice more problems than most, but I doubt such attention is even needed to have reason to complain about the rushed ending or some other simplifications, and I must also mention that at least a few things don’t quite add up properly. However, overall Crucible of Gold does at least give some reason to hope that the series won’t end with a whimper.

Rating: 4/5

I must state from the beginning that this review is based strictly on playing the campaign, without caring for any other scenarios and, as usual in my case, without any multiplayer, seeing as I have no interest in that aspect. What’s definitely not usual for me is that I didn’t even try the editor either, despite the fact that I often tend to do that even before starting to actually play a game that offers one, at the very least to get a better idea of what I may end up facing. And no, there was no particular reason why I didn’t do so with this game; I simply dived straight into the campaign, temporarily abandoned it at some point, and after returning to it I was set on finishing and didn’t even look at anything else.

Despite clearly enjoying the game, I find it rather difficult to think of any specific thing I liked. Still, it must be said that it does do a good enough job of creating that “one more turn” feeling that’s required for any decent turn-based game, it occasionally made me lose track of time for a while and there were moments when I was rather excited about playing it, especially in the “special” scenarios and towards the end. In fact, that final scenario was quite interesting and I was rather surprised that, despite the odds being so heavily stacked against you from the beginning, it wasn’t frustrating. To a certain extent, the game as a whole can be said to be rather difficult without being frustrating and there were a couple of other interesting scenarios as well, but that final one made a significant contribution to my overall impression on its own.
Otherwise, Age of Wonders II features certain elements that I tend to see as mandatory for this type of games, such as having heroes that actually act as such and can be relied on and allowing all other units to move freely as well. I find it somewhat difficult to consider these as positive aspects in themselves, as I tend to only consider lacking these elements as a flaw of those other games, but I guess I must point out that, by comparison, I clearly liked having those heroes to handle important battles and, especially in groups of two or three, just about all the offensive on their own, usually leaving only the task of defending my territory to the other units.
Once they gain enough levels, the heroes can become extremely powerful, though never quite invincible, so if you are so inclined you can play the game as something of an RPG with an added strategy element instead of the other way around, which is great from where I’m standing. Add the teleportation gates that can be built in cities and, perhaps as the one clearly positive aspect, in the sense of a feature that I don’t consider as absolutely necessary, the interesting and massive battles that can be fought since all armies in adjacent hexes enter combat, and you probably have a good enough explanation for my lack of frustration, which is rare enough in itself.

Moving on to the negative aspects, I must start with the lack of information. When you first need to select your starting skills, you won’t know what each does. When you develop your first heroes, you won’t know what the attribute cap is, nor will you know the maximum level for skills that have multiple levels. When you research summoning spells, you’re given no real information about the units in question. The description of some spells can be lacking as well, and the same thing can also be said about some skills. In addition, no attack or damage information is shown for units that only have ranged attacks, but on the other hand those attacks have effective attack and damage values, as well as chance to hit, listed when they are used, which doesn’t happen for melee attacks. And, while I’m at it, a list of armies would have been particularly useful as well.
Then there’s the matter of the AI, which is generally poor and at times terrible. Granted, the game is difficult enough even so, which means that a good AI would have made it next to impossible, but that’s no excuse for the computer not doing so many simple things that’d make a difference, starting from moving another unit away to be able to take the wizard to the tower of the city it respawned in if the garrison was full at the time. During sieges, it can be quite laughable, taking units all the way around to another gate instead of perhaps waiting one turn to be able to enter through one that was already destroyed or, perhaps worst of all, assuming that a breach was created when one of its units that can climb or pass walls does so and making all the others in the area waste a turn by pointlessly gathering behind it. In addition, it rarely seems to notice when moving units in a different order will bring benefits, makes rather poor use of units with multiple skills or of powerful heroes, doesn’t properly develop its cities, never uses transports, so it’ll never take units that can’t fly or swim across a body of water, and even enemies will make deals with you that will greatly harm them.
Some annoying bugs exist as well. I didn’t experience any that made it impossible to continue, but some certainly make things more difficult, such as the fact that it often seems to check whether a quest, particularly a build quest, was completed only when you capture a structure, and at times it seems to fail to check at all, so you’ll be told you failed even though you did what you had to do. Some negotiations also seem to simply be ignored, which I think happens when the AI would have accepted the deal but it doesn’t have the required mana to make the transfer, or perhaps when it doesn’t have the amount of gold you asked for as well. During one scenario, both of my AI allies simply stopped moving as well, I believe after such ignored deals. In addition, though I’m not sure whether these are actual bugs or not, it’s definitely unpleasant that the allied victory condition doesn’t trigger if your allies aren’t allied to each other as well and there’s no way to persuade or force them to do so, leaving defeating one of them as your only option, and also that being pulled into combat alongside an ally means you don’t see the battle and the ally controls your units, but they retain control of theirs when they’re pulled into combat alongside you.
I should also state that the story is little more than an excuse to get you from one scenario to the next and the low number of special events during said scenarios is, at the very least, a clear missed opportunity. I already mentioned that there are a few that are different, but most, and those you must complete in order to advance in particular, can hardly be said to have any story of their own. Some sort of unit descriptions would have been nice as well, and some more notable effects of your relationship with the various races wouldn’t have hurt either… And, solely for the fact that it doesn’t fit anywhere else either, I’ll also add here that I’d have liked magic to be more powerful, though I guess that’s a matter of preference.

Once again, I focused far more on the negative aspects, but there are plenty of them and they significantly affect the overall experience, so I doubt I was unfair, though the brief notes I wrote down while playing the game probably were, seeing as they included a very brief summary of most of those negative elements but lacked as much as one word about anything I actually liked. However, as I already stated, I clearly enjoyed playing this game and will stress this now, in the conclusion, if otherwise the review may have given you a different impression. The simple fact that, at least if you don’t count Castle of the Winds, it’s the first actual game I finished in about a year and a half should be proof enough of that.
Granted, the enjoyment may have been at least in part generated by the fact that I was rather starved for a decent fantasy TBS that actually featured those elements I listed above as mandatory from my point of view and didn’t frustrate me with things such as time limits, lack of control, choices that result in completely missing significant areas, parts of the story or development opportunities, or an unfair difficulty, pitting me against challenges that planning and tactics aren’t necessarily enough to overcome. However, it seems that such games are all too rare and, despite its many flaws, I’m glad I finally got around to playing this one.

After getting some four hours of sleep, going to buy a few things and then putting another four hours into editing the last section I finished in my story, I certainly won’t be writing much here, but want to say that the reason why I woke up early was that the books I ordered over three weeks ago arrived this morning. I’m talking about Time of Contempt, Crucible of Gold, Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon, these last two being picked instead of The Waterborn and The Blackgod.
I wanted those because I read and liked Greg Keyes’ other two original series, but was told after placing the order that they’re no longer in print, so at first, for no particular reason, I considered the Mistborn Trilogy, but eventually settled on those, since I already have the first two in the series, I’m currently playing Return to Krondor and they were cheap as well. The problem is that those first two were among the books I took when I was thrown back here and didn’t read during those first few months, so it’d definitely be hard to read them now and I don’t know what I’ll do in the end, but at least I have the next ones now as well, just in case.
After all those names and links, I’ll just add that I also bought a small bowl today, but it immediately proved to be a bad choice. Been looking at that particular kind ever since I accidentally dropped the one I was usually eating in and had to switch to another and today I finally grabbed one, but when I got back I noticed that the shape is very close to that of the one I’ve been using lately, so I pretty much spent some money for nothing, since what I wanted was obviously something very similar to the one that shattered. How did I keep believing that this one was what I was searching for, especially after carefully looking at it several times over these past months, I’ll never know.
Otherwise, the last part of the title refers to the fact that the amount of spam I’m seeing has increased so much that I’m not even glancing over it before deleting everything anymore. Used to do that, to make sure I wasn’t deleting anything that wasn’t spam, but now I’m getting in a few hours as much as I was seeing in an entire day, so if anyone just happens to post a comment that accidentally gets caught by Akismet, I apologize in advance.

Since I was looking at Opportunity‘s latest self-portrait when the big news hit yesterday, I’ll start this post with the second part of the title and say that bright days sure seem to be ahead for the little rover, and not only because it made it through its sixth Martian winter. Strangely enough, the update covering March 20 to 27 is missing from the archive and the pictures that form that image were taken between March 22 and 24, so I don’t know what the dust factor, which measures the percentage of sunlight that gets through the layer of dust and reaches the solar panels, was at that point, but it was reported as 0.777 on March 19 and 0.868 on April 1. This latter value seems to be the highest since this measurement started being reported, in 2007, and it certainly is a whole lot better than it was when the previous self-portrait was taken, between January 3 and 6, the dust factor reported on January 7 being 0.555. Then again, even that was an improvement at the time, as it was reported to have reached as low as 0.467 on December 5, which was a value not seen since February 14, 2012.
I still find myself in some way attached to that little rover, while at the same time largely ignoring Curiosity, largely due to the latter’s nuclear power source. Since space exploration should make use of the best technology we have available, I find that moving back away from solar power instead of making use of the opportunity to push the technology to its limits and improve it even further sends the wrong message here on Earth, not to mention that it carries a risk, no matter how small or irrelevant, of contaminating another world. As such, if little else, I at least hope that Opportunity will, however briefly, end up holding the record for the longest distance covered by a vehicle anywhere other than on Earth, even though the Russians made a point of moving that goal.

As for yesterday’s big announcement, it’s undeniable that finally being able to confirm the first Earth-size exoplanet within its star’s habitable zone is a major achievement. The previous best find was 40% larger than Earth, while Kepler-186f is estimated as probably being only 11% larger, with other possible values ranging between 2% smaller and 25% larger, so it’s certainly Earth-size, seeing as this is defined as being between 20% smaller and 25% larger than Earth. Granted, it’s at the outer edge of the habitable zone, the average temperature calculated according to a standard model that ignores atmosphere being a frigid 180°K, but a sufficient amount of greenhouse gases would easily allow for liquid water to exist on the surface, not to mention that other processes may cause the temperature to be above freezing in the depths of any oceans that may exist. As such, it may not necessarily be the single best suited for life as we know it out of all the exoplanets we have found so far, but it’s definitely a huge step in the right direction in our search.
A study about the formation, tidal evolution and habitability of the Kepler-186 system has also been submitted and, if you’re in any way interested in the topic, you definitely should read it. Not counting the references, it only has 13 pages and it is currently the best source of answers to many for the common questions people may have. In short, it says that, while it is currently argued that planets in such systems should be relatively dry and, in addition, Kepler-186f either already is or is on its way to becoming tidally locked to its star, it definitely has the potential to be habitable according to our current definition of the term, though the degree of uncertainty is relatively high due to the lack of data.
Perhaps more importantly, however, the study also stresses that simulations confirm something that is also obvious if you simply look at the distances, namely that at least one other planet, and probably two, should have formed between Kepler-186e and Kepler-186f, so in the warmer part of the star’s habitable zone. It is, of course, possible that the planet or planets in question have been destroyed by impacts or thrown out of the system, but if they still exist then their masses should probably not exceed that of Earth, because otherwise their influence would have made the transits of the five we do know of, and of the one announced yesterday in particular, unlikely. As such, the system itself may be even more interesting than it currently appears, seeing as the conditions on those potential planets would probably be even more suitable for life as we know it, though at the same time the existence of such a planet or planets would actually reduce the likelihood of Kepler-186f being habitable.

Overall, I’ll go as far as saying that yesterday was an important day for mankind. Of course, many don’t see the true significance of the knowledge gathered and I could only sigh and shake my head at many of the comments and questions posted by some people on the Kepler Mission‘s Facebook page. The mission’s purpose was to see whether other Earth-size planets exist in their stars’ habitable zone and, if so, to get a rough idea of how common they are, plus of course to get a rough idea of how common planets of all types are in general. With this confirmation, that first goal was reached, and that’s a great achievement in itself! Anything else is, at this point, science fiction… And will unfortunately remain so for a long time if space exploration will continue to be as low of a priority and receive as little funding as it currently does.