Cav's Place

Playing a Flash game is very unusual for me, not happening for years, and I’m reasonably certain that this is the first time I actually completed one, so I thought I might as well go one step further and review it too, especially since I already wrote a brief strategy guide for it. Understandably, despite certainly being more complex than I expected such a game to be, considering my extremely poor opinion of the genre and of Flash itself, there’s little actual content in it compared to the games I’m used to playing, but I’ll do what I can.

When I first stumbled upon Empires of Arkeia, I saw it listed as a “tactical” game, which implied that it somehow differed from the countless tower defense games that keep spawning lately. And it does differ from that basic formula, largely due to the fact that it puts you in the role of the general tasked with securing an area instead of simply holding a position against waves of enemies. As such, you will need to attack and advance, starting by liberating a number of villages plagued by pirates, raiders or strange creatures and ending with taking the fight to the enemy, which gives a sense of progression and also provides some plausible explanation for facing such different and increasingly stronger units as you advance through the campaign.
However, this isn’t to say that the game simply turned the concept around, becoming a “tower offense” game. The defense portion is still there as well, as you will need to look after your own base while trying to destroy the enemy’s, which certainly puts the game on another level compared to those that focus solely on one of the two concepts.

Another good aspect of the game, adding another layer of complexity, is the pretty large amount of upgrades that are available, which allow a significant degree of customization of your units and, coupled with the almost equally large number of different units that can be unlocked over the course of the campaign and with the special abilities that many of those units have, make way for a large number of strategies. And I do need to mention that you upgrade those skills by directly spending the experience earned as a result of your victories, which I will once again say that I strongly prefer over anything that involves the quite senseless concepts of levels or skill points.
The fact that you can see the statistics of each of your units, as well as those of any enemy unit that took part in any of the battles that you already won, in detail also helps in making this skill system perhaps even more meaningful, as in most cases you’ll be able to notice the exact effect each skill increase has on each of the units that are of particular interest to you and determine for yourself whether further increases are a good idea at that particular moment or you should instead focus on something else. In many other games, you can find yourself wondering why a certain strategy isn’t working, but here, especially since the damage and hit points of all units and the results of most special abilities are fixed, you can often work out the numbers for yourself to see the outcome of each strategy and the exact effects of each upgrade.

Last but certainly not least when it comes to the positive aspects is that which most players will probably care about the most, namely how the battles themselves play out. About this, all I can say is that they feel quite rewarding and that the pace is excellent, not quite overwhelming but never giving you time to pause either. With the proper strategy, winning will generally take around one minute or even less, with a few battles possibly being won in as little as 30 seconds if you really try, and that’s without replaying any of them to gain additional experience, so you can quite literally play this game whenever you have a minute to spare… Which minute may well turn into many more when you’ll find yourself thinking “just one more fight” several times in a row…

Getting to the negative aspects, the first one that I need to mention is the lack of some sort of help in the game. Yes, you get a brief tutorial at the start of the first battle, which oddly enough repeats itself at the start of the legendary mode as well even though many other dialogs no longer appear in that mode, but a game like this could probably do with more, especially considering that many of those who regularly play Flash games may be expecting something simpler.

The main problem, however, is that the game seems to want to hold back its own complexity at some point, and that point comes disturbingly early. It’s rather annoying to find yourself arbitrarily restricted to just six active units for each battle when you can have up to 22 unlocked, but what’s perhaps worse is that you probably won’t even use that many. The most effective strategies tend to imply the use of two to four unit types, with one more being brought in at the very end of each battle once you’ll unlock it, and all those unit types may well be selected from those you unlock relatively early on.
The issue has to do with the fact that the enemy has far greater numbers and raw power than wits, which means that trying to find the most efficient way to counter its units will quickly become a losing strategy but also that it won’t exactly be trying to counter yours either. Coupling that with the fact that different upgrades are required for different units and, perhaps more importantly, that most special abilities tend to be unique to a certain unit type, which makes it hard to make room for newly unlocked units even though their base attributes may well be far better than those of the ones you already have, it means that you’ll pretty much ignore all the new options that open up to you as soon as you’ll discover a winning strategy. As a result, nearly all of the units unlocked in the latter part of the normal campaign will amount to nothing more than so many new pictures in the barracks tab.
And, while I’m at it, I also need to mention an issue with unit speeds. When the units differ so much in their other attributes and abilities, it’s strange to see only three speeds, and even stranger that not even those are properly used, with all but a few units having the exact same speed. It’s both odd to see light and heavy units have the same speed, which also ignores any implied degree of training, and rather disappointing to notice the lack of any skills that can improve speed. When a fair amount of attention seems to have been given to all other attributes, this is a lost opportunity.

Under “miscellaneous” complaints I could file the fact that the point that units need to reach in order to be considered as having reached the enemy base is behind the point where new units are created, which means that you may create a unit before you see your base being damaged only to find said unit walk calmly away while the enemy gets through behind it. Or that both of the above mentioned points are off screen, which means that some fights may be entirely invisible to the player. Or that at least the supposedly optional battles should have been made to stand out in some way, such as by adding different terrain types or enemy fortifications, to make the “optional” part actually have a point. Or that it’d have been nice to also have the units you faced in the battles you lost show up in the library, so you’ll have an easier time figuring out what to do against them. Or, if I’m to nitpick, even the times when the text doesn’t fit the dialog box and a word or two may not appear.
But all of that falls either under nitpicking or under suggested improvements, possibly for future games. However, what I think really must be noted is the lack of some sort of separate save feature. Yes, the game does save everything you do as soon as you do it, so you can close your browser, open it again and continue right away, but clear your cookies and you’ll have to start over. That may work for games that are over in a few minutes or for those found on social networking sites, which can store your progress on their own and associate it with your profile, but when you have a game like this, that will take you a few hours to complete and that can’t have such “cloud” services available to it, a way to create a save file that you could really hold on to would have been more than welcome.

Overall, it won’t make me change my opinion about Flash games in general or look into more of them, but I may give the other ones created by the same developer a try someday, if I’m bored enough. That’s because, while only scratching the surface of what I’d like to see in games in general, it really does offer a degree of complexity that I thought was generally beyond the genre, because it has a great pace and offers you a decent sense of accomplishment mixed with that “just one more battle” feeling, and because, past all the issues that I pointed out, it’s a well-made and quite enjoyable little game that you can try whenever you have, even literally, a minute to spare.

A week ago, I was briefly listing my top five demands regarding environmental issues, which are not negotiable and would be the shortest list I’d put on the table with the occasion of any meeting or conference dealing with such problems, such as the Rio+20 Summit. Obviously, they’re also courses of action that’ll never even be considered as long as people in general, whether we’re talking about world leaders, be they those we know or those who pull the strings from the shadows, or about the masses, have any say in it, which makes any such summits at best pointless, and perhaps even harmful. But that’s just the point…
Why are we flying so many diplomats and negotiators all that way, providing them with quality food, luxury accommodations, security and so on, consuming a large amount of resources and generating significant emissions and pollution in the process, if we already know that nothing noteworthy is going to happen? Why bother to claim that anything meaningful might happen when any commitments that may be announced during such summits are either voluntarily undertaken by individual participants or agreed upon by all of them and those very participants are responsible for the current situation and clearly unwilling to actually do anything about it? What’s the point of this masquerade?

What happened now was the same thing that happens whenever something like this takes place: The first item on each participant’s agenda seemed to be to ensure that nearly all real solutions are ruled out from the very beginning by looking at everything from a purely anthropocentric perspective, even when that very perspective is why the problems appeared in the first place. And then, of course, once that matter was settled, those with the most influence, who would have the most to lose if the status quo would be changed in any noticeable way, stepped in and stamped out nearly all remaining hopes by bringing economics, tradition and organized religion into the game and therefore also ruling out even the options that’d indirectly create some minor improvements despite being mainly aimed at improving people’s lives instead of tackling the problems that actually need to be tackled first.
So all we’re left with are a bunch of voluntary commitments, which amount to a drop in the ocean compared to what needs to be done and which could have been made just as well without the need for a summit, and a watered-down declaration that’s worth about as much as the paper it’s written on. What’s more, the anthropocentric perspective is so pervasive that, at a quick glance through said declaration, particularly through the first few pages, you’d have every reason to believe that the summit was all about poverty and human rights, not about the environment and sustainability!

I was planning to actually read the whole thing carefully one of these days, but right now I don’t even think it’s worth the trouble. As I keep saying, the solutions cannot and will not be found through politics, diplomacy, negotiations or conferences, but only through the direct actions of that small number of dedicated individuals determined to do absolutely whatever it takes to solve these problems at all costs, to themselves and to humanity as a whole… If it’s not too late even for that.

There were no matches yesterday, I wasn’t alone and didn’t have anything else planned, so I certainly meant to write a post, most preferably a non-personal one. However, instead of doing that, I ended up spending most of the day playing a little game called Empires of Arkeia, finishing the whole thing in normal mode and then also the first two islands in legendary mode, which gets unlocked after you finish all eight islands in normal mode. And just now, instead of writing this, I ended up taking a break in the middle of this first paragraph to finish the third island in legendary mode as well…
It’s highly unusual for me to pay any attention to a Flash game, in fact it hardly ever happened before, but I was looking through the day’s posts on theCHIVE when I saw a comment that said that almost all of them were stolen from a little-known site called Izismile, so I went there to check, happened to notice that they have a games section as well and this was the only one listed on the first page that got my attention at first glance. Certainly didn’t expect that to result in so much time spent playing it, however, but I guess it shows that I haven’t been playing anything at all in probably over a month now.
Not sure if I’ll be looking into other games from there as well or not, but I guess I’ll be following both Izismile and theCHIVE from now on, at least for a while. It’s hard to give a verdict so quickly, but it does seem that most things gathered from around the Internet are indeed posted on Izismile slightly earlier, though I also noticed a few things posted there after first appearing on theCHIVE, so it may be that they’re both copying the same sources, though not necessarily each other. And it’s not quite everything that gets posted in both places, so let’s see…

Otherwise, various talks that I had last week gave me even more ideas of issues to write about, but ideas are certainly not the problem. What I’m lacking is the skill to put those thoughts into words properly and, more importantly, the mood to even try. It’s so much easier when I’m debating or arguing with someone, at least when it’s not someone I’d really want to support, but it would appear that I can’t even turn my side of such debates into posts. After all, that one about the punishments that those who would still try to have children after being told that they’re not allowed to do so should receive is still waiting in a file, as it has been for months now. But let’s see what I’ll manage to come up with later this week, if anything.

And speaking of the end of the week, I should also let anyone who may happen to read know that the site apparently won’t be accessible for about four hours at some point during the weekend, since I got a notice stating that the datacenter used by my host will undergo a major upgrade at that time. Let’s just hope it won’t happen Sunday afternoon or evening, when I’ll probably be struggling to post something.

The Rio+20 Summit is starting next week and I thought I might as well write a short list of personal demands. To make everything simpler and clearer, I have also decided to follow a suggestion that I have seen given to those who have taken part in the recent protests, namely to put forward a single list, containing no more than five main demands, each of them having an explanation no longer than two lines, and leaving all other details aside until the actual negotiations. So I opened a file, used the default font and size, which is Times New Roman, size 12, and wrote my five main demands when it comes to environmental issues, making sure that no demand will take more than one line and no explanation more than two. This is the result:

1. Solve the overpopulation problem by drastically reducing the number of births worldwide.
Enforce strict regulations to reduce the population to no more than three billion by 2100 without requiring increased mortality. Only allow healthy people with extraordinary talents to have children.

2. Adopt a declaration stating humankind’s place within, not above, Earth’s ecosystem.
Acknowledge that humans are merely one species of many and that our immense capacity to influence the world implies more responsibilities to care for and help the others than rights to exploit them.

3. Protect sufficient areas to allow the other species to live out their lives without fear of humans.
Strictly protect wilderness areas covering at least 25% of the land area and 25% of the oceans of Earth by 2050. Select areas according to what other species need, not according to what humans can spare.

4. Ensure that healthy and organic food will be readily available and affordable for everyone.
Tax conventional and subsidize organic food production. Encourage organic farming in all private gardens. Ban the use of GMOs and patented plant and animal species. Phase out factory farms by 2050.

5. Switch energy generation to clean, safe and renewable sources with a low negative impact.
Cover at least 30% of the demand from such sources by 2020, 50% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. Phase out nuclear by 2030 and coal by 2050. Ban additional hydroelectric plants of any size.

The order I listed them in is the order of importance at the moment, though all of them are crucial. Yes, even the second one, which is essentially a demand for a statement, not for a binding agreement or any other immediate action, because such a statement would pave the way towards what needs to be done in the future, specifying the framework within which we must work and the mindset we’ll all need to have from this moment forward. It could be written in the form of a pledge that all attendants to such summits would be required to take from now on, so it’s only second because the overpopulation problem is absolutely critical and very drastic action must be taken immediately, because the necessary reduction may well become impossible to achieve without also increasing mortality within as little as five years, if the current trends continue.

Let’s not wait until the last moment again and end up posting on Saturday and Sunday, shall we? I hear that I may be alone tomorrow anyway, so I’ll feel like doing this even less, even if it’s just a personal post. Not that I’m exactly sure what the other one will be about this week, so I may even end up with two personal ones and have that buffer fall back to two, unfortunately. But let’s hope that won’t happen, because I certainly have several things that I mean to write about, including what should be a pretty short one about the Euro, analyzing the situation before the last round of group matches. I should at least manage to post that, if nothing else…
Should also have the “monthly computer maintenance day” tomorrow, leaving it to verify things while I’ll see what else I’ll feel like doing while alone. And I may also install this major WordPress update that just became available, so let’s see if it’ll break anything, which is what I keep fearing every single time, considering the ancient theme I’m using. That’s why I tended not to install major updates for a long time after release ever since 2.7, if not even earlier, preferring to wait at least until after the first maintenance update and sometimes even more than that, but this time I find myself thinking that I might as well try and get it over with.

In other news, my opinion of this hypermarket that I go to when I buy things just dropped significantly after I noticed that they charged me too much for something last time, which was last Monday. The difference is less than 2 RON and they might have done it once before, back in January, when the difference was exactly 3 RON, but back then I knew that I hadn’t looked well and I might have seen the wrong price, so couldn’t exactly accuse them of it. This time I’m sure and, while in itself it might be an honest mistake, the real problem is that they didn’t even bother to reply when I let them know about it.
I only noticed the issue when I got back, so let’s say that it was partly my fault as well, but I immediately sent them an e-mail about it, plus a second one the next day to add the scanned receipt as proof, expecting at least an apology if not also a coupon to print or something with a value at least equal to the difference. Then I even sent another message two days ago, this time through their site, just in case the e-mails got lost or weren’t sent to the right address for such complaints, and still got nothing, so I guess I’ll need to go somewhere else the next few times. The difference was tiny, but I want to take over 100 times that amount, so at least 200 RON, away from them for their attitude, even if it’ll probably imply a fair amount of trouble on my end, especially when it comes to getting back with the stuff now that it’s starting to be so hot outside.