Cav's Place

I wanted to wait until this will be approved on MobyGames before posting it, but since it’s been two weeks and it’s still waiting in the approval queue, I guess I might as well post it now. It describes the strategy I used to quickly finish Empires of Arkeia, including in legendary mode, so it certainly works very well. That doesn’t mean that there are no better ones available, perhaps by using units that you unlock later during the normal campaign, but it was the strategy that I settled into and maintained all the way to the end of the normal campaign and then throughout the legendary one, so thought I’d share it, in case somebody’d be interested, even if it’s just a little Flash game.

Early on, you’ll be tempted to do the “rock, paper, scissors” thing, looking at what the enemy sends against you and recruiting units to defeat theirs. And early on that may be the best strategy, but it’ll soon become a losing one due to the strength of the opposing armies. What you need to do past that point, and all the way while playing in legendary mode, is to destroy the enemy base as quickly as possible, which means taking twelve units across the battlefield, since the enemy doesn’t have units that can repair their base.
The best way to do that is to wait a few seconds to see which lines the enemy sends their first units on and then send a line of cavalry on one that they have no units on. Start with scouts, which will be a staple from start to end and can become quite powerful with the proper upgrades, and once you get border cavalry you can start alternating, two or three scouts with two or three border cavalry. (Ignore lancers; they’re too expensive and upgrading their damage requires the spear skill tree, which you won’t really need otherwise.)

A third unit that you need to have available at all times, as soon as you’ll unlock it, are the engineers. Since you get bonuses according to the state of your base, you should try your best to fully repair it once the enemy base is destroyed, even if that implies taking slightly longer to clear out the remaining enemy units. (Don’t rely on the fact that you can repair it after it’s destroyed, however, as it won’t restart generating gold then, so don’t let it get to zero.) You’ll earn far more experience for repairing your base than you’ll lose for taking a little more time to win the battle, though by using this strategy you should often be able to get the maximum bonus for both, particularly in the latter parts of the game.

Your remaining three slots should be filled with units that have special abilities which will help your cavalry charge. You may have other preferences here, but I used centurions, Sun priests and a ranged infantry unit that changed as better ones became available.
The centurions are also a sword unit, which can be important when it comes to upgrades, give an attack bonus to the melee units in the same line with them, which bonus can be upgraded (third skill on the bottom line), and can also be used against spear infantry, to clear a path for your cavalry if need be, though that should only be as a last resort since it’ll cause your cavalry to need to wait for them all the way afterwards.
I used the Sun priests rather rarely during the normal campaign and hardly ever during the legendary one, but they can be handy at times, particularly if you upgrade their healing ability (fourth skill on the bottom line). Don’t expect them to fully heal units, because they heal few hit points compared to the amount your units will have, but they can make a difference at times. If you want, you may try to replace them with the Moon priestesses, for their ability to reduce the damage taken, and see how that works for you.
As for the ranged infantry unit, I tended to only use them after destroying the enemy base and repairing mine, to speed up clearing the remaining enemy infantry. There’s little use for them otherwise, because they’re slower and generally more expensive than the border cavalry, plus that they may require upgrades that you won’t otherwise need in order to become truly effective.

Speaking of upgrades, since what you need is speed, the skills that increase your income, starting gold and morale generation, which are the last three on that same bottom line, are pure gold. They’re costly, but once you get these sufficiently high, you’ll be able to send a stronger and stronger line of cavalry early on and defend yourself or even repair your base with more free waves of units. Keep in mind that the skill that increases your starting gold also increases the efficiency of your engineers, and getting that all the way up means that a wave of engineers will repair 50 base points in normal mode and 70 in legendary mode!
Also because you need speed, which implies cutting through enemy units as quickly as possible, you should also put as much as you can into the relevant damage skills for your scouts and border cavalry, and don’t forget upgrading the range for your ranged units as well. Hit points help as well, and I tended to focus on them before attack, but in hindsight going the other way around would probably have been the better choice.

There may be a point, for me it was on the second island in both the normal and the legendary campaigns, where it’ll be very difficult if you focus on these units and skills, but once you manage to get past that it should become increasingly easier, and the final couple of islands will be a joke to get through, because by then you’ll be able to destroy the enemy base within seconds with this strategy, so taking over a minute to win a battle will become increasingly uncommon.

Edit: According to the keywords I see, people seem to be ending up here wondering how to play Empires of Arkeia in legendary mode. You unlock that the same way you unlock such modes in nearly all games I know of: By completing the game in normal mode first.

Rather surprisingly for Modesitt, there’s practically no mention of the environment and ecology in this book. There’s also little put forward regarding how a future society should function. There is, however, plenty of talk about, or in fact against, religion, as well as much about certain other defining characteristics of humanity, so it’s certainly still Modesitt, largely wrapping philosophy in space opera in order to get some ideas across to a wider audience.
What I can say about the book is that I liked how it went perhaps somewhat into Rama territory but had next to nothing of the human filth that made me loathe those books. Or it still had a fair bit of it, seeing what its purpose was, but it was presented in a way that I could not just stomach but actually even enjoy, mostly. And the contrast between Chang’s and Fitzhugh’s chapters was quite refreshing, as were the four different viewpoints in general.

Rating: 4/5

After Rafael Nadal crashed out in the second round, this year’s Wimbledon was announcing itself as very interesting. And now that we also had the second longest match in the history of the tournament take place yesterday, you can say that another segment of that promise has been delivered as well. As a result, now that today is the traditional day of rest, during which no matches are played, I’ve decided to go through all of those that have been played so far and list all the interesting results.
The first type of matches that I looked for were the surprise losses, by which I mean the matches that saw the defeat of players or couples who, as a result of their positions, were expected to have gone at least two rounds further. Those would be all seeded players or couples who were eliminated in the first round, the top half of the seeds who were eliminated in the second round and, in case of the singles matches, for which the third round has already been played as well, the top quarter of the seeds who were eliminated in said third round. Since the seeded couples don’t play in the first round of the mixed doubles competition, a loss by any of the bottom half of the seeds in their first match didn’t generally count as a surprise, since it was already the second round. There was one exception, however, namely the couple who won the trophy last year, whose loss in said second round is listed as a surprise, even though they’re ranked only 12th out of the 16 seeded couples.
Secondly, I also looked for matches that went into “extra time” in the final set. That means a minimum of 14 games, as 7-5 is still a normal score, which can be found in any set and in any competition. You’ll see these matches ranked according to their total duration, though I’ll admit that I didn’t check whether other games were in fact longer from that point of view. What I meant to do was point out those matches that you won’t be able to find in any “normal” tournament, or even in the US Open, not look specifically for the longest matches of this particular competition.
Thirdly, in case of the men’s matches, I also looked for the other thing that can’t be found in “normal” tournaments, namely comebacks, matches won by the player who lost the first two sets. In case it’s not immediately obvious, I decided to rank those according to the number of games lost by the player who ended up winning over the last three sets, with those who lost the least games being listed first.
You’ll find links to all the match reports as well, just in case you want to check anything out. And yes, even though some matches are listed under more than one category, the link will be provided every time, not just the first time.

I. Men’s singles:

1. Surprise losses:

– Rafael Nadal (2 and last year’s finalist) lost to Lukas Rosol in the second round 6-7 (9-11) 6-4 6-4 2-6 6-4
– Tomas Berdych (6) lost to Ernests Gulbis in the first round 7-6 (7-5) 7-6 (7-4) 7-6 (7-4)
– Janko Tipsarevic (8) lost to Mikhail Youzhny (26) in the third round 6-3 6-4 3-6 6-3
– John Isner (11) lost to Alejandro Falla in the first round 6-4 6-7 (7-9) 3-6 7-6 (9-7) 7-5
– Gilles Simon (13) lost to Xavier Malisse in the second round 6-4 6-4 7-6 (7-5)
– Feliciano Lopez (14) lost to Jarkko Nieminen in the first round 7-6 (7-4) 3-6 7-6 (7-5) 6-4
– Bernard Tomic (20) lost to David Goffin in the first round 3-6 6-3 6-4 6-4
– Andreas Seppi (23) lost to Denis Istomin in the first round 6-7 (2-7) 6-4 3-6 6-3 8-6
– Marcel Granollers (24) lost to Viktor Troicki in the first round 7-5 7-6 (7-5) 3-6 2-6 8-6
– Stanislas Wawrinka (25) lost to Jurgen Melzer in the first round 3-6 7-6 (7-2) 2-6 6-4 8-6
– Kevin Anderson (32) lost to Grigor Dimitrov in the first round 7-5 7-6 (7-3) 6-7 (4-7) 6-3

2. Long matches:

– Marin Cilic (16) defeated Sam Querrey 7-6 (8-6) 6-4 6-7 (2-7) 6-7 (3-7) 17-15 in 5h31m.
– Martin Klizan defeated Juan Ignacio Chela 7-5 3-6 7-6 (8-6) 1-6 11-9 in 4h53m.
– Guillermo Garcia-Lopez defeated Edouard Roger-Vasselin 6-7 (2-7) 6-3 7-6 (7-4) 5-7 10-8 in 4h48m.
– Viktor Troicki defeated Marcel Granollers (24) 7-5 7-6 (7-5) 3-6 2-6 8-6 in 3h40m.
– Malek Jaziri defeated Jurgen Zopp 4-6 4-6 6-3 6-4 9-7 in 3h31m.
– Jurgen Melzer defeated Stanislas Wawrinka (25) 3-6 7-6 (7-2) 2-6 6-4 8-6 in 3h29m.
– Denis Istomin defeated Andreas Seppi (23) 6-7 (2-7) 6-4 3-6 6-3 8-6 in 3h26m.
– Jerzy Janowicz defeated Ernests Gulbis 2-6 6-4 3-6 7-6 (7-2) 9-7 in 3h10m.

3. Comebacks:

– Inigo Cervantes defeated Flavio Cipolla 2-6 6-7 (4-7) 6-3 6-2 6-1
– Roger Federer (3) defeated Julien Benneteau (29) 4-6 6-7 (3-7) 6-2 7-6 (8-6) 6-1
– Florian Mayer (31) defeated Philipp Petzschner 3-6 3-6 6-4 6-2 6-4
– Nicolas Almagro (12) defeated Olivier Rochus 6-7 (4-7) 3-6 7-6 (7-4) 6-2 6-4
– Malek Jaziri defeated Jurgen Zopp 4-6 4-6 6-3 6-4 9-7

II. Men’s doubles:

1. Surprise losses:

– Max Mirnyi and Daniel Nestor (1) lost to Daniele Bracciali and Julian Knowle in the second round 6-4 6-4 6-4
– Mariusz Fyrstenberg and Marcin Matkowski (3) lost to Johan Brunstrom and Philipp Marx in the first round 6-4 6-2 6-7 (1-7) 7-6 (7-2)
– Alexander Peya and Nenad Zimonjic (6) lost to Chris Guccione and Lleyton Hewitt in the first round 7-6 (7-3) 7-6 (7-3) 3-6 7-6 (7-3)
– Marcel Granollers and Marc Lopez (9) lost to Jonathan Marray and Frederik Nielsen in the first round 6-7 (3-7) 6-4 7-6 (7-4) 2-6 7-5
– Frantisek Cermak and Filip Polasek (11) lost to Dustin Brown and Oliver Marach in the first round 6-2 6-2 1-6 2-6 7-5
– Colin Fleming and Ross Hutchins (13) lost to Mikhail Kukushkin and Lukas Rosol in the first round 3-6 4-6 6-2 7-6 (7-5) 6-3

2. Long matches:

– Jonathan Erlich and Andy Ram defeated Treat Conrad Huey and Dominic Inglot 4-6 6-3 2-6 7-6 (8-6) 9-7 in 3h37m.
– Chris Guccione and Lleyton Hewitt defeated Benjamin Becker and Cedrik-Marcel Stebe 6-4 5-7 4-6 6-2 9-7 in 3h17m.

3. Comebacks:

– Mikhail Kukushkin and Lukas Rosol defeated Colin Fleming and Ross Hutchins (13) 3-6 4-6 6-2 7-6 (7-5) 6-3

III. Women’s singles:

1. Surprise losses:

– Samantha Stosur (5) lost to Arantxa Rus in the second round 6-2 0-6 6-4
– Caroline Wozniacki (7) lost to Tamira Paszek in the first round 5-7 7-6 (7-4) 6-4
– Marion Bartoli (9) lost to Mirjana Lucic in the second round 6-4 6-3
– Na Li (11) lost to Sorana Cirstea in the second round 6-3 6-4
– Dominika Cibulkova (13) lost to Klara Zakopalova in the first round 6-4 6-1
– Flavia Pennetta (16) lost to Camila Giorgi in the first round 6-4 6-3
– Jelena Jankovic (18) lost to Kim Clijsters in the first round 6-2 6-4
– Lucie Safarova (19) lost to Kiki Bertens in the first round 6-3 6-0
– Monica Niculescu (26) lost to Stephanie Foretz Gacon in the first round 6-4 3-6 6-3
– Daniela Hantuchova (27) lost to Jamie Lee Hampton in the first round 6-4 7-6 (7-1)
– Svetlana Kuznetsova (32) lost to Yanina Wickmayer in the first round 6-2 6-3

2. Long matches:

– Christina McHale (28) defeated Johanna Konta 6-7 (4-7) 6-2 10-8 in 3h10m.
– Nadia Petrova (20) defeated Timea Babos 6-4 6-7 (3-7) 9-7 in 3h4m.
– Silvia Soler-Espinosa defeated Edina Gallovits-Hall 4-6 6-4 10-8 in 3h1m.
– Serena Williams (6) defeated Jie Zheng (25) 6-7 (5-7) 6-2 9-7 in 2h28m.
– Yanina Wickmayer defeated Galina Voskoboeva 4-6 6-3 8-6 in 2h27m.
– Sabine Lisicki (15) defeated Bojana Jovanovski 3-6 6-2 8-6 in 2h24m.

IV. Women’s doubles:

1. Surprise losses:

– Kveta Peschke and Katarina Srebotnik (3 and last year’s winners) lost to Flavia Pennetta and Francesca Schiavone in the second round 6-3 4-6 6-1
– Iveta Benesova and Barbora Zahlavova Strycova (8) lost to Olga Govortsova and Mandy Minella in the second round 7-5 7-5
– Anabel Medina Garrigues and Arantxa Parra Santonja (12) lost to Klaudia Jans-Ignacik and Alicja Rosolska in the first round 4-6 7-6 (8-6) 6-4
– Gisela Dulko and Paola Suarez (14) lost to Irina Falconi and Chanelle Scheepers in the first round 3-6 6-2 6-4
– Chia-Jung Chuang and Vera Dushevina (16) lost to Anna-Lena Groenefeld and Petra Martic in the first round 6-4 6-4

2. Long matches:

– Stephanie Foretz Gacon and Kristina Mladenovic defeated Jelena Jankovic and Virginie Razzano 6-3 5-7 8-6 in 2h41m.

V. Mixed doubles:

1. Surprise losses:

– Mahesh Bhupathi and Sania Mirza (5) lost to Paul Hanley and Alla Kudryavtseva in the second round 6-3 6-1
– Jurgen Melzer and Iveta Benesova (12 and last year’s winners) lost to Dominic Inglot and Laura Robson in the second round 6-3 3-6 6-1

In addition to all of this, I found two more matches that deserved a special mention, both of them from the mixed doubles tournament:
– Kenneth Skupski and Melanie South defeated Eric Butorac and Varvara Lepchenko 7-6 (7-5) 7-6 (8-6), in a match that had no breaks whatsoever.
– Treat Conrad Huey and Raquel Kops-Jones won the first set’s tie-break against Bruno Soares and Jarmila Gajdosova 15-13, making this the tightest tie-break of the tournament so far. They then lost the match, however, 6-7 (13-15) 6-4 6-4

For a while, I meant to look for long ones through the boys’ and girls’ matches as well, and also through the qualifying matches, but I think this should be quite enough for now. Besides, there are no details available for the qualifying matches, so I couldn’t have gotten the length or provided any links.

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.