Tekkit and Terraforming!
After our switch to cheating via the Not Enough Items interface, I lost interest in building the machines I had started on.. if I could have any item I wanted, I didn’t need to bother mining for resources!
I wanted to make some buildings and try out all the new blocks.. covers, panels, strips, corners.. and coloured lamp blocks and Luminators. I wanted some nice flat land for this too.. so I went to look at the Terraformer. The Terraformer can flatten land, turn it into a desert, or grassland, can add plants and trees to existing land, irrigate or chill the area to snow.
Coal Collector!
The Great Gift Pile objectives are turning out to be a mix of quick and easy tasks and longer, more difficult challenges..
Atom Zombie Smasher: KringleJammer was fairly easy to get, as was the Rock of Ages: Snowball War. Audiosurf: Candy Stripe required only the collection of red and white blocks in a line, but it took me a while to find something on my PC that played at the right pace to generate the blocks I wanted. “Still Alive” was giving me blue blocks, so wouldn’t do for this!
Beat Hazard: Survive Christmas 10 required me to survive for 10 minutes.. and it took far longer than that! After several attempts of under five minutes each, I realised I had unlocked some perks which might help: the Ultra DLC added Micro Missiles and a Reflect Shield which just about let me last long enough to complete the objective.
A harder achievement was the deliberate loss of a game in Fate of the World, where instead of trying to save the world, I led it towards global thermonuclear war and the Let it Glow achievement! After a few attempts I ended up consulting the internet for tips on how to get the ‘right’ ending.. it turned out to be a rather tight list of instructions while hoping for the right random numbers to be generated each turn. I think actually winning this game, as opposed to playing for an achievement, will be next to impossible as all territories seem to get annoyed with you very quickly! 😀
For another deliberate loss, I also tried to nuke Santa in DEFCON.. but found his movements too unpredictable, the AI too eager to react, and my supply of nukes too low for me to get him. I quickly got bored of this, so I checked out the tips on the net again, and reduced the number of cities to 5 per territory, but then found the game crashing almost as soon as I launched a nuke! Something to do with the latest update and Windows 7 🙁
Another not-quite-game objective was Winter Assault.. survive a 30 minute match on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Retribution, on one of the winter maps. Four of us joined the game, with one going AFK immediately.. only interested in the achievement itself.. but three of us met in the middle to trade blows until we’d met our time requirement! I wished for more Great Unclean Ones, but settled for a squad of Chaos Dreadnoughts instead 😀
With the completion of all these objectives, I’m collecting lots of coal along with vouchers which probably won’t get used.. two are for Valve.. I already own all their games, as do all my gaming friends. Although, if anyone does want them.. 🙂
I did win one game via the giveaway.. Silent Dreams’ Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes, a fantasy role-playing game with strategic combat and a sense of humour. The games in this giveaway are provided as a token, which can be added to your own inventory or traded.. so if you already own the game you win, you can give it away or trade it for something else.
A friend bought me Space Pirates and Zombies by Minmax Games, which I tried briefly last night. After stumbling through the first couple of missions, I decided I need to be somewhat alert to play! 🙂
The Steam sales are ongoing, and I also picked up ACE Team‘s rather Monty Python-esque Rock of Ages, mentioned earlier, and Croteam‘s Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, and Serious Sam 3: BFE, with the first two games below £2 each, and Serious Sam 3 at a reasonable price, considering I wanted a copy for me and a copy for Tim.
Other women spend their money on shoes: I spend my money on games! 🙂
Civilization V
I won a copy of Civ V from a Twitter competition a while back, but until the weekend I hadn’t really taken the time to try it out properly. This weekend, however, another friend picked up the game and had been playing, so a multiplayer game was suggested..
Four of us set out to conquer the world.. and I think I might have got the worst starting island I’ve ever been on.
This bit of the island was the best purely because there were a few hexagons of land in a clump. Fortunately there are methods of getting some use out of the water, such as the fishing boats, so my people weren’t always starving, but that particular notification did pop up a few times.
Barbarians were a nice source of XP rather than a real threat to my city.. this may be down to the difficulty setting chosen.. and overall I’m finding this version a lot easier to pick up than Civ IV was.. though as yet I don’t know which technologies and Wonders I should aim for.
Two friends decided to pick a fight with Suleiman, and proceded to smash their way through his lands. As I was passing by the destruction with my exploratory trireme I decided to join in.. partly because I wanted to see battle, but mainly to pick up a bit of XP.
Much more to learn about this version of the game.. I can see this particular multiplayer game taking a while to complete too, since it requires four people to be online together.
My first experience of the Civ series comes all the way from Civ 2, which I often played alongside my dad, discussing tactics and which the best Wonders were.. the Pyramids were essential as they counted as a granary in every city, meaning you only needed half the food to get your next citizen.
The Great Library was also fairly good as it automatically provides any tech discovered by two other civilizations from that point on, though only really profitable if you weren’t leading the tech race yourself. I also liked Leonardo’s Workshop, for the free upgrades to all units, and Adam Smith’s Trading Company, which reduced your maintenance costs.
My Civ 2 games tended towards mass-expansion, with so many cities that the automatically-generated names started to come from other Civilizations after a while.. unless I chose to rename them all. As far as dealing with other Civilizations.. I either rushed for the Spaceship, or if enemies were pressuring me.. I took spies to their cities with a lovely Nuclear present 🙂
A successfully built and launched Spaceship would eventually arrive at Alpha Centauri, and count as a win for your Civilization.
(Screen taken from CivFanatics)
More recently, I picked up Civ IV: Beyond the Sword, but found myself rather lost with the new concepts of Religion and Culture, as well as the changes to my well-used and well-known tactics. Expanding to a new city suddenly became expensive as the cost increases further away from the Capital, so instead I had to focus on building one city up at a time.. and all my old favourite Wonders stopped doing as I expected.
I attempted to play this version with a group of friends who knew the game, but quickly started to feel frustrated with my lack of knowledge, and rather uncomfortable with the banter that went on if somebody beat someone else to a Wonder, when trading with the AI, or when building cities where somebody else wanted to expand towards. The others had been trading technologies from the start, so I quickly fell behind in tech as well. With poor technology you don’t get access to the next level of resources, and your military units are weaker. Then, not only do you have no technology or resources to trade, you can’t take anything by force either. At this point, you probably need to get something from one player to use in trade with the next, and so on.. or wait to be picked off!