Clandestine Receives Update 0.9
Indie studio Logic Artists have announced that Update 0.9 for asymmetrical co-op espionage adventure Clandestine is now live.
Theramore’s Fall – Horde Side!
I finally got around to playing through Theramore’s Fall, the Horde version of the first of the new Scenarios for World of Warcraft.. and only just in time, really, as this was the last night where it would be available before the launch of Mists!
I would have liked to try the Alliance version, too, which takes place after the events of this Horde version.. but the highest Alliance character I have isn’t even 20 yet. Once the new expansion goes live, the scenario will return for level 90 players, though that still means levelling an Alliance character all the way up!
The backstory for the scenario comes from the novel Tides of War: Theramore had been fortified and aided by Alliance commanders, and had subsequently come under attack by the Horde.. and though a spy had helped the attackers gain access to the city, they still lost the battle. Garrosh had intended this, though, planning to catch the commanders all together with a highly-destructive mana bomb.
The first stage of the scenario had us rigging powder barrels on the Alliance ships.. and of course, killing the guards too 😉
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!
Spying and Engineering
We went for a bit of a change and played some TF2 this weekend!
Usually I play soldier as I find it the easiest class, but it’s good to try something else from time to time..
First up was the spy..
Disguises were easy enough to use, as was the cloak, but I had to learn to choose my battles.. my normal style of play involves firing at the first enemy I see!
After I’d had a bit of a mess around, we started sneaking into the other team’s base.. this meant lots of waiting to get past enemies in the doorways, or hiding under stairs hoping for engineers to leave their sentries for us to sap 😉
The cloak frustrated me a few times as I’d find myself in a great position to attack someone, but by the time the cloak was off and I could attack, my target had turned around.
The Engineer Update was released recently, and I joined some friends when they went to play with his new toys: Frontier Justice, a new shotgun; the Wrangler, a pistol/remote control for the sentry, and the Gunslinger which looks like a robotic hand, and even better, drops awesome mini-sentries!
Gamecrit have a great video with these new items in action on their YouTube channel here.
Again I had a friend give me some tips, such as building and upgrading sentries just outside the base, and then once finished, moving them closer to the frontline. Moving buildings is a new ability, and it really allows the engineer to do more than simply defend.. for me this makes him a much more fun class to play.
