Thursday, May 17, 2012

Things I learned in Bronze TvT

Look, I suck at SC2.  I know it.  I'm in bronze, that's what that means.  But, man, this stuff is just...I don't know.


  1. Best opening build ever?  3 reapers
  2. When that gets crushed, build four banshees.  Cloak is for pussies
  3. Under no circumstances should you attack the mineral line when using those banshees.  That's for pussies.  Go for the command center so that way your opponent can stim up some marines and crash your birds.
  4. Do not attack again after that.  Ever.  Turtle power!
  5. Cluster the hell out of your tanks.  That way, when your opponent is dropping, he can drop marines one at a time on that group so your splash damage kills half your line.  Genius!
  6. The natural is for morons.  Build over in a disused start location.  Defending both at the same time is easy.
  7. That drop sure did a lot of damage.  I know how to stop this:  turrets at every location physically possible along the perimeter of my ninja expand.
  8. Remember that barracks for the reapers?  Because I sure don't.  No need to have any sort of force to move at all, sieged tanks are the best.
  9. Reactors are for pussies. 
  10. My opponent has set up outside my little enclave with a few siege tanks, a couple of dozen marines, and a handful of vikings?  I know how to break this!  Battlecruisers.
  11. That didn't work?  I'll try sending my 15 tanks on the ramp to siege up.  Nothing can go wrong.
  12. He's landing vikings to finish off my buildings?  I know, I'll use lift-off/land micro to save them because my non-existent units can't!
  13. If you've lost three full mineral lines, have one base left at all, it's 40 minutes into the game, and your opponent is knocking on your last base's door, don't GG.  He might get frustrated with the time of the game and quit.
  14. When your opponent has killed your last CC, and your last SCV, and your last unit, say "Faggot."  and quit.  You showed him!


Yes, this was culled from four consecutive TvT games.  Let me tell you, none of this is an exaggeration.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Quick Estimation of Turbolaser Power

Last post I talked about photon torpedoes, and came up with a range (and a pretty wide one at that) for their max yield. This will go somewhat quicker.

The basis for comparison that I am using is the asteroid that is vaporized by a single turbolaser blast in the asteroid field. As in "not there" any longer--and this is a legitimate claim, just watch Empire Strikes back. Also note that this is well below their actual yield per shot--the bolt continues onwards after vaporizing the rock.


So, let's estimate the size. 20m diameter seems about right (if you think this is too much, please let me know). That gives a volume of 4200 m^3 (a little less, but not too much.) At irons density of 7.87 g/cm^3, this gives 33*10^6 kg of iron. Now, just like last time, I'm going to assume initial temperature of 11 Kelvin (as I did for the asteroid in Pegasus, to be wholly fair). In order to vaporize, it first must increase temperature by 1800 K, melt, then increase temperature by 1323 and then vaporize. Molar heat capacity is 25 J/(mol*K), heat of fusion is 13.8 kj/mol, heat of vaporization is 340kJ/mol. At 55.845 g/mole, we have 5.9*10^8 moles of iron. This means 2.7*10^13 Joules to increase temperature the first time, 2.0*10^13 to increase temperature the second time, 2*10^14 Joules to vaporize, 8*10^12 to melt, for a total of ~2.5*10^14 Joules/shot., .1 megaton.



But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, this is quite low--the asteroid in question is a diameter of 80 meters (using the Millennium Falcon as a point of reference), which would require 16000terrajoules of energy to vaporize--which is 40 megatons.)





Review of Civilization IV

Yes, this is way late, but this actually will serve a purpose for newer things that I will get to in my own, loveable, and roundabout way.

Civilization IV is objectively not a good game.  I am not saying you cannot like it--if you want to like it, go ahead, that is your right.  But it is not a good game, and it in no way represents a net improvement over Civ III.  That might seem harsh, but I am going to give you my many, many reasons for this statement.

Let's start with the good.  They absolutely made diplomacy more transparent, which was quite good--you knew why they hated you, and how much they hated you because of things you did.  Same with liking, but the AI never really liked you all that much anyhow, and I'd rather just avoid people senselessly attacking me rather than being friendly with me in Civ games, so that's a plus.  Also, new tile improvements were cool, the idea of dynamic governments via civics were cool, great people were cool, non-generic promotions were cool, units having strength and total HP rather than offense/defense stats and a variable HP count, all good.  Still with the units, adding units that had bonuses versus classes and specific other units, also good, as well as the idea of collateral damage and "flanking" to whittle down the stacks of doom.  Adding religion in was good.  So why do I say the game was objectively bad?

Every single thing I said was done really, really poorly.  Terrible, in fact.  Let's we go in the order I mentioned everything.  Okay, the diplomacy wasn't bad overall, except that they put emphasis on religious similarities and differences actually influencing behavior in states.  Historically speaking, this never really has anything to do with anything at all on the policy level--Catholic lords never had a problem going to war with each other when they had the opportunity to expand their power and their coffers, nor did any other person. Religion only seemed to ever be used in stoking passions, rather than a fundamental cause.  But that's pretty minor.  Otherwise, seeing exactly how people think of you, what you did to upset them, and how much it did upset them is really nice--I wish that Civ 5 had a bit more of that in it, honestly.

The tile improvements were pretty damn cool, having more than just roads, mines, and irrigation.  But what was absolutely terrible was the fact that there were simply too many.  There were, what, 12 different tile improvements by the endgame?  How the heck are you supposed to have an idea on how to optimize, or even set a priority, for a given city with that kind of absolute mess?  Then you have to factor in that these all change over time, and with various civics, so your city might dramatically change as you change governments, and given that some tile improvements (I'm looking at you, cottages) changed as they were used, this made planning a nightmare.  Civilization is a turn-based game, which means all you do is plan.  Planning shouldn't be made harder, it should be made simpler.

Civics were also completely bungled.  Their value was not at all in proportion to when they became available in game, as some that were unlocked later were absolutely worthless compared to earlier civics.  Also, their advent made hurrying production absolutely impossible unless you had one of two civics, neither of which was actually all that good aside from allowing production to be hurried.

Now for the units and all that entailed:  where to begin?  Well, in all honesty, it boils down to one thing:  absolutely no transparency whatsoever.  Too many concepts, which made too many promtions (again with the too much stuff to plan for) made the idea of optimizing a unit even for a specific role almost impossible.  What did first strikes do?  Was it at all better than going with a straight combat bonus? Who knew?  How could you? Why all the different promotions for literally every terrain type at all?  Good lord, you'd literally have to have plains, hill, and forest/jungle specialists, just to do well!  Counter-units were never good in offense, which meant that you had to carefully select which unit to attack with, and hope that they didn't have that unit's counter in that stack.  Then you had to contend with damage.  Now, it always told you what your odds of killing and your odds of retreat, giving a total "unit not die" probability, and that was good.  But you never, ever, had any idea on how much damage this could mean you inflicted or would take, meaning that you couldn't reasonably estimate how much damage your cavalry that would likely withdraw before killing the foe would do.  Since this was a turn-based game, not being able to properly plan is a problem.  This was compounded by the absolutely too many different units throughout most of the game.  Every unit had a counter, which meant that there had to be more and more units.  It started to simplify a bit around gunpowder, but only a little.  It wasn't really all that straightforward until you got to a modern army.  Even then, it's still a bit spotty.

Finally, religion.  Okay, this was just god-awful.  Everyone starts as pagan, but simply having one of the five approved non-Pagan religions in a city made that city objectively better than one that was pagan.  This would be less of a problem if it wasn't for the founding/spreading problem.  The first to get a tech, even by a turn, gets the associated religion.  Everyone else?  Tough luck, hope you beat the others to it.  This, again, wouldn't be so bad if it were not for the fact that having a religion made your city objectively better.  Then, you had to contend with spreading this religion.  It wasn't necessarily fast, and settlers from cities, even cities that founded a religion, never brought their religion with them--which is patently absurd.  This meant that if you wanted your city to not objectively be worse off, you had to have a missionary with you.  This was problematic, since you had to build a specific building for that religion to build missionaries, and that building could be made obsolete (as in, can never ever again build) by technological advances.  That's right, you could technologically advance and screw your ability to set up foreign colonies properly or even change state religions.  Good job, team!

But, really, I dislike the message it sends--you having a religion is better than not having a specific religion, and everyone is better off if they just find some sort of god.  That is a highly offensive notion to anyone who ever thinks for his self and doesn't allow religion to be the focus of his life.  Thomas Jefferson would be appalled by the notion of the game.

This brings me to my main point:  Civ 5 has an expansion, Gods and Kings, coming out.  They're adding religion in.  Now, they did everything that I complained about better in Civ 5, so maybe they won't bugger this one either.  I am still leery though--religion already passively exists in the form of culture and the piety policy track.  I'm a bit wary of all this, but the initial information seems to not be terrible, overall.  Still, I'm not so certain.