summary of negativity in my recent AARs

[bvanevery]

With respect to whether I consider them to be HOME page worthy.  Or negative enough to make this site look bad.  Or some other reason they shouldn't be posted on the HOME page.  I did remove the nasty boilerplates I had at the end of all of these when I was  .  They're civil and perfunctory now.

Final Tally:

• 2 clearly usable
• 1 debatably usable
• 1 usable if not squeamish about bleeped profanity
• 5 unusable

boring small island start - too short to be HOME page worthy

slow transporting - I won the game.  Only the very end of the game has any negativity at all.  I'm entitled to my opinions about how I felt about the AI "dictating the terms" of the game's end.  There is nothing wrong with this AAR for posting on the HOME page.

Aki vs. Yitzi and PRACX - I blew off this game.  I did not enjoy it at all.  It made me itch.  There was plenty of bleeped out @#$@#$ profanity in it.  I consider that "clean" but it is negative.

Zhakarov is killed by aliens - I lost this game.  That almost never happens, but it did happen, and in an unusual way.  The Usurper AI behavior was weird in this one.  That alone makes it an object of curiosity.  It's HOME page worthy material.  Of course I was pissed about losing the game, but otherwise this AAR isn't negative.

Miriam makes me shiver - Early in the game, I was pretty bored of doing AAR writeups.  I put some really off the wall stuff in there, clowining 80s songs and some @#$# profanity about making Lal dance.  He wasn't even in the game.  Yeah, that was weird, and negative, but I'm not changing it, 'cuz it's also real.  I had a point midgame where it was seriously starting to get boring, and I questioned continuing it.  However I found a way to make it interseting again, and that's the opposite of negative, that's finding something positive to go on with.  Eventually I won this game over and over again.  Lots of Transcendant Thought techs, could have transcended at any time since forever.  I toyed with my enemies and "sandboxed" them for quite awhile, then eventually hit the wall.  It became bor-ring!  That's not negative, that's reality.  You can only do so many sandbox things before you've spent a thousand mouseclicks on each of them and don't want to do it anymore.  If you're really squeamish about the @##! Lal stuff, fine, whatever.  Otherwise though, there isn't enough negative here to keep it off the HOME Page.  It's a darned long writeup of a game that I won.

Cha Dawn braves the unknown - this is the exemplar of what really happens in half of my writeups.  I play a game to the hilt.  The posts get very long.  No time for anything negative, I'm too busy accounting tons of tactical detail.  Lotta meat on this one.  Then I get to the last post and you know it's like, this game and this AAR have been wearing me out the whole time.  Author's journey or something.  Yeah, I'm going to be a bit negative about wasting a day of my life on such a thing.  I don't think that should be a dealbreaker because the tactical stuff is so long and so solid.  This is one I'd throw out there and see if anyone actually cares that I got tired of the thing.  Yeah our opinions differ on whether that matters to anyone.  I don't require a dose of happy sauce in everything I read.

Svensgaard is a douchebag - The title is as negative as it gets.  I hate Svensgaard.  I've always hated him, more than any other character in the game.  He's the pretty boy that these SMAC add-on idiots decided they'd shove in there.  They gave him a voice actor that doesn't sound like a pirate, he sounds like an English major wearing a sweater.  What a load of crap.  Hope Yang kicks his ass and throws him into the tanks.  Well maybe an AAR shouldn't be a forum for what I think boldly sucks about SMAC.  I won't even bother to contemplate the rest of what I wrote, it probably has the usual merits.

Santiago the Builder - Lots of aspects of this game were a drag.  I couldn't build the SPs I wanted because of Santiago's Industry penalties.  I felt forced to fight which was not the kind of game I wanted to be playing.  I doubled down on Lal @#$@# profanity, making it more explicit than usual.  That's really the bigger problem in it, but I'm not going to take it out.  The analysis of how Santiago turns this game into a lot of work, is valid.  Other factions can accomplish a lot more with a lot less work, on a Huge map.  Interesting but I can see how this one is too negative to put on a HOME page.

Does Miriam suck? - The title itself is framed negatively, but since Miriam didn't end up sucking, the AI did, I can't consider the title to be a dealbreaker.  It's what I titled it when starting the game, and one doesn't know how things are going to go.  This game would have been my epic AAR, threatening to go to a length equal to all the other screenshot AARs combined.  But it was derailed by this process of coming to terms with being an AAR writer here.  I'm not interested in removing the conflict that ensued, there should be some record of it that isn't sanitized for posterity.  This AAR is a casualty of war and couldn't be on the HOME page.

[Buster's Uncle]

I just want to point out that in the game that you could have transcended any time - why not rush through the three turns or whatever it takes, doing nothing that doesn't speed the build, for the sake of sweetening your audience's experience?  It's minutes of effort, surely -absent a dangerous vendetta situation- to add serious non-trivial value to the many, many hours you've invested in playing, writing up, and screenshots.  BOOM! there goes one of my concerns.  AARs are stories, y'know -we considered just having them in the fiction forum before Green1 and others ask for a dedicated sub- and it's an intuitive story-telling thing to try to reach a satisfactory ending.  Why not for the quick win when you're bored and there's something available (and definitely very quick)?

NObody would mind THAT in any way.

[bvanevery]

I just want to point out that in the game that you could have transcended any time - why not rush through the three turns or whatever it takes, doing nothing that doesn't speed the build, for the sake of sweetening your audience's experience?  It's minutes of effort,

No, it was at least another hour of effort, as I said in the AAR.  And I was dead tired, and totally sick of pushing units around.  If you never personally reach the point of screaming ENOUGH! in a game, well you're wired differently than I am.  Additionally consider the burden of writing it all up as well.  It makes things take even longer.

BOOM! there goes one of my concerns.

I don't share your concern about this.  I look at the 99.9% of an AAR that is there.  Not the 0.1% that you can easily imagine yourself.

AARs are stories, y'know

No, they are writeups of tactics unless they're meant to be story driven narratives.  And the tactical value of "how would I have finished that last 0.1% of the game" is zero.  One of those games, I had Singularity engines, planetary drop squads, and whatever the size 30 gun is.  What's Morgan gonna do if I decide to win?  Nothing.  Summary execution.  Not even worth the time.

I would also point out, on the subject of "does 0.1% matter?" that you might be a Completionist.  I am not.  In the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, a strong desire for closure and orderliness corresponds to the Judger category.  The opposite, a person who prefers things open ended and uncommitted, is in the Perceiver category.  I'm about a 60/40 Perceiver/Judger split, and definitely biased towards the Perceiver way of looking at most things.  I don't need my AARs to be "polished to the last nail".

BTW morally speaking I don't like Transcend.  I think it's a completely creepy, morbid idea.  It's rather similar to the Buddhist concept of committing "suicide of the self", just to get off the wheel of life.

[Buster's Uncle]

An hour, really?

ISTR that you're not much for hab domes and populations over 16 - I like to grow all my cities as big as they can get with a bunch of Sky Hydroponics (and Nessus and Orbital), and crawler my capital -made a super science city because zero inefficiency with all the research-boosting SPs- all the way up to pop 127 which is the limit before a rollover bug kicks in, wait for the other factions to declare vendetta and whip them until there's only one faction with one city left, then play out the clock terraforming like it's Sim City and transcend in 2499.  It takes three turns at that point in my 127, Nessused-up, capital w/o cashing in any units.

I play on transcend on normal maps -because much bigger is too tedious for even my blood to fill up with bases- and use every exploit known to man and at least one I seem to be the discoverer of.  The community frowns on all the exploits I use as cheating, so there goes any AAR value, unless it was novelty value and demonstrating all the single player cheats for the record.  [shrugs]  One of my games tends to take about five days of doing very little else, well over 12 hours play a day, so I don't have to tell you it would take well over a month writing it up in any detail to speak of.  I enjoy playing that way, though, which is all that matters.  -It does skew my experience from the typical, though, thus my oversight in saying three turns.



Oh, and protip: in a recent game, you seemed to have gotten all the com frequencies first, and then raised EC selling some of them around.  I'd counsel you not to do that, as com frequency money is peanuts, and you enabled one of the others to call an election before you were ready.  Being governor is very lucrative, along with the other advantages; I never sell frequencies, and even back when I was playing more conventional games, I'd count up populations -or save scum calling a council meeting to save work/time- and call that election when I was on the ballot, able to either win outright or buy enough votes in advance (costs half as much if you do the bribing individually before calling the meeting).

[bvanevery]

An hour, really?

Do you have any idea how many Super Formers it takes to push rails instantly across Huge maps?

ISTR that you're not much for hab domes and populations over 16

That is false.  I build them when I get the technology.  But if I get bored of a game long before then... anyways you can read the AAR in question and clearly see I had Hab Domes.

I like to grow all my cities as big as they can get with a bunch of Sky Hydroponics (and Nessus and Orbital),

I have already long since conquered food and minerals issues on the ground.  I don't know if you automate but I work every square manually.  On a Huge map that's a lot of squares.  If all the satellites get fried in a storm, it won't matter to me at all.

and crawler my capital

I energy crawl from my capitol if I have nothing better to do, picking up all the energy resources that are not being used by cities.  I often have better things to do though.

-made a super science city because zero inefficiency

That's standard drill, as well as also having it be a super-economics city if I've managed to get the techs for it.  But I can't always get The Merchant Exchange.

all the way up to pop 127 which is the limit before a rollover bug kicks in

You could have won the game far, far before then.  Highest I've recently gotten is into the 30s before finishing the tech tree.  If you're having fun, fine, but in my AARs there was a point at which I was not having fun, it was exhausting.

I play on transcend on normal maps -because much bigger is too tedious for even my blood to fill up with bases-

So cut me some slack for not finishing the damn games to your exacting standards then!  I might be pushing a lot more stuff around than you are.  Definitely much longer distances even if the same amount of stuff.

and use every exploit known to man and at least one I seem to be the discoverer of.

I don't.  Don't really care one way or the other, I just don't.  Most I'm ever guilty of is save scumming a bad combat roll, and that's rare for me to do anyways.

One of my games tends to take about five days of doing very little else, well over 12 hours play a day, so I don't have to tell you it would take well over a month writing it up in any detail to speak of.

Many of my recent AARs have had 7..10 day time outlays of "heavy" play.  Which is why I often get to the point of !@#$ this.  And why I'll cut them off, because it's a lot of time out of one's real life.  Made doubly long by writing the AARs

Oh, and protip: in a recent game, you seemed to have gotten all the com frequencies first, and then raised EC selling some of them around.  I'd counsel you not to do that, as com frequency money is peanuts, and you enabled one of the others to call an election before you were ready.

Not true.  I have enabled others to get in wars with each other, and to give me map info on people I'm at war with.  I've generally profited from the tech trades and come out with the most tech.  Remember also I am playing on Huge maps.  Factions don't just run into each other and it's not easy to push a skimship probe team to steal someone's map.  Rest assured that I have no problem with the phrase "Nope, haven't heard a word" when it suits my purposes.  I'm a ~20 year veteran I know why I'm doing things.

[Buster's Uncle]

Believe me, I do work every square by hand, and I was playing the demo obsessively in 1996 and am a 22 year veteran of the game.

I may have to actually DO that novelty cheater AAR for your edification; my most recent game saw me with so many super formers, at the point I'd researched mag tubes, that that the F7 command nexus screen had rolled over, so north of 255 and I was able to -guessing- link all my bases, roughly 40 covering an entire normal map with few gaps for other factions, in something like 10 turns, maybe 20.  Yes; I do know - I just find terraforming fun.  (That game started won, 'cause I was doing the timewarp cheat, where I've never done it, but it's possible to win by transcendence on the second turn - second turn, but still takes RL days to do.)

I don't play like you do was my main point, there.  No attack in that.

[bvanevery]

I think people would in fact be interested in a "weird cheat" AAR, same as people are interested in going to the Far Lands in Minecraft.  Today I tried posting a link to my current AAR on the Alpha Centuari Reddit subforum.  9 upvotes so far, which isn't awful I guess.

I say ~20 years because it sounds better.  If anyone literally narc'd me on when I started playing, they'd find out it's a lie.  My defense would be "close enough!"  I started playing it some time after it's release, maybe 1 to 2 years later.  I cut teeth on Civ II: Test of Time, probably in 1998 after I left DEC.  Once I got good at that, SMAC was the next obvious title available.  I'm definitely a 20 year Civ-style game player though.

I deliberately avoided Civ I in college, because I was afraid if I started playing it, it would seriously jeopardize my grades.  In hindsight I was absolutely correct.  I played all kinds of other games in college, including Galactic Trader on a VAX mainframe, wasting incredible amounts of time.  I was helped with Civ resistance by not owning a PC.  I was using public Macs to do my work, and to play my games.  There were PC labs available but I had to walk far to get to those, whereas a few Macs were in my dorm.

[Buster's Uncle]

The stuff is crack to our kind of personality, isn't it?  I discovered CivII after SMACX, and though it's primitive by that comparison, lacking the faction personality/story and features like terraforming, it's a solid little game of which I am quite fond, and has burned many weeks worth of my life.  It's the civ game other than SMACX I'd most like the forum to get into kicking around.

-All the traffic will bear, please, of members taking initiative spreading URLs of anything here to anything here, within sensible non-spammy limits about where and what and how often.  Two thumbs up for that. 


BTW, after I posted that, I realized it was only 1997 when I was obsessively playing the demo - found the full game in a $5 bin late in the year, and I still have that copy.  I'm super-cheap, but it was a sawbuck well, well-spent...

[bvanevery]

The stuff is crack to our kind of personality, isn't it?

Well you're not lying about that.  The job that I quit, before I got hooked on Civ II and then SMAC, was optimizing 3d graphics device drivers in DEC Alpha assembly code.  That's the ultimate in micromanagement.  That's why I'm so impressed, yet so saddened, by Yitzi's binary patching efforts.  I have the technical skills to do exactly the same thing, with a little learning curve about binary formats and tools etc.  Only to know that it it does no good, it won't make a good AI happen.

Every game of SMAC I play is about optimizing something.  Generally my growth rate against that of other factions.  The current Pirate AAR is challenging because I'm not sure what the reason for playing it is.  It's not about the reportage anymore, that's a byproduct.  I've made sure it's not going to be about popping pods.  I'm not sure I want it to be about drowning the planet, because I have lots of good land.  So what will it be about then?  I haven't found my direction yet.

Is there a sustainable rate of nuclear missile delivery?  Can I sink everyone else?

  I discovered CivII after SMACX, and though it's primitive by that comparison, lacking the faction personality/story and features like terraforming, it's a solid little game of which I am quite fond, and has burned many weeks worth of my life.  It's the civ game other than SMACX I'd most like the forum to get into kicking around.

Interesting proposition, and it makes some sense.  I did not like Civ III.  Especially, I hated the number of revolts cities would go into.  You'd end up having to conquer everything twice.  Twice as many mouseclicks, twice as many units to push around.  I ended up snapping my CD in half, between my fingers.  That's how a lot of games that have frustrated me have ended.  Historically it was the only way to stop the disease, the point one gets to in the game where it's all diminishing returns.

BTW, after I posted that, I realized it was only 1997 when I was obsessively playing the demo - found the full game in a $5 bin late in the year, and I still have that copy.  I'm super-cheap, but it was a sawbuck well, well-spent...

I paid reasonably full retail for my 1st copy of SMAC.  I destroyed it out of frustration at some point.  My 2nd copy, I paid $10 for a CD-only version at a used bookstore.  That I eventually destroyed as well, but I still have that jewel case, and I think also an original game manual.  This is why I keep shamelessly downloading a pirated GoG version and rage deleting it periodically.  Maybe I will finally toss GoG a couple of bucks at some point, but if I did that, I think it would keep me from destroying the game.  I'd need to look into whether their games can be re-downloaded again, like onto a new machine.  I am a bit of a Luddite about digital content delivery.  I don't have a digital-only license for anything.  I think the last game I actually bought was Civ IV, and that came with a traditional DVD.  Which I destroyed.  Played the Civ V demo heavily, saw they weren't fixing the major problems of Civ IV, so declined to deal with the franchise from then on.  Played Freeciv for years, which is essentially Civ II with like 3 tweaks.  Finally got tired of it and went back to playing SMAC, which is a better game.

[Green1]

Just trying to help..

But people that read AARs or watch LPs do so for three main reasons.

- They want a story.
- They want to learn mechanics to improve their play.
- They want to see game play before they buy it. Make sure it does not suck.

Most of all, they want fun. An escape from the mundane.

If you are negative and have a callous attitude in an AAR or LP, why would a reader want to hang with you?

[bvanevery]

If you are negative and have a callous attitude in an AAR or LP, why would a reader want to hang with you?

In my specific case, because I'm offering far more mechanical insight than I'm offering negative comments.  Really, I mean with 39 AARs to my credit now, a simply vast amount of game mechanical analysis, I get tired of the harping on negative comments as some kind of dealbreaker.  The overwhelming majority of the work is tone neutral, "this happened at this time".  I've conceded that some of the negativity makes some of the AARs not suitable for front-and-center advertizing.  That doesn't make them valueless or repellant AARs by any means.  There are a lot of human beings out there, who respond to different things and have different needs.  Maybe as an expert player yourself, you tend to forget that tactical insight is valuable to people who are learning the game?

"Try before you buy" players, I've done them the favor of being thoroughly honest.  I don't require people to stick with my writings, my goal is to help someone.  The work has enough merit that some fans can be created, if there are any fans to be created at all, given the age of the game.  I do not insist on trying to turn everyone into a fan of my AARs, or the game.  Some people honestly shouldn't be playing SMAC, it won't be the game for them.

My attitude in that regard is very strongly related to my attempts to create games in general.  I am not going to try to please every gamer out there.  I'm not interested in making the maximum pile of money from the maximum number of people, as that means dumbing things down and appealing to the least common denominator of taste.  You love World of Warcraft??  Get lost!  Well that's a little harsh, people can like more than 1 kind of thing at a time, but I would never have designed WoW.  Don't care how much money it made, in my universe it's a boring RPG.

As for writing stories, I can seriously put that hat on.  I have those writing skills.  But it's already a lot of work to write up AARs as perfunctory accounts of tactics, because of the large maps and long games I'm doing.  Writing up a Roleplay AAR is a lot of narrative and storytelling work, basically an order of magnitude more "free content" to offer.  There's a point at which I think my writing skills should be monetized somehow, to justify that kind of effort spent.  For instance, I could be writing my own Choose Your Adventure games for that level of literary output.  So I'm disinclined to spend lots of time writing "good stories" because that stuff is actually valuable as a game developer.  If I do a really really good job, there are also copyright issues, and it should be licensed on my own website (which I don't currently have) so that copyright claim is clear.  Sites like this one, the usual arrangement in the Terms of Service is if I write it up, they can do lots of things with it, they have a number of claims on the work.

Having fun and escaping, I don't tend to write with those ideas in mind.  I must be getting something out of SMAC myself, as I do keep playing it and haven't given up on it.  But I approach it with the attitude of a would-be game designer, so possibly my explorations don't match someone else's notion of "fun".  Like, I don't think WoW is fun, I think it's a dead bore.  I would hope that SMAC finds its audience and that's communicated through my AARs somehow.  I mean heck, ya gotta find 4X TBS to be "fun", or else why read a bunch of AARs about it?

[Buster's Uncle]

We do have a writers' forum in need of some love - and I recall reading our TOS boilerplate and I hereby formally waive any legal or moral claim on people's fiction on behalf of myself, AC2, and my partner in same, sisko.  (I know considerable media/IP law from my communications degree; between you slapping a copywrite notice on everything and me being willing to publish disclaimers of any claim to your satisfaction, that takes it out of the public domain and puts you in a pretty unassailable legal position IRT to any hypothetical fiction published at this site.)

We do not waive our right to have some say on what meets our standards - but there's two semi-private (stuff in there, Googlebots can't see, so meets the legal standard of not public) subforums you won't have seen, because you have to join the Writers' membergroup, Adult Fiction (empty so far, but VERY lax standards of what's allowed) and Writers' Workhop, which has gotten some gratifying use and Elok found very helpful in writing his novel, The Curse of Life, on sale now.  Joining the membergroup is worth it for a chance to read Rusty Edge's excellent Known Space fanfic alone, in Workshop.

-Just throwing that out there, 'cause I really would like to see some action in the public forum and build a writers' community...

[Green1]

True...

But even the mechanical players want SOME resolution to the game other than "I just blew it of... Oh well..... time for AAR #55 that I will blow off too!!!!"

That is the elephant in the room.

That, and release schedule. Where do you find time? That's a lot of unfinished AAR threads. I managed to do around 7 or so. I think if I did more, people would get tired of my drunk, crud spamming arse and boot me off the forums.

I'd do less with an emphasis on quality and an ending. You won't get paid unless enjoyment process of long writing with pictures and playing combined is payment enough. That, and some of these neckbeards might actually nod at you.

Pretty soon, though, they might have to make another forum just for orphaned bvanevery AARs!! LOL.. 

I'd take a break and enjoy the game. That way, you want get understandable crud for abandoning a too many game that got tedious.

[Buster's Uncle]

Green, I SWEAR you never crowded any too-many limit - though you always crowd me in other ways.   I wish you'd do more.

[bvanevery]

But even the mechanical players want SOME resolution to the game other than "I just blew it of... Oh well..... time for AAR #55 that I will blow off too!!!!"

Do they?  I don't know if you've followed the gory details when BUncle and I were fighting about earlier things; fortunately we're past all that now.  But one of the things I proved, is you yourself have one of the most popular AARs ever in terms of views, and it was unfinished work.  Now, maybe you'll say you finished some things and didn't finish others, so therefore people kept following you.  But in my case, 1/2 of my work was 99.9% finished.  So one way a player could actually satisfy that supposed craving for resolution, would be to read my AARs, instead of complaining about them.

That is the elephant in the room.

The only elephant in the room is whether pushing buttons that officially say YOU WIN is a dealbreaker in someone's mind or not.  It isn't in mine.  I'm perfectly happy to knock the king over in a chess game, "mate in 2 moves".  I'm more interested in the question "why did you even play this game, what was worthwhile about it?"  That is answered by the 99.9% journey, not the 0.1% official ending.

Let it stand for the record, again, that I am not a Completionist.  I can't satisfy that craving in anyone.  I'm not going to "collect all six".  Plenty of people on the internet are not Completionists either.

That, and release schedule. Where do you find time? That's a lot of unfinished AAR threads. I managed to do around 7 or so.

My 39 AARs represent a year's worth of work.  Thank you for letting me know how many you actually did, as I actually hadn't counted them up.  I hope you will consider the sheer volume of labor I've done, when making further critiques about any "elephants in the room".  For me, the "elephant in the room" is that I've done a far more gargantuan amount of work than anybody.  How good is the work?  Well a lot of it is decent, some of it can obviously stand improvement, but there sure is a lot of work.  And I think the difficulties of a person, who has done so much work, on such large games, should be respected more.

I think if I did more, people would get tired of my drunk, crud spamming arse and boot me off the forums.

Is that tongue in cheek, or do you think your writing needs to improve?

I started looking at Paradox's AAR forum, to see what the typical level of writing was over there.  It can't be that high because I got bored.  I was mostly reading Europa Universalis IV AARs, since I did play EU I back in the day.  I started branching out to the various space opera games before getting tired of it.  I became more interested in the question, "what, if any, 4X TBS game has a decent AI?" and unfortunately the answer is none of them do.  Which diminished my interest in writing AARs for some other game with a bigger audience, and increased my interest in writing a 4X TBS that has a decent AI.