Category: Featured Posts

09/17/15

Birth of the Federation, an AAR, Part 15

CHAPTER XV: CONTACT!  (FINALLY!)

BOTF-15-001

A breakthrough in Construction! Phase Transition Bonding. Whatever that is. Oh wait, let’s read the description:

“Phase transition bonding merges two pieces of material by temporarily changing the phase of one item., When the phase distortion is reversed, the two pieces are inextricably merged, and the density of their intersecting volume is doubled.”

This allows for both Industrial Replicators and Type 4 Mass Replicators. Upgrading to newer versions of Mass Replicators can be a very expensive proposition. Well, expensive, in that it takes for-freakin’-ever to do it. This is why having a good, solid agricultural base is so important: you can drag people off of their farms, sometimes kicking and screaming, to working in a factory somewhere. Ah, the choices of an autocracy.

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09/12/15

Screenshot Feature: Thirty Years War

Screenshots by Boggit, 12 September 2015

Developed by Headquarter and Published by AGEOD/Slitherine

Many a crown shines spotless now
That yet was deeply sullied in the winning.”
Friedrich Schiller (Act II, sc. ii. – Wallenstein)

The Thirty Years War was one of the defining periods of the Seventeenth Century, and has been of interest to me for years, so I was delighted when AGEOD/Slitherine published Thirty Years War. Here are a few screenshots from the first few turns of the Grand Campaign from the perspective of the Imperialists to give you a flavour of what is being offered.

Thirty Years War comes with 8 scenarios. Three are tutorials, four deal with key phases of the war and one is the Grand Campaign.
Thirty Years War comes with 8 scenarios. Three are tutorials, four deal with key phases of the war and one is the Grand Campaign.

 

Turn one of the Grand Campaign starring General Bucquoy with a small force of some 6,500 men preparing to put down the Bohemian revolt. He needs more troops, but must act soon to squash the revolt before it gets out of hand.
Turn one of the Grand Campaign starring General Bucquoy with a small force of some 6,500 men preparing to put down the Bohemian revolt. He needs more troops, but must act soon to squash the revolt before it gets out of hand.

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09/11/15

The Zombie Apocalypse, Part 4: Preparing For The Inevitable

It’s what you do before the crisis that matters…

Jonathan Glazer, 11 September 2015

If we were part of the storied 1%, preparing for the outbreak would be relatively easy.  Money, storage space, transportation, manpower and even the legal climate would not pose issues for the rich and powerful to plan their survival.  Most have security personnel who are in charge of this planning, so all they do is write a check.  For the rest of us, planning is critical.  Every choice we make is a tradeoff and each of our decisions carries opportunity cost.  Every dollar spent on survival planning is one less dollar available to pay the cell phone bill or buy shoes for the children.  We must prioritize every single element and decide what to buy or prepare and how much to spend.

bunker
Maybe a little bigger than this?

A huge underground bunker would be fantastic.  We could stockpile food, water, medicine, ammo, generators, fuel as well as all the creature comforts which would keep us happy until natural causes claimed us or the last zombie on earth keeled over and ceased being a threat.  Most of us do not have such a bunker.  We have to plan either to stay in our homes and defend it or be mobile and carry our essentials with us.  Even if we plan to stay in our homes, the possibility of needing to leave must be in our contingency plan.  This decision might be made for us due to powers beyond our control, such as civil authorities or natural disasters.  In that situation, you may have to grab what you can carry and run.

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09/5/15

First Impressions of Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men

Slinging dice?  Awwww, yeaaaaaah!

Michael Eckenfels, 5 September 2015

The Dice Masters phenomenon has been going on for a while now, starting with Quarriors! and blowing up into several different themes, including Dungeons and Dragons, Yu-Gi-Oh, and too many others for me to even want to wrap my head around. It’s bad enough that I already have been collecting two of these damnable things, though I’ve slowed my purchases of them greatly in the last few months (mostly to spend it on X-Wing Miniatures stuff, but more articles on that later).

For those curious, the Avengers vs. X-Men Dice Masters game is one of the more popular iterations of this system (because hey, Marvel), but is relatively easy to find in hobby stores or online. And this isn’t necessarily a good thing. If you’re addicted to something bad, is having it readily available a good thing, necessarily?

Dice are the new crack.
Dice are the new crack.

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