Monthly Archives: July 2018
Thunder in the East: A First-time Player’s Perspective
Our guest author takes us to ConSimWorld Expo for a report on VPG’s upcoming east front mini-monster ~
Christian Snyder, 21 July 2018
I recently had the amazing opportunity to sit down with some good folks at ConsimWorld Expo’s Monster Conand play Frank Chadwick’s Thunder in the East for the first time; it was fantastic! Full disclosure: I am currently awaiting my Kickstarter copy of the game and had seen some Vassal play prior to arriving in Tempe, Arizona. Seeing the game on videos and reading the rulebook, however, are nothing compared to sitting down to play with the printer’s proof copy at the show. Since the game is not available, this is not a review, but a first impression focusing on what impressed me about seeing, playing, and meeting the development team for Frank Chadwick’s ETO Vol. I: Thunder in the East.
Frank Chadwick’s ETO Vol I: Thunder in the East! Nice maps, charts and counters!
Thunder in the East is a dynamic, action packed game covering the entire Eastern Front of World War 2 in six scenarios starting with the German Operation Barbarossa and ending with the Soviet Operation Bagration. You can do each scenario singularly or start a full campaign from these points with incredible systems for morale, seasonal activities, economy and unit reorganization. My experience consisted of three playthroughs of Operation Barbarossa using the optional and campaign game rules. For each of our playthroughs, we were typically unconcerned with capturing Moscow. However, to capture Moscow, along with Stalin, would have been a scenario automatic victory.
Dragon’ Up The Past – Going to War!
The guys eek their way into the ’90s with an issue stuffed full of articles on the art of war ~
Statler & Waldorf, 20 July 2018
A jam-packed issue with a full set of articles about warfare in fantasy RPG’ing – paladins, heraldry, role-playing soldiers, and leading an empire. We also get an early look at The Princess Ark, and… a Donald Trump reference?!
Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>
Gaming Nostalgia – Time Tripper
#TBT at GrogHeads!
A multi-genre RPG? Quantum Leap meets GURPS? SPI went a little nuts here, huh?
click images to enlarge
Sound off below, or pop into our forums for a chat >>
What’s Gus Playing: Total War: Warhammer 2 Tomb Kings – Part 2
Take a toiling tour of the terrible tombs ~
Lloyd Sabin, 16 July 2018
Still trying to get to those four other Books of Nagash as the Tomb Kings. This campaign has bogged down a bit – partially because I am a Tomb Kings noob and partially because the game play has become somewhat repetitive. They’re both linked, though, and feed off each other.
The campaign is still fun enough, with enough things to do, to keep me going.
This Vortex campaign map is not as massive as the Mortal Empires map is…but it’s still pretty gigantic. After close to 150 turns I have revealed probably around 80 percent of it. There is some wacky fruity stuff out there in the Warhammer universe…knights riding spiders, talking giant toads, vampire pirates…the mind boggles. There are even some ordinary human factions, like the New World Colonies, which I had never heard of until stumbling across them in this play through. All intriguing, but perhaps a bit overwhelming.
It also doesn’t help matters that my armies, made up mostly of skeleton spearmen and swordsmen, are like tissue paper when facing elf (both light and dark) armies, which are my most common enemy. The dark elf armies are especially tough and tear through my units like they are undead toilet paper. I need to learn how to upgrade my troops quicker. Until then I need two armies to take on every one enemy army…not a recipe for victory.
The campaign is still fun enough, with enough things to do, to keep me going. Check out the below screen shots and let’s see if I can not only keep this campaign moving, but maybe even push forward to victory. I didn’t win my Norsca campaign earlier this year but I was one of the last five factions left standing in that Warhammer I campaign. I just barely snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (and Chaos).
Forum Database Trouble!
Crap! We blew up our database! ~
GrogHeads Newsdesk, 13 July 2018
Apparently the Russian hacker disapproved of the latest episode of Dragon Up The Past and they took down our forum database. Either that, or our YUUUUUUGE fanbase has posted so many messages that we blew up the server. Go with whichever one makes you feel better 🙂
Meanwhile, you can always just use the comment area below this post to continue to discuss and/or commiserate.
Or hit our Facebook page.
Or our Twitter feed.
Or you could, y’know… go play a game!
UPDATE 2245 EDT 7/13
We got an alert from GoDaddy at approximately 1645 today that the database for our forums exceeded the size limit for our hosting plan. About 60% of that limit is the table in that holds all of your posting history, so it’s not a lot of fluff.
Of course we get this alert 15 minutes before the curtain comes down on the work week on the East Coast, and as everyone is already bailing out of work with visions of beer & wargames dancing in their heads.
Now, when this happened, we were only about 5% over the DB limit and well within the capabilities of SMF’s own internal maintenance tools of paring the error logs, backup files, etc. to bring us within compliance. But we’d had our write-access completely shut off, which meant no one was able to log in at all (because each login writes a login event). So not was our admin team locked out, but the database continued to balloon as you – our loyal fans – kept trying to log in and get errors when SMF was telling you that you were locked out (each failed login writes an error).
We shot up almost 1/2 GB in 3 hours thanks to all y’all GrogHeads-addicted forum geeks.
But we still couldn’t get into our forum to do anything.
Our next plan was to create and download a backup of the DB, and then attempt to manually edit the SQL tables using GoDaddy’s built-in web access. Of course, that was right when the server threw an Apache error, and what was normally a 10 minute process dragged on to 80 minutes before GoDaddy shut it down and restarted it.
We manually edited the database, and go down from 155% of our capacity limit to 40% of that limit, but we still couldn’t get in, because even though we got below the size limit, we’re still hitting the threshold on rows within the database.
Worse, GoDaddy wouldn’t even allow access to the DB for our team to even try to run the built-in SMF maintenance tools. After 85 minutes on the phone, we finally found someone who would let us get into the system and run those SMF maintenance tasks.
At this point, we’re online, but honestly not sure for how long.
And we’re still on GoDaddy right now, but honestly not sure for how long.
Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>
