Trying Out Blogger Pages

I've decided it's high time I figure out how Blogger pages work, and how to start using CSS on them. As a first start I built a little summary page for my Final Fantasy marathon with a table showing the names of all the games, their initial release dates, when I started playing them, when I finished playing them, and my relative ranking after I finish a game compared to the other finished ones in the marathon. The table is ugly right now but that's what relearning CSS is going to fix! Maybe! It's also got links to all of the posts about each game to make it easy to go back and find something in the future.

The Final Fantasy Legend: Level Systems!

After reading Sthenno's comment to my previous post about this game I decided to actually do a little research into the level system of the game. Part of me feels like I've lost my gamer nerve to be doing so instead of just plowing in and mapping it all out as I go, but so be it... One interesting thing I discovered is this game was apparently the first game Square put out which sold over a million copies which is pretty cool.

As far as the leveling system goes it turns out there are actually three pretty distinct leveling systems! One for humans, one for mutants, and one for monsters.

Humans level up pretty much solely by spending money on potions for permanent stat boosts. They can also put on up to 8 pieces of gear. Actually doing combats does nothing for them, except maybe earn some cash to use on stat boosts in town. Humans are apparently the easiest to twink out and therefore make for the easiest playthrough.

Mutants level up randomly at the end of every fight. They can gain or lose stats or abilities. The guide I found even went so far as to suggest saving after every single fight since if you randomly lost a critical ability you were in a lot of trouble. This sort of works like FFII in that you're more likely to gain stats by taking actions which use that stat. Mutants can also wear 4 pieces of gear. Mutants are random but tend to trend upwards and have a reasonable time beating the game.

Monsters have one stat that matters: their current race. That determines their stats and their abilities. They can't use gear. They can't power up in any way. One goblin is the same as every other goblin. The way you level up is by killing enemy monsters and eating them. There's a huge transformation table based on a few simple rules and I think I may just make a spreadsheet to track the possible changes. Monsters have a finite cap on power and are therefore the hardest race.

Part of me wants to fire some of my dudes and hire one of each type to experience all the leveling systems. But part of me acknowledges that I'm unlikely to play again, and that I want to do the hard thing, and that I already randomly chose the four monster party anyway. So I'm going to stick it out and see if I can't play through the plot with four monsters and find out how hard it really is. I was a little disappointed at how easy FFII actually was once I'd twinked out, so maybe being unable to actually twink out will be a good thing!

About Iron

I posted a couple days ago about a Through The Ages challenge I was issued by a guy who was upset that he didn't get an iron card. He said the game is bad because you simply can't win without getting an iron. I'd disagreed that it was impossible to win without iron and he said he'd play 5 one-on-one games with me and doubted I could win even one game. He was so confident he even volunteered to spot me 30 points (about 20% of a winning score)!

We played one game and he ended up conceding on turn 12. (Games typically last around 20 turns.) I don't think I was guaranteed to win the game by any stretch (though if you take the 30 point buffer into account I probably couldn't lose) but I was certainly in a strong position. Knowing I wasn't going to get an iron meant I had to play a little differently, and I ended up focusing heavily on getting more actions and stockpiling research for age II. I used the actions to pick up extra cards which generated minerals themselves so I was able to function pretty well without iron. Coal (the upgrade to iron) came up very soon in age II and I'm pretty sure my opponent had a chance to grab it for 3 of his 4 actions but didn't.

He then started up a second game. This one was a little weird in that both of the iron cards were near the bottom of the age I deck. He picked up an iron card on turn 7 and played it on turn 8. I picked up and played coal on turn 9. So really, we were both playing the game without iron, but I'd been planning on not having an iron and was better positioned since I had focused on other ways of making minerals with actions and leaders. I had Leonardo as my age I leader and he gives you a research per turn and a mineral every time you play a tech card.

He stuck out the second game a little longer but eventually conceded it as well. In this game I don't blame him though as I don't think he had a chance of mounting a comeback. I'd built a really ridiculous military lead (Napolean was my age II leader and I got an early air forces in age III to go with my hussars tactics card. My military was 40 to his 15.) He also got a very powerful age III leader himself but I had the assassinate card and immediately killed off Sid Meier. When he scooped I was up 60 points, was making 5 more points per turn, and was making more research and food than he was. The turn before he gave up I also played an attack to steal all 8 of his minerals for the turn!

He ended the game with this parting shot...

"thanks, I won't be playing with you ever again. please do not ever join or contact me for a game. all the best bye"


Ouch! I wasn't taunting him or even saying anything at all in chat in either game. All I did was argue with him in the initial game that you didn't need an iron and then beat him twice at his own challenge. Oh well!

So, do you need iron? Clearly the answer is no, but I'm not sure it's as clearcut as these games showed. Both games were a little weird in terms of when coal showed up. We were also playing with an expansion and in both games I made good use of an expansion card. (The first game I played an age A leader which made all action cards better and I generated a fair number of 'free' resources that way. The second game I played an age A leader that got buffed so he was just straight up a civil action every turn. My tactics card at the end which let me get such a huge military lead was also expansion only.) Also, in both games I built the pyramids as my age A wonder and it really feels like it's just the best. (It gives an extra civil action every turn for the whole game.) Especially when you won't get an iron that extra action a turn helps with playing more cards.

Perhaps most importantly I'm just better at the game than this guy is. In the second game he took Genghis Khan as his age I leader. Genghis makes all your mounted units stronger and makes them generate points. (I'd used him in our first game to build up my lead.) But after he took Khan both of the knights cards were on the board. One was going to cost me 1 action and disappear if I didn't take it. The other was going to cost me 3 actions. So I took the one that cost me 3 actions and then Khan was useless for all of age I. It also made most of the tactics cards in the deck useless for him as well since they mostly need mounted units. 

Through The Ages feels like it should be random enough that anyone can win any game but the more I play the less I believe that to be true. There is some randomness, sure, but it really feels like one of the more skill intensive games around. I still haven't beaten Robb yet! 

Do you need iron to win? Not if you're better than your opponent, that's for sure. I'm less convinced if you're on equal footing... 

I recalled they posted statistics about the game at WBC and went to check last year's write-up. Unfortunately it only broke down the winning percentage of leaders, wonders, and governments but not techs. On the other hand I read the recap of the final and the winner, Randy Buehler, was the one person in the finals who didn't get an iron. But that may just be more evidence that you have to be better than your opponents to win without iron? I do hear he's pretty good at games...

Final Fantasy II Conclusions

Well, I finished off Final Fantasy II last night. It turns out there are only 3 dungeons left in the game after getting flare and ultima so those spells really are terrible. There's simply not enough time to level them up unless you cheat or grind for hours and hours. I feel like they needed to either start those spells at a higher level, make them so powerful that even at level 1 or 2 they're good, or really ramp up the leveling formula so low level spells would improve quickly in the end game. Oh well.

The final dungeon was both a let down and rather scary. I never really felt like I could get wiped out, or even like I could lose a party member (other than the new 4th guy). But it really seemed like just a little bit less twinkage and I wouldn't have stood a chance. As it was I had to use all of my elixirs to get to the end. The final boss didn't even land an attack (I think he tried to blind someone) before he fell over dead to the might of my berserk spell.

Some final thoughts:

• Leila didn't actually die when we got swallowed by Leviathan. I guess she fell overboard and drifted to the capital or something? My party seemed about as interested in her being alive again as they were when she went missing: not at all.
• You start the game by naming four characters, and then you immediately lose the fourth one. (The four people are main male character, his girlfriend, their dimwitted friend, and the girl's brother.) In the third last dungeon of the game you end up killing the evil emperor and it seems like all is well... Until your fourth guy suddenly reappears and picks up where the emperor left off. The second last dungeon has you invade his castle to kill him... But when you get to the end the evil emperor comes back from hell to conquer the world. Your random jobber commits suicide to stall the undead emperor (pretty sure I could have just killed him there, but whatever...) while the rest run away. Fourth guy decides he has nothing better to do so he tags along to kill the undead emperor. And then after you do? His sister wants to be friends again but the fourth guy is all "everything has changed, screw you guys" and walks off. And you don't try to stop him! He tried to conquer the world, of his own volition, and it's clear he hasn't repented... But you let him leave to scheme a new plot to conquer the world? Kain in FFIV turns evil for a while but at least he had the excuse of being 'mind controlled'.
• In order to get into the emperor's castle you need an airship. You go to visit Pavel who has been taking care of Cid. As soon as you walk up to talk to Cid he falls into bed, gives you his airship, and dies. I guess Pavel is a lazy jerk and was feeding him the slow fish.
• I was trying to hit for 9999 damage but it looks like berserk actually has a cap. I'm guessing attack is limited (maybe at 99 or 256?) since it didn't seem to matter how often I cast berserk on my guy, I was stuck doing around 3300 max. I bet if I cared I could come close to 9999 though, by maxing weapon skill and haste. 
• Mental note: get osmose for all of your characters, not just the black mage. I was stuck chugging elixirs to restore my healer's mana.
• All told it took 15 hours and 44 minutes to complete. Before the final dungeon I was thinking I'd wasted a lot of time and would really be able to shave time off next time around. I'm not so sure anymore, since I think the final dungeon might actually be a problem. Though maybe with multiple copies of osmose it won't be...

Ultimate Spells?

I finally returned to the world of Final Fantasy II and plowed through the Ultima Tower. Supposedly this dungeon is hard but it has awesome spells at the top to make it all worthwhile. I found the dungeon to be reasonable trivial and the awesome spells at the top seem terrible. I needed to get Ultima to progress the plot so it still made sense to go get it, but it doesn't seem worth casting. Flare was also up at the top of the tower and is supposed to be the best black magic spell in the game. Unfortunately it starts at level 1, so by default it is bad. But maybe if I level it up a bunch it will become good? How exactly do spells work?

Damage spells, like flare, hit a variable number of times. You make an attack roll for each level of the spell (using magic accuracy which for flare starts at 0% but which gets an extra 1% for every int you have) and the defender makes a magic defense roll for each level of magic defense they have (just like how melee attacks and dodges work). Subtract the defender's successes from the attacker's successes to determine a number of hits, rounding up to 0 I think. Then add the level of the spell on to this number. So, basically, you hit somewhere between L and 2L times with the spell.

Then you work out the power of the spell. Flare's power is 20. The other black magic spells have a power of 10. To that number you add on a quarter of your int.

Finally, for each hit you obtained in the first step roll a number between P and 2P where P is the spell power from the second step. Add up all these numbers to see the damage done.

Ignoring enemy magic defense for a moment your expected number of hits, based on your intelligence I, is:

(L+IL) {assuming I stays less than 100% anyway}

which means the expected damage for a normal spell is:

(15+75/2*I)*(L+IL) = 15L+105/2IL+75/2IIL

and for flare is:

(30+75/2*I)*(L+IL) = 30L + 135/2IL+75/2IIL

So flare should just do more damage. And against a generic monster it will, but the tricky part is monsters tend to be vulnerable to some element of magic and flare is non-elemental. What happens when you shoot a monster which is vulnerable to fire with the fire spell?

Two things, both of which are awesome. The first is that the spell simply can't miss. Instead of getting a number of hits somewhere between L and 2L (with some 'dodged') you just get a full 2L. The second is that every hit does double damage. So the damage for a vulnerable spell is:

2*(15+75/2*I)*(2L) = 60L+150IL

Comparing flare to a same level vulnerable spell isn't useful since it's guaranteed to be worse. (All flare has going for it is double the base power. The vulnerable spell has that same doubling, but it also doubles the int factor and removes misses. The question I have is how many levels do we need to give flare before it beats out a vulnerable spell? Call the level of flare F.

30F+135/2IF+75/2IIF = 60L+150IL
F=L*(60+150I)/(30+135/2I+75/2II)

My caster has 52 int right now, so lets use that as a starting point and then also look at a couple bigger points for I.

F(I=.52)=1.81*L
F(I=.75)=1.70*L
F(I=.99)=1.56*L

These numbers are even high since flare can miss! Even if I managed to cap my int and get flare to max level (16) all I would need is the elemental spells at 11 and a vulnerable enemy. But here's the thing... There may be something even better...

I have a black mage now and the spell she's got the most levels in isn't an attack spell at all. It's berserk. So far it's seemed really ridiculously good but I'm wondering if that's just because my fighter has a high axe skill and it would even out if I power leveled a damage spell or not. So, how does berserk work compared to a damage spell?

The first difference right off the hop is you don't get the free hits. You need to actually roll your hits on your friend in order to land berserk. Fortunately you don't roll magic resistance checks on buff spells! Berserk also has a base +50% to accuracy instead of the base 0% which means that my mage with 52 int can't actually miss a cast of berserk. The base power for berserk is only 5. What berserk does is it 'attacks' once per level of the spell, and for every hit it adds the base power of the spell to the target's attack stat.

So in order to really work out what it does we'd need to go into all the details about melee attacks, and hits, and crit strikes, and such. I'm just going to wave hands and abstract a bit. My fighter gets 10 swings a round with pretty much perfect accuracy. But the monsters do dodge, probably around 2 a round. Crits are rare so I don't care. There's also enemy armor, but I'm going to assert that my base attack beats the enemy armor and therefore the bonus damage from berserk is all used. (I don't know that this is true against some bosses necessarily, but it's probably close.) So I'm probably getting 8 swings a round and the damage added to each swing is going to be a random number between X and 2X where X is the added attack power.

Assume berserk goes off before the attack this round. How much damage is added?

8*3/2*(L*(5+I*25)) = 60L+300LI

With all spells at level 6 and 52 int, flare will do 451 damage. Vulnerable fire will do 828 damage. Berserk will do 1296 damage.

With all spells at level 16 and 99 int, flare will do 2137 damage. Vulnerable fire will do 3336 damage. Berserk will do 5712 damage.

At any fixed int a level 6 berserk actually does more damage than a level 16 flare!


And all this ignores the most salient point for berserk... It carries over between rounds. Flare is going to do 451 damage once. Berserk is going to do 1296 damage every round! It even stacks, so I can cast berserk again on the same person so they do 2592 extra damage the second round. Of course, the downside is this damage only hits one mob at a time... Darn!

There is also a haste spell, but it doesn't stack up round after round and I don't have a second black mage. Though next time I play the game I may well set up my 3 fixed characters as two guys who cast berserk and one that casts haste and just have jobber mcbag in the 4th slot be an absolute monster!

Galaxy Legion: Planet Buffing Races

There are three races in the game which have to be unlocked by doing a long mission chain and which have the ability to permanently buff a planet. These buffs all work the same way, the different races just buff a different planet production resource. Every 40 hours you can spend 200 energy with no experience gain. In return you get to increase the abundance of one planet by one tier (you add .25 to the multiplier).

I've been working towards completing the mission chain to unlock the artifact race but have hit a bit of a snag. It turns out I've actually been running at a money deficit for the last little while by working on that mission chain. (It requires a very high amount of scanning to do the missions, so I've had to keep switching in and out scanners, weapons, and energy modules as I work on it. Each time you unequip something it takes damage and it costs money to repair them, and I've been paying an awful lot of money to do so.)

I'm also very close to completing the mission chain to unlock the mining race. (I did most of the chain already because I wanted to get a passive cloak reward for my awesome planet.) I'm running low on money and the way you net more money is by spending less or earning more. Stopping the artifact chain for a while is a good way to spend less. Buffing my mining planets is a good way to earn more. So it seems like spending a couple days to finish off the mining chain could make a lot of sense.

The question then is what exactly will this ability do? How will I use it? Overall planet production pretty much boils down to size times abundance so it will be more efficient when used on a bigger planet. Most of my current mining planets are not very big but the thought crossed my mind of taking a truly terrible research planet that happens to be very massive and buff it up over time. Let's compare...

I have very massive planets now and their production from buildings is 40. Double that for owning the planet for 5 days and multiply by the .25 bonus and I'd be adding 20 points per hour every time I use the ability on a very massive planet. Large planets seem to have a base of 30 and very large a base of 34. So a large would get 15 per hour and a very large 17. My very large starts at a 2.25 multiplier. It will take 18 uses to max it out. If I were to abandon it and replace it with a very massive planet with no mining at all my two potential income functions are:

40*34*2*18/2*(2.5+6.75)+34*2*6.75*t = 459t+226440

40*40*2*18/2*(.25+4.5)+40*2*4.5*t = 360t+136800

Huh. I will admit to being surprised at this outcome. I was expecting it would make sense to grab the worthless very massive planet and buff it up but it looks to be not even close. I guess the difference between the two sizes isn't actually that big (I gain 3 per hour per use) and the difference in starting value is huge (153 compared to 0). If I could use this ability into infinity then I'd start profiting after using it 52 times.

It's capped at 6.75 per planet, but I can actually use it more often on the naked planet. I only got it up to 4.5 in the example; I could have used it 9 more times. Maybe a better comparison would be to look at what I could do with 3 planets? I could have three copies of my base 34@2.25 planet or I could have two copies of my base 40@0 and one copy of a base 34@2.25.

3*34*2*2.25*(t+40*53)+40*54/2*(17+918)+918*t = 459t+973080+1009800+918t = 1377t+1982880

1*34*2*2.25*(t+40*53)+40*54/2*(20+1080)+1080*t = 153t+324360+1188000+1080t = 1233t+1512360

Even in the 'fair' comparison the huge planets lose out. Both the flat amount earned as we use the ability 54 times and the amount earned every hour thereafter are lower with this option. As long as you have access to a large number of 34@2.25 planets you're golden.

I don't have an unlimited number of them, but I do have a lot and the ability to get more. It takes a month to fill out one of those planets and I can colonize 22 new planets each month so I'll have plenty of places to use the ability. Right now I actually can't afford to take that many planets, unfortunately, but hence why I want to start buffing my mining points.

Of course there is also the issue that I'm building awesome planets without having any plans for defending them. That could actually be a real problem but I figure I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. (Possibly I'll need to start cloaking planets as I buff them?)

Galaxy Legion: Xecti Ensconcing Field

Another temporary mission launched today. The reward is an interesting one, to be sure. The mission is the standard 55 xp for 25 energy (which I have come to detest... I've been doing missions with a 2.6:1 ratio instead of a 2.2:1 ratio and the difference in leveling speed is staggering). You have to do that 50 times to get the reward, and you can get the reward 15 times total. The reward is an NPC spawn which drops an item you can use on any planet to give a permanent passive bonus of 80 cloak and 80 defense. If the planet should happen to be unscanned (check with a flux probe) the bonus is doubled up to 160 of each. Do it all 15 times and you're looking at a passive 2400 to cloak and defense before taking legion bonus into account.

That's enough to make a planet really hard to scan on its own. Coupled with a bunch of buildings you can get all the way to undetectable. Even if you're not going to go all the way the extra 2400 passive defense will at least give you a chance of surviving should someone hit the lottery and actually scan your planet. (I constantly live in fear that someone is going to scan my awesome planet, but now it feels like it actually has enough defense to maybe not fall.)

At any rate, I have a planet that is 4 times as good as my second best planet and 10 times as good as my new colonizing options so I have a clear place to use these items. In fact, I already have. I cleared the whole thing out with the aid of a couple energy cubes and buffed up my planet nice and spiffy like. If I didn't have an awesome planet I'm not sure I'd bother with this mission. Sure, you can protect something pretty good, but you can also spend the ~20000 energy someplace else and do this mission when it comes back if you even get a planet you really want to defend.

The Necessity Of Iron?

I've been playing a lot of Through The Ages online recently. In one of my current games one of my opponents had the following to say:

"wow not having iron is so brutal. Gl to you guys, I am not longer really in this. cheers"


The 3rd player in the game gave an example of someone winning without iron. Which prompted the following responses:

"lol, i am not wrong, not having iron is perhaps the only real weakness in the game. play a few more games and then tell me what you think."

"i will probably resign rather than finish the game. I will see how next 2 rounds play out."

"hey nick, if you like I can prove my point. We can play 5 1 on 1 games. Use any strategy you like taking into account that you will not be using iron. I would be surprised if you could win just one game. But it would be fun to try it out."

He then challenged me to a 1 on 1 game which is currently in progress. I found this exchange a little amusing as in one of the first games of TTA I played (with Pounder, Sara, and Duncan) we came to the same conclusion. There are 3 iron cards in the deck and 4 players. All 3 iron cards were grabbed the second they appeared for max cost (cards start off costing 3 actions to take and you get 4 actions each turn). Someone (Sara I think) didn't ever get the chance to pay 3 actions for an iron and she fell far behind and lost. 

For those who don't know, the game is a simulation of the Civ computer game series. There are a few different resources you have to balance out (food, minerals, science, culture, actions, and military strength) and you start off making bronze which is worth 1 mineral. Iron is worth 2 minerals and the only cost to upgrade is a one shot cost of 5 science and then 3 minerals per mine you upgrade. So in a pretty short period of time you can end up doubling your mineral output. Minerals and actions are all it takes to build wonders and pretty much everything in the game needs minerals to get up and running...

I remember talking with Robb about iron at WBC this year and he told me he's seen Jason win games without getting iron. (Jason being our 4th teammate at WBC. His team game is Through The Ages and he is a two-time champion so I guess he knows a thing or two about the game.) Robb said he thinks knights might be almost as important (without knights you're probably going to be last in military strength and therefore end up getting hammered by attacks and events). In the games I've played so far it seems like alchemy is also way up there as well. (Turns minerals and actions into research per turn.)

At any rate, I am now in a game trying to prove that iron isn't needed. In the chat for that game was the following:

"concept of your game is to win with no iron, anything else goes. If you get within 30 points in endgame I will still concede defeat. That should be a nice handicap."

Now, 2 player games are a little different. In a 4 player game there are 3 iron cards, so someone misses out. In a 3 player game there are 2 iron cards, so someone misses out. The fact that someone is going to miss out means the cost of iron goes way up. Assuming iron is that important you need to pay 3 actions to get it which somewhat mitigates the power. In a 2 player game there are 2 iron cards (and you can't take both copies to punish your opponent) so you can get an iron cheap in a 2 player game. But still sometimes you'll pay extra for the first one as there might be 5 or 6 turns between them. Under this challenge where I can't take iron even that restriction is gone. He gets the first iron for as cheap as he wants it. And he also gets a knights and an alchemy. 

But whatever! I like playing games, and I like challenges, and he's even spotting me 30 points (winning scores tend to be in the 130-200 range, so 30 is a really big deal). Going into the game I liked my chances to win at least 1 of 5 games. We're currently about halfway through the first game and I actually have a lead. I make 4 food, 5 minerals, 5 science, and 4 culture per turn. He makes 3 food, 6 minerals, 3 science, and 1 culture per turn. We have comparable military strength, I have a 21 culture lead, and I have 4 extra military actions per turn. The outcome is certainly still up in the air but I'm definitely not blown out by giving up on iron. (It helped that 2 of the first cards out of the age II deck were constitutional monarchy and coal and I got both of them. But I was able to do that because I had a lot of early research by not spending any on iron...)