Revisiting Blood Bowl Clients

Six months ago I started using a second client for playing online Blood Bowl. I wrote a bit about the two clients (Cyanide and FumBBL) at the time but having now used them both for six months I wanted to go back over the differences between them. This may have been prompted by the two games of Blood Bowl I played yesterday, one on each client. In particular the game I played on the Cyanide client took more than three times as long to play as the one on FumBBL and featured several interface quirks/bugs that ranged from annoying to frustrating.

What does the Cyanide client have going for it? Pretty pictures. It has the coaches and teams for Sceadeau's league. And that's pretty much it. It does have a log file you can parse for stats which is nice, except it's bugged such that any roll of a 1 or a 6 doesn't give you the mod info so roughly a third of all the d6 stats are corrupted.

What does the FumBBL client have going for it? So many things I need to go to bullet form to list them all...

• Graceful recovery for disconnections. Several times over the course of the Cyanide league I had to log in and reset a match because one of the two players got disconnected in some way. The only options are to have the disconnected person forfeit (losing their cash, MVP, and any chance at winning or tieing the game) or restart the game from the very beginning. Both of these options are terrible. Someone in a dominant position could suddenly find themselves back at the start of the game. Robb had multiple injuries disappear when one of his games got reset. FumBBL just pauses the game where the disconnection happened and you can resume it right away, or the next day, or in a week. 
• Speed. Pretty pictures come with pretty animations and those take time. A lot of time. I know I play with some slow players in the Cyanide league but I think the interface isn't doing them any favours. Cyanide also has a ruthless time out feature where if you go over 4 minutes your turn instantly ends. My playoff game yesterday had my opponent think for most of his 4 minutes and then run out of time just before he threw the final block of his turn, which happened to be on my ball carrier who has in range of the end zone on turn 8. I failed the dodge away so I didn't score, but I probably shouldn't have even had the chance to do so. On FumBBL you get a button to time someone out after their time expires but it isn't automatic. This also means if the doorbell rings or a baby wakes up or someone needs to run to the bathroom or something they aren't just screwed.
• Fewer bugs. FumBBL has a few bugs but not nearly as many or as common as the ones on Cyanide. FumBBL has never lined up invisible players for me in random positions. It has never kept me from subbing out my Deathroller. It has never let my opponent field 12 or more players. Neither client is really updated much, which pretty much means either client is stuck with their bugs and interface quirks. The only really bad bug I've run into on FumBBL is you can't induce positional players who are missing the current game.
• A better interface. One of the important design decisions when building a Blood Bowl client is deciding how to handle skill use. Practically every skill in the game is optional, so you need to decide if and how you're going to prompt the players to use these optional skills. FumBBL took the route of just defaulting almost every skill to the obvious choice and only prompting for things when the coder thinks you should be asked. You always use dodge, unless you're in danger of getting crowd surfed (or maybe even in a 1-turn touchdown situation?). I know it doesn't always prompt, but sometimes does. Cyanide decided to just default all skills to always use them, unless you go into an external option menu and then you can tell it which skills to prompt you for. And then it prompts you for those skills ALL THE TIME. I'd knock down one of Steve's guys yesterday and it would ask him if he wants to use claw. On the ground? That can't have any game effect. But I guess because I could have chosen attacker down I can see how it would end up coded that way. Badly, that is. Even worse is the way the stand firm skill is implemented. When you get pushed into someone with stand firm they should get to pick if they want to use it or not. If not then none of the pushing chain happens. If so it all does. On Cyanide you get prompted if you were the first guy pushed. If you're the second guy in the chain it doesn't prompt you. Instead it uses the decision made the last time that guy was pushed. Will a chain push work or not? WHO KNOWS! This is actually a big problem for my Cyanide team, since I'm playing dwarves with a bunch of frenzy and stand firm. I want to set up chain pushes to surf my opponent while being immune to the return chain pushes and it simply can't happen with this interface.
• Unit labeling. One of the neat features I only recently learned is you can hold shift and click on any player on either team and it will let you enter up to 5 characters as a label. So I can tag all of my opponent's units that have guard with a G, and anyone with an abnormal strength or agility with a number. Want to know who has a niggle so you can target them for free experience? Cyanide won't even tell you! FumBBL will let you find out just by clicking on them, or you can tag them with a $ so you don't even need to click around after the start of the game.
• Community. There are big tournaments with unique prizes run all the time on FumBBL, and I can find out about them pretty easily by just going to the list on the webpage. I couldn't tell you if Cyanide had any big events. I feel like no, but there's no way to get from the game to any sort of forum that I can find. I've had to Google search to find the forum to look for downtime info before, so I know it does exist, it just isn't easily accessible.
• View of the field. FumBBL shows you the entire field the entire time. Cyanide is trying to show off their pretty graphics so it does lots of zooming in and is set up so you need to scroll around the screen with interface elements in the way. I've definitely seen people end their turn accidentally when trying to click a guy standing behind the end turn button.

Suffice it to say, I now think FumBBL is way better than Cyanide. So much so that I'm going to have to think about joining the next season of Sceadeau's league because I find the client so frustrating now that I've been using the other one. I do like playing games though, so I'll probably just suck it up.

Final Fantasy XIV: Crafting

Back when the first version of FFXIV came out I started off as a crafting class. The idea was that you could level up as a mage or a fighter, or as a blacksmith or a fisher. There'd be crafting and gathering quests and there were little minigames to play each time you tried to gather or make anything. It was a very appealing idea, but it didn't really work out very well. The minigames were confusing and frustrating. You had to look closely at the colour of a little dot on your screen and pick the right command to use for that colour. But nothing was documented and everything had odds of succeeding based on the colour so working out what was doing what was hard.

Apparently they decided that system sucked as it seems to be pretty revamped. Crafting and gathering classes are still things, but you need to do your combat class level 10 quest before you can switch to one. The fishing minigame is completely gone and we're back to a system where your bait and location determine what you can fish up instead of your ability in the minigame. Cast your line, wait a bit, hit the reel button. Just the way I like fishing in a game! They did add fishing stats for gear though, to decrease the wait or to increase the chance of catching a bigger version of the fish. Get a big enough fish and you get a high quality version and bonus experience. Woo!

Crafting is similar to the old system in that you have different buttons to hit and you're trying to both complete your item while increasing the odds of getting a high quality result. But now the game actually tells you what your buttons do. I have two different resources to spend and five different buttons I can hit that spend those resources in various ways. The amount of experience I get from a successful craft seems to be based on how many abilities I resolve, so there's a balancing act between using fewer buttons to speed up the process against succeeding a lot to ramp up the chance of getting a good item and extra experience.

The stupid coloured light is still there. I don't know what it does. The internet seems to think a good colour makes adding quality work better, and a bad colour makes it worse and you should consider waiting when the colour is bad. I can't wait yet because I'm only level 12 and haven't learned that ability, so I think at this point I just ignore it and hope.

The question I have for now is how good one of my abilities is. It costs 0 durability and 22 CP and makes my next 5 abilities succeed 20% more often. It's not clear if that takes my 70% ability to 90% or to 84% or to 76%. I feel like based on a gut feeling of how often it seems to fail that it's the 90% one. I don't think I've ever failed my base 90% ability after using the buff, if that helps. Both of those abilities, which are the relevant ones, cost 10 durability to use. The 90% one is the one that actually finishes the item and costs 0 CP. The 70% one is the one that increases the odds of getting a HQ result and costs 18 CP. So using the buff straight up guarantees I can use the 70% ability one fewer time (unless the constraint was actually on durability) but makes it more likely the ones I use will work. Should I be using it?

Right now I'm making bubble chocolate, a food item good for combat casters. My combat class is a caster class, so it seemed like I'll probably want a bunch of this stuff. I made enough raw materials to make 20ish of these things, and I want to maximize my experience gain here. (Though really if I'd just done anything instead of typing up this post I'd have made a lot more experience...)

Bubble chocolate has a base durability of 60, so I get to use 6 abilities. I can spend a whopping 92 CP to get 30 durability back, so I could use 9 abilities if I go that route. I need to use the 90% ability 3 times to make the item. I also have 180 CP to use each time. And finally I have a 5th ability that costs 18 CP, no durability, and makes quality successes better in some way that I'll also need to test. So my options on ability use are:

3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 4 quality abilities. (With durability to spare for 2 more progress if needed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 1 success buff, 3 quality abilities. (With durability to spare for 3 more progress if needed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 success buff, 1 quality buff, 3 quality abilities. (With no durability to spare for anything so I may have to throw away a quality ability in order to succeed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 1 success buff, 1 quality buff, 2 quality abilties. (With durability to spare for 4 more progress if needed.)

2 successes (no buff) - 110 quality, 4% HQ, 828 XP (+90%)
3 successes (no buff) - 165 quality, 6% HQ, 1024 XP (+135%)
2 successes (buff) - 114 quality, 4% HQ, 854 XP (+96%)
4 successes (no buff) - 220 quality, 8% HQ, 1194 XP (+174%) (actually HQ)
3 successes (buff) - 177 quality, 7% HQ, 1068 XP (+145%)
0 successes - 0 quality, 1% HQ, 436 XP

Judging from this data it looks like succeeding with a quality ability gives me 45% bonus XP, except the 4th one which seems worse. Or maybe when it's a HQ item I get a penalty? I only got 4 successes twice and both times it came out HQ. Using the quality buff is worth nothing on one success, 6% on two successes, and 10% on three successes. Since one more success is 45% in and of itself it seems like I should never use that ability unless I'm capped on durability and have CP to burn.

How about the success buff? Well, comparing the first two options we have:

1) 1% - 0 successes, 8% - 1 success, 26% - 2 successes, 41% - 3 successes, 24% - 4 successes ; EV = 124% XP
2) 0% - 0 successes, 3% - 1 success, 24% - 2 successes, 73% - 3 successes ; EV = 122% XP

So it looks like it's pretty close, but from an XP point of view and from an HQ point of view I'm better off not using the success buff and just taking the extra quality ability. But it's really close one way or the other. And the third option is likely just as close. It's basically the same as #2, with a small XP and HQ boost in the biggest categories. It does have the downside that failure is an option since you have no extra durability and you have to use one of the progress abilities without the success buff. But as long as you make that one your first one you get to find out if it's a failure or not. If not you have the safe third path. If it is a failure you can abort back into the first path.

The lights and waiting will probably make things even more complicated, and make the ideal path have even more branches. And will probably be different based on what you're making and how badly you want a HQ result. And based on your gear since what you're wearing changes how many times you need to use the progress ability and how much quality you gain from the quality ability and how many CP you have to use! I like it!

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

Last week apparently saw the launch of the new iteration of Final Fantasy XIV. FFXIV first came out almost 3 years ago, and it was a complete disaster. It had all kinds of server issues, and client issues. And it wasn't fun. To be blunt, it wasn't a finished product, and not in the way that Diablo III wasn't a finished product. Even worse than that. It was supposed to be a game with a monthly subscription fee and they ended up waiving the fee for a year and a half while they slowly worked on making a reasonable game. And despite my love for all things Final Fantasy and the fact it was free for that year and a half I only played maybe a couple of hours when it first came out and never looked back.

Square Enix ended up reshuffling the entire development team, saw the original guy in charge 'resign', and set to work making a better game. Eventually they decided the ideal thing to do was to scrap the current game entirely and rebuild from scratch with most of the same world and mechanics but with a proper backend. I've heard this before (how many versions has Magic Online gone through?) and was skeptical here, but the reviews I've seen had been pretty favourable...

And then I got emailed an article about the new launch, and how it was a disaster, and I'm not surprised at all. Well, I am a little surprised... It sounded like the problems were all related to unexpected usage and not to launching early with massive bugs. It would seem they underestimated how many people were actually interested in playing the new FFXIV. I was lined up at the door when the first came out begging them to take my money and hadn't even heard of the launch date this time, and I can't imagine I was alone in this, so I guess I probably would have underestimated demand too. But it sounds like they implemented reasonable measures to throttle log-ins and character creations and the game was at least playable for those who got in. Which is better than just having everyone crash constantly.

I clicked around from the article and found a link showing that they're giving the new game away for free to anyone who bought the first version, as well they should. They're also letting everyone with an old account log in and play for free until the 9th. So now I was torn... I don't want to play a game at launch, but free is also a good price. This free has a limited time offer, though... I figured that since it sounds like the issues were user density related, and that since I'm sleeping during the day right now, that I could chance it. Playing in the early, early morning rates to have fewer server density issues, I would think. Right?

I downloaded the game this morning and gave it a spin. The intro movie talked a bit about how Bahamut came and did terrible things to the world. It's nice that they have a reasonable story as to why the old FFXIV is gone and there's a new very similar one in its place. The old one let you start as a crafting class but this one forced me into combat right away. I chose the summoner class, which it turns out started in the same city my original character started in so it was vaguely familiar. The quests to start off were different though, and everything was much smoother. I did some combat, and while it is definitely pretty standard MMO combat it worked a lot better than the old one did. At the very least, everything worked and it was fun!

I've heard the crafting minigames were made a lot better in this version, but I haven't reached the point where I can switch to a crafting job. Which is fine, since I'm enjoying doing the combat quests. They've added a lot of convenience stuff to the game, like the now standard 15 minute heartstone. They also added teleport crystals around town so you can jump around quickly without running around or taking a speeder. (I hated that in SW:ToR!) They've also added in public events where some crazy thing will go on in the world and everyone in the area can come kill monsters to help out. I think this was taken from Rifts or Guild Wars but I haven't played either game. It gave something else to do with other people though, which I guess is a good thing.

They put in an interesting way to encourage people to help each other. The person who engages a monster gets full experience when it dies regardless of who actually killed it. People who help out get a share as well based on how much they helped. They've also added the chaining xp bonuses from FFXI, so helping a bunch of people burn down monsters was giving a good amount of chain bonus.

There's also a 'kill all the things' minigame where you have a monster log and need to kill 3 of everything in the list. It reminds me a little of FFX and running around catching one of everything for the arena. I like little things like that, where I get encouraged to wander around and kill random things for extra experience and to make a number get bigger.

I haven't played all that much, but I think I've played as much as I did of the original. And I liked what I saw thus far, so I will be going back to play some more in the morning. It didn't feel like a newly launched game, possibly because it has been a live game for almost 3 years. It did launch on a subscription plan system, despite Tobold's assertion that the business model is completely dead. Will I want to keep playing enough to pay up come the 9th? That remains to be seen. But for now I'm going to keep playing my little catwoman Polemical Ziggyny on the Faerie server.

Space Pirates and Zombies

Another day, another game with Steam cards that came in the huge bundle of games I bought over the new year. With a name like Space Pirates and Zombies how could this game be bad? Or good, for that matter? The name seems really silly and it would probably be on the list of games I'm unlikely to ever try if it didn't have Steam cards. So I guess they got at least one person to play their game by doing the Steam card thing!

The game itself is a space combat game. You have a mothership with the ability to build smaller combat ships. You fly around to different planets to perform quests which pretty much all revolve around some flimsy excuse to send computer controlled ships at your ships. You control one ship, the AI controls the rest of your ships. So you end up flying around in a circle shooting things until they die, then finding the next thing to fly after and shoot it until it dies. Eventually all the things are dead and you get a reward.

There's a decent overarching plot directing your movements. There's all sorts of things to unlock and level up that lets you build better ships. Different types of ships, different types of modules to put on your ships, and tech levels for each type of module.

A huge randomly generated galaxy to explore, lots of numbers to make bigger, reasonable combat... How could I not want to keep playing this game? Well, the control scheme hurts my hand. This game screams out to be played with a controller. Instead I have to use the WASD keys to go forward, backward, or strafe and use the mouse to aim what direction is forward. And my hand isn't used to that control scheme, and it hurts my little finger to be holding down w almost the entire time I'm playing the game. I want to get the rest of the achievements and see where the plot leads, but I don't think I can without a controller. Oh well.

Even More Cylon Leader Stuff

Yesterday I went out and played another game of Battlestar Galactica. It was another 6 player game and we gave the new cylon leader rule another spin. This time around Duncan was the cylon leader and I was on the human end of things. Dave commented on the Facebook link to my last post that he didn't like cylon leaders because they aren't playing the same game as everyone else. And as such they don't get to really participate in the conversations the same way other people do. I can definitely see how that's the case. Normally you're just trying to make a binary decision about the other people. They're human, or they're cylon. Maybe if you're playing with Andrew you also need to figure out if they're just being random? But with the cylon leader (at least early) pretty much everything they do is going to be shaded both ways. They're helping and hurting with everything they do and the other players can't know which way they're going to end up. So they can't really have discussions with them.

What it seems to boil down to is the cylon leader is playing a different game than the other players, and the game they're playing basically uses the other players as pawns. They're trying to set up board situations that will lead down the paths they want to go down. On the other hand the rest of the players don't really get to manipulate the cylon leader at all. They can do things that may end up helping or hurting the cylon leader but they can't get the cylon leader to do what they want them to do and they can rarely even tell if they even are helping or hurting. So the other players pretty much can only ignore the cylon leader, maybe throw them in the brig if they're infiltrating and are forced to brig someone, and hope they don't screw up their game that much.

In the game yesterday Duncan started off with two cards that wanted the humans to win and ended up with 3 human wins cards. So he had to spend the whole game trying to help us win. We got off to a fantastic start with Sara looking at the admiral's loyalty card and outing him as a cylon. The admiral got thrown out the airlock before he even got a turn. In an odd twist the person who threw him out the airlock was actually the other cylon. I'm convinced if that guy had taken any other action we were totally screwed. As it played out it looked really good for the humans, but having to go distance 10 is actually a pretty big deal. We managed to manipulate things such that the cylon fleet actually never jumped back in through a good choice of treachery card plays and destinations. (The new admiral was the other unrevealed cylon and he picked out probably the single best destination in the deck for us... I feel like he may not have understood how the cylon fleet board worked.) And even still we almost lost in several ways. We had 3 centurions on the boarding party track at one point and had to kill them all in one go around the table. We took 6 shots across 3 human player turns and got all 3 of them, thanks to the cylon leader having a calculations card. Then we ended up with 1 food, 2 fuel, and 2 morale when we finally jumped away. We did have 8 population left when we won, but there were 13 cylon raiders in the same location as 10 civilian ships with only 2 vipers for cover so we were pretty close to losing on that one too.

I'm pretty sure if Duncan had two cards for cylon wins he could have easily made the humans lose. 28% of the time he'll have 3 or 4 humans wins cards, so despite everything the other 5 players did there was a 72% chance Duncan could have had the cylons win. It feels like it's hard to accept that as one of the other players? But on the other hand having both cylon cards get dealt out at the start of the game is also brutal and that happens 22% of the time. I want to think BSG is a very skill intensive game, but it is also a game with small numbers of 'dice'. The cylon leader adds in another aspect of random chance the players can't control which may be a bad thing, or it may just be more of the same thing you need to expect out of the game?

One thing I will say is the new cylon leader rule feels very appropriate for the theme of the show. The average human and cylon get jerked around by the cylon leaders all the time! Dance my little puppets, dance!

But is it good for the game? My gut feeling after two plays is I'd probably rather just play a 5 player game. But in the past I would sit out and not play at all to make sure a 5 player game happened and now I'd be player 6 and hope to be the cylon leader! There is also the mutineer option which I haven't used. I'd like to try that out to see how it compares.

Bridge Match 2 - Board 16

Board 16 – Dealer West – EW Vul

Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard 2001
Opponents playing strength: Intermediate

My hand: ♠ J 9 5 ♥ 6 5 2 ♦ Q J T 8 7 ♣ A 2

West opens 1 club. Partner passes. East bids 1 heart. My hand isn't very good, and I don't particularly want partner to lead a diamond (we're probably much better off having me lead them) so I don't see a reason to bid. West bids 1NT, East bids 3NT, and that's where they end up.

Partner leads the 3 of spades.

	NORTH ♠ 3
		EAST ♠ A 8 4 2 ♥ A Q J 3 ♦ 5 3 ♣ J 8 5
	SOUTH ♠ J 9 5 ♥ 6 5 2 ♦ Q J T 8 7 ♣ A 2

West	North	East	South
1♣	Pass	1♥	Pass
1NT	Pass	3NT	All Pass

I expect partner has around 6 points, and he has exactly 4 spades. West shouldn't have 4 hearts with his 1NT bid so partner has at least 3 hearts too. I suspect unless partner has the A of diamonds and I lead through West that they're in a good way. But let's see what shakes out in spades first? 3-2-J-Q. Declarer shifts to hearts. 7-8-J-2. And now clubs. Do I need to hop here? Or do I need to preserve my entry? I feel like with only two clubs my entry doesn't get to be preserved. So I hop. 8-A-7-3. Now to pound through diamonds... Q-A-4-3. Back to hearts. 9-T-Q-5. Cash a heart. A-6-4 of clubs-4. Partner should have the high heart now. Back to clubs. 5-2-K-9. Another club. 6-Q-J-5 of spades. Partner cashes the K of hearts and throws me in with a diamond. I am forced to give declarer his 9 of diamonds to go with his high clubs and diamonds. Making 3.

	NORTH ♠ K T 7 3 ♥ K T 8 4 ♦ 6 4 ♣ Q 9 3
WEST ♠ Q 6 ♥ 9 7 ♦ A K 9 2 ♣ K T 7 6 4		EAST ♠ A 8 4 2 ♥ A Q J 3 ♦ 5 3 ♣ J 8 5
	SOUTH ♠ J 9 5 ♥ 6 5 2 ♦ Q J T 8 7 ♣ A 2

All 8 of the tables played 3NT. 2 went down 1, 2 went up 1, 1 went up 2, and 3 just made. So we get 8 MPs.

Captain Jack agrees with me all the way!

Ranking after board 16/60: 7/16 with 51.34%.

Revisiting Cylon Leaders

The 3rd expansion for Battlestar Galactica came out recently and I got a chance to play a game of it today. We had 6 people, which isn't optimal for BSG, but they made even more tweaks in this expansion to try to balance things out more. A mutineer option which pits 2 cylons against 4 humans, but makes one of the humans particularly volatile and forced to either spend the game in the brig or take suboptimal actions every now and then. And a revamp of the cylon leader system. I really liked the idea of the cylon leader when it first came out, but the first implementation had some flaws. So I was eager to see what they'd changed and if it worked any better.

As initially released the cylon leader starts the game as a more powerful revealed cylon. They have abilities, drawbacks, and once per game abilities like any other character. They have the ability to 'infiltrate' the humans and go pretend to be a slightly weaker human character. They can take most of the standard human actions and can do what humans can do, like get thrown in the brig or play positive action cards. To direct the actions the cylon leader takes they would be dealt one of six agenda cards. Each card would indicate which side needed to win (humans or cylons) and extra conditions that needed to be met. The extra conditions were designed such that the cylon leader would want the humans to ultimately win the game but take a lot of damage along the way, or that they'd want the cylons to ultimately win the game but in a trickier way. The idea being that the cylon leader would need to both help and hurt the humans as the game progressed, making the game into a 2.5 v 3.5.

The problem was the extra conditions weren't actually well designed. A couple of them were really trivial, so the game would really shake out as a 3v3 or a 2v4 and not really be a terribly interesting game. It also felt like adding the cylon leader would make the game more fun for that specific person, but was worse for the other players. Possibly because having 1 in 6 or 1 in 3 games just be a blowout was terrible. (It's a similar reason to why I hate the 'extra loyalty card' rule added in the second expansion. Having 2 in 11 games get screwed with only 1 cylon just wasn't very fun when it came up even if it was slightly fairer in the long run.)

What did they do in this expansion? Well, instead of having one deck of 6 cards and giving the cylon leader a single card instead there is a deck with 14 motive cards and you get dealt 4 of them. 2 at the very start of the game, and 2 more during the sleeper phase when the rest of the players get their second loyalty card. Each motive card lists an extra condition on it, and a winning side. In order for the cylon leader to win they need to satisfy at least 3 of their 4 extra conditions, and among the conditions they satisfied they need at least 2 of them to list the correct winning side.

This changes a few things. For one, the cylon leader may not know what side they want to win the game from the beginning. In the game today I was the cylon leader and my initial two cards were a human wins card and a cylon wins card. If my next two cards were human wins then I couldn't have the cylons win the game. On the other hand if they were both cylon wins cards then I couldn't have the humans win the game. So I actually had to play the start of the game right down the middle. I couldn't let one side or the other get too far ahead or I might have no way to win. Assuming the deck is half of each type this situation will come up 54% of the time. On the other hand you'll double up 46% of the time, and doubling up may be really bad for game balance. Can the humans win if the cylon leader starts with a pair of cylon wins cards? I feel like it's going to be really hard for them, which may be terrible...

Another thing that changes is it becomes a lot harder for the other players to figure out what the cylon leader is trying to do. With only 6 potential options in the past it wasn't that hard to figure out the goal of the cylon leader by deduction. Now there are 1001 different options for what the cylon leader could hold. Maybe you could piece together one or two of them, but maybe not. This should make it harder for one side or the other to spite out the cylon leader, which I like.

The end result of the game today was I got dealt 2 cards for each side. I managed to achieve 3 of the 4 cards (and was really close to the 4th one) and the right side ended up winning so I won too. Woo! It felt more reasonable than most of my games with the old cylon leader rules. I spent the early game trying to keep either side from getting too far ahead, and trying to work towards the two conditions I knew about. In this case it was lowering population to 6 or less and making sure the humans jumped at least distance 7. So I was trying to keep the humans from falling behind early, but I was also trying to work over their population and was trying to slow them down once it really looked like there were no starting cylons.

But is it actually a good thing in the long run? I'll need to see it play out a few more times. In particular, I need to see what happens when the cylon leader gets dealt a pair of 'cylon wins' cards from the start. I also need to see how it plays out when I'm a regular player in the game with a cylon leader. Is it still the case where being the cylon leader is more fun, but being in a game with someone else as the cylon leader is less fun? Would it be reasonable to force the first two cards to be one of each, and then shuffle the remaining 12 cards up to deal out the last 2? This would certainly make it even harder for the cylon leader to win, but would prevent the blowouts I fear. Or maybe the conditions on the 'cylon win' cards are harsh enough that even with 2 of them at the start you need to play both sides? Only more tries will tell. At the very least I think it's worth future testing. Which is a step in the right direction, since using the old cylon leader rules was not very appealing to me.

Holdem Manager

I have a bit of an issue with the pursuit of perfection. If I'm going to do something I want to do it right! Unfortunately this often means that when I don't really know how to do it right I end up spending a lot of time thinking about doing things without actually doing them. Trying to get over that need is one of the reasons I started blogging (initially I wouldn't edit any posts at all because otherwise nothing would ever get posted) and it didn't kill me so I guess it's worked out a little bit at least? At any rate, trying to find the optimal option from a big list of confusing options tends to result in analysis paralysis for me, and nothing actually gets done.

That's where I am when it comes to giving poker a spin. There's a lot of different sites to play on, each with a huge variety of sign up bonuses. There's quite a few different stat tracking pieces of software. There has to be an optimal pair of site plus software that would be right for me. But how to find that out? Normally I'd turn to the internet and do some research but the internet is a little flawed here because most of the people posting about poker sites or software are getting paid to do so. Online poker has this whole crazy system of affiliates set up where the person who gets you to sign up for something gets a cut of what the something eventually makes off of you. And then those affiliates share some of that cut back with you. So the people who would normally be the ones talking about what is a reasonable thing to do end up being the people who make money if you listen to them. BLEH!

Earlier this week I decided to just say screw it. There may be an optimal solution but I'm not going to find it by reading books or the internet. So I picked a piece of software pretty much at random, installed the free trial, and went to play super low stakes to try it out. It didn't have a very good tutorial or anything, and it didn't seem to be working at all. It thought I was some other guy and couldn't detect a Ziggyny playing at all! Eventually I figured out that it gets the data it needs by reading log files and PokerStars defaults to not saving the log files. Turn that on and suddenly things started happening.

One of the many, many, many screens that HoldEm Manager has for stats. Of course this chart suffers from an incredibly small sample size. This was me just screwing around for a couple hours to get some sort of data and see what the software would do. I was even positive for a brief period of time! Woo?

More interesting was the stuff it was showing at the table itself. There was a screen with probably 30 numbers for each player, and I really need to figure out what those represent. But it also gave each person a little picture showing what the software thought of the way they were playing, and it would jot down notes about odd things they did. A fish, or a whale, or a mouse. It gave me a picture of a die.

The software also gives me a list of every hand I played, and shows the actions and results. It has an option where you can tag hands to look at later, which is nice.

I did have some issues with the software putting it's stuff over top of my cards. From one seat at the table I couldn't see my whole hand, which is a bit of a problem! I think I found a way to force PokerStars to always give me a specific seat when I sit down, which should help fix that problem. I know of at least one seat where I can see my hand properly!

Is this the software for me? Would PokerTracker or something else be better? Maybe! But I don't care! I have a starting point now, and the way to go from here is to learn how to use the one I randomly picked. Just having a path to walk along is the key, I think, and now I have one. Woo!