My 2014 WBC Schedule, Honest

I finally got around to finishing off my scheduling spreadsheet for WBC this year. I'd wanted to update it to make it faster (right now when you select a game it checks every other game to see if it overlaps when I should just build a table of connections and only check other games it can influence) but I ended up deciding I just wanted to get a look at things for myself this year and be done with it. So I stuck with old and slow and put together a little something...

Just like every year I couldn't find time to squeeze in Empire Builder. I have this (possibly irrational) fear of playing some of the more 'real time' games at WBC. I worry that the shortcuts my group uses for these sorts of games (like the mid-turn parse and the no destructive track) will make it difficult or unpleasant to play the game in a semi-competitive setting. It's the same reason we walked away from Gangsters a few years back after getting taught the game before a heat. Being on the clock in a new game is extra stressful and not being able to take things back or count ahead is rough. And yet I still added in two heats of Galaxy Trucker this time. Maybe I just like that game enough to risk running into real time issues? I do worry about how to handle people double fisting it (and I worry that I will accidentally do so myself!) Maybe I'll end up getting enough Galaxy Trucker games in open gaming that I can drop it from my schedule? I do prefer playing with expansions, after all...

This is the first year I haven't found a spot for Queen's Gambit in my schedule and that makes me sad. Even though I haven't won a game since 2008 I still like playing the game. I wonder what I put against it since I didn't consciously exclude it... The first heat is up against my team game (Le Havre) so it's a non-starter. The second heat conflicts with Galaxy Trucker... Hmm... The third heat conflicts with Agricola, which I added in to my schedule this year since I've started playing it again in person and online. But I don't know that I need/want to play all the heats and I can probably drop this one for Queen's Gambit if I don't back out of Galaxy Trucker. Bottom line... I should still bring my copy of Queen's Gambit since I'll probably convince myself to play it over one of those!

A Few Acres of Snow disappearing due to a lack of GM is annoying, but it does open up being able to play two games that have conflicted with it the last two years. I can plan on having time to play in both the San Juan and Through The Ages elimination rounds this year! Woo! There's certainly no guarantee I make them, but I can slot them in for now because there's nothing else really against them.

On top of those two games the only final I've put on my schedule is Le Havre. It's my team game, so I feel obligated to schedule it even if I won't make the finals. I do plan on making the finals since I've done so every year thus far, but anything could happen! And it's not like I'll be getting up at 9am on Friday morning for anything other than Le Havre, anyway.

I only put two demos on the schedule this year, and they're for games that have existed forever but haven't run demos in the past. Ace of Aces and Pro Golf. Both games have been things I've wanted to try but didn't know how to play and 'C' events haven't always worked out the best for me. Part of the reason for not including any other demos is I already learned how to play 2 of the new games this year and have even put them on my schedule! Spyrium and Concordia both were fun enough (Concordia more-so) that they seemed worth giving a spin. I assert that trials tend to be softer fields than established games and I'd like to win something! Also, they fit into empty holes. That may be more important.

I may or may not plan on sleeping in all day Saturday. Even if I don't explicitly plan for it to happen it always seems to happen anyway. Looking back at my old posts it looks like I've started playing games on Saturday at 1pm, 11am, ???, 8pm, 7pm, 3pm, and 9pm. So even putting a game in at noon seems extreme. Looking at it makes me feel like maybe I'm too old for a full week of games but in reality I know that by Friday night it's more likely I'm just up playing games until 4am. When else are Robb and I going to play TOBOGGANS OF DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM?!?

There are also way too many food holes in my schedule this time around. Not a single day is booked from 9am until midnight! I must be slacking something fierce. Or maybe I just want to eat at Red Robin? Yum!

Bridge Match 3 - Board 2

Board 2 - Dealer East - NS Vul

Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Excellent

My hand: ♠ A Q 7 5 4 ♥ A 7 ♦ 7 5 ♣ A Q J 6

I open 1 spade in second seat. Partner raises to 3, which should show a weak hand with 4 spades. But it didn't get alerted, which makes me think we may not be playing Bergen raises? Time to cheat and sneak a peak at my card... (Which I feel ok doing because I play one hand per week.) Bergen compex is turned on. So he should have 4 spades and fewer than 6 points. My hand is pretty good, but probably not good enough. I pass.

West leads the Q of diamonds.

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

West	North	East	South
		Pass	1♠
Pass	3♠	Pass	Pass
Pass

Ok, well, that sure is what I thought partner had. I guess you just don't need to alert the 3 spade bid in Bergen? Good to know! Anyway, I will lose a diamond, a heart, and a spade or two. I'm going to have a hard time taking tricks since I don't really have much to set up outside of clubs. Maybe I should try a dummy reversal and ruff a lot of red cards in hand? I should duck the opening lead to cut communication I think. Q-2-6-7. West continues a diamond. 9-A-4-5. Yeah, I want to ruff a bunch on hand. So I play another diamond. 3-K-4 of spades-J.

But now how to get back to board? Probably I should just go ace of clubs, ruff a club. Run it. A-2-7-5. 6-4-3 of spades-3. Another diamond through. 8-T-Q of spades-3 of hearts. I cash a heart and lose a heart. They try to take another heart, which I ruff. With the heart pitch earlier I have the last heart on board now. So I should probably draw trump? If spades are 2-2 that's fine, but if they're 3-1 it's bad. I'll cash the A and see what happens. A-2-6-9. Bleh. Let's just ruff things. I play a club. Q-K-8 of spades-8.

Ok, they have 2 spades left, and I have the high club. Their two spades are high. So my only way to make another trick is if spades were 2-2. Might as well draw trump then. Spades were 3-1. Making 3.

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

Everyone played in spades, but with 4 different results. Two pairs made 4 spades. 2 pairs went down 1 in 4 spades. 1 pair was in 2 spades making 4. And 3 pairs were in 3 spades making 3. We lose to all the people who took 10 tricks and beat the people who went down. So we get 6 MPs.


Jack disagrees with my pass. He wants me to bid 4 spades. That feels crazy. I have too many losers for his hand to be good enough considering how bad it has to be for the 3 spade Bergen bid. He had a complete maximum and it was still a questionable game! He then disagrees with my play most of the way through the hand. He doesn't want me to draw trump because it will cost an overtrick. Which it turns out is true. Doh.

Ranking after board 2/60: 10/16 with 35.71%

Civ V: Balancing Asynch Games?

We've mostly entered the modern era in our first asynch Civ V game and a few issues have arisen in this game and in conversations with Robb that may need solutions outside the game itself. There seem to be certain things that work in a particular way that probably only crop up in an asynch game so they weren't considered or were deliberately ignored by the game designers. Ideally there'd be a solution in game but that's not going to happen...

The main problem is the way turns are treated in the game. Each person, starting with the game host, takes a turn. Then the game does a cleanup step at the end of the cycle and the game host goes again. People used to playing a single player game will understand this concept for sure. Barbarians and city states take moves after all of the AI civs take moves, and that happens after the player takes a turn. Some of the stuff that happens during this cleanup step are crucially important and the game host always gets to act first after they happen which really isn't fair.

There are some minor advantages with going first. For example, the game host will always win a tie for a wonder if two people would build it on the same turn. Matt complained several times in the comment thread for our most progressed game that he'd missed out on wonders by one turn over and over. Rough, but at least he was legitimately a turn behind. He finished Parthenon on the exact same turn I did, but he got to have it and I didn't because he was first in turn order. Ideally the game would look ahead to see if a wonder was going to be tied for and would give it out randomly. Or maybe if a wonder was legitimately completed on the same game turn by multiple civs then they both get to have it. The game host will always be a turn ahead on troop movements, too. So they have a minor edge in both attacking and defending

The cleanup phase is when spies assigned to city states get to rig elections. This happens on a schedule and the starting player always gets to go first. Now, city state elections rarely matter. They can boost someone's influence and knock everyone else down. Where it does matter is when people are at war and an election makes it so one of the warring civs loses control of their ally. When this happens everyone is able to make peace with the city state and can spend money to become the ally. In an asynch game the game host gets first crack.

Now, I don't think this is actually something that should ever happen. Because elections are on a fixed schedule and you can look and see how much influence you have with a city state you can always pay money in advance to make sure you never lose control of the city state. Stealing a city state this way should only work against broke opponents, or negligent ones. But because you don't know where your opponent has parked their spies you don't know which allies you need to bump up and which you don't. Keeping a city state ally is so critically important that you should just pay up on all of them anyway. But the game host doesn't need to bother with this. They don't need to pay attention to city state election timing. They don't need to pay up in advance. They can just wait and see what's going on and pay up only when they lose control of a city state. Because they go first. On the other hand the person last in turn order needs to worry about all of their city states all of the time because every other player gets a crack at them if they ever lose control.

The council vote is another thing that gets generated between turns. The game looks to see who is host, and who otherwise has the most votes. And then the game prompts them on their next turns to make a proposal. If the game host is one of these two people this means they get first crack at making a proposal. Some of the proposals have options on them and the person who proposes them gets to pick the option. This means that the person last in turn order should never get to pick a world religion or a world ideology. (At least not until both options become available, anyway, and they get their second choice!)

It doesn't matter if someone has, say, 21 votes and the opponents have 14 between them. Normally I'd think that person could guarantee world ideology the first time that becomes an option, but not if they're late in turn order. This is happening in our current game, where Dave has a huge vote lead and should be able to force through freedom as world ideology. This should make Matt and I unhappy and give Dave extra happy faces. Instead Matt was able to propose autocracy as the world ideology. A vote sure to fail, but it it does pass then Dave and I will get a big chunk of unhappiness and Matt will get extra happy faces. Extra happy faces he probably shouldn't have. (Dave did get to make a different crippling proposal though so I don't feel too bad for him. I'm the one getting blown out here!)

There are a bunch of solutions to this problem from a game design standpoint. I'd make it so proposing 'world ideology' didn't have a selection at time of proposal. I'd make it so you voted like an election when it came down to it and if any ideology had more votes than the rest combined it would win and otherwise none would go in. Or you could let both proposals be for different world ideologies and let the one that passes by the most go through. But I don't get to make either of those things happen. Instead the game host gets to dominate things.

For some of these things there are outside solutions available. The council thing we could just mandate that the game pauses when proposals are made and we make them in an outside forum. Let the council host pick first. Or choose randomly each time. Or alternate. It would 'slow things down' a little, but it feels like it has to be more fair than running the game as it is. The city state thing you could pause the game and ask if the spy owner has the money to spend on their next turn to get the steal off. And if they do, you have to let them.

I don't know that there is a solution for wonders. You could always announce a couple turns in advance when you're going to complete a wonder, but with great engineers existing I think that would be problematic. I guess you could take the stance that you announce with 2 turns to go and that locks out people from using an engineer? And then if two people announce at the same time you roll randomly which one gets it and the other has to switch off on the last turn?

That feels like it would work, but is a real pain and doesn't feel fun. Maybe you just accept that turn order is an advantage for wonders? You could use it as a handicap system of sorts I guess, by putting the stronger players/civs late in turn order? I guess that could be true for everything. Just accept that people late in turn order don't get a good path to a diplomatic victory?


The other problem comes with the way the random number generator works, and the fact that you're playing a game you have to load up every single turn. Robb did some testing and you can change what is inside a hut by changing what turn you open it up. You can change what is inside a hut by taking a different action in the same turn! Attack a barbarian and you can get something different out of the hut! You can try out combats and reload if they don't work out the way you wanted. You can use significantly fewer units as scouts by moving them in one direction, restarting your turn, and then moving them in other directions.

My boats in our main game are faster than Dave's by 2 I think since I have great lighthouse and exploration opened and I don't think he does. This means I can legitimately control movement in the seas (or at least have guaranteed knowledge of the sea movement) by moving forward a bunch and then juking back so I end up moving forward a little bit. I have a couple boats that can move 6 that keep moving 3 forward and 3 back to keep an eye on a small area of the ocean. But if I was willing to keep reloading I could actually move 6 spaces in every direction every turn. With my extra vision range I could probably cover an entire ocean with 1 boat!

I'm torn on if either of these things are bad or if they're fair pool for an asynch game. I do things like write down the cards in hand in A Few Acres of Snow when I play that asynch on Yucata, and reloading to do extra scouting feels similar. Without doing it it's hard to know where units have moved when in a live game you'd be able to see which way they walked. Reloading to scum good huts would be impossible in a live game though... One thing I am sure of is I want to be on the same playing field as the other people. I've been keeping my huts with maps and haven't been scouting a circle of radius 10 every turn, but if other people are getting good huts all the time and doing big scouts then I should too.

Civ V: Great Person Decimals

Matt brought up the point that he didn't think gardens were very good because you need to get at least 4 great person points (or another multiplier) before they'll do anything because the game doesn't display decimal points for great people like it does for things like food, hammers, and science. I did some testing by making a note of how many points I was generating in a game where I have a 75% bonus to great person generation and was making 9 base great musician points. With the 75% multiplier that would be 15.75 points per turn. I went 15 on one turn and then 16 on the next which shows that the game is tracking hidden decimal points when it comes to great person points.

There were other criticisms left in the comments on my post about wanting to get a garden. Dave said he spreads out his guilds (presumably to dampen the impact of having to run so many specialists in one city) and Sky decided that the hammers to build and upkeep cost to maintain of a garden makes it terrible.

I definitely used to spread out my guilds when they first came out. But back then I made a point of not building a granary if it wasn't going to give me a ton of extra food. I also only built trade routes for gold if I built them at all. (I kept having the AI declare war and destroy them all so I ended up just not building caravans and cargo ships after a while.) But it turns out a granary for just 2 food is enough to cover a specialist so it's a lot like a granary could give you 3 culture and 3 great person points! Or it can give you 2 gold and some great merchant points. Or it can just grow your city faster... Granaries are actually awesome and I've really started building them all over the place. And as a side effect to building granaries all over the place you can start transporting your food around. I used to not do this both because I didn't build granaries and because I thought it would cost food in one city to add it to the other. No, it turns out you actually just generate free food! And you should totally do that! And if you've been doing that to one city for most of the game it ends up really big and has no problem coming up with all the specialists you could desire. (If you go tradition that one city should be your capital due to monarchy.)

I definitely think any time you go tradition you should be building all your guilds in one city and that city should be your capital. If the city doesn't have a lot of food to make that viable you should be shipping in extra food from the outside to make it happen. Get the extra gold and happiness out of monarchy, get the extra culture and great people. And get a garden/national epic in that city to make more great people!

The opportunity cost of building a garden could be a thing. Gardens cost 120 hammers and 1 gold per turn in maintenance. Especially early on, 120 hammers is many turns worth of production and you could get something else instead. Especially if you don't have any guilds there's really no reason to be picking up a garden early. The writer's guild itself only costs 100 hammers! So paying more than that amount again to get only 25% of some of the benefit only makes sense if the writers' guild is a fantastic deal. I actually think it is, since great writers can be sacced for a big burst of culture to get a policy, but I can see how others may think otherwise. Once you've spent the 150 hammers for the artists' guild and especially the 200 hammers for a musicians' guild the extra 120 for a garden stops looking like such a big deal. Especially if you have other things going on in the city to generate great people like wonders or different specialists.

The 1 gold upkeep feels like nothing at all, especially if you build all your guilds in one spot. You're not building a garden in every city, so whatever 1 gold. Whatever I say!

Tower Wars: Mine Upgrades

One of the things you can spend gold and BP on in Tower Wars is to upgrade your mines which lets you make more gold per turn. On the surface this seems like the most important thing to me. Spend your money to make more money! Then when you have an enormous income use it to crush your opponent underneath your massive piles of gold! Unfortunately it turns out that if you take the time to just level your mines your opponent is free to spend his money on units instead. This will force you into spending money on defending yourself on top of upgrading your mines which means you won't have any money left over to attack him. This means your opponent can skip spending money on towers AND it means he has a source of BP income and you don't. So while you'll end up with more gold than him eventually, you're also going to end up dead. It also turns out that if you spend all your BP on mine upgrades instead of on unit upgrades your opponent can just front load their maze with high level towers and it becomes impossible for you to generate enough BP. You need to spend BP to make better units to survive that onslaught, but you can't earn BP without units that can survive in their maze for at least a little bit.

All this means that just pounding out mine upgrades is a bad idea. You need to pace yourself. But when does it makes sense to upgrade your mines? Is it possible that skimping on upgrading your mines can be the way to go? My experience tells me that falling behind in mine upgrades and then trying to catch up is bad because you're taking time off from attacking and getting less out of it than your opponent did. So he just gets an edge. Maybe trying to all-in him is the right play? But then he should just get a small enough mine upgrade edge to be relevant and then switch off to defending himself and attacking you to force your money into towers too. It's all so very tricky...

The first step is going to be looking at what actually happens for you when you upgrade your mines. Every map seems to have exactly three mines on it for each team. You start with level 1 mines that each have 1 worker and every mine can hold up to 6 workers. If a mine has all 6 workers you can pay to upgrade the mine a level and then you're allowed to buy 6 more workers. There are 3 levels total.

The level 1 workers cost 25 gold and 15 BP and generate .65 gold per second. This means a given level 1 miner will pay himself off in 39 seconds. My experience tells me the gold cost, while real, is not the relevant part here. You need to earn BP to buy the workers and the BP is harder to come by. Sending an initial wave of 7 guy seems to generate around 60 BP, so you can earn enough BP to buy 4 workers by spending 175 gold. In a sense I guess it actually costs 275 gold for 4 workers? At least at the start? Regardless, that would still pay off in 106 seconds and that feels like it has to be worthwhile.

Level 2 workers cost 100 gold and 45 BP and generate .8 gold per second. But before you can buy them you have to pay 375 gold up front. So the first miner costs 475 gold and even ignoring the BP it would take almost 10 minutes to pay that guy off. Being down gold for 10 minutes is absolutely terrible. Who cares that you're ahead after that point, you've probably lost! But all that means is upgrading the mine to build a single worker is a bad plan. Realistically you should be planning to do a full mine upgrade all at once, and that costs a total of 975 gold and 270 BP to generate 4.8 gold per second. That pays off in 204 seconds (ignoring BP) which is an amount of time that feels reasonable. I can see playing down for 4 minutes in order to get ahead for rest of the game if the game is going to take 20 minutes, for example. Spending that money is going to set you back on BP generation and give your opponent a reprieve from attacks, but I can imagine how that's a reasonable thing.

Level 3 workers cost 300 gold and 90 BP and generate .95 gold per second. The cost to upgrade the mine is 750 gold. Once again the first miner is a terrible investment since he'll only pay off the gold cost in a little over 18 minutes. A full mine on the other hand will pay off in 448 seconds. That's actually a pretty long time, especially since the 540 BP cost could unlock a new support unit.

One thing worth thinking about is how much gold you're going to be spending on a typical attack wave. If you can get your gold income above the amount you're spending on attacks then you have left over money to invest in upgrades (either more defense, or mine upgrades, or on better units) while keeping your pressure on. At the start of the game you can send out at most 18 guys that cost 25 gold each. You can send a wave every 45 seconds. So your start of game gold expenditure on attacks is capped at 10 gold per second. A full set of level 1 mines will make 11.7 gold per second, and you will also earn money from units when you kill them. If he's sending out the first unit you get 10 gold for killing them, so you get an extra 4 gold per second from them. So you've got a pretty large surplus running to use saving up for an upgrade of some kind. It would take about 3 minutes before you could afford a full mine upgrade, but that's assuming no money is spent on towers and that's probably not true.

Regardless, the first upgrade you're going to get is almost certainly a better unit. The next unit in the chain costs 250 gold and 250 BP to unlock, and increase the cost to send a wave to 513. That's still less than the cost of a full set of level 1 mines (barely) so you can use the bounty on killing the enemy units to buy more towers and save up the initial 250 unlock cost from the earlier profit. That seems pretty good, but then you're stuck without really making money to go any further unless the bounty from unit kills is a net profit (I feel like it probably isn't) or you take time off to upgrade your mines. You lose pretty much a full wave and a couple early unit upgrades to do it, but it will pay off in under 4 minutes. I feel like at some point once your opponent has stabilized a little you're going to need to do this to advance further?

The next set of units are a fair bit more expensive than the second tier. They're also support units, so sending a full wave of them feels wrong, though looking at the stats they actually have comparable health per unit slot as the second tier so maybe I should try sending waves of just tier 3 units for a while and see how that works out. Anyway, a full wave of support units will cost you 828 gold and you have to spend 500 gold and 500 BP to unlock them. Comparable health but way more expensive than tier 2? I guess that's a reason to stick with some tier 2 units. And at a cost of 18.4 gold per second to send a full wave it's actually not viable with only level 1 mines.

The next tier up is even more extreme, with a cost of 1458 for a full wave. The level 1 mines can barely support a 513 cost! Almost tripling the price is right out, especially with the 750 gold and BP cost to unlock him. He does have more than double the health of the tier 2 wave, so you are looking at getting your money's worth out of him. Especially when your opponent's maze suddenly needs to deal twice as much damage as before! Getting these guys out and being able to spam them is a big deal and should cost your opponent a lot of gold on his towers, which should buy you some spare time.

The problem? A full set of level 2 mines will only generate 26.1 gold per second and sending full waves of tier 4 units costs 32.4 gold per second. You probably don't need to spam them on cooldown since they're pretty good, but if they don't win you the game then and there you're kind of stuck. You may have to take the time off to upgrade to level 3 mines at that point?

The way long games seem to end is someone unlocks the ultimate unit and sends a few of them out. I've lost after sending only 3 (you can max out at 5) because of how much gold I sunk into not winning the game. But I bet if I'd saved up a little more money and sent the full wave I would have won. What does it take to do that?

You need to unlock all the tiers of units, though by the time you're thinking about this you should have the support tier at least. I often don't get the 4th tier, but maybe I should be. Anyway, the cost for tiers 4, 5, and 6 combined is 3000 gold and 3000 BP. You may need to fully upgrade him, which is an extra 3232 BP on top. And then to send a full wave (which you have to spend other upgrades to unlock) is 8060 gold. So you need to have a huge stash of BP and then save up 11060 gold. At 26.1 gold per second you're looking at 423 seconds to save up that much cash. Alternatively if you have full level 3 mines you're making 43.2 gold per second and it only takes 256 seconds to save up the money. You can save 167 seconds by getting the level 3 mines. The problem is it's going to take 293 seconds to save up the money needed to buy the level 3 mines! (It will actually be a less since you don't need to save up the full cost up front here, and the extra miners you get along the way will do something. Just not enough!)

So it feels like if you're at a bit of an impasse and want to do something to break things open... You may be better off saving up for a full wave of ultimate units instead of getting more mines. I guess it depends on if you can earn the 6232 BP? The mines do only cost 1620 BP...

I think I'm going to try playing a few games with a focus on getting to full level 1 mines, then just work on spamming tier 2 units. At that point mines are probably better than tier 3 units, unless I think I can win with a few support units. And I'm going to try to avoid upgrading to level 3 mines. I'll try out the tier 4 units and then just save for what I hope will be one 'I win' push.

League of Legends: Game Recaps

A new feature made its way into the League of Legends client recently that I haven't seen announced anywhere. (Though, to be fair, I didn't look anywhere except the patch notes.) It's a pair of buttons on the game end screen which both take you to a webpage with information about the game you just played.

The game I just played, as Kayle, for example...

There's some really interesting stuff on here. It gives you the normal info like items owned at the end of the game, and the gold totals at the end of the game. But then it goes further and lists barons, dragons, and turret kills. It shows the bans!

IT SHOWS THE NUMBER OF WARDS PLACED!!!

AND THE NUMBER OF WARDS PURCHASED!

(I bought 0. I am terrible. The game as a whole bought 6 pink wards total. We're all terrible.)

Wow, it breaks down the jungle monsters killed by which side of the map they were on. The other team managed to kill a total of 4 monsters in our jungle. I actually placed wards a couple times to try to catch Singed at my golems, but he never went for them despite farming between the turrets.

It also has some graphs showing gold over time, and when various objectives were taken. So I can see that at the 14 minute mark the enemy team made a comeback. Their mid roamed bottom and killed both of my bottom laners and then their ADC killed our jungler and the dragon. We went from being up 4k to being up less than 1k in 2 minutes. It's a shame it doesn't also give a chat log, because I can remember at the time my team was raging at our mid for not indicating that Kat was missing from mid. Things really swung back in our favour at the 22 minute mark, when we aced the enemy team without losing anyone and got dragon.

You can also do a graph comparing individual champion gold totals. So I can see for example that in that 14-16 minute span their mid made 1.4k gold and my mid made 600 gold just obliviously farming away in lane. The graph makes it look like Gangplank was dominating Katerina in lane, but then he lost focus and let her get away to kill people in another lane without accomplishing anything in return.

Or if I look at my lane matchup, I see that I did a bad job. I fell behind in gold for pretty much the whole game. Part of that was two successful ganks from their jungler to zero from mine. (A couple failed ganks as well, and one 2v2 fight that we lost because my jungler wandered off right before the fight started and it ended up being a series of 1v2 fights. Oh well!

On the plus side, that ace for nothing at the 22 minute mark happened because I decided to protect Vayne instead of trying to do damage and managed to intervention her right when Kat jumped on her and then we were able to burst her out. If I'd wandered off to join the big fight happening nearby then Kat kills Vayne in 2 seconds, gets all her resets, and might well be able to wreck our faces.

I definitely feel like I was a weak link on my team, but I wasn't weak enough to cause us to lose. Hurray!

Tower Wars

One of the games I've had sitting around unplayed for years on my Steam account is Tower Wars, which was on sale pretty cheap on the weekend and which apparently recently added a co-op multiplayer mode. Snuggles noticed this and picked it up so we could give it a spin.

Tower Wars is a pretty decent tower defense game using one of my favourite tower defense twists... The monsters aren't generated automatically over time by the game. Instead you play against another player and spend money to generate monsters to attack the other player. This was one of my favourite styles of tower defense games to play back in the WarCraft 3 mod days. It gives an extra dimension to the game where you need to decide if your money is better spent on defenses or on attacking the enemy.

Tower Wars has two types of currency. Gold which you earn over time and by killing enemy units and battle points which you earn by having monsters alive in your opponent's maze. You spend gold to make more towers or to make more monsters to send at the enemy. You use battle points to make your monsters better. You use both to upgrade your gold income rate or to unlock stronger units.

Because of the way you earn battle points (having your units stay alive longer in the enemy maze) it turns out making your monsters better and unlocking stronger units both serve to generate more battle points. It also has the secondary effect of forcing your opponent to spend his gold on more defenses or causes him to lose the game when he dies. There seems to be a real snowballing effect here, where if you get ahead and keep spamming units you end up earning enough battle points to upgrade your units enough that your opponent is stuck spending all of his gold on towers to stay alive and can't spend any gold on units to attack you. This means he doesn't earn any battle points and it means you don't need to buy any more towers. An early lead feels like a guaranteed win.

On the other hand, an even game feels interesting. When do you spend time to upgrade your gold income? Is it better to upgrade your units or unlock better units? There's a tech tree for upgrades and one for units and the way you go will change what towers your opponent needs to build since shields are hard to damage except for a specific tower that seems bad if they don't have shields.

I rarely find myself in an even game. Most of the time it feels like I get blown out, or I blow my opponent out. It actually reminds me a fair bit of playing StarCraft 2. The actual game, not any mod. It feels like some people have actual build orders for each of the maps and I get ruined by their tempo when I just randomly do upgrades that make sense. Knowing how much BP to expect against your opponent and knowing how large a wave you need to send in order to get the exact amount you need right now is probably a very important thing to know in a game with such a snowball factor.

Multiplayer against the AI doesn't seem to have the build units aspect. Instead it seemed to be a pared down tower defense game with an added twist where a big dude would periodically show up and destroy towers or chunks of land. This would impact your maze design temporarily or permanently. I guess it's good that it keeps you on your toes but I didn't find it terrible interesting.

You can also play a game with up to 3 people on each side where each player has their own tech trees and such, but share the gold income. I played a couple of 2v2 games with Lino but the queue times were really long and the games were blowouts in our favour. I'd like to give it a try against not randoms at some point.

Overall the game seems pretty reasonable. Hurray for whatever random bundle it came in!

Bridge Match 3 - Board 1

Board 1 - Dealer North - None Vul

Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Excellent

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

East opens 1 diamond in second seat. I overcall 1 spade, which gets passed back around to East who makes a protective double, whatever that means. (Hovering over it seems to indicate spade shortness, probably to give her partner a chance to pass for penalty.) I pass and West bids 2 spades which apparently denies a spade stopper. East retreats to 3 diamonds. I feel like if partner has anything anywhere they could be going down, but I don't think I can bid again. So I pass and everyone else does too.

I lead the K of spades

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

West	North	East	South
	Pass	1♦	1♠
Pass	Pass	Double1	Pass
2♠2	Pass	3♦	Pass
Pass	Pass
1Protective
28-11 points, no spade stopper

K-5-4-2. So partner doesn't have a high spade. Noted. I'm not too worried about dummy setting up a long suit for pitches so I switch to hearts to try to set up a ruff or something. J-3-9-A. East plays a club. A-7-2-5. Then a heart back to board. 2-8-K-6. A heart back that I can ruff, but partner is actually winning it so I pitch a club. 4-T-5-8 of clubs.

Partner returns a spade, which I guess is a reasonable enough thing to do. 8-3-J-7. I guess I might as well see who has the 13th spade. A-T-6-6 of diamonds. Declarer then cashes a club and tries to ruff a club. I overruff with the T.

I'm now stuck with the last 2 spades and Ax of trump. I can give everyone pitches and finesse partner in trump, or I can go ace and out of diamonds and finesse him that way. I feel like partner has the outside suits covered, so drawing trump is probably right. They end up cross ruffing anyway. Down 1.

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

This ends up being a bad result for us. There was a NS pair that made 2NT, a NS pair that went down 2 in 3 spades, and every other board was EW playing 1NT. 3 of those went down 2, 2 of them went down 1. Our +50 was good enough to beat the 3 spade pair and tie with the 2 who set 1NT by 1. So we get 4 MPs.


Jack disagrees with my spade overcall. He thinks it's capped at 15 points and wants me to double with 16. I do agree that you should start with a double with a good hand but I'm not sure my hand is quite good enough. It's also very one dimensional, and I wanted to make sure partner knew to lead a spade if it came to it. He then disagrees with my pass over the double and wants me to eat up bidding room with a 2 spades bid. Finally he disagrees with my play at trick 2. He wants me to keep cashing spades instead of switching to a heart.

Ranking after board 1/60: 9/16 with 28.57%