Fourth of July!

KABOOM!

As is tradition around here I watched Independence Day today with my mother and sister before they went back to New Brunswick. It was the first time I watched the movie on Blu-Ray on my own tv (last year I watched it down at Sara and Duncan's theatre) and I was pretty impressed by how it looked. Much better than the regular DVD quality.

Independence Day is my favourite movie! Watching the White House explode will never get old. Never I say!

The Price is Right: Big Wheel

I was off in Ottawa for Canada Day and ended up catching an episode of the Price is Right in the hotel room. (I finished reading all the books I'd brought so I was left being bored and turned to daytime tv.) The first person to spin the wheel landed on 75 and paused to think if they should spin again or not. They decided to stop and Drew told them they'd made a good choice and hurried them over to stand under the sign. But it got me thinking... Did they really make a good choice? Or was Drew just trying to make the person feel good? 75 felt like it was probably just a really bad opening spin. Spinning again brings with it a guaranteed 75% chance of failure, but stopping gives your opponents 4 spins with a 25% chance each to beat you. Rough off my head math told me stopping was right, but your chances of advancing were not good.

There does have to be a point where it's right to spin again though... And now I need to know what that point is! It also feels like going 3rd is strong since you have more information, but just how strong is it going to be?

Start with the simple case... Player one busted out and player two is up. If you come up with a 50 or lower you need to spin again. If you come up above 55 you need to stop. (This is all ignoring any potential gain from the 1 in 20 chance of hitting exactly 1 dollar. I'm asserting the value of getting the showcase showdown outweighs that.) Starting with a spin of 70 or lower means you expect to lose even with proper spin again play. 75 is actually the first number that has a more than 50% chance to win! Overall it works out that player 2 will only win 45.76% of the time after player 1 busts out, which does mean a spin of 70 is better than expected since it will win 46.48% of the time.

I can use that information to determine player two's optimal play when player 1 spins low. Player two doesn't care who beats him, so even if player one opens with 5 into 5 and player two opens with 50 he should still spin the second time. I did some crunching and starting on a 75 is actually only slightly below expected for the first player, with a 28.42% chance of winning off the 75. Overall the first player is only 30.83% to win, so the 75 isn't all that bad. You should certainly stay on 75 (you only win 15.36% of the time if you spin again) and you should even stay on 70. 65 or lower and the first player should spin again, but the choices at 65 aren't very appealing. 16.05% to win if you stay, 17.86% to win if you spin. The best number to start with after the 70 is actually the 5. Because once you accept that you're spinning a second time you want to reduce the chance of busting. Even if you start on 5-5 that still has a theoretical chance to win where going bust is a guaranteed loss!

As far as the division of wins between the different positions assuming optimal play as defined on my sheet (which may be a little wonky in terms of if player three should spin when his first spin ties both other players) we have player one at 30.83% chance to win, player two at 32.73% chance to win, and player three at 36.45% chance to win. So there's a pretty significant edge in going last! Player one should spin at 65 or higher. Player two should spin when he's behind player one or when he spun at 50 or below. Player three should spin if behind, or if tied under 50.

Final Fantasy X-2: Female Protagonists

All of the Final Fantasy games that had a solid cast of characters (from the SNES age onward) have had exactly three female playable characters. The number of male characters varied between games but they strangely all had three female characters. Final Fantasy X-2 only has three playable characters so, of course, they are all female.

The character advancement system in the game is a job based system. Each of the characters earns points towards whatever job they're in when they take an action and those points get spent to unlock new abilities in that job. Unlike most of the other job system games you can't use abilities from one job while you're in a different job. (FFV and Tactics in particular had some pretty neat combos you could build up by combining a support ability from one job with another job.) The twist in FFX-2 is you can change between jobs in the middle of a fight. So you don't need your fighter to be able to cast white magic spells... If you need a white magic spell right now you can just turn into a white mage!

The different jobs are contained within spheres and the way you assign these spheres to the different characters is by adding them to a 'garment grid'. I can remember hearing about people being a little thrown off by this when the game first came out. Your job is tied to the clothes you wear? And you swap clothes in the middle of combat using a Sailor Moonesque transition scene? Some people just didn't like that. I didn't mind it at all, but I guess I've always played the female characters in games anyway and have a really easy time just seeing things as numbers and stats. I might find it interesting if the gambler job outfit looks the best on Rikku, but if my plan calls for Yuna to be the gambler and Rikku to be the white mage then that's just what's going to happen!

Many (most?) of the outfits are on the revealing side. In my playthrough this time I'm actually a little thrown off by the poses Rikku has taken in the black mage outfit. She sure likes to stick her butt out in ways that just don't look right. But on the plus side she's also throwing out Schwarzeneggeresque puns with each spell! (What's wrong, cold feet?  You're... fired!)

Some time ago I posted about trying out an MMORPG where every character was female and you could buy an item in the cash shop to remove your underwear. It felt weird, and it was pointed to me that agency would be a big part of it. Why are these women taking off their clothes? It turns out in the game you played as a male controller who issued commands to female robots so it was very much a case of them just doing what they were told by men and it really was as creepy as it felt. I think FFX-2 is very different from Scarlet Blade in this regard. The game is set on a series of tropical islands and skimpy clothes make a lot of sense for anyone to be wearing. (I went through the art book that came with the collector's edition and one of the things they talked about was how in FFX they made Yuna's outfit be a traditional reserved priestess style outfit while also having slits cut in the right spots for air flow because of the tropical climate.) Also, Yuna, Rikku and Paine are very much doing the things they do for their own reasons. Part of it is treasure hunting for the sake of treasure hunting. Part of it is trying to find clues in the search for Tidus. Part of it is doing what the leader of the Gullwings wants them to do (Brother, who I believe is Rikku's brother, but he's incompetent and seems to delegates all decisions to Yuna so far anyway.) But they are very much in control of their own actions. I guess the garment grid system isn't described in too much detail so it's possible the clothes they end up wearing were chosen by someone else? But since they're using the same spheres and grids but getting different outfits it probably has something to do with their own thoughts?

The bottom line is it feels like this is a game with all female main characters where they're actually the ones making decisions and being awesome. Hurray! I don't feel like I should feel bad for playing this game, that's for sure.

Magical Diary

I don't remember where I found out about the game Magical Diary, but it was on my Steam wishlist at the start of the summer sale. It went on sale, I picked it up, and I gave it a try over the weekend. It's a Japanese style life simulator where you plan out what you're going to do each day as you level up your various stats. The goal would typically be to use your stats to 'score' with a variety of anime caricatures.

The 'twist' here is that you're not playing a horny teenage boy. Instead you're playing as a teenage girl, and you're studying at a magical school. So the stats you're choosing to level up each day aren't being chosen solely by who you are trying to see naked right now. They're chosen to learn new spells which you can use to solve different puzzle exams. I'm sure doing well at the exams will help with dating certain people, but I failed almost all of them so I can't say for sure. And the goal is to get a date to the prom, not to have as much sex as you can. It's a refreshing change of pace.

The Steam user tags for the game are 'visual novel', 'dating sim', and 'female protagonist'. I went and looked through the list of tags and there's no corresponding tag for 'male protagonist'. Which isn't surprising, really, given the way games are developed. It does make me a little sad that it needs to be pointed out when a game is lead by a female. But then I think about how this game made it onto my wishlist and it was probably from a list someone put out of games with female leads... So it is certainly a needed tag to have. I just don't like that it is needed.

Anyway, I played the game through to the end once and it was a lot of fun. I've always liked life simulator games because they let me imagine what it would be like to have a life. And even with this game being set in a magical school it still seemed like the situations that were set up were reasonable, given the setting. Heck, I have an easier time imagining that I could have attended a secret high school for witches and wizards than I do imagining having had a 'normal' high school life with getting a date for the prom.

Definitely worth picking up this Steam sale, and I will play it again for sure. I'd like to actually pass some of the exams! And maybe my character won't turn out as basically an evil failure next time around. As my yearbook entry says, I'm plotting world domination this time!

Civ V: Great People Generation

Building your capital beside a river in Civ V gives you access to a building that provides 25% more great person points in that city. If you aren't beside a river then you can try to build the Hanging Gardens wonder to pick up the building. Otherwise you're out of luck. There's no other way to get that 25% bonus. There are a few other 25% bonuses you can get but those all stack with the gardens bonus.

My question is how much it actually matters. If you can get a 'better' city spot that isn't beside a river what are you giving up? Along a similar vein, how important is it to build the national wonder with the same bonus? How important is it to stack other buildings in the city with that wonder? Heck, how important is it to build an early wonder with great person generation built in?

I built an early pyramids wonder in my quick asynch game and 67 turns later I got a great engineer out of it. That let me rush buy another wonder (Angkor Wat) that I had no hope of building otherwise. It also came with a great engineer point, so after 67 more turns I could have had another great engineer! With no other source of great people I could have turned an early pyramids wonder into 2 more wonders for free!

Or is it actually for free? It turns out great people are generated in a bit of a weird way such that there is a cost to getting a great engineer. There's a system in place such that each subsequent great person of a given type costs more points to generate. The first great artist costs 100, the second costs 200, the third costs 300, and so on. The twist is the scientists, merchants, and engineers all share the same cost pool. So if you get a great engineer for 100 it bumps up the cost of your first great merchant to 200. Get one of those and now the cost of a great scientist is 300. If you hadn't picked up that engineer or that merchant then those 300 great scientist points would have gotten you 2 scientists, not 1.

This is a big deal because great merchants are garbage. Money is really good, don't get me wrong, but the sheer amount of stuff given by an engineer or a scientist is a lot larger than the amount given by a merchant. I guess if you have a game plan around a lot of money (diplomatic victory) then getting great merchants can be a good way to get some cash along with some city state influence. I guess the big thing is just to recognize what you're going to want and then try to avoid getting the stuff you don't want.

The other weird aspect of the whole thing is each city generates great person points for each type of great person for themselves alone. The points don't get pooled together between cities. So you can get yourself into a situation like I'm in where I have 4 cities generating 3 great engineer points and another generating 2. So I am making 14 great engineer points and if they were all consolidated I'd get a great engineer in 14 turns. Instead I'll get one in 67 turns. I will get one 67 turns after that, and then 67 turns after that. Consolidated I'd have to wait 28 turns, and then 42 turns. One of those things is _way_ better than the other.

Of course the tricky part is you can't just go and consolidate it all in one place. You can get a few great person points out of wonders but for the most part you get them out of specialists. I have so many cities making small amounts of engineer points because all of those cities and manning workshops in order to throttle my population growth while I deal with happiness issues. So I'm not really trying to get great engineers. I'm trying to get 0 food and 2 hammers! It is conceivable to imagine stacking wonders all of the same type in a city though, and then making sure that city ran the right specialists too.

But what about gardens? Considering how the costs of the great people escalates, do they even help much? How should I work such a thing out? The easiest is probably to look at the non-pooled ones first. Great artists, musicians, and writers can only have points generated from one national wonder so they're restricted to one city each. Let's compare the number of great writers generated from a city with different amounts of bonuses... Assuming you fill up the specialist slots you'll be making a base of 7 GPPpt. Here's the turn number after building the writer's guild where you'll get the Xth great writer.

	base	+25%	+50%	+75%	+100%
1st writer	15	12	10	9	8
2nd writer	43	35	29	25	22
3rd writer	86	69	58	49	43
4th writer	143	115	96	82	72
5th writer	215	172	143	123	108
6th writer	301	241	201	172	151
7th writer			267	229	201
8th writer				294	258

Going from base to +25% means you'll sometimes be even on number of great writers and sometimes be up a great writer. You're never going to get up a writer, at least not in the first 300 turns. And for the most part you're going to spend more time even than you are up a writer. On the other hand, if you get both a garden and a national epic and compare that to a city with neither and you'll get up a full great writer after 143 turns. What about if you do have a garden in both cities... How important is it to build the writer's guild in the city with the national epic? It's pretty similar to the first case. You'll never get up a full writer. You'll sometimes be ahead 1, and you'll sometimes be even.

Now, you are still getting something. Assuming you make a great work out of each writer you'll be up 168 tourism and culture over the first 200 turns when you compare base against garden. It's a 16% boost in culture and tourism.

But is that worth worrying about getting a garden? Well, you'll be getting the 168 tourism from the great writers but then you'll be getting a similar boost for great musicians. And for great artists. And you might get the boost for the pooled great leaders too, assuming you have a garden in a city with lots of specialists and/or wonders. Is your capital really going to have room for all those specialists? It needs 6 just for the artists/writers/musicians. Then to get even more specialists for all that other stuff too? Feels a little restricted.

You can definitely do it. A full tradition policy tree, a lot of food, maybe some internal trade routes... And if you're going to do it, you want it to be your capital, because of the monarchy policy which halves the unhappiness for people in your capital. And all those people will do good things for your science production too, so it feels really strong. It's not the only way to go, but it is a good way to go. If you do go that way you're going to want a garden. So I think if I'm going to be trying for a big capital I'm going to want to be on a river. Or I'm going to need to rush hanging gardens. The 6 food from the hanging gardens will help with getting a big enough city to run all the specialists, too!

My gut feeling is a 25% boost is nice, but it's not critical. But there are a bunch of them, and if you can stack up quite a few of them you do get a pretty significant bonus. I'd need to be getting a lot out of it to want to settle someplace that isn't a river with my great person city.

I can see building a city just for great people that isn't the capital. If I can't get my capital on a river and if I can't get the hanging gardens then founding a city somewhere else, on a river, and giving that city the national epic and all three guilds is pretty reasonable. You might even be able to stack an extra 25% boost in there by rushing a wonder with a great engineer or something?

But if I get a chance I will definitely keep trying to found my capital on a river. And I'm going to keep an eye on what cities have specialists in a market or a bank to try to cut down on my great merchants. I'd really rather get extra great scientists or engineers!

Bridge Match 2 - Conclusion

I wasn't sure what was going to happen when I went to play my bridge hand today, since I was pretty sure I've already played all 60 hands in the competition. It gave me a nice list of all 16 pairs by their percentage of MPs earned with Jack and I finishing on top with 63.33. Second place was only 56.31, so we won by a pretty substantial margin. High five, Jack!

As a reward for winning we got promoted out of Flight D and have moved up to Flight C. It then started up another round of 60 boards against presumably stiffer competition, if that's what I want to do.

I feel like I played reasonably well this time around but mostly it felt like we won because our opponents made some pretty big blunders along the way. I imagine that was part of being in Flight D, where the game forced the opponents to make mistakes every now and then to simulate playing against worse players. And I can't say I disagree with that tact... I played in a fair number of bridge tournaments at a local club with Andrew back before he had kids and I never walked away from a night feeling like we were awesome. But we did pretty well sometimes, and I remember feeling like we scored a lot of points those nights by snookering some poor old ladies with our crazy bidding. I remember one hand where I opened 3 clubs with 6 to the T and they just couldn't comprehend what was going on. Playing weak no trump almost felt like cheating! Other times the opponents would just hang themselves with mistakes and we'd get points by not stopping them from being insane. Of course the same is true in reverse, as there was the hand where Andrew didn't understand my cuebid and decided the best course of action was to pass, letting me play 4 hearts in their 9 card fit instead of making our spade slam.

I didn't get very many comments this time around, certainly not relative to the people commenting on my first match. But I guess a lot of the comments then were about how I was getting screwed by my partner being crazy and random and it's just not as interesting when I'm winning by the opponents being crazy and random. At the end of the day I like playing bridge hands, and I like having something short scheduled on the weekend, so I think I'm going to keep making a bridge post each Sunday. And while I'm tempted to go back to the IMPs format, this current one has a nice feel to it. Only 60 hands (I'll be done by next September!) and a sense of progression if I can play well enough to get promoted again! I may mull it over a bit more in the coming week, but I fully expect to start match 3 next Sunday in Flight C.

Talisman: Digital Edition

One of the games I'd had on my Steam wishlist for quite some time was Talisman: Digital Edition. It finally went on sale during the first day of the summer sale and I decided to give it a shot. Talisman is a board game from the 80s which is probably best described as a fantasy Monopoly with slightly more player choice than actual Monopoly. (You can move clockwise or counterclockwise each turn and you get a small number of rerolls to use over the course of the game but it's still just a roll and move game.) It has a lot of RPG elements where you level up and fight monsters and the like. I'd played it once or twice in high school with the Soulieres and have fond memories of the game. I'd also played it once or twice in University once I discovered that Watsfic owned a copy of the game but my memories of those were not nearly as good.

I suspect the difference is I was playing with a group of people who were used to playing strategy games where your success or failure depended a lot on the decisions you make. This isn't so much the case in Talisman, where if you go to town and roll a 1 you get turned into a frog which is a lot like being eliminated from the game except you have to sit around and pretend to keep playing. Also the characters were 'balanced' around making sense thematically and not at all around giving each player an equal chance of winning the game. So one of us got an overpowered character and won while Pounder got turned into a frog.

I definitely think there is a place for games where you roll dice and silly things happen. Tales of the Arabian Nights is exactly that sort of thing and I very much enjoy playing that game. But you need to recognize what you're getting yourself into and that particular gaming group was not looking for this sort of game at that time.

Anyway, the video game Talisman claimed to be a reproduction of the board game with AI so I wanted to give it a try. I have now given it said try and I regret the decision. The problem is the AI is both slow in taking their turns while not giving me information about what they're really doing. They'll draw cards and I won't be able to follow along what they're doing easily. Part of the fun of a game like this is the theme and the world and I just can't experience that against the AI. I also can't taunt the AI when bad things happen to them.

So really I'm left trying to play Talisman as a good game and it's really not a good game. If the AI randomly gets assigned the troll I might as well just quit since the troll is very likely to win even with the bad AI decisions. I can make what I feel to be good decisions but since there's so much randomness going on it ends up feeling like nothing I do matters. I'm sure if I played over and over I would win far more than my share of games against the AI because I am making marginally better decisions constantly, but it just isn't fun.

And when I have so many games waiting to be played it just doesn't make sense to keep playing something that isn't fun.

I probably should have seen this coming. I should have been able to remember enough about Talisman to know that I wasn't going to enjoy the game much against the AI. But I didn't really remember our games with the Watsfic copy until I'd played a couple games. (The troll showed up in game 2 and won easily.) Oh well. Live and learn! Not every game buy can be a winner, after all.

Steam Summer Sale

Apparently someone ran the numbers and found out that 37% of all games bought on Steam go completely unplayed. I suspect a lot of this has to do with the big sales Steam puts on a couple times a year. If a game you might want to play is on sale for a couple of dollars or 90% off how can you say no?

Personally I have 112 games on Steam and have ever played 41 of them. So I'm running at 63% of my games going unplayed. This seems pretty stupid! Only four of the games have over 100 hours played and two of those are free to play games! It feels like I should be playing some of the games I already own and are just sitting around instead of buying more games that go on sale.

And yet... I've already picked up 12 new games so far this sale.

Now, I don't actually need to get over 100 hours out of a game for it to have been a good buy. FFX needed to come in around that mark because I ended up spending over $100 for it, but when World of Goo was less than a dollar I only need like 3 minutes of fun out of it to make it better than going to a movie. So really I can believe that it was a decent gamble. Assuming I ever get around to even trying it, it'll be a great deal. So if I'll end up playing it for an hour even 5% of the time it's probably fine. More so if it ends up being good and I play it for many hours!

Some of those 12 games also came in bundles. I've always wanted to play one of the newer GTA games, especially after watching some speed runs of them, so getting 2 of them in a bundle for under $5 is just fine by me. I'll play one of them at least, and maybe both of them. A lot of my unplayed games actually came in a single huge bundle I bought several years ago. I definitely got my money's worth out of that bundle and if I end up playing more of those games it'll only get better and better.

So yeah... I'm sitting here with lots of unplayed games, but I still can't convince myself that I need to stop getting more games. I do need to play more games, to be fair, but the ones I'm buying are good candidates for that!

There's also this weird 'team mode' thing going on with the summer sale where you get randomly assigned to a team and then the team that scores the most points each day gets some bonus rewards. With 5 teams and 10 days it seemed like each team was going to win twice. The first five days all went to different teams so that all made sense. But the same team won days 6 and 7 and has a huge lead on day 8. So it seems like the teams weren't generated very fairly? It's a little annoying since I'm not on that team! Boo! Hiss!