Alfred vs. The Vast Romanian Conspiracy

Another thing I've discovered recently has been Travian, a real-time game that has started with Settlers and gone a very, very long ways away. Such as there's a bunch more warfare. Anyway, you start with a tiny little village and build it up into--you hope--a mighty empire. There's also trade, warfare, diplomacy, raiding, culture, and pillage.

I've been doing reasonably OK. I have a respectable little hamlet, as these things go. The trouble is that you're given a random starting location, and mine is in the thick of a large web of very large, well-established, and heavily-armed alliances--all of whom are populated by Romanians. New players (Hi!) are typically seen by longtime players (i.e., the Romanians) as an overflowing supply of natural resources. Such as the time I was recently overrun by a huge army (131 units to my 7), who thereupon carted off half of my accumulated supply of grain, iron, bricks, and lumber. Now, I can rebuild that army, of course. The Romanian solution: Send 100+ units into my territory on a reasonably regular basis.

In the final analysis, I think success at Travian (and similar games) depends largely on having a very high caffeine-to-life ratio. I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep up with this...although one of my fellow grad students at MSU knows Romanian...maybe I'll have her give me some messages to try to convince them that I, too, am Romanian and wish to join the Borg. That, or at least have her give me some Romanian swear words so I can hurl imprecations at them as I go down in flames.

A Foray into RPGs?

I recently stumbled across a combination miniatures ruleset-roleplaying game called "Science vs Pluck." Each of the players represents an officer in the British colonial army in the Soudan in the late 19th century, with the Umpire/GM playing the Mahdi, the forces of nature, other (rival?) officers, Cruel Fate, etc. As in life, the player-officers have numerous concerns. They have to plan the campaigns--including the logistical difficulties, manage their men on the march, lead them in battle, perform heroically, write up after-action reports deflecting blame elsewhere--and carefully grooming their reputation, both in the army and back in England. To that end, there are rules for promotion--and a possibility for a player to represent a war correspondent rather than an officer.

It's currently in its third edition, and is available here; a previous edition of the game is now "freeware" and can be had here. As of now, I only have the freeware version.

Now, the goal is to rope some folks into playing the thing...

What am I On About?

Whoof. It's been a long month-plus. I'm taking a little break from box-packing--I have to be mover-ready by the morning of the 26th, and I have a couple of hobbies that take up a little bit of space.

My first few weeks of State College--I went up to take possession of my apartment, get my academics straightened away, etc--went peacefully. I met some of my future classmates, who seem like good folks.

A couple of us went out to the batting cages, which I hadn't done in too long. We figured that, when you think about it, there really isn't that much difference between us, and a major-league ballplayer. I mean, our genes have to be 99.99-plus-percent the same, right? Thus armed with confidence, and quarters, we got a bat and headed for the cages. The 40 mph cage was broken. The 50 mph cage was inhabited by a little kid, maybe six or seven, who was making contact with some authority. Refusing to be upstaged, we chose the 60 mph cage. We didn't do so hot. Eventually the kid came out of his cage and started giving us some tips, which we maybe didn't take with all the grace it deserved. We've decided that there were several problems. First, the pitching machine was just wonky. The pitches were like sliders. Second, the balls had to have been a little lopsided. Who knows how the kid managed to connect five times as often as we could.

The biggest problem, though, was certainly our bat. We're on the prowl for better bats, ones that will allow our formidable natural skills to shine forth. As befitting my status as a mid-19th century US historian, I'm going with this bad boy.

One disappointment with State College is the game and book store situation. There's one (1) used-book store, and two game stores...across an alley from each other. And they're both kind of thin; games are a sideline for both. The game club seems to have gone home for the summer, and neither store seemed to have any idea if there was another group. Furthermore, both stores close at about 8 PM, which is distressingly early. (Gamers, in my experience, are rarely morning people. Unless you count 3 AM.)

In between my other tasks, I've decided to add to my language collection by picking up some Biblical Hebrew. It's an interesting challenge, since all my other languages are Indo-European, and have a decent number of cognates between each other. The impact of Old Norse on Biblical Hebrew is very slight.

One thing that's helped is iTunes U. Ever been there? There's a lot of admissions-office BS, but mixed among it is some free-for-download courses in various topics. Concordia Seminary, in my fair hometown of St. Louis, has its Elementary Hebrew and Elementary Greek courses up. They're not perfect, but more than worth the price (again, free).

Right now I'm trying to get a feel for the syntax and morphology, so I can be comfortable with the sentences. Vocab is less of a worry; there are dictionaries for that. Learning a language (for reading purposes), it's far more important to know which words in a sentence are nouns and verbs and adjectives, and what their roles are, than what the precise translation is--at least when starting out. (For conversational purposes, that's probably reversed.)

I'm also brushing up my Old French; one of the books assigned to me this coming semester is La Chanson de Roland, and the copy I have sitting around is in OF. Luckily, if you have Modern French and Latin, OF isn't so hard, especially if you learn the rules for pronouncing words.

As for games...

Coolest. Amusement Park. Ever.

The wonderfully-named Action Park.