Rescuing slaves in Kenshi, part 2

Sinkum (click the pictures to enlarge)

OK, this is the conclusion of my story (Part 1 is here). We're rescuing slaves in Kenshi, and now need to make our way south, through or past both the United Cities and the Holy Nation.

Note that both societies keep slaves. Both will eagerly capture escaped slaves. And the Holy Nation, at least, will attack non-humans on sight especially hates non-humans. (With the ex-slaves, I have two different species of non-human in my faction right now.)

My plan was to skirt United City territory on the west. I'd never been there before, but we'd seen a Hive Village just south of us. So far, the Hive people have always been peaceful. (I'm not sure why. I doubt if human beings have treated them well.)

When we got there, I left the escaped slaves hiding nearby, and the rest of us went in to trade. We were able to sell all of those skimmer claws, but they didn't have anything we needed. So we moved on,... into Sinkum.

As soon as we crossed into Sinkum, my guys started warning me about the dangers there. Apparently, this wasn't going to be simple. So I tried to stay just inside Sinkum, but not very far. We needed to head south, and I figured that our best chance was to stay near the border between Sinkum and the Great Desert.

That first night, we were ambushed by two heavy bandits. I don't know where they came from, because I didn't see them coming. And there were just two of them against 13 of us - 14, if you include the pack bull. But they were very tough.

Red, our pack bull ("Red Bull," get it?), in Sinkum

It was probably lucky for us that they focused on our pack bull at first. (I forgot to order the bull to stay out of the fight.) But after the battle was over, everyone needed bandaging, and we had to carry not just the pack bull, but also two of the ex-slaves we were rescuing. (Again, there's no magical healing in Kenshi. You can bandage people and splint their broken limbs, but it takes time to heal - more time if you can't sleep it off.)

So we slowed down - and started sneaking, which made everyone move at a crawl - and I tried to keep a better eye out for danger. Sinkum was clearly a dangerous place, but it still seemed like the best option. (For one thing, it wasn't sand dunes, so skimmers couldn't wait in ambush. There was a type of skimmer in Sinkum, but they appeared to be solitary, and they could be avoided.)

As we got further south, we started to run into canyons, which limited our options and made it hard to see what was coming. And there were both United Cities patrols and Holy Nation patrols (looking for each other, but we had to stay clear of both).

At Drin, a heavily damaged United Cities outpost, I finally gave up and decided to try the desert again. Partly, that was because of the scary cannibals we saw (luckily, they'd already captured their lunch - an unlucky slave they'd grabbed at Drin - and didn't see us). But when both factions have patrols out, it doubles the number of people we have to look out for. And it's just so much easier to see what's coming on the open desert, too.

So we stayed right on the edge of the desert and made good time for awhile. Then we reached the Skimsands near the mountains south of Okran's Fist. All we had to do was get across the mountains and we'd be in Holy Nation territory (not safe, but a lot safer than we had been!).

The first trail led directly to Okran's Fist, apparently. (At least, there was a wall with a guarded gate across the trail.) So we tried to get to the next one, further south. What a nightmare!

The dangerous Skimsands, looking towards the mountain pass

First, there was all sorts of traffic here - manhunters, slavers, mercenaries, bandits, and military patrols from both sides. Even worse, this was the mother lode of skimmers, apparently. I've never seen so many in one spot! (I had to reload a saved game once when my entire party was wiped out by a skimmer ambush. That was the only time, luckily.)

Eventually, I had everyone stay put, hiding in the sand dunes, while other travelers tripped the skimmer ambushes. The patrols were always a lot stronger than we were, so they'd defeat the skimmers and move on, at which point I'd loot the skimmers for meat (and ensure that they didn't get back up again).

At one point, Rebecca - one of the human women I'd recruited before rescuing the slaves - ran up to a huge Holy Nation patrol which had easily defeated a skimmer. She was intending to wait until they left, then loot the corpse. And normally, that would have been fine.

But the Holy Nation is a patriarchy which doesn't like women a whole lot more than they like non-humans. Usually, that doesn't affect us too much. Women just have to pretend to be submissive. But in this particular case, they got suspicious because she was in disputed territory - a woman in disputed territory, with no man keeping her in check. Clearly up to no good, huh?

Luckily, she was fast enough to run away and lead them towards a huge United Cities patrol, where the two sides began an epic battle (larger than I've ever seen in this game). She ran off a bit, started sneaking, and made her way back to the rest of us.

But we weren't going to survive there much longer. It was just too dangerous. So when a group of manhunters got distracted by dying bandits (just like the last time, they'd been ambushed by skimmers and now were going to be enslaved), we made a run for it.

The Holy Nation has some of the richest farmland in Kenshi

I sent my fastest character up the path through the mountain, to see if the way was clear. (Luckily, it was.) And I sent my second-fastest character to lure another skimmer out of the way. Everyone else, with fingers crossed, ran up the mountain path and across the border.

It was night by then, and there didn't seem to be anyone around. In general, Holy Nation land is a lot more peaceful than the rest of Kenshi, provided you're human and not an escaped slave or a heretic. We still had to keep our eyes open, but the rest of the journey was a piece of cake, compared to what we'd just gone through.

We stayed to the rough land on the east side of the mountain range, where there was unlikely to be much traffic. And we skirted a Holy Nation village in the middle of the night. Just as it got light again, we crossed the main road between Blister Hill and Okran's Shield, running south on a well-maintained road that seems to get no traffic at all except for bandits. (We avoided them.)

Technically, we were still in Holy Nation land, but not the populated part of it. There were a couple of ruins there - former Holy Nation mines, now completely destroyed - and I was able to leave our ex-slave recruits hiding in relative safety while the rest of us made a run to Blister Hill for backpacks and food.

When we got back, everyone loaded up with construction material looted from the ruins. At that point, my new recruits had only ten hours left, out of that initial 100 hours, to stay out of sight (at which point they'd be under no risk at all of being identified as escaped slaves).

So we headed further south, out of Holy Nation land and into the Border Zone, looking for a place to build a settlement for ex-slaves. (I've decided that my goal will be to rescue slaves - mostly from the Holy Nation, no doubt - and bring them back to build a new life with us.)

Lots of fun!
___
PS. We did start a settlement, too. Now, the Dust Bandit king is trying to extort money from us. It's just one thing after another! :)

Beginning to build the Phoenix Aerie, sanctuary for ex-slaves

Rescuing slaves in Kenshi

Phoenix Rising in the Great Desert of Kenshi (click pictures to enlarge)

Yeah, I don't blog at all, anymore. I certainly don't make game posts. But I had such a blast with my first attempt at rescuing slaves in Kenshi that I thought I would write it up.

Note that I didn't plan to write this, so I haven't saved any especially beautiful screenshots, even though the world can be really beautiful in Kenshi - especially for an indie game. So I'll just take a look at my saved games and try to come up with some illustrations here. (Note that all of the screenshots in this post were taken in the Great Desert. The terrain in Kenshi is more varied than this.)

I've written about Kenshi a few times previously. It's an open-ended squad-based game of exploration, combat, and construction on a arid, alien world devastated by environmental destruction and violence. (It's single-player, so you don't play with other people.)

I've been playing it off and on for three years, and it's been great fun, even though it's still in development. (The final part of the already-huge map is supposed to be finished early next year sometime.) But the game just gets better and better.

You start the game by creating a character. But this character starts off with no impressive attributes, no skills, nothing heroic at all. He's wearing rags and wields a crappy sword, and there is literally nothing in the whole world which can't kick his butt. A puppy would leave him bleeding in the dirt. (Admittedly, the puppies in Kenshi are pretty tough.)

And the only way you get better is by doing. You learn to fight by fighting. You learn to heal by healing. You learn to cook by cooking.

Your strength increases when you carry heavy weights or fight with heavy weapons. Your dexterity increases when you fight with light weapons and no encumbrance. Your toughness increases whenever you get badly damaged or even defeated in combat (assuming that you don't bleed out and die).

I don't want to talk about strategies here, but you start off staying near a town and just running everywhere, so that you get fast enough to escape from danger. (Again, you have to run in order to get better at running. The whole game works like that.) But you need to eat, too, and your starting money won't last long.

North Port at midnight

When you recruit other characters to join your faction (some will join you for free; others require a payment), they become no different from your initial character. Often, they start with some skills, but otherwise, it's exactly the same. Indeed, if your initial character dies, the game will continue as long as someone in your faction is still alive (or so I've heard, at least).

But you can play the game however you want. You can have one character or dozens (there's a mod which increases the maximum from... 30, maybe?... to 256). You can explore, just running away from danger. You can look for fights. You can trade. You can steal. You can even build a small city (and/or several smaller settlements). You play the game the way you want, and the only goal is whatever you decide for yourself.

So, anyway, I wanted to stick with just the one character and explore the world. It's huge, it really is. Even with part of the map unfinished, it's absolutely enormous! It's rather empty - this is a damaged world - and parts of it were much too dangerous for me to explore, but I tried to make a start at it, at least.

Then I decided that I really needed some help, so I recruited a few more people - just a handful. (They are pictured in the first screenshot at the start of this post.) And we continued to explore. But I got pissed off at what I was discovering. The Holy Nation is a bunch of bigots. The United Cities seems better, until you take a closer look. And both make extensive use of slavery.

It's funny, since this is just a game, but I absolutely hated seeing how they treated their slaves. And the Traders Guild nobles - who make their money off slavery - really pissed me off, acting as arrogant as rich, evil bastards can be. So I decided that my goal was going to be to free the slaves - some of them, at least. (I tried to steal from a noble, but... they've got a lot of guards in their homes!)

Eventually, we found ourselves near North Port, a slave compound far to the north, bordering the sea in the Great Desert, in United Cities territory. (This was a bad place to start, as it turned out. But it was lots of fun.) And I didn't really know how this even worked in the game. So I figured I'd just give it a try.

I waited until after midnight, but the gate to the encampment stayed open - and well-guarded. I wasn't expecting that, since I'd seen slave compound gates locked at night in Holy Nation territory. Here, I was able to walk right in, but it would be a lot harder to get any slaves out. (I left the rest of my team hiding outside, just west of the encampment.)

Starving North Port slaves at midnight, before my rescue attempt

The North Port slaves were still working, even in the middle of the night, but their overseers had gone to bed, apparently. In the dark, I was able to sneak around and pick the locks on their shackles. But other than their expressions of gratitude, nothing else seemed to happen.

Eventually, I realized that I had a bunch of slaves following me, sneaking along as I was. I figured that I'd release as many as I could, so if we rushed the gates, maybe the guards wouldn't be able to stop all of them from escaping.

But then I noticed that the guards had been pulled away from the gate by an attack of skimmers - giant, dangerous, insect-like monsters which inhabit the desert. This seemed to be a great opportunity to free at least some slaves.

I'd removed the shackles of ten or twelve slaves by then (it's hard to tell, because some slaves are so beaten down they won't even try to escape), and there were lots more. But I felt that I couldn't pass up this opportunity. So I led the slaves to the gate, all of us sneaking through the darkness until some of them were discovered, at which point we started running for freedom.

Most of the guards were still fighting the skimmers. Only two followed us, and both had been injured. Even so, they were much too tough for my squad to fight, but their injuries probably slowed them down. At any rate, after awhile, they gave up the chase, and we started sneaking again - heading west along the shore, through the sand dunes.

Note that my faction hadn't been identified as criminals. No one saw me unlock the slave shackles - a crime in United Cities territory - and although the guards chased after us, they were just trying to recapture the slaves. Either they didn't recognize the rest of us or they didn't connect us with the crime.

Of course, the world of Kenshi is dangerous enough even without the active enmity of the United Cities or the Traders Guild, but it would be far worse with it.

After awhile, one of the slaves expressed his everlasting gratitude and joined my faction. One by one, the others did that or simply ran off into the desert. Six of the slaves had stayed with me - three of them human and three of them Shek (which would become important when trying to get through Holy Nation land, because their guards will attack non-humans on sight).

[Correction: The Holy Nation people are bigots, and they hate non-humans, but they won't necessarily attack them on sight. Apparently, I was mistaken about that.]

The rescued slaves (disguised now, and well-fed) who joined our faction

They were all starving. Slaves are kept at the ragged edge of starvation specifically to make it difficult for them to escape. They had no skills at all, they were wearing slave rags, and they'd had their hair cut off to make it obvious that they were slaves.

Note that this is exactly the same thing which would happen to any of my characters if we were captured by slavers. We're just... ordinary people in the world of Kenshi, just like the NPCs. And now that the slaves had joined my faction, they were exactly the same as even my initial character. They were just skinny, slow, weak, completely unskilled, and really, really hungry.

I gave them food, but starvation is like injuries in Kenshi - there's no magic solution here. It would take time to recover from near starvation, and in the meantime, they'd eat a lot more food than normal.

And they were obviously slaves. For the next ten hours, anyone who saw them would know instantly that they were escaping slaves. (And even if they weren't recaptured then, that recognition would reset the timer to ten hours again.) So we really need to stay out of sight - not just from the slaver patrols and the manhunters, but from everyone. And that's not easy to do.

As the night went on, we continued sneaking towards the west, since I had a plan (not a good plan, as it turned out, but... well, I suppose we were lucky).

Sneaking is a lot easier in the dark, of course, but it's also harder to see people at a distance (one benefit of being in the desert). When it got light, we stopped sneaking - so we could run - whenever the way looked clear. Note that sneaking is very slow, especially with unskilled people, so we couldn't stay ahead of any slaver patrols coming from behind us is we didn't do anything but sneak. And the ex-slaves were quite slow even when running.

At one point, I saw a trader's caravan in the distance, so I ran off - just my initial character, who has become very fast - to buy some more food. Starving ex-slaves take a lot of food, and we were already getting low. The whole trip was very tense - trying to spot patrols, estimate where they were heading, and then attempt to avoid them - and we'd barely begun.

Crossing the Great Desert

After ten hours, though, my new recruits were no longer "escaping slaves." Now, they were "escaped slaves." The difference is that they wouldn't immediately be identified as slaves, provided I could disguise them a bit. And if they could avoid being recognized for another 100 hours after that, they'd be free and clear.

And that's when we had a real stroke of luck. We'd seen a small group of bandits traveling from the west, and I was hoping that they'd stay far enough from shore that they wouldn't spot us hiding there (while also hoping that they'd move quickly enough to clear the way for us to continue west before slaver patrols came up behind us!).

But then they were ambushed by skimmers. As I noted, skimmers are insect-like monsters which live in the desert. But they're especially dangerous because they can hide under the sand and then spring out to ambush you when you get close. And that's exactly what they did to the bandits.

The bandits fought back, and it was a very tough fight on both sides. At the end of it, all of the skimmers were down, along with all of the bandits but one, who limped off, severely injured.

Note that these were starving bandits, ragged people living on the edge, owning almost nothing. They didn't have any first aid kits, or the surviving bandit would have bandaged himself and his friends (not "healed" them, but at least bandaged to stop them from bleeding to death).

And note that none of them were dead, though most of the bandits were dying. Without help, they'd eventually just bleed out. The skimmers were a lot tougher. They were unconscious - and badly injured - but they would get back up again (and be almost as dangerous as they were before).

Bandits

But I ran over before that happened (just me, again). By taking even one piece of meat or claws from an unconscious skimmer, that would kill it completely. And I wanted them to stay dead! Besides, we needed the food (and the claws could be sold for money).

I was sneaking (my first character is very fast by now, and very accomplished at sneaking), so the surviving bandit didn't see me. Most likely, he would have continued leaving anyway,... except when I started stealing everything from his buddies.

Yes, I stripped all of them naked and left them to bleed to death in the desert. What can I say? It's a rough world. And I needed that stuff.

You see, that bandit clothing would help disguise my escaped slaves. I had them throw away their slave rags and dress in that bloody bandit gear that was probably just as ragged. But it made them look less like slaves. After that, there was only a 10% chance that a person getting a good look at them would recognize that they were escaped slaves.

Those aren't real good odds, given that we had six escaped slaves and that there might be a dozen people in any patrol we encountered. Slavers and manhunters are especially good at identifying escaped slaves - and they don't really care anyway, since they'll enslave anyone they can, regardless - so my new recruits were still at huge risk. But... step by step, huh?

Indeed, shortly after I ran back to my people, a group of manhunters saw the dying bandits and gleefully ran over to bandage them up,... and then enslave them. Well, it was that or death, I suppose. But I was very glad to see the manhunters head back east, carrying their new 'property.'

It was time to try to make our way south, through or past both the United Cities and the Holy Nation. (Just before we left, I saw a nomad caravan and ran up to purchase a pack bull from them. I could afford it, and I thought we could use it to carry stuff. As it turned out, though, I ended up carrying the pack bull myself, much of the way - plus everything it was carrying. Heh, heh.)
___
Note: This is getting very long, so I'll continue with the story in Part 2.

A Really Bad Day in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Yeah, these screenshots don't do the game justice. Sorry, but I didn't take any screenshots while I was playing, because I didn't know I was going to post this.

I haven't been blogging about games or books lately, although I've still been reading and gaming just as much as ever (if not more so). But I'm sick to death of politics, after what bigots and idiots (and bigoted idiots) did to our country last week, and I thought I'd post my first day of a new play of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

I've blogged about this game many times before. It's one of my all-time favorite games - which is really something, given that it's free, developed entirely by volunteers. Note that I'm playing 0.C Cooper, which is still the latest stable  (i.e. non-experimental) version of the game. But it has tons of content.

Cataclysm is a turn-based zombie-survival game. I set the options to my own preferences (no joke monsters, no skill rust, no NPC's - which tend to be annoying as hell - and extra character points), then usually pick the hardest starting scenario in the game.

Ironically, if I survive, that makes my character even more powerful. But I don't play long enough for that to matter much. I like the early game the best, when I'm struggling to survive. When survival seems assured, I stop playing or start a new character. But hey, those are just my own preferences. They don't have to be yours.

When the day began, I was drunk to the point of incapacitation, depressed, dying of an infection, and sick with the flu. I was naked, wearing only a wet towel, inside a city infested with the undead. And the house was on fire.

There was actually a zombie in the room with me, only a couple of steps away. [That's a first for me. I've never started this scenario with a zombie in the same room!] The door was only a couple of steps to my north, but my afflictions and the pain I was suffering had slowed my movements drastically. I would have died in the next few minutes, but for a chair which slowed the zombie just enough that I could get through that door and close it behind me.

[The hardest part of this "Really Bad Day" start is how slow you are. Until you heal up, you can't outrun anything (and you certainly can't out-fight anything, even if you weren't naked and completely unarmed). Luckily, zombies are mindless. They'll walk into lava if it's on a direct path to you. In this case, the lucky placement of that chair made the difference - and only just barely, even then - between death and at least a few more minutes of life.]

Zombies can break down doors, but it takes awhile. With the house on fire, the roof would collapse before that would happen. And speaking of which, I needed to get out of that house ASAP. The fire had started in the wall to my left, that same wall I'd just come through. Unfortunately, that was the same direction I needed to go.

I found myself in a large room - a combination living room, dining room, and kitchen - and there was no possible exit to the east. There were bedrooms to the north, but I could hear zombies behind the doors in that direction. So that left only west, through the smoke, as a possible escape route.

Luckily, the main door to the house was in that direction. However, I could see a second fire burning in the northwest corner of the living room. I had to get out fast, before the roof caved in. There was just no time for anything else.

So I plunged into the smoke, taking further damage (thus, slowing me down even more) and increasing my coughing. Admittedly, at this point, there was enough noise from the burning house that a little coughing wouldn't make much difference. But it would make it just that much harder to hide, assuming that I managed to escape at all.

When I opened the door and stepped outside, I ended up on a little patio at the northwest corner of the house, which was itself at the northwest corner of town. Walls on the south and east sheltered me from sight, and there wasn't anything but an empty field in view.

Of course, it was snowing, and I was naked, but you can't have everything, right?

Map: I started in a house in the northwest of that north town, then entered the two houses just north of that. Once I broke contact, I looped around counter-clockwise, west of that tiny subway station town, then southeast to the town with an office tower (T), ending up in a house at the northeast side of that south town, south of the mansion (M), west of the prison in the forest.

I walked west along that wall until I could see around the corner to my left. There was a pack of wolves to my southwest - and zombies closer yet (apparently drawn to the noise of the burning house). One of the zombies was huge, and another was... well, I don't know what it was. It was humanoid, but snow-white in color and with no eyes or nose, just a perfectly round mouth in a blank face.

[Note that, as many times as I've played Cataclysm, that's a monster I've only ever seen once before - and I avoided it then, too. So all I knew is that it was very, very scary-looking.]

Clearly, I couldn't go west. Maybe the wolves and the zombies and that... weird-looking horror would all fight among themselves, but I couldn't risk it, not as slow as I was moving! So I backed up, then moved north along the wall there, staying as close as the smoke would let me get.

There were zombies nearby to the east, and since I wasn't able to hug the wall and peer around it, they quickly spotted me. A grabber zombie, with long arms, was the closest, but there was a van in the street just a few steps to my north, and it wasn't smart enough to go around the van to get at me.

But when I went along the van to the north, with the grabber zombie mindlessly ripping apart the vehicle in a frenzied rage to get at me, I discovered another zombie, which shrieked loudly when it saw me, coming from the northeast. I don't know if that one had a few brain cells left, or not, but it came around the van to attack me. So I just entered the side door of the van and escaped out the back, still heading north.

The shrieker zombie saw me, but I went through a car the same way I'd gone through the van [and out the trunk, somehow], which put me just a few steps from the southwest corner of another house.

The door was to the east, but it was almost certainly locked. And there were more zombies in that direction, anyway. So I stumbled my way to the nearest window and smashed it with my bare hands. Then I leaped through the broken glass, cutting myself on the sharp edges, just ahead of that shrieker zombie, which had been delayed - but not very long - by my previous tactics.

That window wouldn't delay it very long, either - not even long enough for me to pick up a piece of the broken window to use as a weapon. But there was a bedroom door to my north, and I was able to make it there and shut the door behind me.

Luckily, there weren't any zombies inside, but there wasn't anything useful, either. Another door to the east led to a hallway, and I checked the rooms which led off from that: another bedroom, a kitchen, and a pantry. But I couldn't find any clothes or medicine. (I was hoping for a well-stocked bathroom medicine chest, but the bathroom wasn't in this part of the house.)

Before leaving, I quickly drank a coke and ate a cheeseburger I found in the kitchen. That was the only way I could carry anything, except in my hands (which I needed for smashing windows). But there was another house very, very close to the east of this one - close enough that I could probably cross the gap without anything seeing me. Things were looking up!

Of course, I was still naked (and drunk, depressed, infected, and sick), and it was still snowing. But it's funny how adrenaline and the prospect of being eaten alive can take your mind off the inconsequentials. :)

This time, I smashed a window on the north side of the house. (I was on the edge of town, so nothing but empty fields were in view in that direction.) I entered into a bedroom, and although I could hear zombies in the south part of the house, the bedroom door was closed.

There was another bedroom to the east, and I finally found some clothes there: winter boots and gloves, a hoodie, and a raincoat that actually fit. (That last was very welcome. It was early spring, and I knew that the snow would turn to rain as the day went on. Nothing like being wet to put the capper on a really bad day...)

OK, I was still naked below the waist. And if you want to talk shrinkage, try being freezing cold, sick, and seriously injured, while being chased by zombies. Luckily, there wasn't anyone to see my embarrassment. (I don't think the zombies cared, one way or the other.)

After that, I snuck back out the window and headed north, only to discover a giant, pink crab-like monster fighting a zombie dressed in tattered military gear. I didn't wait to see how that turned out (though the zombie was clearly out-classed), so I turned around and ran - or hobbled, really - west. There was a science lab and a hazardous waste sarcophagus to the north, but neither would have done me any good, even if I could have gotten to them.

So I went west, into the open field, then south when I was far enough outside of town. After awhile, I came back east to loot a house on the outskirts - and finally found a pair of pants! - but there wasn't much else inside, not even enough to fill up the pockets of my hoodie.

There were a bunch of non-animate dead bodies outside the house - they looked like scientists - and some weird blob-like creatures. There were lots of zombies further east and southeast, so I turned around and headed west again. I had to skirt a large hotel and a megastore that were absolutely packed with zombies, and then squeeze between a couple of slime pits filled with more of those weird blob-creatures.

But eventually, I found a gas station, where I could grab some snacks. I ate what I could, since I couldn't carry very much, but it was very close to the forest, and I had to sneak out the back to avoid a bear which had become enraged.

As it turned out, there were lots and lots of bears around - and moose, too. There was only one direction I could go - southeast - and even that was quite difficult. In the distance, directly to my east, there was a subway stop, surrounded by a few buildings, but I couldn't even get close to it. Face it, I couldn't have outrun a bear or a moose even if I'd been healthy. As it was, I was just very, very glad to avoid their attention.

The next day, I moved into this mansion.

Eventually, I came upon another town that was directly south of the first one. I got inside a house on the northwest side of town and found a few more clothes (it was still very cold outside), but then a bunch of zombies spotted me through the window.

I couldn't outrun them, but I had a head start, so I jumped out a south window, then ran around to the back and entered the house again from the west (where I'd initially smashed a window to get inside). I closed an interior door behind me and slipped out a north window, leaving the zombies happily smashing their way through the house.

Luckily, zombies are mindless. If you use your brain - and you're not surprised in the middle of nowhere, without many options - you can usually confuse them and lose them. Of course, in town, there are a lot of zombies, so you might just run from one bunch of mindless predators to another.

Again, I had only one direction I could go - this time, north. So I skirted the north side of town (too many zombies to loot any of the buildings there) and ended up in a house on the northeast corner, with a mansion off to my north and a prison to the east.

This time, nothing spotted me, and I was able to close the drapes on every window. Better yet, I found a well-equipped first aid kit in the bathroom, so I was able to treat my infected wound. [The infection is fatal if left untreated for too long.]  It was mid-afternoon, so I'd sobered up by then, too.

But I was still sick with the flu (although I'd found some cough medicine, at least), and I had nothing to kill the pain, not even aspirin. I hadn't found a knife or a backpack or a flashlight. I'd picked up a rock, which I wielded as my only weapon. Not that I was in any shape for a fight, anyway.

Still, I'd found a few snacks and a bottle of lemonade. And nothing was trying to eat me right this minute. There were even a few magazines inside - Cosmopolitan and Sports Afield, to be precise. But it was pouring rain and too dark to read, and when I tried out the bed, I couldn't sleep either.

So I explored a couple of nearby homes and found a backpack! Finally, I could carry stuff. I didn't find much else, but I made a crude knife out of a stick, a sharp stone, and a piece of string (not for fighting, but for crafting).

Finally, I went back and tried to sleep again, but I was too sick. I kept throwing up, which just made me hungry and thirsty again. When it got dark, I cleared out a nearby grocery store, finding a shopping cart with wobbly wheels to carry everything. Still no medicine, unfortunately.

I tried exploring a couple more houses, too, and I almost died stumbling into a dark basement filled with zombies (still no flashlight, either). Luckily, the zombies weren't smart enough to do anything but stumble around in the dark themselves, and they made enough noise to mask my own movements. So I escaped with deep scratches and torn clothes.

I headed back to the house I'd found (still zombie-free) and tried to sleep again. After a few tries, and numerous fits of vomiting, I finally got to sleep, and when I woke in the morning, I was no longer sick. I'd survived one really bad day in the zombie apocalypse.

___
Note: I'm not sure if I'll continue with this or not, but the rest of my game-related posts can be found here.

All about that base - Star Wars parody

You know, I'm really not a huge fan of Star Wars. So why do I keep coming across these musical parodies?

This one doesn't have Princess Leia, but it's still a lot of fun, don't you think?

Cataclysm: a very bad day, with zombies

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a free zombie survival game, developed and maintained by volunteers. Yet it's become one of my all-time favorite games. Every year or so, I'll install the latest version and play it again. (See my previous posts here for the details.)

I've been playing it a lot in recent weeks, but I got to the point where my character didn't really need anything else to survive. By that point, he was highly skilled, with good weapons, tons of useful items, and several secure hideouts.

Note that the gameworld is procedurally generated and nearly infinite in size, and there are many, many dangerous locations, even for an advanced character. And the content is just incredibly varied. I had all of the equipment I needed, but not even close to everything the game has to offer. And after years of play, I've never even seen most of the special locations in the game.

But I had all I needed to survive, and from a role-playing perspective, I couldn't see putting myself at risk for no reason. I'm a role-player. Why would I do something like that, in a zombie apocalypse? Well, I always get this way. The early part of the game is always more fun for me.

You see, a zombie survival game is all about a desperate struggle for survival, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead does that perfectly. You start out with almost nothing and with few, if any, skills. With the default start, you're not immediately at risk, but you're forced to put yourself in harm's way in order to survive.

After all, you won't survive without food, clean water, warm clothing, shelter, weapons, tools, and other items. And the vast majority of those critical necessities are found in buildings, usually in towns, and that's where the zombies are. (There are other dangers elsewhere, but this is the main issue at the start of the game.)

Hunger and thirst will kill you just as surely as zombies will, if not as quickly. So you have to explore. You will not survive without taking risks. That's the brilliance of the game.

And nearly everything is useful. (I admit it, I love loot in role-playing games!) At the start of the game, in particular, you need everything. You may not be able to carry what you find - one critical necessity at the start of the game is to find items to increase your carrying capacity - but nearly everything can be used (often to craft other items).

But towns are very dangerous for a beginning character. You're a mouse in a roomful of cats. If you find a weapon, even an unskilled character can probably destroy a lone zombie (at least, if it's not one of the more dangerous types). But if you're injured, pain will slow you down. And a mouse that can't run away from cats may find himself in big trouble, especially since the house is full of cats, and if he hopes to survive at all, he can't stay away from the litter box.

Anyway, I reached the point where my survival seemed assured, unless I started exploring very dangerous places for no real reason. And that didn't sound appealing, because it didn't seem to make sense. Of course, I could build a cabin in the forest or along a river and spend my time hunting and fishing. I could even start farming.

All of those things, and more, are possible, but... just didn't appeal to me. I love the early part of the game, where survival is a desperate struggle against hunger, thirst, the elements, and pretty much everything that moves in the game. So I started over in a new world.

This time, I chose the Very Bad Day scenario, the most difficult beginning in the game. My character started out drunk "to the point of incapacitation," depressed, with an infected injury, and sick with the flu, wearing only a wet towel (the Shower Victim profession) in the middle of a city full of zombies.

Note that it's also freezing cold,... and the house is on fire.

Note that I'm no longer drunk or sick here.

I started in the living room of a house, and the fire was small. But I'd had previous experience with fires in Cataclysm! The nearest door - to the kitchen - was only two steps away. I made it through the door, but before I could even close the door behind me, the ceiling of the living room caved in. Yeah, you don't want to mess around in a house that's on fire!

At first glance, there was nothing in the kitchen, but I didn't even bother to check the cabinets. My wet towel didn't have any pockets, anyway. The door to the bedroom was nearby, so I went that way, and on my way to the north window, I found a robe.

Funny, but I don't ever remember seeing a robe in this game before that, but even after playing Cataclysm for years, I'm still finding new items. In this case, a robe was far better than a wet towel, both for warmth and because it had pockets. So I quickly slipped it on, although fire was already eating through the east wall of the room. No time for anything else, so I opened the north window and jumped out.

Most homes in this game have (open) curtains on the windows, but the curtains in this house had been closed. Thus, although I started in a town full of zombies, they couldn't see me until I left the house. They could hear the roof of the house collapsing, though, and noise will also attract them. So will scent, though I'd just taken a shower. Heh, heh. (Actually, my character had the Weak Scent trait, so I was harder to track that way.)

I needed to get to the edge of town, but being drunk, depressed, injured, cold, and sick all lowered my movement speed. Until I recovered, anything would be able to catch me. And that low movement speed - even more than my complete lack of a weapon - meant that I'd have no hope of fighting anything, either. I wasn't just a mouse in a roomful of cats, I was a slow, weak, sick mouse in a roomful of cats.

But luck was with me - remarkable luck, in fact. There weren't any zombies to the north, and only a couple of zombies even saw me before I made it to the nearest house in that direction. As slow as I was, I could smash a window and dive into the house before they got there, then close an interior door on the pursuit. (Zombies can smash through a window fairly quickly, but it takes longer to beat down a door.)

And there were useful things in that house - boots and clothing that actually fit me, for one thing. I moved through the house, looting what I could, then slipped away to a neighboring house, where I repeated my actions. Each time, when I spotted a zombie - one time, inside the very house I was looting - I was able to close a door on them and gain enough time to escape.

My luck was just unbelievably good. I made it to the north side of town without any zombies following me and with a remarkably good start on equipment - all of the clothing I needed to keep from freezing to death, plus a backpack full of food and drink. And a needle and thread, and a steak knife, and several magazines with sewing and cooking tips. (Let me tell you, sewing is a critical skill in the zombie apocalypse, and cooking is quite important, too.)

I was in a house with no zombies, on the edge of town, and I could finally relax. My infection had even healed up. Remarkable luck. Only,... I wasn't tired, so I couldn't sleep. Otherwise, I would have slept until I was sober again. And the weather had changed to thunderstorms, so it was too dark to read my magazines.

But there weren't any zombies around, that I could see, so I decided to try for the house to my east (also on the edge of town). Bad mistake! Halfway there, a moose killed me.

Moose aren't normally hostile unless you get too close to them. But this one had apparently been fighting zombies. They're big, they're strong, and they're fast. Even if I'd been healthy, I wouldn't have been able to run away from it. As it was, there was just no chance. And no chance to kill it, either, even if I'd had a better weapon. (I'd picked up a stick.) I was just dead. Game over.

Oh, well. Twice more, I tried that Very Bad Day start, with results more like what I expected. Both times, I was killed before I'd even made it to the next building. I was just too slow to get away from anything that saw me.

True, I didn't die immediately, in either start. There were wrecked cars nearby, and zombies aren't smart enough to go around obstacles, so I avoided them for awhile. But I was surrounded by zombies, and I couldn't get them all smashing into a vehicle. Not for long, at least. Not long enough to get to, and into, a house.

When I tried a fourth start, it seemed at first to be just as hopeless as the previous two. I did make it to a neighboring building, but there was just nothing there. In fact, even after the second house, I was still wearing my wet towel (and it was snowing). There was a business very close to my north, but the windows were barred, so I couldn't go that way.

I'd started right in the middle of the city, too. On the map, I could see the outskirts of town to the east and the west, but they were equidistant, with a lot of buildings in between. There were zombies on all sides of me, and no other building was even close. It really looked hopeless.

A mansion, with my stash of loot. (Note that these three screenshots are from later in the game, since I keep forgetting to take screenshots as I play.)

I wasn't willing to give up without a fight, though, so I tried to lure zombies into the house with me, then escape from a different room (closing the door behind me). That worked for a couple of the zombies, but not all of them. I was just too slow.

But I did make it to some vehicles in the street and, again, I tried to lose them that way. There were two vans (neither one drivable), but when I moved into the back of the first one, I discovered that it was a mobile meth lab - with some low-grade meth already prepared! Ah, aren't drugs great? :)

Yes, meth has dangers even when you're healthy, let alone when you're already drunk, sick, and infected. But zombies were going to eat my brain, so what did I have to lose? So I ate some and doubled my speed. (Admittedly, that was from an unusually low level, but I ended up half again as fast as I would have been fully healthy.)

Now I could run away from everything - at least, for a time. Certainly, I could make it to the next house, and then the one after that and the one after that. I didn't find much - I was still having quite poor luck in that respect - but I was alive. And I made it to the edge of town, then lost the zombies following me as I ran into the open field to the west.

I was still freezing. And as I started to come down from that meth high, I became completely exhausted. I went south to a house on the outskirts, hoping to be able to rest there. There was a zombie - a 'boomer' - inside, and I still had no weapon (or any ability to use one). But the meth hadn't completely worn off, so I was fast enough to stay away from it. I lured it outside, away from the town, and threw rocks at it until - finally - it died.

I was still drunk, still sick, and still injured (though I'd disinfected my wound), and with meth withdrawal on top of that, I thought I'd pass out before getting inside the house. Despite my exhaustion, I could only sleep for a short while before hunger woke me. I ate everything I had, tried to sleep again, woke hungry again, and explored the house for anything I could eat.

I was still exhausted when I woke the next time - again, because I was starving - but it was night. So I went across the street and looted a couple of houses for food (luckily, without encountering any monsters). I ate what I found, slept again, and the next time I woke, I was only 'very tired,' not exhausted. Of course, I was hungry again. (Mostly, that was because of meth withdrawal, I suspect. But my character also has the Heavy Eater trait, so he needs more food than most characters.)

It was still dark, and I was able to loot a grocery store this time. It was a very small grocery store - disappointingly small, in fact. But in addition to food, there was a shopping cart there, only slightly dented. So I could haul everything I looted.

I went back to bed after that - it was lucky nothing found me, especially since I'd smashed the window beside the bed in order to get inside - and slept until morning. I was sober. I was straight. I was healthy. Even my flu had gone away (and usually, flu hangs on like... well, the flu).

In effect, I was in the same situation as a normal starting character. OK, I did have a shopping cart. And a few other items, too. It wasn't that bad. But the only way I kept from freezing was by wrapping the blanket around me as I slept. And I couldn't use most of the stuff I'd looted from the grocery store, not yet. (Raw macaroni doesn't make a very good meal.)

I was still unskilled and poorly equipped. Yet, the difference was just incredible! I could move again. I could run away, if I had to. And I was on the edge of town - a very large town - so I had lots of options. Well, assuming that a moose didn't attack me, or a cougar, or wolves. But although the countryside isn't safe, it's usually a lot safer than cities.

Yesterday had been a very bad day, with zombies. Today? Well, today still had zombies, and it was still cold, and I wasn't at all prepared to take on the world,... but I was optimistic. I was sure I could survive the day, and that made it a heck of a lot better than the previous day. :)

I love this game!
___
PS. My other posts about Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and other computer games, are here.

"New Dawn" by Chris Hechtl

(cover image from Amazon.com)

As I noted awhile back, I'm not even attempting to keep up with this blog, except as I encounter interesting content that's very easy to post (mostly video clips). In particular, I haven't been posting any book reviews lately - and I've been reading some very good books, too. Oh, well.

However, I just have to talk about New Dawn by Chris Hechtl. It's a self-published science fiction novel available for download at Amazon.com, the first in his Wandering Engineer series.

I stumbled across it at Amazon.com - at this point, I'm not sure how - and read the beginning free, on-line. It was such a train wreck that I just had to buy it (only $2.99) to see how bad it could really be. And I ended up reading the whole thing in one day. Heck, I might even buy the sequel, although this might be the worst book I've ever read. (I'll explain that in a minute.)

At the start of the book, a fleet admiral in the Federation navy - an engineer par excellence - has been in stasis for more than 700 years, when a ship finally discovers his escape pod and takes him aboard (shades of The Lost Fleet, although this is quite a different book).

The Federation has been obliterated, but so has their enemy, apparently. Both sides started out destroying inhabited planets and ended with causing stars to go nova, wiping out entire star systems (including Sol system, but many others as well). Now, 700 years later, there are people still alive on some planets and on a space station or two, but in most cases (on the planets, at least) they've lost their advanced technology.

The ship which picks him up was originally a Federation fleet repair and supply ship (ideal for an engineer, of course) which struck a mine during the war, then was holed by enemy action, abandoned by the crew (who destroyed the computer, per Federation rules), drifted as a derelict for 700 years while being struck by asteroids, and then was reclaimed as salvage by the woman who's now captain. She and the rest of the women on board use it as a trading vessel, flying between isolated star systems. (Somehow, after all that, it's still a working starship.)

Yes, I said women, because the crew are all women (except for the male doctor they kidnapped from one of the planets) - all young women, except for the elderly captain - all young women wearing sleazy outfits they got from a whorehouse (literally; their clothing was salvaged from a whorehouse) - most of them just... incredibly ignorant. None of them even know what a computer virus is, for example, and some can't even read.

Yet, somehow, these astoundingly ignorant young women are flying this salvaged bucket of holes from star system to star system as traders. The whole thing is a complete wreck, inside and out, and when the engineer is picked up (that's what they call him much of the time, just "the engineer"), they've taken fresh damage from a pirate - damage to their hyperdrive system, so they can't escape. (The first thing he does is fix that. No problem, right?)

Most of these women act like teenagers from a bad 1950's sitcom. Yeah, they wear porn outfits, but they giggle and blush at everything. I'm not kidding. They blush when talking about taking farm animals to another colony for genetic reasons - and it doesn't get any more specific than that, either. Just the phrase "limited gene pool" - in regards to livestock - makes them blush. Heck, they blush when they flush a toilet, too - not when they've been using it, but just to test that it's working again after repair! It's like a parody of a bad 1950's sitcom.

Even the man is like that, often enough. For example, when explaining how a straightjacket is worn, he hesitates before mentioning that one strap goes between a woman's... legs. (I was surprised he didn't say "limbs" instead of "legs," like a proper Victorian.) But the women are the worst. They giggle and blush whenever he's around - except for the few who want to kill him. It's just the dumbest thing.

I might point out, as a reviewer at Amazon.com did, that these people seem to use the equivalent of Windows XP in their advanced starships in the distant future. And with a screwdriver and a wrench, a good engineer can fix anything. (OK, admittedly, he's got replicators, once he fixes them.) But it's the ship full of young women in sleazy outfits, sighing over the wonderful man who knows everything (would you believe that he's also a black belt in martial arts? yeah, you expected that, huh?), that's really bizarre.

I had to buy this book just to find out if he was going to make himself king, with his own ready-made harem. But in fact, the book is much too prudish for that. There's no explicit, or even implicit, sex, except for some implied lesbian relationships. In fact, the heroic man seems to be made of stone, with all these giggling girls flirting with him. He's a young man, too - very young for an admiral, certainly. But he barely even notices their revealing mini-skirts, skimpy halter tops, and French maid outfits. For the most part, the sexual tension - such as it is - is entirely a matter of giggles and blushes (of which there are far too many).

But there's more. I would swear that no one actually read this book before putting it up for sale at Amazon.com. No one. Certainly no editor. But it wouldn't have required a professional editor to improve things, because I'm convinced that no English speaker could read this book without becoming exasperated at the abundant spelling errors in it.

For example, there's a morale officer on the ship, and frequent talk about the morale of the crew. But almost always, it's spelled "moral." (After awhile, that was like fingers on a blackboard for me.) "Quite" is invariably spelled "quiet." He uses "to" for "too" - and vice versa! He uses "their," "there," or "they're" just... randomly, it seems.

Those are just a few examples, because those kinds of errors are on every page of the book. Heck, I noticed more than one per sentence, sometimes. It's like the author dictated this to a speech-to-text converter but then never bothered to actually read it afterwards. And clearly, no one else did, either. Now, I don't mind occasional errors, especially in a self-published book. We all make mistakes, after all. But this could well be a parody of self-published books. It's pretty much all error.

The paragraph divisions seem to be made randomly, too - at least, during conversations. Frankly, it's a very good thing that the hero is pretty much the only man on the ship, because it would be even harder to know which person was talking without knowing who "he" had to mean. Honestly, it's just ridiculous. I've never seen a book so desperately in need of editing.

There are other problems, too, but they're hardly worth mentioning, given all this. I mean, yeah, the women are mostly indistinguishable - except for the elderly captain and the woman who wants to kill him, at least. All of the other young girls whom he trains to become skilled engineers just kind of blend together. You don't really need to keep their names straight (luckily for me), because it doesn't matter in the slightest.

But do you know what the biggest tragedy of this book is? It's a good story. The idea behind it caught my interest right away (of course, I always did like classic SF with an engineering outlook), and the story is actually entertaining. I wouldn't have read the whole thing, otherwise. Indeed, as I say, I'm tempted to buy the sequel, just to see what happens next.

That's why I said that this is the worst book I've ever read, because I did read it. If it hadn't been entertaining, I would have stopped long before finishing it. I've certainly done that with other books.

But this is also a story where I was either cringing or groaning or rolling my eyes at... well, everything. You can't read even one page without being completely exasperated at how juvenile it is or how poorly it's constructed. There's a very entertaining book in here - somewhere - but you pretty well have to imagine it yourself, because the author certainly hasn't given us that book.

I said that this was a train wreck, and that's exactly what if feels like. Reading it, I felt rather ghoulish, like I was an eager spectator at a train wreck, both fascinated and repelled at the same time. This is the most... astonishing book I've read in years, maybe ever. But it's not astonishing in a good way, unless you consider it to be astonishing that there's an entertaining story hidden in this mess, disguised almost beyond recognition.

As you can probably tell, I'm still astonished by the thing. This author seems to be a natural storyteller, but his book-writing skills are severely lacking. I hope he never reads this review - I'm not that cruel - but if he does, I want to encourage him to keep writing. Seriously. He's got talent. He just doesn't have an editor. And he desperately, desperately needs one.

___
Note: My other book reviews, such as they are, can be found here.

"Portal" by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor

(cover image from Amazon.com)

Portal (2013) is the third, and presumably final, volume of a SF trilogy by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor. (The other two books in the series are Boundary and Threshold.)

In my review of the latter book, I noted that I enjoyed both volumes, but I kept thinking I should have liked them better. The story was great, but I found the characters less than completely appealing. And that's probably why it's taken me awhile to get around to reading this one.

But Portal is the best of the three, and a fine conclusion to the story. Partly, that's because it's not really character-based (so the characters aren't especially important in this one), and partly, it's because it starts in desperate circumstances, with a dozen characters marooned on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter.

I thought the first two books started slowly - mostly because the characters never really grabbed me. But in this case, we already know the characters, and the focus of the book is on survival. Right from the start, they're in a great deal of danger, stuck with a wrecked ship on a hostile moon.

Another reason why I liked the book is because it reminded me - in a good way - of the classic science fiction of decades ago. The survivors are mostly scientists, and they have that same "can do" attitude of capable engineers which I always enjoyed in classic science fiction.

If there's a problem, you know they're going to find a solution. They're all very capable, they use their training and their minds, and they never give up. I like that!

No, I never object to capable characters. I like capable characters. My problem with the first two books was that they didn't seem particularly appealing - all being super-achievers without any significant problems at all. Indeed, they were so perfect at everything, they were almost supermen. (Why couldn't a superior engineer be a bad cook? Joking about the food would have at least made them seem human. But no, they're gourmet cooks, too.)

But that doesn't come up so much in this book. After all, we already know the characters. (Admittedly, I had a little trouble remember who was who, since it's been three and a half years since I read Threshold, but that wasn't particularly important.) And the fact that they're very capable at their jobs just makes sense. In fact, it would have been hard to believe if they hadn't been superbly capable in their own specialties.

And the characters were appealing in this book not just because of their "can do" attitude, but because, as scientists, they never stopped doing science. Even in desperate circumstances, they couldn't all stay busy all the time. And they were stranded in a location where no human being had ever been before.

So of course they're going to want to investigate. Scientists want to learn. They were all smart enough to understand priorities, but while working on the solutions to their immediate problems, they still wanted to do scientific research. That kind of attitude did make them appealing.

Madeline, the intelligence agent, was still pretty much an unbelievable super-hero, but I could shrug that off. And of course they're going to succeed, they're going to survive - most of them, certainly. That was never in doubt. It is fiction, after all.

But it was great fun watching them do it. Furthermore, the book - indeed, the whole trilogy - was fundamentally optimistic. This isn't just a survival story, but a story of discovery, too. Could our solar system have such wonderful surprises waiting to be discovered?

Well,... probably not. But the possibility is always there. And with science, with new technologies, and with determination, we could find out. The journey will be valuable enough in itself, whatever we discover.

___
Note: My other book reviews are here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: smarter than the National Review

Actually, I wanted to post this video, or one like it, of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Maher discussing the recent cover story about Tyson in the National Review, "Smarter than Thou."

Unfortunately, HBO seems to be pretty aggressive at keeping their material off YouTube, so the video clips don't last very long there.

It's a great clip, though, if it's still available. I'm not a huge fan of Bill Maher (only in some ways), and I think it's rather ironic that he's the one supporting science here, but he still gets things right, often enough. (Of course, he's made a career out of being provocative, and I'm wary of that business model in general.)

Anyway, the National Review cover story attacked Tyson for being "the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up “nerd” culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States."

What they mean, of course, is anyone who understands and supports science.

Now, the whole "nerd" thing pisses me off anyway. Even Tyson seems to equate understanding science to dressing up in costume at a comics convention. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's very definitely a niche interest. And science should be mainstream.

The label, "nerd," has been lavishly embraced and promoted by the entertainment industry in order to sell stupid movies and TV shows to teenagers. Although National Review calls nerds "the cool kids," that's almost as dumb as most of their beliefs.

Smart people have indeed embraced the term, but the connotation was never "cool" or "popular." To my mind, it's as stupid - and as harmful - as the media portrayal of scientists as laughable, socially awkward misfits with zero common sense.

OK, I don't really have a problem with people who embrace the term and attempt to reinvent it. But as I say, science has nothing to do with comic books, although for some reason even Tyson immediately leaps to create an impression otherwise. (He also says "Democrat," rather than "Democratic" - just like the right-wing - which is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.)

I guess I'm getting off the subject aren't I? As usual.  :)

So what is the right-wing's problem with Neil deGrasse Tyson? Bill Maher says it's because he's not just a scientist, but a black scientist - and one who's demonstrably smarter than they are. Well, I can't help but think that's a factor. Forget voting for Barack Obama; these people can't even accept our president as a "real" American.

As Washington Monthly says:

Considering National Review’s sordid race history, one can’t gainsay that point. Nor can one deny that the political right’s embrace of ignorance—what conservative writer Patrick Ruffini once called the “Joe-the-Plumberization of the GOP”—is also a motivating factor in this attack; as Peter Sinclair notes, Cooke’s demonization of Tyson is reminiscent “of recent remarks by Jeb Bush that scientists and those that believe in what science says, are ‘sanctimonious.’”

It's also a simple fact that "nerds" - i.e. scientifically literate people, not necessarily comics convention fans - tend to vote Democratic. Well, today's Republican Party is faith-based, not evidence-based.

The GOP is not just scientifically ignorant, it's proudly scientifically ignorant. It's actually become anti-science, because science tends to tell them things they don't want to hear. That's why only 6% of scientists these days (as of 2009, at least) self-identify as Republican, when it used to be a pretty even split between the political parties in America.

And then there's a more specific reason for attacking anyone prominent who accepts science. From Washington Monthly, again:

Of course, there’s another pretty influential motivating factor.

For years, National Review has been heavily dependent on advertising from the fossil fuel industry; I can still recall reading the publication in the 1990s and 2000s and being stunned by the number of coal, oil and natural-gas industry ads throughout the magazine. “Doesn’t McDonald’s advertise in National Review? Or VO5 shampoo?” I’d think to myself. Flip through recent editions of National Review and you’ll be graced by Chevron’s obnoxious “We Agree” ads. ...

Tyson is saying things that the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want to hear, like climate scientist Michael E. Mann before him. So naturally, those dependent on the fossil fuel industry have to butcher him.

Yup.

Now, as I said, I don't like the "nerd" stuff. I don't think it does us any good, and understanding and appreciating science should not be restricted to a minority of any kind.

Hell, we've built modern civilization on science! We should all embrace it. At the very least, it should be mainstream!

Science is not just the present, it's the future. Faith is the past. The right-wing crazies who've taken control of the Republican Party want to drag us all back into the Dark Ages. I'll take reality over fantasy any day, even if the fantasy is more pleasant, because if we start with reality, we can get better.

I have some problems with Neil deGrasse Tyson (as I do with everyone, I suppose), but they pale into insignificance next to his inspiring videos, like the one above. And I have some issues with this article in Salon, too, but it sums things up for me:

Nerds love science fiction, in part because we love the promise of the future, a promise of Star Trek abundance and material prosperity for everyone. We look at the past, at centuries that included slavery and child labor and infant mortality and Inquisitions and the lack of female suffrage, and we think, we can do better than that. We can progress.

That’s why we like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Because we believe that civilization is going somewhere, and that if the future isn’t better than the past, then we’re just wasting our time on this planet.

Distant Worlds: Universe on hard

My empire (the green circles) in Distant Worlds: Universe

In my last post about Distant Worlds: Universe, I mentioned that I found the game a bit too easy, so I'd just started over on higher difficulty settings.

Specifically, I'd set the difficulty to "hard" and the aggression to "restless" - in both cases the next step up from "normal." I'd also set pirates to "many," though I started with an "agreeable" home system, which is slightly better than normal.

Hoo boy! That's certainly made a difference! This has been a real challenge. (Lots of fun, though.)

On the screenshot above (click to embiggen), the green circles indicate my territory. The other colors belong to other empires, except for the smaller, light-gray circles, which indicate the range of my long-range scanners.

I started in the large green circle at the top left. My people were humans living on Akthul 7, the descendants of a space-faring people from long ago. As it turned out, the very next solar system contained a human colony on Sol 2 (which I renamed "Earth"), which joined our young empire just as soon as I could get a colony ship there.

Soon afterwards, I sent a colony ship to Drumond Cass 3, which was close to both planets, and also settled another planet in our original solar system, Akthul 2. So I had human colonies on four planets of three neighboring solar systems - a very nice, compact beginning, I thought.

Of course, I'd been paying off the pirates. Pirates start the game with ships and advanced technology, and there's absolutely no way out but to pay extortion money for awhile. And there are a lot of pirates.

But I was careful not to tax my people too heavily - pirates have their sources, so they can tell when an empire has lots of cash - so this didn't cost more than I could afford. And without enemies, I could save money on defense.

That was never going to last. If nothing else, new pirate factions would keep discovering us, and I couldn't pay them all off. So I started to build a few escorts armed with rail guns. The idea was not necessarily to destroy pirate ships, since every single pirate faction had a larger military than I could afford, but at least to drive them off by damaging their ships (so they'd return to their base for repair).

About this time, one of my exploration ships stumbled upon a capital ship - a much larger ship than I could build, with more advanced technology. It was rather slow, and far from invulnerable, especially alone against a fleet, but I was very glad to have it (and even more glad that the pirates hadn't found it first!).

So when Hidden Star Ventures canceled their protection agreement, I wasn't completely helpless. They sent 12 ships to attack our mining station at Drumond Cass, but I had three escorts defending the system.

My escorts were wiped out, and so was the mining station, but the fleet was badly damaged. Better yet, the battle took long enough for me to get my capital ship and other reinforcements to the system, where we destroyed almost the entire pirate fleet. (A couple of ships limped home for repairs.)

This was the pattern for awhile. My empire was so compact that I could successfully send reinforcements whenever and wherever I was attacked, provided I had a few military ships in place to prolong the battle a bit. (At our low level of technology, my ships weren't very fast.)

My damaged ships could be repaired fairly quickly, too, while the pirates had to travel some distance to get repairs. So I played for time. My empire was getting stronger all the time. So were the pirates, true, but not as quickly - I hoped.

I was still paying off three or four pirate factions, but I'd canceled another protection agreement with the most expensive of them. Fearsome Security was very powerful, but I hadn't seen them around much. I figured it was worth the risk.

Hidden Star Ventures kept attacking my mining stations - successfully, often enough. But each time, my suicidally brave escorts would do enough damage to the fleet to drive it off. I'd still lose the mining station, and all of my escorts (they were ordered to fight to the death), but a fleet three or four times the size of my escort fleet would still have to return for repairs - what was left of it.

Again, I had a real advantage with my compact empire. I could station a few ships at each critical location and get more ships to reinforce them whenever necessary.

I couldn't match any of the pirate factions militarily, not even close. But I could quickly get ships to where they were needed, so my much smaller military could keep the pirates at bay. (My ships, which I design myself, tend to be better than the pirate ships individually, too.)

Then one of my exploration ships, investigating a rumor clear on the other side of the galaxy, stumbled upon an abandoned cruiser and a planet full of Haakonish and Naxxilian settlers (two different reptilian species) which eagerly joined our empire.

Our colony at Sukurru - completely surrounded by Haakonish Industries

Note that I didn't ask them to join us, and I had no option to refuse this honor. There were very few resources on the planet (no fuel, of course), and that lone cruiser wasn't going to be much of a defense by itself. Plus, I soon discovered that the Haakonish Industries empire was right next door!

We weren't at war, but we weren't best friends, either. I would have sold or traded the colony to them, if I'd had that option - I might even have given it to them, as a way to make friends. There was just no way I could defend a planet so far away from the rest of my holdings.

(Indeed, a pirate faction I hadn't encountered previously was very active in the area. Almost immediately, they sent a fleet to raid our new planet. So I started paying them off, too. Luckily, that didn't cost me much.)

Very soon afterwards, the same thing happened. Another explorer found a planet of humans and Naxxilians some distance to our south - not nearly as far away as Sukkuru, but not at all close, either. They, too, eagerly joined our empire.

That whole system was infested with pirates, but luckily, our two biggest enemies were fighting each other there. Thus, they left our new colony alone long enough for me to get a fleet to it - not as strong a fleet as I needed, but better than nothing.

And there were actually two inhabited planets in that system. Calipsa 2 joined us immediately, while Calipsa 1 - a volcanic planet inhabited by Shandar (a third reptilian species) - joined us after I sent a colony ship to the planet. (If I was going to have to defend one planet in the system, I might as well defend two.)

To the west - far southwest of our home system - a third explorer discovered a planet with Korabbian Spice, an extremely rare - and extremely valuable - substance which we needed to mine (and defend, naturally). Nearby was an abandoned fleet of derelicts, including a massive planet-destroyer.

Unfortunately, pirates had already discovered that enormously powerful derelict ship, and the Kennegar Mercenaries had sent a construction ship to repair it.

This faction was friendly, since we'd been paying them off from the beginning, but we certainly couldn't let them get a ship like that. On the other hand, we couldn't really afford to take them on, either - not clear out there.

Two of my construction ships repairing a fleet - but a pirate vessel is repairing the planet-buster

Suddenly, we were spread out all over the place. My nice compact empire was now scattered from one side of the galaxy to the other. We were overextended badly, but I was still managing to keep things under control. I'd increased taxes on my homeworld far more than I wanted, and I was still short of ships, but it looked doable - if barely.

Then disaster struck. A colossal quake struck my homeworld, killing billions of people, destroying the infrastructure, and opening rifts in the surface of the planet which badly damaged the environment. Tax receipts plummeted.

Keep in mind that this was the only planet I'd been taxing at all! Most of my other colonies were much too small to bother taxing. Even Earth was far, far smaller than our home planet of Akthul 7. I cranked up the taxes there, even so, but it couldn't even come close to making up the shortfall. (It did, however, stop the colony from growing as fast as it had been.)

I'd been overextended. Now, I was massively overextended. I hadn't had enough ships to defend myself against pirates. Now, I couldn't afford the ships I had. Fun, huh?

I'd been doing OK when this happened. I'd been overextended, thanks to an empire which had suddenly - and mostly without me having anything to say about it - spread out across the galaxy. But I'd had some money in the treasury.

Now, though, I was hemorrhaging red ink. I raised taxes as much as I could everywhere - pretty well putting a stop to the growth of my colonies - and I tried to cut expenses. But there wasn't much I could do, since I'd been watching my expenses very closely, anyway. (Mostly, I started disbanding army regiments.)

It's been two or three years now, and I'm still hanging in there. I've been saved mostly because of massive ship purchases by my civilian sector. I've got lots of planets now - more than any other empire - and although most of them are very small colonies, that's apparently been good for business.

So I've been making enough money at my construction yards to get by,.. so far. I'm still losing money, but not as much as I was. My homeworld is starting to recover, but very slowly. And none of my colonies are growing very fast, since taxes are so high. But I'm surviving.

I'm still hugely overextended and desperately short of money,* and every single pirate faction has been growing in power. Despite constant fighting among themselves, they've been increasing in military power faster than I have. All of them. Yeah, this game hasn't been so easy. :)

It's been lots of fun, though. Unfortunately, the game slows down when you're past the very early years. I mean, I'm still very much in the early game, but there's already so much going on that I've got the game paused most of the time. Every few seconds, something happens that I need to deal with.

Of course, I could automate more of the game, and that would help. But I'm just barely getting by as it is. In most cases, the AI simply isn't as good as a human player, so I don't like to automate very much. At lower difficulty settings, I can let the AI handle more things, but not in this game.

As I say, it's been fun. That colossal quake on my homeworld was just one of the random things that happen sometimes, but it came at a bad time for my empire. Then again, there probably wouldn't have been a good time, huh?

I'm still in the lead when it comes to other empires. It's just the pirates which are the big danger, still. (Empires start off very weak, while pirate factions start off strong. That usually changes during the game, since empires can research new technologies faster than pirates.)

If I can survive in the short-term, the long-term looks bright for the Terran Federation. But we'll just have to see...


*PS. Note that I've got technology trading turned off in this game, since it's way too easy to take advantage of the AI that way. Normally, if I got this short of money, I'd just sell some relatively- useless technology to another empire. But that option isn't available to me, now.

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Note: You can find more posts about the games I play here.