Just got done playing a quick game of Fallen Enchantress on the Mac.

Played it via Parallels 8 on my MacBook Pro Retina.  

Who can ever forget the epic battle shown at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring?  Sauron the Maiar was able to wipe out hosts of men and elves in a single swing.  So terrible and powerful was he that he single handedly kept the armies of the last alliance at bay.

And yet…

There is a balance. Because what most people don’t realize is that the power of Sauron seemed great only in relation to his foes.  Some time in the past, the host of Numenor – mortal men – no elves, so overwhelmed Sauron and his allies – when Sauron was at his peek, that they were able to take him prisoner (this didn’t end well for Numenor in the long run).

And before then…

The half-elf, Luthien’s guardian companion, Huan, single handedly defeated Sauron in combat. Single. Handedly.  Huan was, essentially, a dog. How’s that for humiliating?

And before then…

A single elf nearly crippled Morgoth in single combat. Morgoth is to Sauron what Sauron is to Aragorn. Morgoth was a Valar, an entire order beyond what Sauron was. Practically a god.

The point being is that you don’t have to cripple the champions to make the soldiers you train relatively powerful.  The challenge is balance. And it is, to be certain, a significant challenge.

In the world of Elemental…

In the picture above, on the left, is Resana. She is the Empress of Krax. A Level 6 Channeler. She is quite mighty but only a wisp of what she will become later.  Next to her is a party of Krax Legionaires.  In Beta 5-B, they take 8 seasons to train (in Beta 5-A, the current public one, they’d take 17 turns to train).  In 1 on 1 combat, Resana would win unless the Legionaires got lucky in combat (critical hits).  But if there were two parties of them, she’d lose.

What changed?

What made training units unpleasant was that unless they were total junk, they took a long time to train. The equipment and skills were simply adding far too much training time. Why bother researching all this great tech if you couldn’t build it? So a considerable amount of time was spent relooking at how much equipment and traits should cost.

Another big change has to do with loot.  This is something we will be working more on. But in previous betas, it was common (literally) to find high end weapons very quickly – just laying around.

What we are moving towards, instead, is where you find cool loot early on but it’s not nearly as over powering. Your sovereign and champions start out with fairly low grade weapons (8 attack).  It’s a bit de-balancing to simply luck out and find a 12 attack +4 speed weapon.  That’s a 50% increase in raw damage not to mention a 25% improvement in initiative.

So instead, Resana finds interesting weapons with trade-offs. A Iron War Hammer that does 12 attack (yay) but weighs a lot (slowing her down) and lowers her initiative.  It makes her tougher in battle (she is doing more damage after all) but it also means she’d need troops to keep herself from getting swarmed. That’s just one example. 

Powerful, rare weapons are out there still. But they have to be earned. You won’t just turn over some lost cargo and find a magic broad sword anymore.

The other change we made has to do with hit points.  Previously, units gained 4 hit points per level.  So by level 10, that’s an additional 40 HP. It doesn’t take long before the trained units become almost irrelevant to the battle because that level 10 champion would have 60 HIP while that newly trained unit might half less than half of that.

The Goal

We do want players who have invested in their champions to be able to win epic battles, single handedly. However, we also want players who invest in building an empire to be able to achieve victory equally effectively.  In the early betas, the champions were considered to weak. The pendulum has swung too far the other way.  Beta 5-B will be our first pass at bringing balance to this conflict.

Human beings tend to want to make sense of things. When we hear that someone has died, many people will try to rationalize why such a thing wouldn't or couldn't happen to them. It comforts them.  We instinctively want to find a reason for the unreasonable.

When we see violent mobs in the middle east, some people want to blame an "offensive video". But that's not rational. Healthy people, in our society, don't go into a murderous rage over the abstract.  Other people will try to blame such behavior on race ("oh, those people!") as if there's a genetic component to it.  But it's not just racist, it's absurd. No organism chooses that engages in violence instinctively for no material reason would ever survive generation after generation.

I believe there are three things that make us what we are:

1. Instinct

2. Conditioning

3. And the sliver of you that is really you.

How big that sliver is differs from person to person. I suspect it would be depressing to measure for most people. But for our discussion, I want to talk about item 2. Conditioning.

Conditioning is basically what we're taught. By our friends. By our schools. By our society. By our religion. By our culture. It's the operating system to instinct's hardware.

And you don't have to travel to the middle east to see people with conditioning that leads them to hate easily. One can merely read the comments sections on popular sites or find  certain web forums that are full of people who are ready to hate other people.

I've been online a long time. Sometimes, after someone writes something particularly vicious towards me someone will respond that they're just envious of me. But that's not it at all. That's just the natural human desire to try to rationalize the irrational. To make us feel better we ascribe some rational flaw to someone who hates us. But that's not why they hate us. They hate us because their conditioning has led them to believe that it is perfectly natural, even acceptable to hate other people for their ideas.

The people who murdered our ambassador in Libya didn't murder him because they resented him. They didn't know him. They don't hate us because we're "free" or because we support Israel or because of the Iraq war. They hate us for reasons far more complex that are not readily understood by us because their world view is alien to us.

This is what happens on the Internet all the time. Two people will see the same thing and have radically different responses to it. What enrages one person might cause another person to shrug or even agree with it (see the reactions to Obama's "You didn't build that" or Romney's "47%" comments).  

If two world views are incompatible, then either they find a way to live together or they don't. If they don't, violence ensues.  So next time you see a bunch of haters on TV or on the Internet, don't spend too much energy trying to rationalize "why they hate us". Their reasons are probably alien to your own world view.  And, more importantly, you don't have to accept that their world view is as valid as yours any more than one has to agree that one operating system is as good as another. 

The thing to remember is this: People who have vastly different world views will never see eye to eye. You often cannot rationalize their point of view to fit into your own world view, they're simply not compatible.

(1994 to 1999) OS/2 era

(2000 to 2011) Windows era

(2012 –) New Era

Mimbly is an NPC who visits (rarely) and offers gifts if you answer his riddles.

One gift are magical dancing boots.

One of my favorite features of Fallen Enchantress is that despite being a strategy game, every…sing…unit…in the game has their own equipment that can be customized in real time. So you get dancing boots, you put them on, and you see it reflected visually on the map.

Caused a minor outrage on Qt3 a couple years ago by being uncomfortable with individual leaders having their own logo. I stupidly pointed out that personalized logos have commonly been used by totalitarian movements in the past (Godwin alert!)

But you know, it’s still creepy.

And you know what else is creepy?

To politicians: STOP IT.

Multiplicity 2 was released today.

You can get it here:

https://www.stardock.com/products/multiplicity/

Here’s a video of it in action:

What makes Multiplicity special isn’t that it’s the first program ever that can enable users to use multiple computers at once. You can get a digital switch to do that and heck, there’s freeware out there that will let you use a keyboard and mouse to move back and forth between computers.

Instead, what makes Multiplicity unique is in the execution.  It’s designed to make your local machines function as a single unit.  So, for instance, you can drag and drop files smoothly from one machine to another. You can copy and paste images and formatted text between machines.

It’s also about how easy it is to set up. You just pretty a few keys one each machine to get it going and you’re ready to go. The configuration process is seamless.

If you’re a laptop user with a main work or home machine, you’ve probably had your share of emailing a document from one machine to another.  Here at work, we often have one machine for “content creation” and they’ll want to have their laptop next to it that they use for chatting, web browsing, email, etc. And often they’ll want to be able to quickly move back and forth between them, copying and pasting between them, etc. 

If you have two PCs that are near each other, give it a shot:

https://www.stardock.com/products/multiplicity/

Jury is out on the new maps.  The satellite images are newer than what is on Bing or Google though.

Siri is noticeably better than it was previously. I was able to ask “Where’s a good Pizza place around here?” and it got me a list.  I asked it “Are there any new Bruce Willis movies out?” to which it found the Expendables and The Cold Light of Day and where they’re showing.

I haven’t noticed anything else.  I saw Passbook (the new app) but can’t tell you if it does anything useful other than in theory.

The full change log can be found here.

Anyone who has an SSD already know this. But there are still people out there who aren’t sure on this.  The performance difference of putting in an SSD is greater than any single upgrade I’ve ever seen since the days back in the early 90s of going from 4M to 8M in memory on Windows NT or OS/2.

October is going to be insanely good.

I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon on order for my wife.

A new Kindle white on order for me.

And of course the iPhone 5 will be generally available.

It does appear technological progress and innovation is accelerating.