Into The Breach - Best Roguelike Ever

A screenshot from the game showing a mission where 4 Vek conveniently lined up for a single laser attack to kill them. Also Spider Boss keeps spawning a lot of spiders eggs each turn, and 3 more Vek are trying to get out of the ground. Best of luck defending that tower.

It's a very information-rich interface.

I wrote the explanation what's a Roguelike and what isn't for a reason. That reason is Into The Breach - possibly the best game I found this year. By the way for some other great game recommendations, check this out.

Overview of a Playthrough

Each playthrough represents a timeline of a fight between humans and Vek (insect aliens).

You start with a time-traveler pilot and a squad of 3 mechs, getting some upgrades on the way. There are 4 corporate islands you try to liberate in whichever order you choose. After liberating 2-4 of them, you can attack the final hive volcano island.

Every corporate island is 4 randomly generated battles (you have a bit of choice which battles to take), and 1 slightly less random final battle. Hive volcano islands is a 2-part special battle.

In other words, it's a Roguelike dungeon of 12-22 levels.

Difficulty is adjusted sensibly, so whichever island you pick first will be easiest, and difficulty of the final hive volcano fight increases based on how long you waited to fight it. You get upgrades (pilot xp, new time traveler pilots, extra mech reactors, new weapons) at about the rate aliens get their upgrades, but it depends on your squad and on how well you play if game gets a bit easier or a bit harder as it progresses.

The whole playthrough takes about 1h (for 2 islands) to 2h (for 4 islands), but it depends on how long you spend thinking. There's no time pressure, except for one achievement.

Metacampaign

Playthroughs are short, but there's a lot of metagame. There's 18 time traveler pilots each with special skill. There's 8 squads of 3 mechs each. You can also play as a random squad (you can reroll any number of times before pressing start), and you can make a custom squad of your choice from unlocked mechs.

You start with just 1 pilot and 1 squad unlocked. There's 3 achievements each for every one of 10 squads, and 25 achievements you can get as anyone. Achievements are currency you can use to unlock more squads. Pilots are unlocked by meeting them in the game - either rescuing them from a time pod, or getting them as a reward for perfectly finishing a corporate island.

Achievements, especially squad specific achievements, are generally great at guiding you towards interesting things you can do, and don't feel like stupid gimmicks or puns at all.

Once you finish, by winning or losing, all surviving pilots time travel to different timelines, and you can follow one of them. In such case, you'll start next campaign with a levelled up pilot. Or you can pick up any other pilot but they'll start at lowest level.

There's also Secret Squad you can get if you get every achievement.

Arguably your starting pilot is the worst of all pilots, but your starting squad is probably second best, so nothing ever feels like "grinding".

Defensive Game

So far it probably sounds pretty whatever, but here it gets interesting. Battles don't need you to kill the Vek. What you need to do is protect buildings connected to the power grid. You can have at most 7 power, and any time a building gets damaged, your power grid takes 1 or 2 hits. If you survive 5 turns all remaining Vek run away.

Each mission has some other objectives too, and you get a bonus for every objective fulfilled. A lot of objectives are also defensive in nature - including the infamous train defence, generally considered the most difficult mission of all, but which mission is easy or hard depends on your squad a lot.

I think that's the first game I've seen which focuses on defence this way. Usually your goal is destroying all enemies, and usually timers go against you, not for you.

Any damaged mechs get automatically repaired for next battle, so taking hits to save buildings or other objectives is expected. If mech gets fully wrecked, it also kills the pilot, so next battle it will start without any of the pilot bonuses, but it's not a huge deal, and you can find replacement pilots as you go.

Fully Deterministic Game

Beyond defensive game, Into The Breach does something even more unique. Your turn is (almost) completely deterministic. Structure of each turn is:

• Vek move and prepare their attacks
• you move and attack with your mechs
• Vek attack and environmental effects happen in predefined order
• more Vek spawn

There's no RNG for movement or attacks - you know exactly how much damage will happen. This leads to some amazing gameplay, as you know where Vek is trying to attack, but many of your attacks push instead (or in addition to) of damaging. So you can push Vek out of the way so it attacks empty space, or other Vek, getting some ridiculous blowouts.

A small exception is that buildings have small random chance of resisting damage. Authors say this was added to avoid player paralysis, as without it pressing "End Turn" sometimes means unavoidable loss, so players would spend forever on their losing turn. The chance is very low (starts at 15%, gets into about 25%-ish eventually), and I'd recommend not relying on it, but maybe it's the only way.

While your one turn is nearly deterministic, the whole battle is not. For most missions, you know where Vek will spawn each turn, but you don't know which kind exactly (every island has a bunch of possible types by some procedural generation). You don't know where Vek are going to move and what they'll try to attack. You have to respond to such challenges a few times in each battle.

Difficulty Level

The game is pretty good at not throwing "RNG says fuck you, so now you lose" moments at you like many other Roguelikes (including FTL by same authors).

If your playthrough is going well, you get more upgrades, so it gets a bit easier. If you barely squeeze by, you get fewer upgrades, and it gets a bit harder. The difference isn't huge - early losses do not generally snowball.

In each battle, if you eliminate Vek very quickly, more Vek will spawn, and if you do it slowly, fewer Vek will spawn. This is pretty much necessary to balance squads which try to kill Vek with squads which try to just get them out of the way.

Game has huge number of mechanics with complex interactions, huge diversity of enemies, a lot of mission types, a lot of different mechs, weapons, and special pilot skills. It's going to take a long time to master this. It's quite good at explaining everything in-game, but even 80h+ in I kept discovering unexpected interactions.

There's "normal" difficulty, which I strongly recommend not playing at. Play on "easy" at least until you get decent and unlock all squads. There's also "hard", which I played once to get that achievement, and barely managed to win. You can unlock all achievements playing on easy on your own pace just fine. Exceptions are achievements for winning campaign on hard, and one for winning two corporate islands with Blitzkrieg squad in under 30 minutes, which were my last two achievements to get.

AI

The Vek are pretty dumb by design. Each of them does something totally reasonable individually, at least it would be if you could just stand still for a moment. They don't coordinate in any way whatsoever, and they like attacking buildings (which you generally need to save) and your mechs (which can often move out of the way) about equally.

Basically if you have 3 mechs, and there's 3 Vek attacking building or other objectives, dealing with them is usually straightforward enough. There will usually be more than 3 Vek at time, and often more than 3 attacking buildings - it's bigger challenge to have one mech deal with more than one Vek with one move. Or sometimes a Vek immobilizes a mech somehow, usually with a web, complicating your life too.

The challenge is mainly in the numbers. Now this is just vague estimate, but let's say Normal has about 1 extra Vek at each time compared with Easy, and Hard has 1 extra Vek compared with Normal. That doesn't look like much, but 3 vs 3 is usually straightforward, while every further Vek requires more and more complex strategy, so difficulty ramps up a lot, and you have lower margin for mistakes.

Graphics

It's all nice retro pixel art. The interface is really good at showing everything that's going on, even when there's a lot going on. There's a few minor issues like tiles affected by multiple effects often show just one (you can mouseover for others), but these are very rare.

tl;dr

10/10 Must Play

It's a strategy with reasonable playthrough time. It's a roguelike without bullshit RNG. It became a classic the moment it got released.

You can get it for £11.39 or regional equivalent.

Vanquish - the game Doom tried to be

This picture of armored dude shooting while sliding on rocket boots is very representative of what kind of game Vanquish is

I finally have a bit of free time to play games from my list. Most of the games are fairly whatever, but sometimes I find a real gem.

One such really fun game is Vanquish. To be fair, I might be biased, as I absolutely love first person shooters (and third person shooters are almost first person shooters), but Vanquish has very positive reception everywhere.

So it's a shooter, but instead of tactically running from cover to cover, it's just stupid fun all the way. You get rocket shoes, slow motion mode which triggers automatically when you're screwed, good deal of armor, nice variety of overpowered weapons, and a lot of enemies to kill. There's good variety of enemies, and a lot of bosses on the way. Controls are a bit nonstandard (you don't have to skip the tutorial), but movement feels really smooth.

Apparently this game was released on consoles back in 2010, but who cares, amirite? Graphics aren't anything amazing, as can be expected from a port from previous generation consoles, but everything is fast paced enough it doesn't matter all that much.

Doom tried to be this game

There was a fairly similar game, the rebooted Doom. It also tried to move away from cover based shooters, and get something more close and personal. In my opinion Doom failed miserably at it, while Vanquish utterly succeeds.

So combat in Doom and Vanquish is a lot of fun, no question about it. The difference is that Vanquish goes from combat to combat, with just a bit of breathing room and some mild cutscenes, while Doom would force the player to waste half an hour of their life wandering around the damn dungeon looking for some key card, or turn into a damn platformer. I'm pretty sure I died more often to fall damage than to enemies, and had to alt tab to find where those damn key cards were quite a few times before dropping Doom in disappointment.

The idea was probably to introduce some breaks between combat, but what Doom introduced weren't short breathers, it was pointless frustration and waste of time. By the time next combat happened I was more likely to be fed up with the game than excited.

Games are not movies

Anyway, even disregarding awful execution, the whole idea of breaks between fun sections is bad. Movies have them, because they last 3 hours without breaks, and watching action into action without any breaks gets tedious after a while. Participating in action does not - people often play games for whole nights.

Players also are far more in control than movie watchers. If you need a break for a snack, bathroom, cigarette, or whatever, just pause anytime, then get back to the action. Need a longer break? Quit or alt tab, and come back to it next day. It's nothing like the passive cinema experience. You don't have to play the whole game in one sitting.

Forced boredom sections in games are just a horrible idea. Stop treating games like movies.

And actually, while Vanquish doesn't have long breaks away from actions, it has so much diversity in kinds of action, with just the right amount of short breaks and short cutscenes, that it never feels monotonous.

tl;dr

Vanquish - 8/10
Doom (2016 reboot) - 4/10

You can get it from Steam for £15 or regional equivalent.

Total War: Rome II Review

I'm really late to the party, but this game had such awful launch, I delayed it a bit, and then I was busy, so here I am, reviewing a 6 year old game.

It is not Rome I

At first I tried to play it like it's basically Rome I with better graphics and weird settlement system, and that really doesn't work.

Battles work more or less like in previous Total War games, but on campaign level it's definitely not so. The biggest difference is that you literally can't have any troops not attached to a general, and limit on number of armies you're allowed to have is quite low.

This breaks a lot of common patterns like recruiting more units and sending them to frontlines, leaving some units behind as extra garrison, or to protect settlement from rebels, splitting big army in half to clean up multiple leftover AI troops, or separating a single unit to send it ahead to scout.

There's a new system of provinces made out of (usually) 3-4 settlements. This really cuts on micromanagement. A very interesting thing they did is that province's capital settlement has walls, but none of its minor settlements do. This completely avoids the problem Medieval 2 had, where 80% of battles were assaults on walled settlements, which might have been historically accurate, but not terribly exciting.

Autoresolve all the things

A surprising and very welcome change is autoresolve not being ridiculously biased against the player, like it was in all previous Total War games. In Empire I'd sometimes try to autoresolve a trivial fight where I had 10:1 advantage and I'd likely wipe out the enemy completely without a single casualty, only to be told that my army lost. None of that here.

Even if win was guaranteed, manually fighting all trivial battles was necessary because reinforcing required getting back to high level settlement (in Rome I and Medieval 2), or paying ridiculous amounts of money (Empire).

Here, army losses are surprisingly inconsequential. Armies reinforce for free, and quite fast, so as long as none of the units in your army get completely wiped out. This was introduced back in Napoleon, but together with reasonable autoresolve, it means there's no point in fighting most one-sided battles. You'd mostly fight close battles, which are far more interesting.

Female generals drama

For my first campaign I took the obvious choice of Ptolemaic Egypt. I don't really give much shit about Western Rome, Constantinople the only true Rome etc. Back in Rome I, Egypt was infamous for being ridiculously ahistorical, with bronze age armies thousand years out of their time. In fact "Egypt" by that time was a Greek kingdom, with the usual Hellenistic armies of heavy phalanx supported by skirmishers and light cavalry.

Now Egypt has a reasonable unit roster. Except all the generals I can hire are female. I was quite baffled by that, and thought that maybe they're some family members, which would maybe be excusable, but nope, they're just some total unrelated randos. WTF?

So it turns out there was this big drama, about 5 years after release, Rome II silently pushed a patch which added female generals, at ridiculously high spawn rates, to all factions including those which had absolutely no business having them. And then instead of toning it down to reasonable levels, and just to factions where it would make some sense, or at least making this silliness optional, devs went full "fuck you all, don't like it, don't play the game" mode. They got very well deserved Steam review bombing for it, but did not learn their lesson.

It's shockingly different from how well a game like Crusader Kings 2 handles gender. Playing a king is quite different from playing a queen, different cultures and religions handle status of women differently, and when you start a new game you can choose a few options to expand state of women. Or if you reform a religion.

Immersion failures continue

One really annoying thing about historical Total War games is that they start by hiding the whole map except your country and its immediate neighbours. It's good that I remember what the map looked like, so I can play based on that. And it turns out Rome II map has very little to do with actual history. Seleucids are really tiny!

In 272 BCE Seleucids were basically half the map, a mega-Persia stretching from Western Anatolia through Mesopotamia, Persia, all the way to a chunk of Central Asia and Afghanistan and Western India. Instead they have 6 settlements on Syrian coast and a bunch of vassals. Wat?

Let's talk immersion. People play historical games for the same reason they watch 22nd Avengers movie. They have connection with historical countries or established characters. I've heard Shogun 2 is a good game, but I've never played it because I don't give a fuck about all the Shimazus, Takedas, and Uesugis. Who is that even? EU4 has about 400 countries, but it turns out over 60% of games are just top 15 nations. Only half of these are even that strong.

It's just so much more fun to immerse yourself in all those historical conflicts. Playing Byzantium in EU4 is borderline masochistic, and yet 1 in 40 of all games is someone trying to stop the kebab menace and restore the glory of Constantinople. People even make mods for restoring Byzantium in HoI4. It's great to also have Hins Kayfa and Tannu Tuva for people who are looking for their 100th campaign, but even these campaign feature mostly well known countries as key antagonists and NPCs.

What does it have to do with it all? When you start with historical setting, or established fictional setting for that matter, you have a budget for how much you can change before people go "fuck this shit, it's not the Harry Potter I love". And many things already demand a chunk of this budget. Better gameplay or technical issues will require breaks with history. Tiny Seleucids might very well be good for the game. Being historically inaccurate to increase the coolness factor is good use for the budget. Being true to people's perception of history rather than actual history (like Rome I Egypt) is fine use of the budget. Every MCU movie needs to spend some time introducing new characters viewers don't care for yet, that uses up part of that budget.

Go too far, and break immersion stupidly, and you get backlash. Even most beloved universes like Star Wars and Harry Potter have breaking point. For historical games this budget is a lot lower. Blowing up a big chunk of immersion budget on something as stupid as forcing female generals on Greek and Roman factions is just so fucking dumb. Not listening to the players is even dumber.

Interface prioritizing minimalistic style over functionality

Anyway, back to the game. Older Total War games had big interfaces where all relevant information was always easily accessible. Rome II instead uses minimalistic highly stylized interface, with completely meaningless icons without text, and where information is hidden behind multiple layers of tooltips, or requires alt tabbing to a wiki. Like, how do I know which buildings I can build in a settlement once I expand it? As far as I can tell, there's no in-game way at all.

From UX point of view that's just atrocious. If you play a lot and don't mind alt tabbing to wiki, you'll get over it eventually, but your first few campaigns it will be a constant pain.

In older games it was really easy to understand what's going on. When game gave me the choice which building to construct, or which unit to recruit, all relevant information was there. In Rome II it's just not there. What's the difference between those two units? Here's 10 sliders, have fun figuring out what they mean. How much money will this building generate compared to that other building? Can anyone even figure this out without alt tabbing to Excel?

This complexity doesn't make game deeper. On the contrary, without any clear information what which choice does, players will either pick at random, or just read somewhere what's the optimal choice, and in either case they'll make no meaningful choices during gameplay.

One interface issue that is highly problematic every single time is that routing units are basically invisible during battles, and chasing them is very important. Giving them white flags like in previous games would be such an obvious improvement.

Bugs 6 years after release

It really did not help my first impression of the game that during the first tutorial siege, AI army hit some invisible wall in the settlement, and just stood there stuck. I tried to attack them, but my armies were also staring at invisible wall in the middle of some street. I finally figured out that if I take my troops out of the settlement and walk in from same direction AI took, I can fight them. It was the only bug I encountered so far (not counting Greek female generals, which are arguably a bug), but wow, those were not good first impressions.

Politics stuff

Rome II has whole extra layer of managing politics of your faction, with other families, something like 40 interactions, civil wars, senate, and so on. It's not clear what all of that does, and so far I've been mostly ignoring it, and it seems to be fine to ignore it.

One baffling thing is that I can't find any options for getting my children married. Maybe all the women joined the army, so there's nobody left to marry?

Overall

Battles are great. Maybe comparing your best Medieval 2 battle to best Rome II battle, Medieval II still wins. But thanks to autoresolver and reinforcement changes getting rid of most one-sided battles, much better mix of walled sieges / unwalled sieges / field battles, and how well battles play, I'd say that a median Rome II battle is more fun than median battle in any previous Total War game.

Campaign changes reduce micromanagement, but consequences of the choices are much less clear, so it's a bit mixed.

Interface is just plain bad. It prioritizes style over functionality far more than is reasonable.

Immersion is mostly fine. I'm reasonably tolerant, but I'll get a mod to fix the biggest silliness for my next campaign.

Game performance is so far totally great. It runs better than Rome I on my hardware.

I had horrible first impressions of the game, but mostly positive second impressions.

Revisiting Empire Total War

I finally have a bit of free time, so I decided to revisit some old games. This post will be about Empire, but first I did a bit of Medieval 2.

Medieval 2 Britannia as Wales

So first, Medieval 2 Kingdoms - Britannia campaign - as Wales. I only played Britannia once before, but I played the hell out of Medieval 2.

I didn't play that much Medieval 2 recently, and the manual claims Wales is the most difficult country, so I picked only hard / hard. I'm not really sure how they reached this conclusion - Wales gets enormous event stacks during first few turns. I was the strongest country almost right away with barely any recruiting. The only problem was paying all those troops, but then there's loot button.

In 10 turns it was basically over, with England being reduced to Nottingham and some Irish towns. I actually lost a few battles, but most of them were me sending a single unit to grab some fort (forts in Britannia campaign are small permanent castles) and that unit getting ambushed or attacked. Oh well, not a big deal.

I really like those mini-campaigns. They add just enough new mechanics to make things fresh for a few sessions, but don't do anything crazy. "Culture" replacing "religion" was a cute idea, but then London was 50% Welsh in 5 turns of me holding it, so maybe nobody looked at the numbers. Permanent forts definitely mattered. In all Kingdoms campaigns merchants are somehow worth many times more than vanilla, so they're actually good.

Overall Medieval 2 is fun, but damn it's easy. Now onto Empire.

Empire Total War

I reviewed this game once before. It's nice to see I hated "professional game reviewers" years before Gamergate made it mainstream to do so. Hating someone before it was cool is even more hipster cred than liking someone before it was cool. It's still completely ridiculous that publisher-paid whores rated this game as better than Medieval 2.

Anyway, regardless of its many flaws, I mostly enjoyed this game, and it's been so long since I last played it. I had some old mods - one I wrote to remove walls, and another someone else wrote to fix diplomacy based on my research. Figuring out how to activate them took a while. A lot of links I googled were dead or led to tools for newer Total War games.

So here's the story. Rome and Medieval 2 were very moddable, but then Empire came with a new engine, and moddablity was nearly zero. Even Creative Assembly couldn't really mod it, they had some extremely convoluted build system to duct tape everything together overnight, and that was it. I was so annoyed by this state of events that I researched format after format, and wrote decoder after decoder - not just for Empire, but for all Total War series going forward. I even wrote tools to mass crack tens of simple formats with statistical analysis.

There were a few people doing some research and tooling, but to be honest I don't think the Total War modding scene would have survived without my push. By the time of Shogun 2, CA figured out modders exist, started releasing some modding tools, mostly complementary to what community already did, and it's kinda self sustaining now. Still none of the new titles are anywhere as moddable as Medieval 2 was. Medieval 2 was peak Total War.

The modding scene is formed mostly by all the people who actually create mods, but there's plenty of games which could have had thriving modding scenes, but don't due to lack of tooling. Like XCOM has godawful tooling and it basically has just one mod (Long War) - plus a bunch of minimods doing literally VM binary patching, half of which got broken by a game patch and never fixed. Total War series was heading in such direction before it got saved. Congratulations past me.

Empire Total War as Russia

Unfortunately while adjusting graphics settings I accidentally switched to Large unit size (120 for line infantry, 3 cannons per unit) instead of Ultra I wanted (160 for infantry, 4 cannons per unit etc). I only figured it out after a few turns and didn't feel like restarting.

My least favorite part of Empire was naval combat, so I picked Russia at normal / normal to avoid it as much as possible. I used to play on very hard / very hard, but this is just a casual revisit. 1700 Russia starts at awful economy, awful tech, awful army with most of infantry not even having guns, and at war with Ottomans and Crimea. It feels so much more realistic than EU4, where 1444 Russia is basically a fully Westernized power already.

In the first war I took Crimea, tried to peace out Ottomans, but they didn't, so I took Moldova to get them to peace talks. This gave me first port (in Empire Arkhangelsk doesn't have a port), and let me get my economy on track.

OPM Dagestan declared on me. I forgot just how aggressive Empire AI was. They didn't last long. Since I already had my troops there, I took Georgia - and Armenia which Georgia grabbed in some war with Ottomans. I allied Persia as I didn't want another front.

I attacked Sweden for Ingria, Livonia, and Finland, leaving them with just Sweden.

Ottomans attacked Persia, pulling me into their war, so I grabbed Bulgaria, Mesopotamia, and Constantinople itself before they peaced out.

Sweden attacked me, and was sending 2 nasty stacks all the way around the coastline, so I recruited a single ship (in Total War the whole army fits on the smallest ship), and dropped it next to Stockholm ending the war in no time.

Then once Constantinople chilled down I actually attacked Ottomans again.

That's overall a shocking mix of everyone declaring wars in every way. It's biased against the player, but every AI was fighting one or more other countries. This is fun. EU4 diplomacy is so tame by comparison. After this session, Paradox games feel so static, as all wars are either declared by me, by a coalition against me, or by some AI blob against minor who can't defend itself.

I tried trading techs, and I managed to buy a lot, but I have no idea what's the AI logic. Friendly AIs would refuse trades like 1 their tech for sometimes even 10 my techs. Overall this Civ1 style tech trading is a bad mechanic as AI is always awful at it, and it's not surprise that very few games have this mechanic nowadays.

I built a lot of universities - 3 in my capital region, and got 1 each in Georgia and Sweden, then I discovered just how big clamor for reform penalty gets with enlightenment research. I had to destroy one of universities in my capital region. Then again, the only really important tech is Canister Shot, and it's available right away. The rest are nice-to-haves.

Empire Total War tech system

Empire has such a weirdly designed tech system. A stack of like 1 General, 10 Line Infantry (available right away), 6 basic mobile artillery (needs Canister Shot), and 3 whichever cavalry to chase routing units is really close to being a perfect stack, and you can get it basically immediately.

Line Infantry gets a lot of upgrades for first few techs, but high tier infantry units are more gimmicky than good. High level cavalry is better, but cavalry is mostly going to be chasing routing units who don't fight back. High level artillery doesn't get meaningfully better.

Everything naval is a joke - the optimal strategy is taking one cheapest ship and zig-zag-ing with chain shot to defeat a fleet with 100x as many cannons.

Industry tech unlocks better buildings, but while early buildings have amazing return on investment, late ones are fairly mediocre upgrades and come with lower class unhappiness penalty.

Enlightenment techs improve research speed, but they also massively increase unhappiness from universities, so it's quite awkward.

Oh and you also get prestige from researching tech, which does literally nothing unless you select Prestige Victory condition. Not like there's any chance of ever winning by prestige, if game lasts that long, you'll just be the biggest blob with most prestige anyway.

It's super easy to rush late techs by just building more universities - having 4 universities means 4 times faster research than having 1 most major countries start with. But it doesn't feel like there's really that much reason to get those techs. I can't think of any game that does this.

Minor Interface Annoyances

In Rome and Medieval 2 it was possible to rearrange units by getting all your cavalry in one stack, all your infantry in another, then merging them, or so. Basically last unit to join the stack was last on the list, except for generals always being first. Also during battle grouping and ungrouping units rearranged their order to my liking. Trying the same things in Empire? Nope, all unit cards are always totally mixed, and that gets on my nerves. I think in newer games at some point they introduced drag and drop to rearrange units.

Inability to wait for better weather is annoying too, but at least Empire doesn't have those extreme foggy weathers like Medieval 2, where AI could see everything, but I couldn't unless I paused all the time. So it's about even. Are there any Medieval mods to get rid of those silly weathers? They mostly make everything look bad.

With building slots scattered in minor town of every province, it's difficult to see what's available for building. There's "building browser" which shows what's current state of all towns, but you can't see what's under construction or build anything from it, so it's a bit wasted interface. Not like it matters terribly much to do it a bit suboptimally. In new games there's just one central place to manage all building in a province.

None of these are what makes Empire a bad game. It's just an inevitable consequence of new engine.

Battles in Empire

Empire AI tries some maneuvers - infantry lines up, marches forward until enemy is in range, each unit faces nearest enemy, and keeps shooting until one side or the other is dead. Mobile artillery advances to the point where enemy is in range, then start firing. Cavalry prances around and sometimes flanks.

Except it never works properly. Just standing still with a mix of line infantry and artillery on canister shot completely obliterates AI in 80% of battles with nearly zero loses. About 20% of battles are actually fun, when this script doesn't work for any reason.

Battles in Empire are paced like a Tarantino movie. There's a very long setup, then the action is over in a minute. AI spends so much time forming its initial line, often derping in process and having to restart multiple times, while under artillery fire. 10 minutes of that, and it loses maybe 1% of its troops, because long distance round shot is so inaccurate against infantry. It's more decent against cavalry, enemy artillery, and buildings, so it's common that enemy general dies before the battle stars.

Then AI slowly marches towards me. It's all tolerable up to this point. Then 125m from my line artillery unloads canister shot causing massive casualties, but AI infantry still slowly walks forward, and takes time to form lines facing me at 70m while both canister shot and muskets are murdering them. Many units never even fire, they just break. What's left loses the firefight quite fast. I might send cavalry against units running away, but that risks friendly fire, so it's the riskiest part of the whole fight. Not exactly exciting.

The only AI counter to this I've ever seen was when AI had a lot of garbage melee infantry, and decided to just charge at my lines. Of course it didn't win, line infantry (especially after a few bayonet techs) is actually much stronger in melee than most melee infantry units, but it inflicted far more casualties than typical AI slow derping.

The simplest AI strategy that could work is checking if enemy has canister fire, and if so, don't try to form lines to shoot, just get bayonets on and run through the whole canister fire range straight at artillery. Or just nerf canister shot and make regular shot better to compensate?

The obvious self-limitation of using less artillery doesn't work, as without artillery superiority on my side AI often just derps around forever, and I have to really slowly advance while it runs around the map. It makes every battle drag on forever.

Actually now that I think of it, I'm seeing a lot less suicidal cavalry behaviour than I remember. Did that get patched?

Oh and this was all normal, but it only gets worse on higher difficulty levels, as AI gets completely ridiculous morale bonuses, as well as more reasonable shooting bonuses, basically making cavalry unusable, and nerfing a lot of tactics, but canister shot is just as good at very hard as at normal.

Continuing as Russia

And so I destroyed the Ottomans - this gave me really nice borders down South as there's no way to walk to Egypt from the West in any reasonable time, and shockingly my ally Persia didn't backstab me yet.

Then I wasn't sure about Norway (who rebelled from Denmark at some point I guess), so I took the stack which was keeping Sweden under control and took it.

Battle of Norway, viewed from AI side. I did a very suboptimal thing and placed artillery on a cliff, just because the cliff was there and it was something different to try.

Notice AI immobilizing both its artillery unit with entrenchment. This is like top trivially preventable dumb AI mistake. Entrenched artillery not only can't move, it can't even rotate properly and can only shoot forward, so basically it will ever affect the battle, and any unit can just walk around and shoot them at its leisure.

It's notable because this is the worst tactic I've ever seen LegendofTotalWar try, when tried to play Empire.

Lower class was getting unhappier and unhappier. Weirdly farms at level 3 have -1 to lower class happiness, but that disappears at level 4, and level 5 is actually +1 upper class happiness. All industrial buildings get from 0 to -1 t -2.

So I triggered revolution, and switched from absolute monarchy to being a republic. I didn't even need to do any shenanigans, 2 universities in capital region was enough. That didn't really help that much - instead of nobility and lower class, I have middle and lower classes now, and better lower class base bonus. But absolute monarchy let me have amazing cabinet with huge lower class happiness bonuses, so it ended up being not all that much better.

At this point it became really weird that none of my allies backstabbed me yet, and we were already in 1726, so I attacked Polish protectorate of Courland to invade Poland. I took 6 provinces from Poland, 1 from Courland, then I bribed Poland to peace out with 2 techs. AI seriously overvalues techs.

Two turns later, OPM Austria attacked me. I thought they'd actually do something useful, like attack with their full stack and a bit in Vienna against my 2/3 stack in Pressburg, as my armies were scattered around recently the conquered Balkans to keep public order, but AI didn't do anything, so I moved some extra troops from Serbia, sieged Vienna, and won in one turn. I still hate lack of grid on this map. I had to reload 3 times just to move my armies from Serbia the way I wanted to join the siege. With Medieval 2 style grid it's very easy to do precise movements. In Empire if you clicked a few pixels off, your armies will just barely not be able to join, and the route game choses is generally not the faster route due to random downs blocking roads which can you enter but only manually. It's an awful change.

I remembered just how highly AI overvalues techs, so I bought Morea from Venice for 10 techs. That really cleans up my borders. And there I was wondering if they'd take all techs plus Vienna for Morea - mostly so I wouldn't have to babysit Vienna while resistance slowly dies out (for capitals of majors it's 30 unrest, for everything else just 13, either way dropping 1 per turn). I tried it with a few other countries by nobody took it. Looking at tooltips I guess that's because Venice likes me as I'm a republic, but all absolute monarchies hate me.

OPM Mysore declared war on my ally Persia, so I joined. Mysore doesn't even have a port.

I was end of 1730, I was absolutely dominant militarily, economically, and scientifically, so I guess that's a good time to end this.

Battle of Hungary. Poland had two stacks against my one damaged stack. The river map has 2 crossings, so I split my army in two defending each. 6 line infantry, 2 canister shot artillery, 1 howitzer, and 2 cavalry chilling behind.

AI could have easily forced the crossing if it just charged my artillery, or if it unpacked all its artillery (8 or so total) and tried to win a long distance shootout against one of my half-stacks. It was still a good battle, and I had to send cavalry across multiple times.

Overall impressions

It was much slower paced game than how I'd usually play. I used my regular stacks to maintain public order instead of just hiring some cheap dragoons while I keep pushing against next and next enemy.

What I totally loved was how it really felt like the country is developing. Villages turned into new towns, industry and infrastructure developed, disorganized militias turned into professional armies, there was peasant unrest for a while, workers' unrest getting worse as time went, revolutionary movements among the students only got worse and worse, while religious and ethnic minorities in conquered lands slowly accepted my rule.

Thanks to the mod I used, AI diplomacy was actually interesting, not just suicidal as in vanilla, and it wasn't just standing there waiting for me to do things like in EU4. This world felt far more alive and evolving than EU4, where 1444 is basically same as 1821 except for some bonuses.

Comparing campaign part of Empire to Medieval 2, I think Empire mostly wins, especially if we forgive it all the minor issues caused by a new engine.

Battles compare much worse. Every now and then I'd get an interesting battle, but most felt just trivial and some were outright tedious. I disabled sieges with my mod, and picked a country which could ignore naval battles (the only naval action was sneaking my stack to Stockholm and some recon), as they are far far worse than land battles. Naval battles are completely unfixable, and I'm saying that after wasting far too much time trying to mod them into something not horrible years ago.

Probably the best thing is that sieges are generally just regular field battles - Rome 1 and Medieval 2 field battles are far more fun than sieges, but playing them normally sieges are a big majority of fights. At least early game, late game without mods become boring siegefest.

The game definitely needed massive polish and balancing fixes it never received. I don't even think it was such a bad game, it was just a big downgrade from Medieval 2 in so many ways.

6 Amazing Games

Now that Google+ got murdered by Google, I'll go back to reviewing stuff on this blog. I should probably start coming up with backup plan in case they murder Blogger too. Oh and maybe I'll dig through my Google+ posts and report reviews here as well.

So here's 6 video game recommendations of games I played relatively recently. These games are not merely good and enjoyable, they go far beyond that. If you like games and game design, it would be utter silliness not to try out every one of them.

Her Story

My memory is fairly poor when it comes to stories. Even if I enjoy a movie or a book, I would have a lot of trouble recalling much beyond general outline and a few highlights. Video game stories are usually even less important and less memorable, usually just providing some background on which the actual game takes place.

And yet, somehow I remember every minute of playing Her Story. It just burned into my memory like no other game ever.

It doesn't "tell a story". It invented a completely new genre, which lets you discover what might have happened, in a way that naturally leads to emergent plot twists, and apparently people end up strongly believing completely opposite conclusions on what the story was depending on which way their exploration went, even if they've seen the same content, just in different order, and with different mindset. This level of story engagement is unprecedented.

I very strongly recommend everyone to play it without any spoilers, as soon as possible. It's a one evening game.

I hope more games like that get made, but it was such a masterpiece of story construction and acting that maybe it's too difficult and it will remain a singular masterpiece forever.

Factorio

It's Steam's second highest game of all times, behind just Portal 2, so throwing another endorsement to million other endorsements might feel a bit redundant.

Factorio invented a new genre of automation games. You start on a new planet, manually extract some resources, and gradually setup more and more complex manufacturing chains so everything runs without your participation as much as possible. If everything in base game is too simple, you can ramp up complexity by another factor of 10x by getting some mods, which are conveniently available from in-game menu.

It's been such a great hit that new Factorio-style games like Satisfactory and Factory Town started coming out, but I don't think they're really there yet.

I don't love all their choices - color palette feels depressingly desaturated, and combat feels like a distraction from core gameplay (it can be turned off when starting a new game). It's still first and so far the best game in this new genre. It wouldn't surprise me if Factorio did to automation what Minecraft did to crafting, and it became regular feature in new games soon.

And it did it all while still in "early access". It's been far more ready for years than most games are on publication day.

Warning: The game can easily take hundreds of hours of your lifetime.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition

Everybody knows Skyrim by now, but special edition brought new life into the game. Games like Skyrim only truly come to life with mods, but setting up mods for them was always pain. I still remember wasting a weekend setting up modded Oblivion for it to only glitch itself into unplayability as soon as I left tutorial dungeon.

Special Edition wasn't just the usual remaster with some better graphics, it brought 64 bit support (which enables big mods), and built mod support into the game itself, so installing a hundred mods at once is fairly easy. It still doesn't have perfect detection of mod dependencies and conflicts, but you'll only face problems if you take things too far, and they'll probably be fairly minor.

You can use third party tools if you're setting up particularly complex mix of mods, but you don't have to, and it will probably going to be fine anyway. Amount of content provides by the mods is enormous, and many of them are of very high quality. And many are not. It's all good fun.

Special Edition even brought mods to console playing peasants! Much more limited, but still, give them a taste of what PC gaming is like.

Annoyingly you need a special mod to enable achievements on modded games, which is basically the point of Special Edition. And between game bugs and 100 mods at once, I ran into bug in main questline, and didn't figure it out right away to reload, so I couldn't actually win this time, but it was so much fun anyway.

It's not a game for everyone, especially because you need a lot of time to play it, but it's definitely best in its genre of vast open world games.

Doki Doki Literature Club!

This completely free game pretends to be a dating sim taking place in literature club of a Japanese high school, but it turns into... Well, I can't say without spoilers. There's a bit of gameplay, but it's mostly a really great mindfucky story.

As the trailer says "This game is not for children or those who are easily disturbed", so I can't recommend it for everyone, but other than that, do it, it's amazing. Play without any spoilers. It probably helps if you enjoy anime visuals, but it only really pretends to be a dating sim. It's a one evening game.

Sniper Elite 4

Having played Sniper Elite 3 previously, I was expecting a decent stealth shooter, but I got a lot more.

The levels are huge, and allow a lot of approaches. Very few games ever tried that - Far Cry 1 and its sequels Crysis 1 and Crysis Warhead did it and then the whole concept died out, probably because console hardware had too little memory, and PC exclusives don't sell quite as well. It's those console peasants' fault as usual.

The second great thing is what happens when you break stealth. In basically all other games every enemy within some distance would magically know where you are, and now you'd have to run away or face a shootout against overwhelming odds. That's fine, and even Sniper Elite 3 did basically that. Sniper Elite 4 has a better idea. Enemies lack this magic, and only guess you might be based on when you've been last seen or where shots have been heard from. They'll try to suppress and flank your suspected location, throw grenades, and even artillery strikes to get you, but you can use it to your advantage.

This change makes breaking stealth a tool, not a fail mode. You can shoot to reveal yourself to lure enemies in direction you want, straight into some mines you just put, while you take advantage of them moving away from their posts to sneak past. Blow something up to make them take cover facing completely wrong direction, while you backstab them staring at the blazing inferno. Huge maps give plenty of options for creativity. Oh and as is tradition of the series, you get to kill Hitler in a DLC, in many unique ways. You can even shoot him in his one ball.

A big downside is third person perspective, which offers less control and immersion than first person would. But it's still an amazing shooter taking the genre in a new direction. If you enjoy shooters, it would be silly not to give this one a try.

The game doesn't actually explain all that well that you can take this dynamic approach, and I guess many people will play it as a traditional stealth game, which also definitely works. But if you do, you won't see why it's so special.

Silicon Zeroes

So it looks like a puzzle game inspired by TTL era chip design. Except they didn't just take vague inspiration, by the end of it, you will actually be designing superscalar pipelined processors with bypass logic. A lot of details of real hardware are simplified, but problems you'll be solving are completely genuine. It's a total opposite of games like Shenzhen I/O where everything is as fake as fake gets.

It feels to me like the most successful educational game I've ever seen, and I'm not even sure if that's what they were aiming for, or just accidentally hit.

There's also some story in it, but it's totally lame (half of negative reviews it has are about the story). At least it's not much of a distraction, you can basically ignore it and just enjoy the game.

The game starts very easy, but final designs are sort of Microprocessor Design 101 finals level, and only 1.5% of people have achievement for completing all challenges.

Oh and there's a free downloadable demo with first levels. Just give it a try.

Good gaming!

Enjoy the games. For summary of key points:

• Her Story - one evening game, avoid spoilers at all cost
• Factorio - long and very replayable, little to spoil, it's more fun if you try your own designs first few times; then it's OK to see how others did it, but if you want to start by watching some let's plays it's all fine too
• Skyrim Special Edition - very long, and mods make it a lot longer, spoilers are mostly fine, 
• Doki Doki Literature Club! - one evening game, avoid spoilers at all cost
• Sniper Elite 4 - medium length, little to spoil
• Silicon Zeroes - medium length, mostly avoid spoilers as it's a puzzle game

I plan to posting a lot more on this blog now.

Wonder Woman review

The movie is bad. Everything about it is bad. Like Star Wars prequels tier bad, but there won't even be any memes.

It's not about Wonder Woman

First of all, it's not even about Wonder Woman, it's all about her boyfriend. He's driving the whole plot, and she just tags along, without any sense of what's going on.

Diana (the "Wonder Woman") doesn't make any choices in the whole movie. The closest she gets to doing something on her own is choosing an outfit in a pointless shopping scene, and then she decides to dress up like him. Just wow.

Every time she suggests something (usually "omg, we got to help those people"), he just shuts her down, and then she does things his way.

The world makes no sense

Obviously the movie shits at actual Greek mythology.

As far as I can tell, the Amazons on the island are just some mortals. They have no children, and seem to be aging, so between ancient Greek times and World War 1, they should all be dead, right? Or is it some Star Trek time bubble? And how do they even speak English and all the other modern languages if they've been isolated from the world for who knows how long?

Then there's a framing device with pointless email from Batman. Like, what the hell? Greek Gods and Batman do not belong in the same movie in any way whatsoever. The comics tend to be stupid like that, but it served no purpose whatsoever.

And of course there are unexplained black Amazons, Hollywood has racial quotas to fill.

Action scenes are few and bad

There are three action sequences in this 2h 21min "action" movie.

Early on there's German army landing on Amazons' island, where the Amazons dance-fight, doing bows trick shot, and combo moves with spears, leashes, and such. Wearing the kind of "female armor" everyone has been making fun of for last 30 years. It's all rather silly, but probably still the best part of the movie.

Then about an hour of bad acting later there's storming of No Man's Land. Wonder Woman runs into machine gun fire, and the movie gives up on any internal logic. I couldn't tell - is she bullet proof or not? If she is, then why the hell is she tying to block bullets one by one with whatever piece of token armor is on her forearms? It's ridiculous every time she does it. And if she's not bulletproof, then how isn't she dead exactly? There's a lot of bullets out there, and she's not exactly waving her arms to block.

Anyway, leaving extent of her powers aside, somehow here mere presence makes all bullets miss everyone in the whole British army, who all decide to run after her, without anyone getting even a scratch.

Another hour of bad acting later, there's final boss fight which is basically shitty CGI, and least entertaining of all three.

The villain

Invincible superheroes are inherently rather boring, and decent superhero movies rely on an interesting villain to work. Wonder Woman's is about the worst, as the main villain gets like a minute of screen time within the first two hours before an obvious surprise plot twist reveal.

Villain's two henchmen get a bit more screen time, one of which Wonder Woman decided to kill, the other one to spare, for pretty much no reason whatsoever.

So instead the fighting is mostly against random German and occasionally Turkish conscripts who have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on around them. Then again, there's not that much fighting in the movie.

Morality

I think the movie attempts to have some moral message about violence being bad, but delivery is so ridiculously poor I'm not even sure what they've been going for. In the end, she ignores her moral intuitions and does whatever her boyfriend asks for. Is that the message perhaps? Do what your boyfriend says?

Sidekicks

At some point the boyfriend and his sidekick Diana assemble a team. None of them does anything. Some Native American "chief" sends smoke signals at some point, it's not very clear why. They try to do some fighting, but Wonder Woman does all the work anyway.

Acting

The only person who got any kind of character development is the boyfriend with his heroic sacrifice. Diana starts the movie as Wonder Woman, ends the movie as Wonder Woman, and her character development is, I guess getting her first boyfriend?

All the acting from Gal Gadot playing Wonder Woman was bad, so maybe they tried to salvage the movie by giving somewhat more tolerable Chris Pine playing the boyfriend more to do, until he took over the whole movie?

Conclusion

The movie has are no redeeming qualities. I watched it yesterday, and it's already rapidly fading in my memory other than the silly dance fight scene.

The only thing you'll achieve by watching it is convince yourself that critics (who for some reason love it) are all idiots, but you should probably know that by now.

Review of The Manga Guide to Biochemistry by Masaharu Takemura

Following highly entertaining The Manga Guide to Statistics, I decided to grab another book in the loose series - The Manga Guide to Biochemistry by Masaharu Takemura.

The book is taking its role as a textbook somewhat more seriously, and is packed with higher ratio of information to manga than the Statistics guide. They obviously had a lot to say, and I'd say they covered it fairly well without any obvious mistakes or oversights. A good amount of it feels poorly integrated into the plot, especially bits towards the end which feel almost like a disconnected appendix.

The plot puts a lot of effort on putting all that information in context, but it still manages to setup some manga romance action - pretty lady professor of biotechnology tries to manipulate high school girl and university student boy tutoring her into realizing their feelings for each other. Oops, spoilers.

Overall, I'd say it does its job pretty well, not just as a novelty item, but arguably even as a legitimate textbook.

tl;dr 4/5 stars

Review of A History of Venice: Queen of the Seas

I keep disregarding over 1000 hours of audiobooks and podcasts already in the queue and adding new titles. I'll probably never go to end of the queue, even listening at 180% speed (the rate keeps increasing every few months) and dropping unpromising books easily aggressively.

Of course as soon as I've seen this book about Venice, it jumped right to the front of the queue, and I'm actually a bit surprised that's the first book specifically about Venice I've ever read.

The book covers long history of Venice - its founding myths and facts, its relations with Byzantines and Karlings, trade connections, evolution of its government, its involvement in attempts to remove kebab, asshole popes, ecclesiastic jurisdiction conflicts, claimants, plots, and its ultimate destruction by the Big Blue Blob.

Surprisingly interesting part was one about all the relic theft, trading, and fabrication going on - subjects strangely under-explored in all games. There's so much DLC potential here.

I feel the book devotes far too much space to time after fall of Venice, which feels about as pointless as including a Berlin tourist guide chapters in a book about World War 2. I guess technically it's a book about city of Venice, not just republic of Venice, but the city without the republic is just a dead historical relic, not worth writing about.

The most obvious missing thing is any kind of serious analysis of randomness amplification design of final system doge elections - instead of straightforward system of just choosing 41 members of Great Council to be electors, they had three stages of taking lots to choose electors, electors choosing next group from which electors were chosen by a lot and so on. The book treats it as paranoid historical curiosity, but this is clearly some next level cryptographic protocol, and I'd love to read serious analysis of it.

tl;dr 4/5 If you like Crusader Kings 2, you're likely to like this book. Not sure who else would this book be for.

Review of The Manga Guide To Statistics by Shin Takahashi

It's been a long time since I last did any book reviews on this blog, or for that matter any other reviews. I usually just use Twitter or G+ for this as it's faster.

Here's a book I bought for the lulz - The Manga Guide to Statistics by Shin Takahashi and it turned out to be better than novelty value I expected.

Plot

The book follows a story: dad invites a cute coworker for dinner, who does some statistics at work for marketing reasons or something like that. The high schooler daughter wants to meet him again because he's cute, so she gets the idea in her head to ask her dad to get someone from work to tutor her in statistics (because she's totally interested in what dad is doing at work, honest) - and the dad obliges except getting some completely different dude as tutor. Basically it would be not out of place in any high school manga, but then again the last one I seriously followed was Aa! Megami-sama back when I was in actual high school million years ago, so what do I know.

The story is not breaking any grounds, but it's way more amusing that in any statistics textbook.

Also I'm reasonably sure that's already more plot than Mad Max: Fury Road had, and that was a really good movie.

Educational Value

The level of statistics in the book is fairly introductory, and unfortunately the book has some annoying mistakes, such as:

• completely incorrect explanation of what it means to reject a null hypothesis (also knows as the most common error in statistics textbooks)
• assuming normal distribution for data which is definitely not normally distributed such as normalized school test scores (also extremely common error)

Most concepts like histograms, distributions, correlations, etc. are explained relatively cleanly, but book's attempt at explaining what chi squared distribution is used for and what's the meaning of independence testing feels like a total miss, and I doubt anybody would have more than just a vague idea what the hell they are just read after that.

There's a bunch of math formulas, and I was not impressed by typography - with parentheses not being correct size to match enclosed content. Of course one could make a valid objection that this is a manga not a math textbook, and it was probably not typeset in TeX, which is fair enough I guess.

Am I the only one annoyed by bad typography here?

Of course this leads to obvious followup issue - is it even possible to teach non-Bayesian concepts like null hypothesis testing at this level beyond just "run this calculations, don't worry what they mean"?

Another problem with the book is that it probably focuses too much on the kind of silly content that predates spreadsheet software like formulas and looking up stuff in distribution tables.

Oh the books also has exercises for the reader and appendix on Excel, which are both potentially useful too.

Summary

Overall I'd say the book is probably not the most amazing textbook, but it'd be a pretty sweet novelty gift. Now non-Bayesian statistics is a particularly messy subject to teach, so I guess other books from the series might do better.

tl;dr 4/5 stars

Zombie Survival Guide review

I was really happy to get my hand on a book that claimed to be a compendium of knowledge necessary to survive close encounter with the living dead - The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks. Unfortunately while the guide has many good points, it also commits far too many mistakes to be a reliable source, so I feel obligated to write this review and refutation, which will hopefully prevent countless unnecessary deaths by naive civilians trying to follow flawed advice.

Zombie Science

The book nearly implies without stating it outright that zombies violate Law of Conservation of Energy. Let's get serious here - zombies don't feel tired, they don't feel pain, they don't waste energy on all the functions necessary for long term survival of the body, so they can keep going far longer than a human, and it might seem to a naive observer that they can go forever, unless they rot away away.

This is of course a total nonsense, a captured zombie could be used to build a perpetual motion machine by just keeping in environment where body rot is unlikely. All zombies will run out of energy eventually. Assuming an average human is 80kg, 60% water, 20% body fat, 20% lean mass, and uses 2500kcal/day, that person will be left with literally not 1 gram of tissue in their body in 83 days. Even if we assume zombies can be far more efficient by shutting down nonessential body functions, a lot of this mass is still necessary for structural purposes. There's pretty much no way a zombie can remain active for more than a few months - not years like the author frequently claims.

A zombie could plausibly remain in a semi-dormant state for much longer, but visions of multi-year zombie sieges author sometimes draws need to be treated as fairy tales. If you can survive 3-6 months, you're basically saved.

The author makes other claims about zombies - that they're slow, clumsy, can't climb, can't throw things, can't use tools, can't coordinate, are not afraid or aware of fire and so on. These should be treated with caution. They might be true of a typical zombie, but how confident are you in risking your life on a bet that zombies you're facing are of the most vanilla variety? Different people had different abilities in life, and while zombification definitely generated massive brain damage, what was left might just be an exception. So prepare accordingly, but always have a backup plan just in case.

Weapons

It's hard to describe advice about weapons given by the book as anything less than ridiculous. It's centered around use of silencers and long distance headshots. Both aspects are completely ridiculous.

Contrary to Hollywood portrayals, "silenced" weapons are still quite loud - and if zombies are attracted to slightest sound like the author portrays them to be (advising not even talking loudly just in case zombies might overhear that), any use of silencers is completely futile. And for untrained civilians able to reliably shoot a (even slowly) moving target in the head from long distance while shitting their pants? Such attempts are just the best way to waste all your ammunition.

Fortunately there are far more realistic solutions to the zombie menace - like shotguns. Sure, they are loud, but your chance of hitting zombie's head from a short to medium distance when your life is in danger is far better than with anything else unless you had years of training.

And contrary to author's claims, I would not completely ignore all targets except the head. Severed zombie head might be dangerous for a while, but your priority is survival, and it won't chase you. Mobility kill is good enough to save your life. Any hit that severs spinal column, shatters limb bones, breaks major muscles, and so on can ensure the zombie thus hit will not be following you. That's why grenades, molotovs, and all kinds of explosives are your friend. Of course the author is right - don't be stupid and approach the immobilized zombies, but your priority should be survival, not being a hero.

What to do if you have no firearms? If you had adequate training and quality equipment available, a polearm or a sword might be very viable - but let's be serious here, that's even less likely than sharpshooter training. If you have nothing better available, improvised spears are relatively easy to make, and can be adequate protection of last resort - they were used successfully for thousands of years against much bigger, stronger, and faster wild animal, than a stray zombie. Anything shorter like improvised knives and swords, baseball bats, hatchets, crowbars, and so on leads to far too great risk of infection even if you manage to eliminate the attacker, so only use in real desperate situations.

Armor

The best thing you could possibly get, if your budget is unlimited is a shark suit. It costs about $5000 and protects from shark bites. Zombies have basically human anatomy, and any armor that protects you from sharks will also definitely protect you from zombies with a huge margin of safety.

If you don't have that kind of money to spare, or zombies caught you unprepared, you should still try to armor up. Any kind of motorcycle helmet and heavy leather clothing (of the kind bikers wear) will offer at least some degree of protection from zombie attack. It's not going to make you invulnerable of course, but every little helps.

Short Term Survival - Get on the Roof

I feel the book covers that well - just get on the fucking roof, and get rid of the ladder. Zombies can't use ladders, can't climb, and even struggle with staircases, so heigh is your saviour.

I'd put much more trust in doors than the author. Plenty of doors are flimsy and will fall in minutes to even a single zombie, but depending on where you live, heavy fire doors routinely installed in all new buildings can stop zombies just as well as fires. Not forever perhaps, but your priority is not to die now. Time is on your side, and even if hundreds or thousands or zombies might be in the neighbourhood, they can't all try to break the doors at once due to physical constraints and zombies' lack of coordination.

Hopefully you'll only need to survive for a few days, and then help will come. But what if help doesn't arrive?

Medium Term Survival - Zombie Demographics

The author inexplicably ignores demographics of zombies, but that's the key to your medium term survival. There are currently about 47 humans per square kilometer. Even in the worst kind of outbreak, where very few people survived, most will likely die without turning into zombies, and every day, significant percentage of zombies will die to delay, loss of energy, accidents, human resistance and so on. Within weeks their numbers will fall real low - even in apocalypse scenario after 3 months it's difficult to imagine more than 1 zombie per square kilometer worldwide, falling to maybe 0.1 per square kilometer after 3 more months.

So what do you need to do? Get the hell out of the city. A single zombie or a handful is not very dangerous, and in the countryside that's the most you're likely to encounter. It's only in densely populated urban areas where you're likely to find literal hordes.

In apocalypse scenario, you won't really have to worry about food and supplies - zombie numbers are falling rapidly, and any store will have huge amounts of nonperishable food for the few survivors. Store trips are extremely dangerous places in the first days of the outbreak, especially for stores located in more populated areas, but a couple weeks or months in, in broad daylight, with prior reconnaissance and cleanup of the surroundings, it's manageable level of risk.

Long Term Survival - Rebuilding Humanity

It's exceedingly unlikely that any kind of outbreak would get all of humanity - most likely it will be geographically isolated and even if a large region falls to the zombies, the military will soon intervene (hopefully not with weapons of mass destruction or carpet bombing), and thing will go back to normal before a year passes.

Still, if we're considering apocalypse scenarios, we might as well consider the worst case of all.

And here the author goes completely off base - recommending setting up the new society for your group in tho most inhospitable environment possible - like deep Siberia, or a desert, or even a jungle. That's just insane. Zombie numbers will be falling rapidly, so your first problem is shifting from eating non-perishable pre-apocalypse food to growing new food - and for that you'll need either coastline for fishing, pastures for livestock, or decent arable land (wildlife hunting can supplement your food, but it's unlikely to work as its primary source) - it won't give the yields modern agriculture, but then the number of survivors will be much less than seven billion.

Bandits are a risk of course, but people can and will defend their homes, and bandits won't last very long in such an environment, just like they didn't in ancient times. Historically, small scale bandits mostly robbed travellers, not farms - you need a small army to setup a successful long term farm robbing operation, and if you have an army you might just as well call yourself President for life, wipe out all other bandits, and start collecting taxes. Of course history doesn't reliably tell what might happen to the society after a catastrophic zombie outbreak, but it very reliably predicts what's going to happen if a bunch of fat urbanites try to set up new life in environment where even natives living there for generations can barely make ends meet.

It's still far safer to deal with some potential bandits than with near certain starvation.

History of Zombie Outbreaks

The book also narrates important historical zombie outbreaks. Since it's based on inference from highly unreliable information, definitely don't take them at face value (especially the alleged multi-year siege), but it's still interesting to read, and can better prepare you for the day zombies come for you.

Summary

4/5 stars - It's really important that someone finally wrote such guide, and it contains a lot of useful information, but using it as your sole source is going to get you killed.

Review of Ruby Under a Microscope: An Illustrated Guide to Ruby Internals

I've been digging my way out of an overwhelming pile of book at pace of about 3 a month - a pace at which I have no chance whatsoever to ever catch up with all the absolutely must read stuff. One book I recently found in my pile was a review copy of Ruby Under a Microscope: An Illustrated Guide to Ruby Internals I got a few months ago, which turned out to be by far the best Ruby book I've ever read.

I'm a little jealous of how easy kids have it these days. I learned Ruby internals back in the 1.6 days - that was the time when most programmers have never even heard of this "Ruby" thing (I'm not kidding you here). To learn anything about Ruby internals you had to dig through macro-heavy and very idiosyncratic C codebase (C/C++ codebases tend to be highly idiosyncratic in general, much more than Java or Ruby or Python codebases), and what little documentation there was was mostly in Japanese. And here someone bothered to write a quality book that explains it all, and well just like that. I've learned a lot about 2.0/2.1, JRuby, and Rubinius from it, even if I was already very familiar with 1.8 series (and had some nonzero level of familiarity with others).

I can see two target audiences for this book. First, advanced Ruby programmers who want to learn Ruby internals - to work on one of the Ruby implementations, or write complex C extensions, or to heavily optimize performance of their Ruby apps.

And second, people who want to write their own programming languages. Ruby implementation is uniquely well-suited for study if you're such a person. It's relatively simple, but implements a highly modern language with all the goodies. Studying something like JVM is basically a waste of time - it's a monstrosity implementing a monstrosity, and half of the features you'll absolutely need in your language you'll have to brutally hack into an unsupportive environment, instead of just cleanly implementing them from first principles. And trying to build your language on top of JVM/LLVM or whatnot, while highly pragmatic, robs you of all the learning experience of writing your own first VM - something I believe any serious CS student should go through at least once.

The book itself assumes you're reasonably familiar with Ruby, but nothing out of ordinary, and as far as C goes it assumes you understand pointers, struct declarations, and basic syntax, and that's about it. That makes it surprisingly approachable considering its subject matter, but I found it really useful even already being familiar with all that (or how it was a few years ago at least). It doesn't bore you with compiler theory, but focuses on actual solutions to actual problems, and invites you to think about how things could possibly be solved. Contrary to what you'd expect, it's meant much more for a cover-to-cover reading than as a reference manual - it's over 300 pages, but it's very heavily illustrated, so it doesn't take that much time.

One big weakness of the book was its chapter about Garbage Collection, which spent far too much time on GC theory and far too little about explaining the interesting bits (like write barriers implementations). I don't think it kept up with standards set up by the rest of the book. And of course many subjects could use some elaboration, but you only get that many pages, and its priorities are relatively sensible.

I'm not sure how complete the book is for someone with no prior exposure to Ruby from the inside - it seems to cover all the basics except maybe C extensions (which would require a lot more C knowledge than the book assumes), but even if something you need to know isn't covered, the hardest part is getting started without being overwhelmed by all the interconnected pieces, and the book will definitely give you that.

If you're in one of two audiences I mentioned, it's practically a must read. I don't think it's terribly useful for people who just hack some Ruby on Rails at work, and aren't terribly interested in going deeper. Sample chapter is available on author's website if you're interested.

tl;dr 5/5 stars

Far Cry 3 vs Tomb Raider - comparative game review

I'm doing a comparative review, since in many ways these games are far more similar to each other than you see outside the same series. They've both been trying to resurrect their troubled franchise with a lost on an island survival/exploration/stealth story, and they've been fairly popular for it.

Also one of these games does just about everything better than the other, so it's going to be a fun review.

Mild some spoilers ahead.

Story

Let's start with the story. Tomb Raider is classic reluctant hero(ine) story - it's quite well executed, but it's hard to get any more cliche than that. Far Cry 3 is descend into madness story under thin veil of reluctant hero - something like what Spec Ops: The Line did so superbly. The execution is probably far too subtle, and it's easy to miss half of what the game is trying to tell you during your first playthrough, especially since you have much freedom to do things in your way and order, so traditional story telling gets diluted, but not to the point where environment becomes the story itself like in Skyrim or Fallout: New Vegas. This is a close one, but I feel Far Cry 3 is doing a bit better.

As for protagonist, Jason is highly generic on purpose as demanded by the descend into madness genre - he must be an empty canvas, and any particularly distinct characteristics would overshadow the descend. Lara can be developed much more, since there are no storyline constraints, so on this point Tomb Raider has small edge.

For antagonist, Vass is a strong contended for top 10 bad guys of all times, and let's just say none of the Tomb Raider antagonists has any shot at that list. The biggest problem with Far Cry 3 is that it has too many antagonists who are not Vass, and they are just so much less exciting by contrast.

Likewise, the team of minor supporting characters in Far Cry 3 is far ahead of blandness what Tomb Raider has to offer. The contrast couldn't be more extreme - in Far Cry 3 everybody except protagonist is extremely interesting, and in Tomb Raider nobody except protagonist is.

And before we leave the storyline, let's talk about sex. Lara in her earlier incarnations was famously oversexualized - it feels weird why in retrospect, her body had fewer polygons than a half-decent rendering of a teapot - but they very successfully toned it down and it's no longer what the character is about. Interestingly while they pretty much had to completely desexualize Lara (not counting a couple borderline creepy cutscenes) to restore her position as a serious character, sex is used quite skilfully and with much better taste than you'd expect from a video game as an element of Far Cry 3's storyline, and then again in Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

Exploration

Major part of both games is exploring the island you're trying to escape from.

The island - in Far Cry 3 you can actually explore wide open spaces on your own - the only thing stopping you is danger it represents, not artificial walls. In Tomb Raider you're largely constrained to following the storyline with just minor detours. Both are valid ways to design a game, but Far Cry 3 surely wins this.

Tombs and ruins - in Far Cry 3 you can explore the whole island looking for ruins - some are fairly easy, others are obscure and extremely rewarding when found. The problem is that you can just buy maps showing you locations of them all cheaply, and that kills a lot of fun. In Tomb Raider the titular tombs are just small detours from path of the main storyline, and it's really not much of an achievement that you found them.  On the other hand, Tomb Raider executed platforming and puzzle aspect of tomb raiding far better than Far Cry 3, where the only really hard part is getting there, and once you're there they tend to be pretty straightforward.

Wildlife - at least during the first playthrough Far Cry 3's island is teeming with extremely dangerous wildlife in addition to more conventional human enemies. Then you learn some simple techniques for avoiding them all and the game loses a lot. Tomb Raider's island contains mostly highly scripted wildlife and doesn't feel alive at all.

Enemies - enemies in Far Cry 3 are highly dynamic and coordinated threat and you have countless ways to deal with them - paranoid avoidance being a good start early game. Even if you're really good at the game, you'll be frequently running away from unfavourable encounters, to strike back some other time. In Tomb Raider there's really not much sense of a threat, and the enemies are pretty dumb.

Graphics - the Far Cry series started from a tech demo, and is still unmatched in terms of amazing graphics - it's one of the reasons why the tropical island is so tempting to explore, and during some of the storyline missions the game far outdoes even that. Tomb Raider's graphics are merely decent - I feel they put far more effort into making Lara look (tastefully) good than into making the environment look good.

Mechanics

Of everything I've mentioned so far, Far Cry 3 sounds like an amazing game, and Tomb Raider as still a very good one. Unfortunately when it comes to mechanics both games leave a lot to be desired - and for Tomb Raider a lot more than for Far Cry 3.

Quick time events - Far Cry 3 thankfully largely avoids them. For Tomb Raider they are everywhere - some storyline sequences require you to perform a combination of six or more quicktime events, including repeatedly bashing various buttons, and other such awfulness which is bad enough on a console controller, and completely unacceptable with a mouse and keyboard. This isn't just an inconvenience - endless quick time events after quick time events sap all the fun from this game. I strongly dislike QTE in any game, but I've never seen a game which relied on them so heavily as Tomb Raider, on any platform.

Stealth - Far Cry 3 wins here easily, since outside storyline missions you have full freedom to go any way you want, and even most (not all) storyline missions leave you with unusually diverse options. Tomb Raider gives you some option to avoid combat or ambush your enemies, but so far I haven't found a single quick time event I could sneak away from, so basically the only thing you want to get away from you can't.

Combat - Far Cry 3 has really bad balance (many mods at least partially fix that, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was also balanced a lot of better thanks to lessons learned) - for example silenced sniper rifles are totally overpowered and can safety dispatch pretty much everyone if you have some patience and good sniping spot, while bows with full ballistics are really awkward compared with all the silenced guns you're getting, but it's pretty decent, and there's a lot of variety if you want to experiment rather than going for sheer efficiency. Tomb Raider is less impressive, but it's executed decently, except of course half of all combat situations which turn into scripted quick time events instead.

Inventory - this is the most painful part of Far Cry 3. They didn't even bother to group multiple copies of the same items, so selling skins of 10 dingos (2x each thanks to a skill) requires 60 mouse clicks instead of 2. Tomb Raider just converts everything into points, so you never have to bother with buying and selling, which is frankly a much better idea.

Skill Tree - neither game provides terribly many customization choices. Vanilla Far Cry 3 locks out most skills until you progress storyline, which is probably fine on your first playthrough, but most mods get rid of these limitations for a reason. Nothing exciting here in either game.

And everything else

Mods - I'm a PC gamer, a game without mods is incomplete to me. Far Cry 3 has some limited modding scene - it's mostly balance and such minor tweaks, but that makes second and further playthroughs a lot more interesting. Tomb Raider modding scene looks completely nonexistent.

Franchise - both franchises needed a serious reboot. Far Cry 2 was a total disaster, and Tomb Raider series was in even worse spot. Far Cry series already got another amazing game in Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, so far Tomb Raider series didn't get any major new content, but it definitely managed to turn Lara into a serious character. Hopefully the sequel Tomb Raider: No More Quick Time Events is coming soon.

And that's why Far Cry 3 is  9/10 totally amazing, and Tomb Raider: Quick Time Events is just a 6/10 almost good but no. (I could definitely imagine this game to go to 8/10 if some modder removed every single QTE from it, but without active modding scene I don't have much hope)