3/09/2010

The Finer Points of Nuclear Warfare



Recently I sat down with about four of my good friends for a good old fashioned LAN party.  We hadn’t done this for a long time and I was really looking forward to it, especially since we had never done one with Rise of Nations before.  It was looking to be a great night.

So we all gathered with our computers.  Me with Felicia, Dalmac with Rachel, Laquat, Ex, and Anthemis all with their nameless computing entities.  Dalmac and I were quite content to play using the final ‘oh by the way I’m a God’ techs but Laquat, Ex, and Anthemis however were never big fans of the idea due to the intsa-spam ability granted by one of the techs.  So we turned them off thinking that would prevent any difficulties.  However after a little ways into the first match it was realized that we hadn’t turned of the nuclear weapons.  This is a problem.  See while some of the techs are overpowered another one is quite simply there to act as a way of stopping Nuclear Warheads from being used.  So we all agreed that no one would build any Nuclear Weapons.  This agreement in the game was about as effective as it is in real life.

Because the maturity level of the people I was playing with our first two games ended in nuclear holocaust with no one winning.  Literally.  See Rise of Nations has this thing called an Armageddon clock that ticks down every time a nuclear warhead is used.  When it hits zero the game ends.  No one wins.  No cool cinematic.  It’s just over.  Not an ounce of satisfaction to be had.  Now it should be noted that Dalmac not once developed Nuclear warheads in these scenarios.  He’s the only one who didn’t build any ever.  Finally we got a mod to work with the game that removed nuclear warheads entirely.  This way we were finally able to have a proper game.  Here’s how it went.

We all coexisted peacefully for quite some time.  All the way up until the early information age I hadn’t bothered anyone.  I just took a few islands and built up my resources until I pretty much owned the economy.  Much earlier though Laquat and Ex had started a war over a single island and they had never stopped.  Ex had allied with Anthemis and this put Laquat at a severe disadvantage for being in the middle of a two front war.  Dalmac was on the other side of the map from me and his territory had no borders with mine and he was playing nice.  So I made the strategic choice and attacked Laquat.  I managed to take one of his wonders out before he could start whining about everybody attacking him as though his having the largest amount of territory had nothing to do with that scenario.

Since he was moaning a being an all around poor sport about the whole thing I pulled back my forces and made peace with him.  This left me only one logical enemy for me seeing as Ex was located on the opposite side of Laquat from me.  So I took a looksie and realized that to my astonishment Anthemis’ capitol city was sitting on my doorstep.  It wasn’t truly defenseless but it was far from what it needed to be.   So considering this turn of events I swooped in and took his capitol with no problems whatsoever.  He then threw a tantrum about how he didn’t realize that you couldn’t move the capitol once it had been captured.  So in the interest of ‘fair’ (that seems to be a relative term) play I gave him back his capitol.

I GAVE him his capitol back.

I literally pulled all of my forces back and gave him time to build up.  Then I attacked again this time in greater force seeing as he would have at least moved his capitol and built some decent defenses.  He had.  He fended me off that island a number of times.  I continued going after that island because I had been forced to give back the land I took each time using strategy by way of whining.  However whenever I attacked in the exact place the he expected me to attack he defended himself quite well.  I soon got bored with this and found his capitols new location took an island that was defenseless which gave me another straight shot at his capitol.  I once again took it with ease as he was using a counterattack to take one of my islands.  His capitol was mine before he could reroute a single troop.  He then threw another hiss fit about his having a path finding glitch and not being able to land on my island.  This time I stood my ground seeing as I’d been having numerous glitches during my entire campaign against him that were worse than what he was describing.

After this was over Laquat and I made a formal alliance because he would have thrown a hissy fit if I’d taken his capitol which was in fact also on my doorstep.  Dalmac and Ex were the only ones who were good sports about it all.  I’m realizing that perhaps I need to find different people to play Rise of nations with.  With the exception of Dalmac.

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