The Stack

And it’s about time to break this one out, I think: the last Final Fantasy to play before I catch up to where I came in with FF7. ¹At least, until I get a system capable of playing FF3. The Jobs system from FF5 is gone again, replaced by a plethora of playable characters, each with their own class, and each with a special ability comparable to the Job skills. If there’s ever a point where you can swap characters into and out of the party at will, though, I have yet to reach it. There’s a point I’ve reached where the party splits up into three groups and you can choose which group to follow, but you ultimately have to play through all three scenes, so you’re really only choosing the order to play them in.

The premise as described in the initial cut-scene was kind of intriguing: it sets up a Magic vs Technology scenario, but with magic, not technology, as the threat that throws everything out of balance. There was a vastly destructive mage war, followed by a thousand years without magic, and now a certain General Kefka is rashly trying to reawaken the old powers in order to help his empire take over the world. Unless he has a personal agenda, of course, and is just using his position in the Empire to pursue it. Kefka’s a cackling, hand-wringing sort of villain, and it won’t be surprising at all if he turns out to be a thousand-year-old wizard or something.

The thing that bugs me about this is that the premise is almost completely ignored by the game mechanics. We’re promised a world in which magic is all but unknown, and then immediately find that the imperial army is heavily based around something called “magitek”. As far as I can tell, the only difference between magic and magitek is that magitek doesn’t use mana, which would seem to make it preferable to magic proper. Similarly, a lot of the monsters are capable of producing what third-edition D&D would call “spell-like effects”. I suppose the implication from the backstory is that magic has the potential to be much more powerful than sufficiently-advanced technology. But right now, I’ve got this genuine mage in my party, someone considered valuable enough to the Empire that they’re sending armies to hunt her down, and she’s not all that. Yet.

Last Tuesday, my server went down. This is not unusual; when you run your own server, you come to expect service to be interrupted once in a while. Usually it’s the router, and usually all I need to do is power-cycle it. Until recently, if this happened while I was at work, I’d just dash home and fix it. My current commute makes this impractical, so the downtime can last multiple hours, until I get home.

This time, it was even worse. When I got home, before I even got in the door, I could hear the alarm from my battery back-up. Something had gone seriously wrong with the system, presumably with the PSU. The machine was unbootable.

In times past, when my server suffered catastrophic hardware failure, I’d fix it with a transplant from my Windows machine, and then go buy a replacement part as soon as the shops open the next day. But this assumes a certain equivalence of hardware. Ever since I moved across the country, and left my old server behind to minimize downtime, my server has lived in a small-form-factor Shuttle box. This has a nice quiet PSU, but it’s a nonstandard size and shape, designed to fit snugly in the one case it was optimized for. I do like the system a lot, and I’ve been saying for some time that I should replace my big noisy Windows machine with another Shuttle box when I upgrade again, but since I started this blog, and have devoted most of my gaming hours to old stuff, I’ve had little motivation to upgrade.

There was another option for a transplant, though: move the hard drives into the Windows machine. Having done this, it failed to boot. Attempting to do an emergency repair of the OS, I discovered that the version of Linux I was using (Debian Sarge) didn’t recognize several of the system’s internal devices, including the specific ethernet adaptor and the SATA port. So it couldn’t access my data or the Internet, which kind of made it a failure as a server.

At this point, I was thinking that I’d need to get some replacement hardware before I could get the server up and running again. Which posed another problem: With my current commute, I can’t shop for hardware on weekdays. My job is in a location with nothing around it except cheap office space. My home is within walking distance of an excellent computer store, but it’s not open yet when I leave in the morning and closed when I get home. In desperation, I placed a rush order with newegg, telling them to deliver to the office, but this ran into validation problems because my credit card company didn’t have the office listed as an address of mine. By the time this got striaghtened out, the advantage of ordering online had been lost: the weekend was approaching, so I figured I might as well wait it out and buy the necessary components personally.

Which, ultimately, I didn’t do. When Saturday rolled around, I got the server up again by upgrading Debian Linux to the newest stable release, which recognizes the hardware on my working machine. Upgrading to a new release of Debian is always a pain — that’s why I was still running Sarge after all this time. Even now, after a day of tinkering, I don’t seem to have the mail server completely right. Nonetheless, it’s up, as you can tell by the fact that you’re reading this.

It’s not entirely happy with the new hardware, though. The load average keeps on getting into double digits. I’ve set up a cron job to restart mysql and apache every 15 minutes, which keeps it from getting entirely wedged, but clearly this is not an ideal solution. Also, it was periodically overheating, especially when doing something computationally intensive, like attempting to install upgraded Linux packages. The OS is smart enough to throttle down when this happens, but whenever it did, it would issue a warning to all consoles (messing up any text editor I had open) and beep. And then it would beep again a second or two later when the temperature came back to acceptable parameters. It’s as if the system had hiccups. I managed to turn off the warning and the beeping, but it’s just one more reason I need to get this system back into something it’s happy with, before it burns down the house or something. It all makes me wonder what was going on when the same hardware was running Windows. Was it running hot and simply not telling me?

Anyway, I have more hardware on order — not a rush order this time, because the crisis has passed. But in the meantime, I’m without a Windows machine. Which means it’s time to switch over to the PS2 for a while. As far as I’m concerned, the big lesson from this whole experience has been that it’s really inconvenient to not live near where you work and also work near where you shop. I suppose other people would derive a different lesson: that it’s not worth it to run your own server, not in the 21st century when there are plenty of reliable free alternatives. But that’s crazy talk.

Well, I finally got the Town Portal spell. And just in time, too: map 6 is the kind of vast, sprawling thing where it’s really needed. It’s also highly open. Since this is the Underworld, most of the maps have been largely made of narrow tunnels, which makes it harder to find your way to where you want to go, but at the same time makes it easier to defend your turf. With tunnels, you pretty much don’t need to leave troops to defend your castles. On an open map like this one, enemy heroes can just slip through the gaps between mine and make a beeline for my castles. Which means I need a way to get defenders to my castles quickly, which is presumably why this is the level where the Town Portal spell appears.

It reminds me a little of the “big room” level in Nethack, which also puts you into an open space where it’s harder to defend. The similarities pretty much end there, though.

Town Portal helps, but I only have three significantly powerful heroes, and I’d really like them out in the front most of the time, exploring new territory and conquering new castles instead of playing defense. I’m kind of getting the hang of how this works. In the past, my chief priority was to buy as many creatures as I could as soon as they became available for purchase and get them to the main heroes as quickly as possible. That’s not such a concern now that Tarnum is Mr. Overkill. Instead, the thing that makes sense is to wait until an enemy approaches a castle and only then fill it with defenders. The troops available for hire build up over time, and this way I don’t wind up wasting my money on pikemen in a castle that never gets attacked.

Purchasing the defenders not only makes the castle’s defense stronger, it makes them unavailable for purchase in those cases where the enemy takes over the castle anyway. And that’s another change made by this level: Castles are plentiful. You don’t have to hold onto them like grim death; if an enemy takes one, you can probably take it back next turn. If you’re lucky, he’ll even spend some money on a new building. But it’s a nuisance when they actually manage to grow their army in the process.

And that’s about all the enemy is to me at this point: a nuisance. Maybe it’s time to turn the difficulty up another notch. It’ll have to wait, though, for reasons I’ll get into in my next post.

I’ve just had a bit of a relief. Back in map 3 of Conquest of the Underworld, there’s a scripted event wherein someone advises Tarnum to keep a certain enchanted helm, sword, and necklace on his person at all times. This was worrying because I had only found the helm and the sword. Had I missed the necklace? Would I have to start over yet again to find it? Looking at saved games from the previous levels, I found that I had done a pretty thorough job of searching them, and thus I plunged ahead. It ultimately showed up on the fifth of the game’s eight maps.

I’m guessing that the misleading text there is a holdover from an earlier draft of the plot, one where things happened in a different order. The helmet, sword, and necklace referred to are pieces of a six-part ensemble called the Angelic Alliance, one of the uniting features of the campaign as a whole. Each piece is a powerful stat-booster in its own right, and apparently obtaining the full set makes you even more ridiculously buff. Each map except the first and (I assume) the last contains one piece.

Now, there’s a long history of this kind of synergetic uber-outfit in CRPGs — Wizardry 2 may have been the first to do it. And it’s a pretty good fit to RPG-like gameplay. But Heroes isn’t a RPG. At least, it claims to be a strategy game, and it’s hard to see how the Angelic Alliance can avoid exacerbating a problem endemic to hero-stack-based strategy games: that the strategy tends to devolve into just putting all your troops and magic items and so forth onto one hero and sending him on a rampage. Being able to simply overpower your opponents is anathema to actual strategic thought.

It all comes down to the positive-feedback problem again. Even without the power duds, the three heroes that I’m allowed to bring with me from map to map have stats well above the norm for their experience level, due to having gone through five maps worth of permanent upgrades. The same thing happened when I played the first Heroes Chronicles episode, Warlords of the Wasteland. I responded then by turning the difficulty up, and I’m doing the same thing now.

But really, it’s like the designers don’t see it as a problem. They embrace it, encourage it even. Not only have they designed the whole campaign around an opportunity to turn Tarnum into an unstoppable badass who can take down a demon horde with a handful of pikemen, they actually have that NPC I mentioned in the first paragraph. Just in case you decided to spread the stat boosts around among your heroes, he’s there to tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

Map 3 of Conquest of the Underworld was excruciatingly long, and made longer by my stubborn insistence on building up the mage guild in every town in hope that I’d finally get the Town Portal spell. In theory, once I get it, I’ll be able to do things a lot faster, but the whole pursuit has kind of backfired so far. I probably should have started casting divination spells sooner. There’s a bunch of spells that reveal different things about the map, but for a long time I was doing things the hard way, scouting manually, because I had forgotten all about overland spells. This is not a game that doles out spells in manageble chunks and lets you get used to them bit by bit, so I find it easy to get lost in the spell list and not know what I should be using. Perhaps the designers assumed the player was already familiar with them all from Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

There’s one thing that keeps the options for a spellcaster from being overwhelming most of the time: Cursed ground. This is a terrain type that sucks magic out of the air. When fighting on cursed ground, you can’t use spells above level 1. Most of the Underworld seems to be made out of it. Mind you, even level 1 spells scale in power with the caster’s stats, so this limitation isn’t quite as limiting as it sounds.

After the vastness of map 3, where the chief challenge was getting heroes and creatures where they were needed efficiently, it was a bit shocking how tiny map 4 is. It’s so tiny that there’s no time to build up your forces before taking on the three other armies tussling over it. You pretty much have to just strike out half-prepared and hope to pick up more troops along the way. But then, this seems to be the way that the level designers want you to play even on the larger levels, where the distance separating you from your enemies grants you the luxury of building up an army first if you want to. If you play that way, though, there are scripted events that don’t make sense — for example, you’ll get directions to find an artifact after the enemy has already made off with it.

At any rate, I seem to be getting the hang of this, so I’ve kicked the difficulty back up a notch. Key points:
1. Scout with magic, not with heroes.
2. Take full advantage of roadside monster factories.
3. Don’t be shy about using magic in combat mode, even if you can win a fight without it. Mana is cheap; troops are not.

My last session was rather short — I finished up map 2, but that’s about it. So for this post, I’ll just describe the story so far. The story is basically irrelevant to gameplay here, but I’d like to see it unfold all the same; part of the reason I started over was to refamiliarize myself with it, and part of my motivation for writing about it now is to help me skip the early levels if I take another year-long break.

The event that kicks the whole campaign off is the abduction of the knightly King Rion Gryphonheart of Erathia. Or rather, of his soul. His daughter, Queen Allison, has a vision, shared with the player in the opening cutscene: demons sneak into Heaven and carry him back to Hell with them, for purposes unknown.

(Speaking of cutscenes, I should note a peculiarity of the game. Every level is introduced with a brief looping video clip, but they seem to re-use the same clips in every episode of the Heroes Chronicles series. They’re not in the same order every time, but they all seem to be used. For example, one clip shows heroes feasting in a feasting-hall, so every episode has to come up with some excuse to show that scene. Presumably some limitation of the engine prevented them from using anything other than the standard Heroes of Might and Magic 3 clips. It’s a bit like watching an Ed Wood movie, spliced together out of whatever stock footage was available. At any rate, the opening cutscene is an exception, probably because it gets shown before the game proper begins.)

Now, In most contexts, I wouldn’t consider the hallucinations of the grieving to be sufficient evidence to launch an invasion of Hell itself. But our hero Tarnum basically has no choice to go along with it, being a bonded lackey of “the Ancestors”, the patrons of the Barbarians who Tarnum ruled with an iron fist during his natural life. There’s just one part that Tarnum doesn’t understand: Rion was an enemy of the Barbarians. In fact, he personally killed Tarnum. Is this assignment some kind of cosmic joke the Ancestors are playing on Tarnum? Punishment for his misdeeds in life? Whatever the reason, Tarnum has to lead the Queen’s forces incognito.

Well, It turns out that there isn’t such a gulf separating the knights from the barbarians. A lot of the knights have Barbarian blood — they haven’t always been at war, after all. In fact, Queen Allison’s mother was a Barbarian. So I suppose the Ancestors want me to help Allison because she’s the closest thing there is to a Barbarian ruler right now. Not only that, but — you can see this coming, can’t you? — Allison’s mother was related to Tarnum. On that fateful day when Rion faced the Barbarian tyrant, he unwittingly slew his own brother-in-law. He’s like a lamer version of Oedipus. ¹Metaphorically speaking, that is. Physically, Oedipus is the lamer one.

That’s basically three levels worth of plot there. There are eight levels total in the episode. One other point I think is worth mentioning: the knights talk about Barbarians, and characterize them as stupid, uncouth savages. This causes Tarnum considerable distress, even though, to most of us, that’s pretty much the definition of “barbarian”. I’d be hard-pressed to say whether “barbarian” or “savage” is more of an insult, but Tarnum takes pride in one label and shame in the other. But he has to admit that there’s some truth in what they say: in the time since his death, his people have started to forget honor. It all reminds me of a bit from one of the later Ultimas, which carries the idea even further, in the diary of an ancient Troll-king that the player can find. This noble and eloquent troll did a rip-van-winkle, emerging from a cave centuries after he went in, and was shocked and dismayed at what trolls had become over the centuries, and how the universally admired troll civilization had degenerated into dirty, oafish brutes who hide under bridges. That troll died, mistaken for a monster. Which is kind of the opposite of Tarnum’s story. In life, he was a monster; now, he’s mistaken for a knight.

And now for some unfinished business. Last year, I was in the middle of a game when the IF Comp started up. Unlike this year, I abandoned it in order to play the comp games. So, it’s been over a year since I looked at this game — enough time that I feel like I have to replay the beginning in order to get back into it. This is of course one of the ways that the Stack maintains its size. This time, however, I am unabashedly playing at a lower difficulty, adopting the same attitude as I did towards Etherlords towards the end. And the content is familiar enough that I’m most of the way through map 2 already.

That familiarity. It hit me like an ocean wave to the face when I started the game up after a year’s pause. If learning a game makes circuits in the brain, those circuits go dormant when you stop playing. But, being dormant rather than dead, they perk up again at the right stimulus and merrily go through their paces, grateful for the attention. There’s a real pleasure there that you don’t get from just playing the latest games steadily until you get tired of them.

Since the judging period is still underway, I suppose I should put in a spoiler break.
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One last game and I’m done for the year. This one is loosely inspired by the legend of Wu Mei, 17th century kung fu master. Spoilers follow the break.
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Veterinarian meets werewolf. It’s a clever premise, but how is it as a game? Spoilers follow the break.
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