Tag: Fun

Command-ing a Slapfight

On By coilerxiiIn Analysis, MilitaryLeave a comment

One of the appeals of Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations is that it gives players a chance to use military platforms to their full potential. It can be a carrier group launching a super-strike. It can be a unit of heavy bombers fighting equally advanced SAMs.

Or, in the case of my latest scenario editor experiment, it can be a more realistic battle of what Saltybet would call “P-Tier” units. I took the MiG-21bis and Mirage V, eastern and western aircraft both armed with just rear-aspect AAMs, set both sides to “novice” proficiency, set up spotting radars, and let them have at it, with ten on each side in a staggered patrol.

The result, when the survivors ran out of fuel/ammo and returned home, was:

  • Seven lost MiGs and four lost Mirages, albeit with a good number of endgame calcs that could have swung things the other way with better/worse rolls.
  • A LOT of flopping around and being unable to fire, and some missiles overshooting once the target turned. However, the low proficiency was such that when a good solution was obtained, it usually meant that the target aircraft was shot down.

The Terror of Saltybet

On By coilerxiiIn FictionLeave a comment

You are someone. You may be a superhero, or a supervillain,  or a student, or a monster of some kind. Whoever you are, you are going about your daily business. Then suddenly, you are transported. You are thrown into a strange place, fighting someone who is usually a totally strange person/monster/road sign by your standards. And you have this insatiable urge to fight them, as they do to you.

Sometimes it’s just one fight-you either win and go back, or lose and go back. But sometimes it’s a big long tournament. You have to go the distance. And you see them-them. The people in the audience. To them it’s-a -game? A casino?

Ok, so I thought it would be fun to do a piece seeing what a Saltybet match is like from the character’s perspective, using the most disruptive method I could think of.

Back to a Big Book Backlog

On By coilerxiiIn Fiction, ReadingLeave a comment

Ok, so now I’m back to a big backlog of books to read. It’s not a bad problem to have. Now, to be fair, almost all of them are cheap thrillers. But I like cheap thrillers, so it’s only fair that I read stuff in a style that I like.

Besides, the cheap thriller genre can be surprisingly diverse, I’ve found. It can encompass everything from throwaway potboilers to gritty and genuinely thought-provoking tales like Peters’ Red Army. And even the former can be incredibly fun.

And even I don’t read only cheap thrillers.

 

FICINT

On By coilerxiiIn Analysis, Fiction, MilitaryLeave a comment

I have to say this about the FICINT concept after seeing some of it being mentioned. I can see its appeal and use, but I have concerns. So I’m going to sound like I’m more negative on it than I actually am. I’m not against speculative fiction or applying it to real-life possibilities in the slightest.

Where I do have wariness comes from my decade-long consumption of bad fiction. In short, my biggest feeling of caution comes from this: There might be survivorship bias at work. Because my experience reading everything from alternate history timelines to 90s technothrillers is that for every hit, you get a lot of misses. For every Hector Bywater, you get a ton of invasion novels that were as inaccurate as they were overwrought. And that holds true whatever the period. There’s also getting a wrong impression from fiction (a technothriller having an overly optimistic portrayal of high-tech gadgetry, to give one example) or treating stuff that’s still meant to be narrative-first as some kind of counterfactual prediction.

I don’t want to strawman or sound like I’m being more critical than I am. In fact, studying the misses of speculative fiction writers could be just as important and insightful as looking at the hits, if not more so. So I’m not against FICINT, I just think it should be applied cautiously and with a study of past failures as well as present speculations.

New Automation Update

On By coilerxiiIn FictionLeave a comment

There’s a huge new Automation update that, thanks to a collaboration with BeamNG.Drive, allows players who own both games to do something fans have been asking for for a long time-drive their creations.

An Automation dev is demonstrating it with everything from city cars to luxury barges in a series titled “Great Engineer, Terrible Driver.” It’s well worth a watch.

 

What I’m Reading

On By coilerxiiIn Analysis, FictionLeave a comment

I actually have, for a variety of reasons, an actual backlog of books I’m reading for fun, which range from nonfiction reference books to classic novels. But most of them are cheap thrillers. I love good cheap thrillers. They’ve been some of my biggest writing inspirations, and I mean that in a totally non-snide way. (Don’t ask me to give a firm definition of “Cheap thriller”, the best I can give is “unashamed genre fic that isn’t afraid of being cliche”)

I did not read nearly enough cheap thrillers in 2017 as I should have, and now I’m making up for lost time.