As I began playing Eve, one refrain in the tutorials and wiki pages had me defiant, doubtful, and insecure: "accept the fact that you'll lose your ship."
Yeah, right, I thought. That's just for the folks who shoot at other live folks. I'm going to play it cool, conservative, stock up on overwhelming firepower before jumping into anything.
Um, no.
My pride and joy, the Brutix battlecruiser Lady Roso (somewhat named after my wife), got blown up last night. And it was completely unnecessary, stemming from inattentiveness on my part.
I was running a level II mission. "I hear some pirates are blocking a useful acceleration gate," said the agent who asked for help. "Flay them, and leave their vacuum-desiccated corpses as a reminder to all who follow!"
Good money and a quick fight; no problem for my tall ship and gallant crew. Generally speaking, level II missions can be knocked out by a cruiser-sized ship; taking a battlecruiser (a baseline hull for level III missions) is often overkill, i.e exactly what I want. Huzzah!
Unfortunately, it didn't take long before I started getting knocked around like a ragdoll. One of the dozen or so pirates consistently jammed my ability to lock a target. I could latch onto something to shoot if I got very close, but then it didn't take long for my shields and armor to get stripped away. Soon after I jumped in the first time, I frantically recovered my drones, jumped out, and repaired the ship. I thought, maybe, I'd destroyed one enemy vessel -- but, that might've instead just been me losing target lock again. There was a six-hour window to complete the mission, though, and it was decent money; I figured I could just wear this out through attrition, with plenty of time to walk and play with the dog between waves.
The second time I jumped in, I figured out what ship was jamming me, and managed to tear it apart. Things were looking up!
But then another ship began jamming, and I was pretty close to the bad guys. Shields and armor gone, and rapidly taking damage to the last line of defense, the underlying structure. I begged my drones to return and started the jump-out sequence. But, too late: before I could escape, Lady Roso disintegrated around me; there was a brief flash of explosion before my character's capsule -- a vessel within the vessel that, in this instance, acts as an escape pod -- jumped to safety. It reminded me a bit of the Odyssey's destruction in Deep Space Nine's second-season finale: a frantic battle with a big ship and tiny support craft getting torn apart by smaller but better bad guys. The show's producers used a ship of the same class as The Next Generation's USS Enterprise to stun viewers: "This could just as easily have been Captain Picard blown to bits." I was almost just as jarred by how quickly Lady Roso bit the dust.
Baffled, too. Two of the enemy ships were battlecruisers, just like mine -- I thought that was odd, not having seen any in previous level II missions. But other tough missions instead have twice as many enemies or strong missile and laser batteries. This wasn't the case here: those two battlecruisers aside, the others were all frigates or tiny fighters, and not too many of them. On the face of it, it shouldn't be tough; yet, the persistent jamming incapacitated my ship.
Fortunately, Roso was insured (yes, this game has insurance: six levels of coverage, in fact); I bought and fit a new battlecruiser, New Roso, and set forth. I had to hop around to a couple of stations to pick up fittings: railguns from one station, a pair of capacitor rechargers from another. Along the way, I trained up on the Electronic Warfare skill so I could equip an electronic counter-countermeasures module to diminish or eradicate the jamming. I read online that pirates and other non-player (i.e. AI) characters aren't particularly affected by jamming buster busters, but I hoped for the best and launched into battle.
I didn't last long, jumping out before recovering a pair of my intrepid drones. A fourth time, I at least got all my drones back before fleeing. The dog, on my lap during that last attempt, was quietly weeping into my leg.
I'm not sure what prompted this, but I checked the mission directions again. Maybe I thought there'd be a clue. Ah. The part of eviscerating those villains? Well, it wasn't there: all I was supposed to do was fly out, see whether there were bad guys (yes), and use the acceleration gate they were protecting to make my escape. Not for the first time, my recall might be wrong: it might've been sufficient just to get jumped and to high-tail it out of there. What I do remember is this: the mission description says killing the bad guys is optional.
Dang.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Monday, March 17, 2014
Pick your Axis power
This weekend, my wife and I took a cutlery class at William-Sonoma. The presenter got into the real nitty-gritty about knives, and some of it tickled my Eve brain.
There are lots of knives (bread, bond, sushi, santoku, etc.) just like Eve presents different hulls (frigates, freighters, battleships, and the like). Japanese knives are lighter, thinner, with a steeper blade angle than ze Germans'. These differences lend themselves to different cutting styles in the same way missile-heavy Caldari ships lend themselves to a different play style than the drone-happy Gallente. You need to fit the knife in your hand correctly to control it; you need to outfit your ship correctly to use it well. There are cheap knives and ships you won't mind dinging up, and plenty of high-end items that provide great power but that you'll want to use wisely. Often, there's a right knife or ship ideal for the job, and plenty to choose from -- but, you can get through most jobs with just a few you're comfortable with. And sometimes, you just do or pick things because they look pretty.
Go figure.
There are lots of knives (bread, bond, sushi, santoku, etc.) just like Eve presents different hulls (frigates, freighters, battleships, and the like). Japanese knives are lighter, thinner, with a steeper blade angle than ze Germans'. These differences lend themselves to different cutting styles in the same way missile-heavy Caldari ships lend themselves to a different play style than the drone-happy Gallente. You need to fit the knife in your hand correctly to control it; you need to outfit your ship correctly to use it well. There are cheap knives and ships you won't mind dinging up, and plenty of high-end items that provide great power but that you'll want to use wisely. Often, there's a right knife or ship ideal for the job, and plenty to choose from -- but, you can get through most jobs with just a few you're comfortable with. And sometimes, you just do or pick things because they look pretty.
Go figure.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Why Waterworld will never have hoverboards
You can't [verb] in space. Unless you've got power.
One of my favorite terms from high school chemistry, which I often use as a metaphor in my job, is limiting reagent. Mr. Bloomfield explained with peanut butter & jelly sandwiches: if you have one swimming pool full of jelly, another full of peanut butter, and two slices of bread, how many PB&Js can you make? Just two; bread is the limiting reagent.
Games have limiting reagents. Some are bottlenecks to shoulder through, others are walls that send you rebounding. Often they are resources that need balancing, decision points that draw the player into the game and reflect one's play style. Where the metaphor breaks from chemistry is that often the "limited" resource is merely the one that replenishes the slowest or has the lowest value; games aren't one chemical reaction, but rather several repeated hundreds of times.
Eve has a few of these limits: there are millions of ships to buy, but I can only snag as many as my pocketfull of in-game currency will cover. There are thousands of world, but the rate at which I visit them is bound by the ship's in-game speed and my real-world time.
And then there's power.
Power management is nothing new. Wing Commander's energy weapons sit idle while recharging if you go guns blazin' and drain them faster than they replenish. Three years later, X-Wing played it differently: you need to balance power flow to engines, weapons, and shields. To recharge weapons, recover shields, or improve speed, the player-pilot must sacrifice one or both of the other resources. It was a great way to bolster my awareness of what was going on around me: could I, for example, afford to zero out my shields and weapons to race ahead to reach an injured vessel? When I got there, did I reduce my ship to a relative crawl to rebuild both my offense and defense? Or would I be better off leveraging my speed and powering my weapons, to hell with the shields because I would destroy all the TIE fighters before they got a shot at me? Although not portrayed in the game, Mass Effect's tremendously rich codex delves convincingly into balancing power use, heat dissipation, and stealth in deep space.
Eve's power readout is prominently centered at the bottom or top edge of the screen. It's a glowing circle that, unlike the icons to fire guns or launch a menu item, you can't readily intuit its meaning. I remember looking at Eve screenshots and puzzling about this persistent decorative gourd in the user interface.
Now that I know what it is, I sometimes lose sight of it. It's pretty innocuous, slowly trickling full or evaporating as I do stuff. A few times, though, I told my ship to do something right now but it didn't do it right now, and that's when all of a sudden I noticed the glowing circle had abandoned me: I'd taxed my ship too hard, and it needed to catch its breath. While getting blasted by pirates. Oops. It's insidious, too: unlike every other interface feature, the readout is strictly informative: clicking on it doesn't bring up a menu or execute an action; all I can do is hover over it and bear the gradual change in percentage, up or down. Not surprisingly, lots of skills and gear affect the rate at which this supply ebbs, fills, and even how deep its well runs.
I especially like the conceit behind Eve's power management. One of the oddball things about X-Wing is that it asks you to believe that a thousands-of-years-old pan-galactic military-industrial complex can create tiny starfighters capable of interstellar travel, but that the only way to recharge their weapons or shields is to sacrifice speed. If I deplete my lasers and fly in circles for an hour without diverting power from somewhere, the lasers won't recharge one iota. That just doesn't parse.
Eve does it a bit differently. The ships, whether gargantuan titans or tiny frigates, have tremendous engines that power their massive hulls. These engines also feed a capacitor, which stores surplus energy. Why? Each bit of equipment has an activation energy tax: it takes a few megajoules to fire that gun or to flip on that scanner. Too many simultaneous draws, the idea goes, would overwhelm the power plant, so the ship uses the capacitor for when it's needed en masse. The orb indicates how full the capacitor is, but there's a massive powerplant behind it. If I repeatedly fire full barrages, I could drain the capacitor, but it will gradually refill as the power plant sends it extra joules, tick-tick-ticking as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. It's a nice texture in the game's lore, and I look forward to finding more of them.
One of my favorite terms from high school chemistry, which I often use as a metaphor in my job, is limiting reagent. Mr. Bloomfield explained with peanut butter & jelly sandwiches: if you have one swimming pool full of jelly, another full of peanut butter, and two slices of bread, how many PB&Js can you make? Just two; bread is the limiting reagent.
Games have limiting reagents. Some are bottlenecks to shoulder through, others are walls that send you rebounding. Often they are resources that need balancing, decision points that draw the player into the game and reflect one's play style. Where the metaphor breaks from chemistry is that often the "limited" resource is merely the one that replenishes the slowest or has the lowest value; games aren't one chemical reaction, but rather several repeated hundreds of times.
Eve has a few of these limits: there are millions of ships to buy, but I can only snag as many as my pocketfull of in-game currency will cover. There are thousands of world, but the rate at which I visit them is bound by the ship's in-game speed and my real-world time.
And then there's power.
 |
| A capacitor readout, showing a full charge. From NevilleSmit.com |
Eve's power readout is prominently centered at the bottom or top edge of the screen. It's a glowing circle that, unlike the icons to fire guns or launch a menu item, you can't readily intuit its meaning. I remember looking at Eve screenshots and puzzling about this persistent decorative gourd in the user interface.
Now that I know what it is, I sometimes lose sight of it. It's pretty innocuous, slowly trickling full or evaporating as I do stuff. A few times, though, I told my ship to do something right now but it didn't do it right now, and that's when all of a sudden I noticed the glowing circle had abandoned me: I'd taxed my ship too hard, and it needed to catch its breath. While getting blasted by pirates. Oops. It's insidious, too: unlike every other interface feature, the readout is strictly informative: clicking on it doesn't bring up a menu or execute an action; all I can do is hover over it and bear the gradual change in percentage, up or down. Not surprisingly, lots of skills and gear affect the rate at which this supply ebbs, fills, and even how deep its well runs.
I especially like the conceit behind Eve's power management. One of the oddball things about X-Wing is that it asks you to believe that a thousands-of-years-old pan-galactic military-industrial complex can create tiny starfighters capable of interstellar travel, but that the only way to recharge their weapons or shields is to sacrifice speed. If I deplete my lasers and fly in circles for an hour without diverting power from somewhere, the lasers won't recharge one iota. That just doesn't parse.
Eve does it a bit differently. The ships, whether gargantuan titans or tiny frigates, have tremendous engines that power their massive hulls. These engines also feed a capacitor, which stores surplus energy. Why? Each bit of equipment has an activation energy tax: it takes a few megajoules to fire that gun or to flip on that scanner. Too many simultaneous draws, the idea goes, would overwhelm the power plant, so the ship uses the capacitor for when it's needed en masse. The orb indicates how full the capacitor is, but there's a massive powerplant behind it. If I repeatedly fire full barrages, I could drain the capacitor, but it will gradually refill as the power plant sends it extra joules, tick-tick-ticking as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. It's a nice texture in the game's lore, and I look forward to finding more of them.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Day 18: Daily countdown
Experience is a delivery device for skills, knowledge, and connections -- a trio that garner opportunity, advancement, and prosperity. Eve works much the same way.
Eve presents skills interestingly. Skills allow you and/or your ship to do stuff; while the label might change (feats, abilities, talents), they're a roleplaying game (RPG) trope, back to Dungeons & Dragons. In some games, your character's actions create "experience points," and you "level up" and improve a skill or two at various point thresholds. Usually, you choose to improve a skill relevant to your gameplay, but you're not required to. In the first Mass Effect, you could kill lots of bad guys with your pistol, then improve your pistol skills at level-ups -- or, instead, you could invest in persuasion or grenades, even if you rarely use those abilities.
I enjoy the Elder Scrolls games in part because skill progression works differently: to get better at something, you have to do it. Want to be a powerful swordsman? Swing one at bad guys. A lot. It's a lite version of the "10,000-Hours Rule" from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, or James Kirk telling a cadet that "we learn by doing."
Eve does its own thing, functionally and aesthetically. To start developing a skill, you acquire the relevant skill book -- digiliterally,* an item represented by an anachronistic tome. (*My own portmanteaux: "literally," within the digital world's conceit. "My teammate literally stabbed me in the back with an energy sword!" complained the Halo player. No: your teammate did it digiliterally.) Skills take time to develop: sometimes five minutes, sometimes weeks. Once that countdown elapses, bam, you can do something new or better. Each skill has five levels of mastery, with stacking bonuses (e.g. an additional 5% boost in mining laser efficiency for each tier), and each level takes exponentially more time to reach. Some skills are prerequisites for others. The clock ticks in real time, and it ticks even when you're not logged in: my capsuleer right now is training Industry to level 5, and it won't be fully baked for nearly four days. It doesn't matter whether I play a lot or not at all during that span: come Monday morning, my character will reap a four-percent boost to manufacturing time.
At first, I lamented that Eve didn't have a more Elder Scrolls-esque recognition for "getting better" by doing. Maybe it's the educator in me. But, then it dawned on me that Eve's closest relation in this regard isn't an RPG, but rather the turn-based strategy game Civilization. (Note, again: strategy games, unlike RPGs, don't care too much about characterization or storytelling.) Civilization doesn't have skills per se, but it does have a technology tree: you invest time in unlocking technologies, from the wheel to nuclear physics, with each technology leading to another. Like an RPG's and Eve's skills, Civilization's technology allow players to do stuff: fly, communicate, wage war, and foster commerce.
The skill queue has a neat mechanic without a parallel in Civilization: all skills in the queue must begin within 24 hours. I could line up 23 hours of quickie skills, and then one more that will take 26 days to train (e.g. Advanced Weapon Upgrades V, clocking in for me at 25 days, 19 hours and 50 minutes) -- but, until the time remaining dips below 24 hours again, I can't add anything more to the in-game queue. This is a nice preventative against, say, lining up a month's worth of skills, then returning to the game world as something of a badass (although lacking commensurate knowledge, something else I mentioned at the beginning and about which I'll write later).
No surprise, there are myriad third-party tools and apps that help players plan their skill queuing much further ahead then the 24-hour start-time requirement. I use Vitality and Aura. It's daunting to see that it will take 100 days to fulfill the remaining minimum skill requirements to fly a kind of über ship that caught my eye. But, it's also been nice to see the counter for piloting a new miner tick down to just three days. And, hey: while the clock ticks down for the big ship, I'll use that miner to harvest resources to start building smaller ships, or just harvesting ore to sell to pay for the big guy. One thing leads to the next.
Eve presents skills interestingly. Skills allow you and/or your ship to do stuff; while the label might change (feats, abilities, talents), they're a roleplaying game (RPG) trope, back to Dungeons & Dragons. In some games, your character's actions create "experience points," and you "level up" and improve a skill or two at various point thresholds. Usually, you choose to improve a skill relevant to your gameplay, but you're not required to. In the first Mass Effect, you could kill lots of bad guys with your pistol, then improve your pistol skills at level-ups -- or, instead, you could invest in persuasion or grenades, even if you rarely use those abilities.
I enjoy the Elder Scrolls games in part because skill progression works differently: to get better at something, you have to do it. Want to be a powerful swordsman? Swing one at bad guys. A lot. It's a lite version of the "10,000-Hours Rule" from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, or James Kirk telling a cadet that "we learn by doing."
At first, I lamented that Eve didn't have a more Elder Scrolls-esque recognition for "getting better" by doing. Maybe it's the educator in me. But, then it dawned on me that Eve's closest relation in this regard isn't an RPG, but rather the turn-based strategy game Civilization. (Note, again: strategy games, unlike RPGs, don't care too much about characterization or storytelling.) Civilization doesn't have skills per se, but it does have a technology tree: you invest time in unlocking technologies, from the wheel to nuclear physics, with each technology leading to another. Like an RPG's and Eve's skills, Civilization's technology allow players to do stuff: fly, communicate, wage war, and foster commerce.
The skill queue has a neat mechanic without a parallel in Civilization: all skills in the queue must begin within 24 hours. I could line up 23 hours of quickie skills, and then one more that will take 26 days to train (e.g. Advanced Weapon Upgrades V, clocking in for me at 25 days, 19 hours and 50 minutes) -- but, until the time remaining dips below 24 hours again, I can't add anything more to the in-game queue. This is a nice preventative against, say, lining up a month's worth of skills, then returning to the game world as something of a badass (although lacking commensurate knowledge, something else I mentioned at the beginning and about which I'll write later).
No surprise, there are myriad third-party tools and apps that help players plan their skill queuing much further ahead then the 24-hour start-time requirement. I use Vitality and Aura. It's daunting to see that it will take 100 days to fulfill the remaining minimum skill requirements to fly a kind of über ship that caught my eye. But, it's also been nice to see the counter for piloting a new miner tick down to just three days. And, hey: while the clock ticks down for the big ship, I'll use that miner to harvest resources to start building smaller ships, or just harvesting ore to sell to pay for the big guy. One thing leads to the next.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Day 13: Traffic
My first thought from before I wrote the last post managed to completely escape my mind when I actually composed it. And it's this: the game's presentation of ships rather than people reminds me of something I read in Traffic, a great text about the engineering and psychology behind driving and roads (cool companion text: The Big Roads). One of the earlier observations is that we have a tendency to dehumanize our fellow drivers by describing behavior on the road as that of the car rather than the driver, e.g. "the red Civic cut me off" or "the SUV is driving erratically." Just a thought.
Go figure: as soon as I posted about my ship, I promptly jumped into a different vessel. I've thought about what I want to do in this game, and my list looks something like this:
Through this mining endeavor, though, I had my first real ship-on-ship action with another player: early on, I set my vessel to orbit an asteroid, blasting away with its mining laser, while I caught up on emails and the news. I returned to the game about 20 minutes later to check on things ... and discovered another player in the system had bumped into my ship, causing it to break orbit and veery off, quite far away from the asteroid field. (As an interesting gameplay note, there seems not to be any collision damage in this game.) I returned to orbit, went away again, and got bumped. Not an accident. I should've just kept the ship sitting still.
This wasn't the only thing I was doing wrong. I did some research, and it turns out another of the freeby ships I'd been awarded at the end of a tutorial strand was a far superior miner. I missed that this ship had a separate hold for mined ore much larger even than the cargo ship. It was also faster, could house an extra mining laser, and in general has been a huge improvement. What I'd been doing before was basically using a school bus to pick up packages rather than a smaller but better-fitted and more efficiently configured UPS van.
Go figure: as soon as I posted about my ship, I promptly jumped into a different vessel. I've thought about what I want to do in this game, and my list looks something like this:
- Garner enough funds to buy a cruiser
- Putter around a bunch of level 2 missions (those massless missions I mentioned before -- there are five difficulty levels, and I've only delved into level 1)
- Save up to buy blueprints for a cruiser
- Get proficient enough at mining that I can scramble enough materials together to make and sell copies of that cruiser
 |
| I own one of these -- but, I can't yet use it. From Eve-Wiki |
There are lots of things I need to do along the way to make that happen: skill training, purchasing smartly (i.e. weighing the time it takes to travel to a place for a good deal vs. paying a premium for a local sale), just making good decisions. One of the first things to do, though, is to raise capital: hence a change in ship. I hopped into a huge cargo ship, strapped on a mining laser, and very, very slowly made my way over to a bunch of rocks to mine. Took 66 minutes to fill the digital cargo hold, with a few moments trimmed off once I bought some assistant mining drones. Holy cow, I thought. This is going to take forever. It was nice, though, that I could work for a few minutes, then step away to be with my wife or get work done and still make headway in the game: this mining was all happening in "high-security" space, where I almost certainly wouldn't be attacked by other players or AI pirates.
Through this mining endeavor, though, I had my first real ship-on-ship action with another player: early on, I set my vessel to orbit an asteroid, blasting away with its mining laser, while I caught up on emails and the news. I returned to the game about 20 minutes later to check on things ... and discovered another player in the system had bumped into my ship, causing it to break orbit and veery off, quite far away from the asteroid field. (As an interesting gameplay note, there seems not to be any collision damage in this game.) I returned to orbit, went away again, and got bumped. Not an accident. I should've just kept the ship sitting still.
This wasn't the only thing I was doing wrong. I did some research, and it turns out another of the freeby ships I'd been awarded at the end of a tutorial strand was a far superior miner. I missed that this ship had a separate hold for mined ore much larger even than the cargo ship. It was also faster, could house an extra mining laser, and in general has been a huge improvement. What I'd been doing before was basically using a school bus to pick up packages rather than a smaller but better-fitted and more efficiently configured UPS van.
Making the switch vastly sped up my mining turnaround time; a few hours ago, I sold a whole bunch of mined ore, putting me over the top to buy that cruiser. I've garnered enough materials since then to sell in a second wave, and that should be enough to comfortable outfit the vessel.
And how about that new ship itself? Well, I can't fly it yet: the acceleration in raising money outpaced my training on the skills to run the new ship. Around 1:00am tomorrow, I'll be appropriately trained -- and then, I'll let you know. More on this whole skills and training thing later.
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