Motivation

Tags

City Domination, Ingress

The War of Ingress goes onwards, eternal, as expected.      The battlegrounds are changing just a bit, however.

Canyon Country, 11 am Friday

Canyon Country is solidly in the hands of the Resistance nowadays.    I’m told that “back in the day” you could hardly keep blue portals up in this town, but today it’s a different story thanks to the committed blue team.    Half of them *should* be committed according to the Google Hangouts chat that I hear.

Kidding.   It’s a fun group, which I’ve yet to meet up with in real life, and may someday.   Who knows.    In the meantime we trade information and locations to capture and keep everything pretty blue that way.

Downtown Burbank, Friday, 11 am

I got busy over the course of the week, and I’m glad I got this screenshot before the inevitable enemy counterattack.    You should have seen what it looked like Monday, but I wasn’t smart enough to screenshot it.

Now I know – I have readers from both sides of the aisle.    Enlightened, and Resistance, and the first thing I’m doing if I’m an Enlightened player is looking for intelligence when reading this.     It’s…… discouraging, actually.     I’m feeling less free to share all of my thoughts if I find them turned strategically against me.

Instead I find myself thinking about the level of Ingress known as motivation.     The perfect world (For Resistance) is to convince all Enlightened players to stay at home and cover the world.     This will, of course, never happen.    It wouldn’t even be good for the game, because the Resistance would get bored and quit too.    Don’t believe me ?    I finally uninstalled City Domination due to a lack of opponents, and the much better Ingress gameplay.

But you’ll always have opponents, whichever side.    What actions should you take given that fact ?     Well, for one, take actions which DO NOT motivate your oppponents, and DO TAKE actions which motivate your team.     Seeing the problem does not mean its easy to solve.    What exactly are those actions ?    I sure wish I knew.

If you leave the portals in the area alone, this could motivate the enemy to redouble their efforts and expand; or simply to sit still and be content.     If, on the other hand, you continually attack and expand, are you discouraging your opponents by showing them the futility of their fight, or are you motivating them to be the rock unmoved by the floodwaters ?    It probably is an individual thing, and there are so many individuals in the game.

I think I fall back on the war between armies metaphor – the only actions for you to take are to play, a good amount, every day.    Hack some portals, take some, and maybe make some fields.     Don’t do too much or you’re on the thin edge of madness, and burnout.    If you don’t do something, the enemy wins.    The game goes to the team which can continually field the most operatives at the highest activity level over time.

And then there are motivation sappers.    The decline in the quality of the portals in the game is a big one.

Mountasia mini-golf has one fountain, but two portals representing it.    The mural at Alfredo’s Mexican place (an old Taco bell) is two portals in Ingress.     Recently a school mural got placed a second time in the game.    This is happening a lot, and it breaks the immersion for me, to see that on one block we have the Monterey Students High Schooler paintings, as well as on another block.    And to have the Centennial Park represented in the game 5-6 blocks away from its real-world location.

The addition of portals shows no sign of slowing down – it might be speeding up.   I don’t know – I’ve only been playing around 2 1/2 months.     But if your local art mural gets divvied up into four portals in the space of a city block, do you really feel like you’re drawing some otherworldly energy in, to harness for your faction ?    Or are you even more just poking away on your phone ?

The shard game is delivering a major butt-whooping to the Resistance – Today, and apparently for awhile, the Big Project portal is in the hands of the Enlightened and hasn’t been scored.     Two goals were made for the Enlightened in China, but Santa Monica is scoreless.    That’s a shame.    Not that I can complain, I’m not really participating in this level of the game – I can’t just head off anywhere, I’m not 20 with no responsibilities anymore.

As near as I can tell, the closest puck is in Denver – Shard 2 having moved from Silicon Valley over to Hawaii.     These things don’t move very much – Shard 14 has slid over to Denver after starting out in Canada.     Then again, the shard locations only matter if the blue team can actually hold Santa Monica, and it doesn’t look too good if you ask me.

Solidly Green.

So blue team – who’s motivated ?

Ingress Vs City Domination

Tags

City Domination, Ingress

Having “won” City Domination I found myself getting a bit bored.   I have nothing to do on my commute, other than drive.   (The Horror!)    Then I heard about another Location-Based Game.    I had not heard about it previously because, naturally, we have to change the terms whenever Google is involved.

Niantic Labs is apparently a division of Google, who markets a Augmented Reality Game (Ie, Location-Based) called Ingress.    You can get it in the App/Play Store for either IoS or Android.   The game is well covered with community based instruction – Google’s instructions, simply, suck hard.    I almost uninstalled the game in the first 3 days since I didn’t know what in the hell I was supposed to do, besides “walk”.    Decoding Ingress is an essential site for reading about the game.

This is a game that’s been around for 2 years plus, and it’s a bit of a fresh take on Location-Based Gaming.   I’m going to compare this to City Domination to get started.

City Domination has no levels.    Each person is as important as their upgrades purchased with gold bars.    And the bars are acquired either by completing badges or spending money.    Ingress, by contrast, has a levelling system (16 levels) and no monetary transactions.    The first 8 levels are the most important ones, with the remaining having minimal benefit – the biggest benefit I can figure out is “Something To Do”.    City Domination has the better system.    Levels are not much good if you are going to blow through them too fast – I am currently level 5 after 8 days playing.

Teams in City Domination are based on gangs.   Every player starts out in their own gang, and is expected to join up into bigger and bigger groups, or you can just dump your old gang and move to another.   Ingress puts players into two teams – the Enlightened (Green) and the Resistance (Blue).    Your choice is permanent.     I like the Ingress system much better – the only thing any gang invite ever made me think of is someone wants to “steal my points”.

In City Domination you take over squares.   The entire Google Map of the world is divided up into little bitty squares that you fight over with bots and the occasional human being.    Once you hold a spot, you hold it forever, until a bot or another player comes by and takes them.    Ingess, by contrast, is about “portals” where energy is leaking into our world from some other world.    Take a portal, and you have it for as long as its energy lasts – 15% decay per day in the game.    If your portal’s resonators decay, it goes neutral.    City Domination is the clear winner here – the decay mechanic is not useful, if you can prevent defensive lockout with other game mechanics like the 200 man limit and missions.

In City Domination, I can play on the freeway.   Freeways have just as many squares as any other area.   Ingress has a “40 mph detection” scheme built in, and no portals near freeways.   I have no idea how, but they know roughly when you’re on the freeway and when you aren’t.    (Something to do with the GPS obviously)   City Domination wins again.

For population, I’ve seen less than 10 other players on the map.    no more than TEN.    Kind of pathetic for a large urban area, right ?   Ingress has dozens and dozens of people who appear in the scanner taking portals and creating links.     Ingress wins in terms of player interaction.

From what I’m reading about Ingress, the big goal you should have is to get to level 8, so I’m working my way towards that goal.    Past that – I’m not really sure.    I’m entertained and playing so that’s going to have to do for the moment.     The real test is if you play a game like this for more than my current one week – but I’ll put that in another post.

 

Domination Achieved

Tags

City Domination

The City is now dominated.   Burbank is 100% under my gang’s dominion.

After tweaking my commute once again, I was able to cover the entire Burbank airport and surrounding area.   Lunchtime jaunts across town also allowed me to finish up the flatlands area and beat the bot gangs into submission.     Now it’s a matter of filling the town up for defense – 200 men are possible in each square.   A lot of them currently have a bare 15.

It was nice to have an excuse to cover the town and see the areas where I grew up.   So many memories.   And it’s all enabled by a location-based smartphone game.

You can kind of get the idea from the screenshot, but unfortunately, the game does not load all the areas past a certain zoom level, and Burbank is bigger than that level.

The only area I don’t have is that small grey blob which belongs to Monolicious, a member of Harvesters of Sorrow.    And that’s fine.

The game now becomes a matter of Santa Clarita errands, long distance travel – ie, off the commuted path – and taking random drives to dump my men.   I’m not sure how long that will stay interesting but we’ll see.

What has happened to this blog ?

Tags

City Domination, Marvel Heroes, Xenonauts

When there’s a lack of things to post about, then, well, I guess I don’t post.

I should have something to write about City Domination sometime soon.   I don’t want to commemorate again “I’m going to do XYZ”, rather, I’ll commemorate actual accomplishments.

Marvel Heroes is not bloggable at this stage.    It’s childishly easy.   Literally.   I turned my 11-year-old son loose on it and he didn’t get killed either.    So the question is, when will Captain America make 60; we’ll find out when it happens.    At that point I think I might want to move the difficulty level up.

Xenonauts is not particularly bloggable.    I’ve moved along in my Easy Game #2, and have yet to lose a single soldier.     (I guess I have learned a few things).   Three bases are established with possibly a fourth one coming soon.    Each of the three has a minimum of three foxtrot interceptors, which are catching most of the UFO’s which appear.

And that’s what’s going on, pretty much.

Still Tanking

Tags

City Domination, World of Tanks

As of Friday afternoon, Amahoser is eliminated from Burbank and it’s time to tighten up defense.    I had some people surprise me by driving through town and taking squares.    I always knew that was a risk, and it’s time to rectify it by fortifying what I’ve already taken.

But that’s all I have for City Domination.

Beast of the Battlefield

The French D1, and its cousin the D2, are absolute vicious predators on the low tier battlefields.    It’s my favorite type of play – I plink away at the enemy or spot them, and they bounce off my armor.    Or even better……….

The Invader medal ?

I know, it’s more of the bad play of the enemy, but still, it was very fun to get this medal.      I even got one that I thought I would never pick up.

The Super Rare Invader !

As is wont to happen, I got into a match and immediately got a honeydo.    When I came back, I found myself low tier on the highway match with the SU-85B.     I tried to catch up to the team.   Took a few shots, as we headed into the enemy base.    Then they all left to chase the enemy and destroy them, while I waited behind.   I couldn’t keep up with them anyway.    And I got this for the very first time when they couldn’t finish them off.

The Stug IV missions continue.   Talk about getting the requirements, in style !

 

Played the Chinese M5A1 on Widepark.    Ran along the edge of the railroad tracks and just had an awesome game spotting everything.

Currently need platoon missions for both LT and TD, and have progressed the Arty missions past that miserable “kill a light tank” mission.     Really – I have to kill a light, but I can’t do it in any tank under Tier IV, where I would be most likely to find a light ?    And so many Tier VIII matches I don’t see any lights, or just one.      The goal being to move them all up to platoon missions and then see how that goes, with attempting to get random platoons via the chat or whatnot.

Many missions to go.

My newest play is “Project 19”, wherein I’m making sure all the tanks I still own have more than 18 matches, so the real junk can stay at the bottom.    I have one tank that I’m trying to remember why I kept it –

The Tier II Chi-Ri Medium

It’s slow.    Not such a good gun.   I have an awful record with it.   Maybe I should just sell it and let it go, but I haven’t talked myself into that yet.     Same thing with the T-60 and T-70; awful records and not such fun matches.   But these both occasionally have really fun ones which make me want to continue to grind up the crews.

Continuing to grind up XP, but given the huge number of tanks I’m doing this with I’m not listing any of it out.    Is it grinding if you’re working on ten tanks at once ?   Probably not.

 

Burbank Domination – In Progress

Tags

City Domination

The Glen-Mar liquor store has been there for many years.    In previous incarnations it was a hardware store and a restaurant, but today it’s a liquor store.    So it has a lot of shady looking characters coming in and out of it – thirsty kids, lots of men, delivery drivers, and City Domination players.

Wait, what ?

A convenient attack point

Many of Amahoser’s last squares in Burbank were near this store, so I’ve taken to heading over here as I work on cleaning up his last areas.      Unfortunately for me, these are also highly populated headquarters squares with many men.    Some of them had only the minimum 500 defense and these were easy to take out, but two had a full 2000 men defending them.     Populations varied among the rest.

The gameplay consists of a few different variations.

1. Drive into Burbank as part of my commute.   Park here, and use up all of my men reducing and conquering the area.     Rally every square, and take a few of his men away for use in attacking the rest.    And collect the missions for a final swing at the bat.
2. For a variation on #1, just drive in along the freeway past Amahoser.   Hit him with what I’m carrying.   But I can’t reach all of the squares that way.
3. Collect missions, rallies, etc wherever during breaks in the workday.     Drive on over to Glen-Mar and beat on the enemy.    Rinse and repeat until all men have been collected and used.    This leads to me driving, for example, up and down Glenoaks Blvd, each time moving farther as I eat up the missions waiting for collection.

I’m getting looks from people, which feels a bit weird.     “What is that guy doing here, again ?”     I can imagine trying to explain it.    But I do get a certain feeling like a bagman for a drug dealer or something must feel – get the stuff, and drop it off.    And watch out for the cops you smartphone-using-while-driving scofflaw.

At the current rate I should be finished with this phase – The Last Squares – sometime next week.

Seven to go.

I’ve been fortunate to welcome another gang merging into the Dark Burbank nation, putting us firmly in #1 for LA county and pushing us up to #9 nationally.     They had a bunch of squares in Covina, a city east of Los Angeles but still part of Southern California, where I want to concentrate my efforts.    Harvesters of Sorrow, aka Pezzonovante, remains independent but that’s OK.    We get along well.

The weekend should see some additional grabbing of squares in the San Fernando Valley.   I’ll have three hours to kill, and run rallies and missions with.

One of the fun things about this game is that the gameplay is very fresh and unique.    I am definitely playing a video game.    But I’m not sitting in an office, I’m driving around (unsafely), or I pull the phone out depending on where my life takes me in Meatspace.    Anyplace I’ve not fully conquered, and I’ve got a minute, means time to pull out the phone.

Contrast this with your typical PC game.     When it’s time for games, I retreat to the office/computer room and start playing.    And when it’s not time, I turn it off.    This is not how it works with City Domination – it’s always time to play, the only question is the appropriateness of shooting virtual gangsters depending on my Real World activities.

Or, oddly enough, in any area you’ve spent significant time and no one is opposing you, you ignore the game.   Anyplace near my house is all mine, and I don’t have much of the game to do there.   But when I head for Dodger Stadium next, you can bet I’ll be trying to conquer then.

Browsing the map and looking at other gangs territories, you can see I’m not alone in this.    Their areas center on freeways.    Because we all sit, bored, in our cars in traffic and wait for our turn to move next; which eventually graduates to slow speed gaming as you look for the next square.

When Android Car, or whatever it is, really catches on I will be very curious to see how gaming gets intergrated.   It will be – probably not officially, but I’m sure apps will pop up.     Might be something along these lines.

French Translation misses subtleties

Tags

City Domination

City Domination is partially a game of taking territory – or even, mostly.     This can consist of both taking squares away from bot players and human beings, and also of reinforcing and maxxing their defense.     But neither of these activites get you good points on the leaderboards.

It turns out that I was mistaken about “$” missions.   Despite the unhelpful text which mentions that your income will go up by “a little bit”, you income can increase 10x over the course of running several of these on a square.    So I began to de-emphasize getting the 5X missions going (which reward a ton of men and money) and instead to run the $’s.    Each of them complete within no more than two hours, and the results so far are pretty nice.

Suddenly, #1 in LA

Just 11 left, Burbank squares for Amahoser. But mostly Headquarters.

So now it’s a question of seeing how high I can get the gang up the leaderboard; talking HoS into joining my gang, which would put us into the top 10 nationally; and wiping out these last squares, to set up completely covering Burbank in these iron crosses.

Yeah, I won the war

Tags

City Domination

The mania has worn off, pretty much.     It’s going on 13 days now, that Silent Bob (Amahoser) has not logged into City Domination, and I’ve done a pretty good job of wiping him out of Burbank.

The Final Stronghold of Amahoser.     He has nothing at all east of this area.

I think I’m going to do more of a slow movement across town from now on.    This driving solely for the game thing, multiple times a day, is not something you can keep up forever.    Now, a low grade thing where it’s part of my commute, that’s a different story.

I’ll have to eat up a few more squares in The Hills, and keep working on all of those HQ spaces over time.   From there, I’ll move more strongly into the flatlands and the area around the airport.

It’s a merry gangster Christmas today !

Lost Battles, but Winning the War

Tags

City Domination

To win the war, you must take away the enemies will to fight.   Truer words were never spoken.

Discouraged by the loss of most of Burbank, I continued to fight against Amahoser as Doc Burbank of the Dark Burbank Nation (gang),  and I take the same squares over and over from him.    He upped the ante, and did both: take anything from me, which I had taken from him; and continued to expand across the town.     Seems however, that I’ve done something right – he hasn’t logged in for an entire week, and I’m hopeful that he’s quit the game.

Still lots of blue. But lots of orange now too.

This has completely refreshed my motivation, and I find myself farming the men as fast as I can get them.     “Five” missions are a good bet, as is driving across Amahoser’s territory and rallying the men.    Now that he’s no longer repopulating his squares, that’s particularly effective – taking his men away from him, to be used to attack his remaining men.

The plan is to box off a square around his headquarters area for future destruction.     The freeway is the first priority, since I like having the connected territory with the rest of the I-5 freeway, up into Santa Clarita.    Second priority is “The Hills” of Burbank, northeast of the freeway.    After that I’ll try to clean up in “The Flatlands” and remove all of his territories.

Of course, the real life actions here are a bit strange.    I step back for a moment and think about what I’m doing, and it gives me pause.    Every lunch break is a drive across town to play the game.     Driving into Burbank means many detours now, just to hit him again or farm men.   I feel a feral hatred for this punk Amahoser – refusing all communication and accommodation, he simply decides he’s going to take me out.     He could have succeeded.

Probably, he asked himself a similar question and decided not to continue sucking up all of his time.  It might have helped that I got a tablet, and used that when possible to bring two accounts to the attack.   But my readers should know I’m psychotic about Burbank.    Of all the things to never challenge me on, this would be it.    So there’s little doubt that I’ll continue to claim the city, come what may.

The enemy could decide to come back, nothing is sure.    If he does I hope he’ll find himself covered with my territory, instead of his blue.

My commute is now completely covered by my squares, and I couldn’t get any more territory if I tried.     Commuting is once again pretty boring, but safer, given that I’m not poking on my phone as I drive.     And Santa Clarita continues to be conquered, little by little.

Monolicious, the other guy in Burbank, has also quit playing, while a new guy (who constantly changes his names) is in Pacoima.    As is usual in City Domination, he doesn’t want to be part of my gang, but he is expanding and I think we have an understanding – I’ll leave Pacoima alone and he’ll leave the freeway alone.     Harvesters of Sorrow, still holding the top spot in LA County, are not a concern and I’m friendly with their leader.

It’s the savage excitement of taking territory that keeps me playing this game.

Losing is hard

Tags

City Domination

When playing a PvP game, you have to be prepared to lose.   Looks like that’s what’s happening to me in City Domination.

Burbank has me and one other serious player in it.    Amahoser.    Silent Bob, who refuses to communicate and recently declared war on Doc Burbank.     I am watching square after square fall to him and there’s not a lot I can do about it.      I can only assume that I’ll end up with a few squares around my workplace and that’ll be it – depending, of course, on the obvious factors.

The “Blue Guns” are him, pushing into my territory.

In the meantime, my ownership of Santa Clarita is unchallenged, along with the 5 freeway down to the 170.   Past that point and I’m being challenged by Amahoser.    So I’m not exactly being completely squeezed out of the game – just out of the area I care about the most, naturally.

Most people playing the game end up bored and quitting.    So will he quit first, or will I ?   I suspect the war will play out until that point.    You can’t exactly have diplomacy with no communication.     I still have one more trick up my sleeve which I’ll try out this week, but it’s success is uncertain and dependent on how much time I want to dedicate to the game.    If you collect enough “5 missions”, you can really smack an opponent around, and that’s what I hope to do to this guy.    The large rewards quickly fill up your inventory, so you can immediately attack an area in force, regardless of how many men are defending.   The 5 missions take a minimum of 48 hours to be ready, and up to around 108, probably to prevent exactly what I’d like to do – have them all ready at exactly the same time.

Then again, I don’t want to fall down the rabbit hole of gaming.    I have a feeling this guy is about 21 years old and unemployed, or a student.     He must have gotten sick of me for whatever reason, and he’s willing to drive around to wherever and smack me down.  I can’t dedicate that kind of time to the game, so I’m expecting to lose.

Either that, the blitz will work out, or I’ll outlast him.    But it’s a bit less fun now, seeing my beloved city slowly slipping out from under my control.