Tobold's Blog: April 2023

Tobold's Blog

Friday, April 28, 2023

Git Gud - The other side

About a year ago, I argued on this blog that a Metacritic score of 97 for Elden Ring isn't a good reflection of reality, because there are a large number of people who won't be able to enjoy Elden Ring, it being too difficult. Thus if you know nothing about the game and just buy the game with the highest review scores, you'd be wrong to assume that a high review score means that it is a game that is fun for everybody. This sort of argument usually gets dismissed by a certain type of hardcore gamers, who argue that you need to "git gud", and it is your fault if Elden Ring is too difficult for you.

I was thinking about that this week because the review scores for Age of Wonders 4 are starting to come in, and in some of those reviews the depth and complexity of AoW4 was cited as reason to downgrade the review score. I certainly agree that AoW4 is a highly complex game, with a decent AI, making it hard to win, especially on higher difficulty levels. That was actually funny to see with some streamers, who as a matter of pride set the game difficulty to hard on their first playthrough and ended up getting their asses handed to them by the game. AoW4 is a bit less complex than the most notoriously inaccessible Paradox games, but it is more complex than Civilization 6, or similar games like Humankind or Old World.

So, what happened to "git gud"? Why does "git gud" only apply to games in which the challenge is mostly one of muscle memory and reaction time, but not to games in which you would be well advised to pause and think what you are doing? That is even more curious if you consider that old people like me have a scientifically proven lower reaction time, and can't actually "git gud" just by practice. I'd argue that most gamers could learn to play AoW4 well, if they wanted. Not everybody enjoys having to learn a lot to be able to beat a game, but even complex Paradox games aren't rocket science that are fundamentally inaccessible to most people. It is just a steep learning curve, a big hump to overcome at the start, but given a bit of time you can understand the complex game mechanics, and beat the game.

One problem with complex game series is the growing gap between veterans and new players. I'm pretty certain that I will have no major difficulty playing AoW4, but that is after spending over a hundred hours over the last half year in Age of Wonders: Planetfall and AoW3. I *want* AoW4 to have more options and features than those previous games. I didn't buy the remake of Master of Magic, because I found that it hadn't evolved at all from its 1994 original, other than graphically. The original Age of Wonders from 1999 already took the Master of Magic gameplay and added to it, and then every further iteration of the series added more stuff. For me, who played every game in the series, Age of Wonders 4 is like tailor-made. But to somebody who played few or no 4X games, AoW4 can look very daunting.

Still I would argue that the fact that Age of Wonders 4 does have variable difficulty levels, which Elden Ring doesn't, makes it possible even for newcomers to enjoy the game. Start with the lowest difficulty, have fun making outrageous heroes and factions just based on how interesting the options look, and learn the game by playing. Unlike Elden Ring, where you would get stuck if you couldn't kill the first boss (and didn't know the secret path to circumvent him), in AoW4 you don't have to win a campaign to start the next one, and try out other things.

For me, Age of Wonders 4 is certainly a better game than Elden Ring. I don't think it is very fair that review scores ignore a game being reaction-time difficult, but downgrade it if is deep and complex.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:45 PM Permanent Link (6) comments

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Humankind has a problem

While the title is probably more than true for the real humankind, in this post I am talking about the 4X strategy game Humankind from Amplitude Studios, published by Sega. The game is two years old now, and it isn't selling very well. So there currently is an 80% discount for the game on Steam, plus a new DLC that you can get for free if you get it before May 10. I would advise against it. I played 70 hours of Humankind and kind of liked it, but I never bought the game. It was, and still is, available as part of the Game Pass for PC. So for the same $9.99 you could spend on the discounted Humankind, you could also get a full month of Game Pass for PC, and play Humankind plus a bunch of other games. You don't get that free DLC, but who cares? And given that Humankind only has a 77 Metascore, and mixed review on Steam, trying it out as part of a bundle might be the better strategy anyway.

The timing is awful, because Paradox's Age of Wonders 4 is just around the corner, and will presumably be the "game of the year" in the 4X category. But the bigger problem is obviously the Game Pass. Even Microsoft recently had to admit (as part of their regulatory filing for their failed takeover of Activision Blizzard) that the Game Pass cannibalizes sales. The regular price for Humankind is still $50 on both Steam and Epic, and anyone who knew that Humankind was on the Game Pass probably preferred 5 months of that to buying the game.

You can buy a collection of 4 seasons of The Crown on DVD on Amazon for $36, which corresponds to 2 to 5 months of a Netflix subscription, depending on the subscription plan. While that situation looks somewhat similar to trying to sell computer games that are available on Game Pass, it is not exactly the same. A physical DVD has some practical advantages over a stream, like portability (I once watched Netflix on the go on a 4G connection, but that exceeded my mobile data limit and cost me dearly). For computer games there is less of a difference: Downloading the game from Steam and Epic and playing it is functionally identical to downloading it from the Game Pass and playing it.

I have no idea what the financial conditions for game studios and publishers are on the Game Pass. But there must be some financial interest, because there are 436 games on the Game Pass for PC currently, and they aren't all old or published by Microsoft. But the parallel offering of a game on the Game Pass and other online stores to me looks like a trap for suckers who weren't aware of the Game Pass offer. As that sucker could well be me, I am now using Game Pass Compare, which allows me to check my Steam Wishlist against games available on Game Pass.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:12 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Age of Wonders 4 Preview

Age of Wonders 4 is coming out next Tuesday, and I pre-ordered it, because the game looks absolutely fantastic, and I enjoyed Age of Wonders: Planetfall very much. And due to some streamers being already allowed to show gameplay, I already know quite a bit of detail on the game.

The biggest selling point of AoW4 is the extraordinary number of choices you have when setting up the game. You have numerous options to create all sorts of fantasy worlds, with many different challenges. Then you can create your own faction, out of many different races, but with additional modification choices. And you can create your ruler with different skills and tomes giving access to different schools of magic. If you always wanted to play a necromancer ruling over a tribe of frogs in a world full of lava lakes, AoW4 has you covered.

Other new features of AoW4 are more subtle: For example, every city has two separate construction queues, for buildings and units. No longer are you stuck in the typical early game dilemma of many other 4X games, where you need to decide whether to build a granary or a scout. Considering that combat is a far more essential part of the game in AoW4, that is a good design choice.

AoW4 is closer in gameplay to Planetfall than it is to AoW3. It uses the same system of expansion by provinces, instead of just hexes. So you need to consider the terrain of the province you expand to, as well as resources and special wonders structures. Wonders provide a lot of content in the form of events and fights and treasures, and then boost the resource income of the province they are in. Also like in Planetfall there is the option to “try out” automatic combat, and decide whether you want to fight manually only after you saw the outcome of automatic combat. That saves a lot of time for people who usually always play manually, just because they distrust auto combat.

Combat is similar to all previous incarnations of the series, but with more distinctive troop types. For example shock troops have the ability to negate retaliation attacks. But while different factions all have some sort of shock troops, they are all somewhat different, due to other abilities. That gives a large variety to the tactical combat encounters. And in AoW4 the healing after combat depends a lot on whether you are on your own or enemy territory, which gives a larger strategic dimension to the building of outposts and cities. New in AoW4 is that only heroes can build outposts and cities, there are no more settler units.

The one thing that worries me about AoW4 is bugs and crashes. Watching several streams of the game I have seen several occasions where the streamer needed to reload because of a bug or crash, and even one where the crash was recurring and the streamer needed to start a new game. A week before release that is not the state you want your game to be in. And Paradox has form, a lot of their games are rough at release; fortunately they don’t “fire and forget”, but keep developing and making their games better over time. But if I were a more patient man, I should maybe have waited and not bought the game before release.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:23 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Monday, April 24, 2023

Video game marketing in the age of the streamer

Age of Wonders 4 comes out in just over a week, on May 2nd. The Age of Wonders series is developed by Triumph Studios, who since 2017 are part of Paradox Interactive. Now Paradox games have a reputation for being not easily accessible. Some of their core titles, like the Europa Universalis series, are simply unplayable for the average gamer. Age of Wonders 4 is still rather complex, more complex than let's say Civilization 6, but it is less complex than Europa Universalis 4. And AoW4 is also graphically rather pretty, which not many Paradox games are. So Paradox decided to market Age of Wonders 4 with the help of some influencers on Twitch and YouTube.

The clever part of that marketing is that they created special in-game assets for specific streamers, in the form of headgear for heroes. For example for one streamer with 300k followers, who is using a pirate theme for his stream, they created a pirate hat, so he could make a main hero in the game that looks like him. These headgear items can then be distributed by those streamers via the Twitch Drops system, so people who follow a specific streamer can get that streamer-specific item in game as well. I call that clever, because it is another source of motivation for the streamer beyond just money.

But there are also not-so-clever parts in that influencer marketing. One is a rather strict schedule at what date the streamer has to show what in their stream. They all showed the character and faction generation part of the game on March 2nd, and gameplay streams on the weekends of April 22nd and April 29th. So instead of getting a steady stream of content over some time, all the selected influencers publish similar content at the same dates. And in some cases that clearly doesn't fit into their own schedules, so I've seen the AoW4 content seen attached to the end of a stream for a different game.

The other problem is that complex strategy games are a niche in the general videogaming sphere. So Paradox got a mix of streamers, some dedicated to this sort of strategy games, and some not normally playing deep strategy games. I watched some streams in which somebody clearly not used to strategy games, and not having taken the time to play some hours in advance for preparation, discovers Age of Wonders 4 gameplay for the first time on stream, and is visibly struggling and confused. That isn't great advertising. But it is the nature of streamer marketing that the company paying for it sees the result at the same time as the public. If a stream is bad, it is already too late to pull the plug. Some people will always be more interested in a particular game, or put in more effort out of professionality; others will just take the money offered and do the required minimum.

Obviously in 2023 nobody would even dream of marketing a video game via blogs. But I preordered Age of Wonders 4 and thus will be able to play it next week. You can expect one or more blog posts on Age of Wonders 4 from me during the month of May. But even I would recommend that if you are interested in that game now, look for recent gameplay videos of it on YouTube.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Saturday, April 22, 2023

AI scams

This definitely is the year in which AI is making a lot of headlines. So I'll keep commenting as well, because I feel that I can contribute some much needed rationality into a discussion which is frequently dominated by emotions and fear. So I have been reading about a scam that happened on Reddit, where "Claudia" sold nude photos of herself. Only that Claudia doesn't exist, and both the clothed and nude photos were created using AI image generators. Not exactly the crime of the century, and the whole operation was shut down after making a whopping hundred bucks. But the episode touches on some aspects of AI scams that are worth discussing.

The first is the simple question of whether it was actually a scam. Didn't the people who saw the images of Claudia clothed and paid for getting nude photos of her get exactly what they wanted? Is a pornographic photo worth less if it generated by AI? In terms of market value, probably yes. Real women are obviously reluctant to send nude photos of themselves to strangers, in fear that those images could come back to haunt them. Claudia isn't worried about that, because she doesn't exist. On the other hand, it isn't as if free pornographic images were exceptionally hard to find on the internet. Why would somebody who likes to look at such images be concerned whether the women in those pictures are real or not, as long as they are naked and beautiful?

The second aspect is that some people who hear stories of AI scams are blaming the technology. And no, if we call this a scam, it definitely was perpetrated by humans. It wasn't some AI who decided to scam humans. It was humans using AI tools who scammed other humans. While modern photocopiers are equipped with technology that makes them stop working if you try to photocopy dollar bills, the instances in which people were fooled with photocopied bills are not to be blamed on the technology, but on people who had the criminal energy to use the copier as a tool to scam others. AI tools are just the same. Yes, you can maybe scam your teacher by having ChatGPT write your homework essay. But you could also get somebody on Fiverr to write that homework for you, although Fiverr explicitly forbids that.

A human selling homework writing services on Fiverr would be unethical, as he is supposed to know Fiverrs rules against it, and is supposed to recognize the task itself as being in furtherance of a pupil "scamming" his teacher. AI isn't unethical, it is a-ethical. Despite the name, artificial intelligence isn't intelligent, and lacks inherent tools that would enable it to recognize a given task as not being ethical. Just like they did for modern photocopiers, it is possible for engineers to add capabilities to AI tools that make it recognize and refuse tasks that aren't ethical. But the AI itself doesn't even understand the concept of ethics, and unless explicitly forbidden to do so in its code, it will try to perform any task a human asks it to do without pondering the ethics of that task.

Many scams these days wouldn't be possible without social media and the internet. But demanding the internet to be shut down to stop scammers would obviously be ridiculous. What we can ask for is better filters and moderation from the tech companies that run these social media. And in the same vein we can demand the tech companies that run AI tools to add better filters and moderation to these tools. Many public AI image generators refuse to produce porn already, although that mostly reflects the peculiar American fear of nudity which isn't shared by much of the rest of the world. The use of AI tools to spread misinformation is probably a greater danger, and there isn't much to prevent that yet.

As my last point I would like to circle back to my previous post on AI and talk about AI taking all our jobs away. If your "job" was to sell photos of yourself nude on Reddit, shouldn't we, as humanity, be okay with you being replaced by AI? I recognize that some people's idea that *all* sex work and pornography is exploitative isn't true, there are people who do that work out of their own free will. But there is certainly some exploitation going on in that business, and I'd much rather see an AI tool exploited to produce sexual imagery than a real person. Claudia doesn't mind if the photos she sold end up being widely distributed.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:00 AM Permanent Link (8) comments

Thursday, April 20, 2023

Wartales grind, difficulty, and streaming

Wartales has different types of difficulty settings. One can only be chosen at the start of the game, and determines whether regions have different difficulties, so you can go back to an "easy region" if things go wrong, or whether all encounters in all regions scale the same way. The other two difficulty settings are about combat difficulty and survival difficulty. Plus there is a setting for how often you can save, which also can affect difficulty. In this post I want to talk mostly about the survival difficulty.

So what does this setting do? The biggest effect is on how long you can play before you need to pay your mercenaries. So at higher survival difficulty level, money is a lot tighter, which means you have less gold for food or gear. While this obviously somewhat affects the overall difficulty of the game, it also has a rather profound impact on the way you play: If money is tight, you need to do random quests more often. In some cases you might even be forced to farm refugee caravans, which are the easiest target in the game. In other words, higher survival difficulty level leads to more grind. Which is why in my game I put it to the lowest level.

Wartales seems to be a very popular game since its release; there are a lot of people on Twitch streaming it. And I noticed that some streamers set all the possible difficulty levels of Wartales to the highest level. That could be a matter of pride, or streamers figure that nobody wants to watch you playing a game in easy mode. However, I had the impression that for the survival difficulty in Wartales, that choice backfires: Streams of Wartales with high survival difficulty contain longer sequences of the streamer having to grind, and fewer sequences with story quests and boss battles, which are more interesting to watch. Grinding is bad enough if it is in your game, so it really doesn't make for very good entertainment when it is in the game of a streamer. So my recommendation to players and streamers of Wartales would be to only set combat difficulty to high, while setting survival difficulty to medium or low.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:10 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Thoughts on print magazines, online news, and artificial intelligence

A reader was inspired by one of my remarks about print magazines, and wrote a blog post about his situation. The interesting question here is whether print magazines are a thing of the past, or whether they still have a future. But maybe we need to turn the question around and ask ourselves whether online journalism still has a future.

As I mentioned before, I get a lot of my news from news aggregators like Google News, or Flipboard. As I haven't put in any filters, the news I get often comes from the United States. That isn't great, because about 90% of the content I get that way from America is stories about the culture war. Just click on the link to the Flipboard site, and without being logged on you'll see how many stories there are about Trump, about DeSantis battle with Disney, or about what some Republican or Democrat lawmaker said. Pretty much all of those culture war stories are partisan, with the left being outraged by anything the right does, and vice versa. As some of my American readers pointed out, the view somebody outside the USA gets from how life is in the USA is completely distorted, because in reality Americans have real lives with real problems and aren't constantly involved in culture war issues 24/7. But their media are, especially the online only part of the media.

Now I spend a lot of time reading and writing, and I know a thing or two about what constitutes quality writing, and what not. And if you scroll through the stories of any news aggregator, you need to be lucky to find any quality writing, or any deep thought. Outrage is the main subject not only because it sells well, it is also the most easy to write. And I suspect there are other commercial reasons for the flood of such stories: It is a lot cheaper to use the "gig economy" to let somebody write about his outrage, than to hire a trained full-time journalists who is giving a subject some deep thought and balanced view. But because the news today aren't something that a Walter Cronkite or Woodward and Bernstein would recognize, there is also a new fundamental danger to the new journalism: AI.

AI chat programs can write mediocre text. And if you look at these texts, they don't offer much depth or original thought, because they are just assembled from frequently associated words on the internet. It's the lowest common denominator approach to writing. And that isn't all that different from the online news you can read today. High quality journalism with original thoughts and stories can't be replaced by AI, but AI needs to be fed by a lot of existing stories in order to write one. But the existing state of online journalism is of such repetitive nature and predictable thoughts on stuff that has been discussed a million times, that it would be easy to generate with AI. You just need an AI that has been fed recent news stories (ChatGPT won't work), and you can easily generate an online publication with very similar headlines and stories than the existing ones, for a fraction of the cost.

My general thinking about AI is that if your job can be replaced by AI, that says a lot more about the quality of your job than it says about the state of the art of AI. It isn't an accident that among the first publications to use AI to write articles are names like Buzzfeed, rather than let's say the Washington Post. If you already have a publication that cares more about search engine optimization than about journalistic values, and more about quantity than quality, then it is only a small step from "pay by word" journalists to AI journalists.

So maybe print magazines and newspapers have a future if they can manage to provide deeper analysis and more original thoughts than buzz. I've read some quality publications over the years, like The Economist, and while an AI could write "in the style of The Economist", any reader would quickly spot that this wasn't written by a real Economist journalist. For many online only publications, an AI version would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Maybe the future of AI is to replace Bullshit Jobs; would that really be such a bad thing?

- posted by Tobold @ 12:02 PM Permanent Link (3) comments

Friday, April 14, 2023

Wartales is back

I very much liked Wartales when I played a very early access version of it for 77 hours end of 2021. So I am very happy that it finally reached its release version this week, and I started playing again. The tactical combat gameplay is as excellent as it was back then, and much of the rough edges has been polished. If you don't know what Wartales is, the closest similar game is Battle Brothers. But while Battle Brothers has a procedurally generated map and quests, Wartales has a hand-crafted map, and a mix of pre-written story quests and generated quests and encounters. Obvious advantage is that the stories are a lot more interesting, and you actually need to make tough moral choices: For example in the first region the story quests are mostly about a conflict between the local farmers and refugees. Are the farmers the bad guys, because they don't want to share their land and their food with the refugees? Or are the refugees the bad guys, because they have turned to banditry to feed themselves? You decide!

The early access version was rather hardcore. The release version has optional difficulty levels, where the medium one is already a lot more mainstream than early access. Furthermore the difficulty settings can now be set independently between combat difficulty and survival difficulty. So if in the early access version you didn't like how you never had any money and eating corpses for food was sometimes necessary, you can make the money/food part of the game easier without making combat less challenging. There are also different options on how to handle save games, although I would advise you to check those closely before selecting one. The easiest one, Free, is actually displayed in the middle, while the one that looks the easiest, Limited, is a bit like Ironman works in some other games, with a lot of autosaves. The Ironman option to the right has absolutely no autosaves, which is potentially annoying.

Another great option at the start of the game is that you can choose whether the enemies have a fixed difficulty, or whether the enemy level adjusts automatically to yours. I prefer the first option, where there are easier and harder places on the map, and you have to navigate accordingly. To me it is more fun if I know of a difficult encounter, but can level up elsewhere and come back later. But if you personally prefer a constant level of challenge, you have that option too. I wished more games would give you that choice. I stopped playing Phantom Brigade because character progression seemed so pointless, when it never actually changed your chance of winning an encounter.

And Wartales has a lot of options for character progression. You gain xp, which give you levels, and that allows you to increase your stats. But at certain levels you can also make choices in what I would describe as a sort of talent tree. In addition to your character class, you can also have one of now 10 different professions, like mining or smithing. And there is a new "paths" system, that tracks your progress in different areas of the game, and converts achievements into points you can spend for bonuses. There is still a level cap, but while that was level 5 when I played it last, it is now 12 with version 1.0. Which also means that there are more regions now and and more content to explore, even if I am currently playing through the same starting region as before.

Overall, Wartales is a much rounder, more complete game now, while still keeping its strong parts. At currently around $25 on Steam with a 25% release discount, I can only recommend the game.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:47 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Potion Craft and Puzzles

So I am still playing various PC games from the Game Pass to either make my current subscription worthwhile, or reach the point where I can cancel it, because there is nothing left I want to play. One genre of game I tend to like from time to time is shop simulators, where you craft stuff and sell it to NPC customers. So I tried out Potion Craft, a game about crafting potions and selling them. Again I was left with a feeling that I was happy to have played that for some hours without extra cost beyond the existing subscription, but wouldn't necessarily have bought it; even if the game is only $12.50 on Steam.

The interesting part of Potion Craft is a crafting system that turns crafting into the exploration of a map. So you have a map with a "fog of war", and by using a given ingredient, you are moving over that map on a path that isn't straight in a certain direction. You have a certain control, like how much you want to grind your ingredient before adding it, and then you can stir the pot to move along that path. Besides uncovering the fog of war, your goal is to land on spots that give the potion a certain effect, let's say healing. The effects come in 3 levels, from weak if you just barely touch the spot, to strong, where you are on the spot in a nearly pixel-perfect way. Besides the effect spots there are "dead zones" on the map, touching which will kill your potion, whirlpools that move you around, and xp spots (with a system that makes some of those respawn).

The overall game consists of checking with your customers what potions they need, using the alchemy map to make those potions, selling the potions, and using the money to buy more ingredients, pages for your recipe book, or parts for an alchemical machine. As I said, it is fun for several hours. And then, while I was crafting a particularly difficult potion which necessitated some very fine controls, I realized that I was playing a puzzle game. Like a jig saw puzzle, there was exactly one correct solution to get a perfect potion of that type with no more than 3 basic ingredients. Once I had that perfect solution, I could save it, and just make new perfect potions out of those 3 basic ingredients with a simple click of a button. Yes, I could sell less perfect potions or use more ingredients, but there was one most efficient solution. The more of those most efficient solutions I found, the less there was to do for me. Sure, there are customers who sometimes want very specific potions, like ones having two different effects, where you then have to solve a new puzzle. But is solving a jig saw puzzle actually a game?

At the very least, I wouldn't want to start a new game of Potion Craft. The map and the paths for the ingredients are fixed, thus the solution for the same problem, e.g. a perfect healing potion, is always the same. And just like there are general strategies that can be applied to solving any jig saw puzzle, there are general strategies that can be used to brew any potion in Potion Craft. At some point you leave the domain of exploration and discovery, and are just stuck with the execution. Your mileage may vary, but I am not entertained long by trying to perfect my execution. For me, the learning of the game is the interesting part. I can replay frequently games like Against the Storm, where the random modifiers and conditions of each map create a fresh and slightly different experience to solve every time. But I didn't get that feeling in Potion Craft. So it was more like "5 hours played, it was interesting, and I'm done".

P.S. Please note that the Game Pass version of Potion Craft I played for some unknown reason is only version 1.0.1, while the Steam version is 1.0.5, which has some additional features.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:44 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Sunday, April 09, 2023

Personal Finance Advice for Early Retirement

I never "got rich quick". I did, however, reach a point in my life where I retired just under the age of 60, with a reasonable prospect that I'll be financially okay for the next 20+ years and then die before my savings run out. Which, if you are a generation younger than me, is probably something that sounds nearly unattainable now. So I could be tempted to put on my best Yoda costume and lecture on my blog how early retirement with financial independence can be reached. But if I am totally honest, I don't think that advice would be very good. I do think that my financial pathway to early retirement is reproducible, even if economic conditions have changed. I just don't think that I really should get all that much credit for it, or that the life choices that got me on that path are necessarily for everybody.

The thing is, I am doing the exact thing that the large majority of people do with their personal finances: I spend money according to some inner belief what my standard of living "should be". We all have some sort of inner compass on that. For most people, when they see a Lamborghini, their financial inner compass will tell them that they can't afford that. And that same financial inner compass is in action whenever you see a price tag or any potential purchase, even down to individual items in the supermarket. Caviar? Too expensive! Potato chips? Yes, I can afford that! The problem with that financial inner compass is that it is frequently wrong. But the alternative, of actually making a budget and calculate whether you can afford this or that expenditure, is too much for the large majority of people. The obvious risk is that your inner compass tells you that you "should be" able to afford items that actually you can't. And so you spend more than you earn, every month, until you credit card is maxed out or you are in some other sort of serious financial trouble.

So how did I get to a comfortable financial situation? Basically I primed my inner financial compass to make me think that I could afford significantly less than I actually could. And I didn't even do that deliberately. I just made a life decision that I wanted a PhD degree in Chemistry. That is certainly not something that I regret, but neither is it something that I would recommend to anybody, unless they are as passionate about Chemistry as I was from a young age on. Some hard truths about doctorate degrees in "hard science" fields: They take very long; in many universities all over the world people going for a doctorate or post-doctorate degree are being exploited; and while people with a PhD degree often will earn good money later, if you consider the optimum length of studies with relation to overall lifetime salary, a lesser degree would have been more optimal.

So, by the time I was 30 and just finishing that degree, I had an annual income of $9,000. No, there isn't a zero missing. I really was way below the poverty line, working all day between finishing my degree and doing work for my professor; I was living in a rented furnished room, had no car, and was unable to afford even minor luxuries like vacation travel. And then I got my first job, where my starting salary was already 4 times my university salary. And nearly 30 years later I was earning a low six-figure salary. But between me having been raised by parents who weren't rich, and having spent long years of studies under financial hardship, my inner financial compass was already dialed in at a relatively low setting. So once I had my degree and was working full time in the kind of regular career for somebody with that sort of degree, my inner compass told me to spend less than an actual budget would have told me. My inner compass was as wrong as that of many other people, it was just luckily for me wrong in the lower direction.

You don't need a higher finance education to guess the result: If over the course of a 30-year career you constantly spend a good chunk less than what you earn, and you invest those savings conservatively without ever going for high-risk financial products, in the end you have a pile of money large enough for retirement. And that part is certainly reproducible. But the other part, priming the inner financial compass, isn't necessarily so. Older generations, like mine, still mostly did better than their parents, which means that in their childhoods they were less financially well-off than later in life, which helps with setting that compass low. Younger generations are less likely to do better than their parents, and have a harder time adjusting to the natural drop in financial means when leaving their parents home. Ideally, everybody should live according to his means, and not according to some fuzzy, pre-formed idea of what their living standard should be. But I never managed to do that, and understand that this is way beyond the capabilities of the average person.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:38 PM Permanent Link (3) comments

Saturday, April 08, 2023

Empire of Sin

I am generally trying to get at least 1 hour of interesting gameplay out of every 1 dollar / euro I spend on a game. And recently I realized that this rule should also apply to my Game Pass for PC subscription, which I hadn't used much this year. In other words, I should check if I can get 120 hours of gameplay out of the selection of games offered with that subscription this year, as it costs me $120 per year. After a very short failed attempt at Astroneer, I am now 13 hours into Empire of Sin, although I probably will just play this for a few more hours. It isn't a great game, but for a limited time it is enjoyable.

Empire of Sin is a mix of several different genres. There are role-playing elements, with quests, voice-over dialogues, lots of equipment, and talent trees. There is a management sim, in which you produce illegal booze in Chicago and then sell it in you speakeasies and other illegal establishments. And behind it all there is a tactical turn-based combat game where your squad of gangsters shoots other gangsters. So the variety and width of Empire of Sin is good. Where it fails is in the lack of depth, and failure to get the different parts of the game to work together well.

The lack of synergy is pretty obvious in the user interface. The turn-based combat part of the game works reasonably well, but the real-time part that underlies both the management part and the role-playing part isn't. You can pause, but if you unpause there is only one possible speed. And whatever you are concentrating on, everything else happens simultaneously, and either gets in the way, or you end up missing it. Events flash up very shortly in a corner, and there is no system of auto-pauses, so if you were waiting for example for your brewery to upgrade its production, you would need to be very lucky to actually see that event displayed. When you do a bunch of management decision while the game is paused, as soon as you unpause a long stream of these events happens, because you for example building a new brewery affects your relations will all other gangs. If you come out of a fight that you did for a quest, it isn't necessarily the quest resolution that pops up, but could be something completely unrelated, like a minor gang wanting to buy some booze from you. It is very hard to concentrate on anything.

While combat is entertaining for a while, it quickly gets repetitive, as there are not so many different enemies and environments. It also suffers from not being balanced. Empire of Sin is the only game I know where you wouldn't want to bring a gun to a knife fight: Melee weapons, unlike guns, have a 100% hit chance, and a sledgehammer deals more damage than a shotgun. Only at long range some guns are better, although curiously rifles typically do better than sniper rifles, and are usable at a much wider range of distances, and cost less action points. Machine guns are often a bit underwhelming.

In theory there is a whole "black book" full of different gangsters to play with. But while a gangster is in your employ, his loyalty goes up, his cost goes down, he learns new talents in real time, and gets better with his weapon as a function of kills he does with them. So while you could later in the game hire somebody whose base stats are better, the new gangster would be far too costly and not so great due to lack of talents and weapon skills. Thus you tend to stick with the gangsters you get early in the game, and the whole relationship system between them never really kicks in.

The crime empire management system is simplistic. Without DLC, there are only 4 different types of criminal enterprises, and the only relation between them is the breweries producing booze for the other 3 types. Every racket has a limited number of stats, which you can upgrade from 1 star to 5 stars, and that's it. There is a lack of management tools, like for example statistical tools, so other than "more stars is better" it isn't really obvious which building or upgrade would have a better return on investment than another. And for example if you produce too much booze, you can sell it in various events or to other crime bosses, so optimization doesn't appear to be crucial.

A medium sized city map of Chicago has about 10 neighborhoods. Each of these neighborhoods has around 8 precincts. And each precinct has around 5 rackets. You can get some of the rackets by buying out a faction, but that usually only works on minor faction. So for the majority of the 400 rackets you will have to go in guns blazing and take them. Plus a bunch of further battles, for examples those against thugs where you are collecting loot crates, or those against guards on the street. That is a lot of very similar fights, all against very similar other gangsters. I don't think I will actually finish a game of Empire of Sin, because that is already way too much, and way too repetitive. Getting the game "for free" as part of a subscription service and playing it for 10 to 20 hours is okay. But on Steam Empire of Sin is $40, and only half of user reviews are positive, so I wouldn't recommend it.

- posted by Tobold @ 4:19 PM Permanent Link (3) comments

Wednesday, April 05, 2023

Astroneer

I'm not feeling well right now. I have a headache and nausea. This is the direct result of me having tried a new game, which turned out to give me video game motion sickness. That is actually a relatively rare occurrence for me, most games I can play just fine. But from time to time I try a game that literally makes me sick. It happened to me with Morrowind and Oblivion, but then Skyrim was fine. I never managed to play any of the earlier Far Cry games up to Far Cry 3, and then never tried 4, 5, or 6. It is very hard to nail down exactly which games I can play and which I can't. Camera "head bobbing" is usually bad; 3rd person games are usually better than 1st person; and in some games I can make the problem go away by making the field of view angle larger.

The game that made me nauseous today was Astroneer. I only played it because I was looking for a new game to play, and it was relatively far up in the alphabetical list of games I have access to as part of my subscription to the Xbox Game Pass for PC. It being 3rd person, I didn't have problems with the game at the start. I managed to get a number of tasks in the mission log done, and understood that Astroneer is basically a very similar game to No Man's Sky. I explored a planetary surface, gathered some resources, crafted some equipment, and was having fun. And then I needed aluminum, for which I needed to enter the caves of the planet and mine underground. That changed two very important things: Camera distance, as in confined spaces the camera is so close to you that it is nearly 1st person view; and light, with the cone of my flashlight basically limiting my field of view angle. 10 minutes later I was forced to give up, feeling really bad from video game motion sickness.

It didn't help that I am not very good with wielding a mining laser in three dimensions. I already didn't enjoy cave exploration in No Man's Sky, because I found it difficult to reliably dig always in a way that created not too steep slopes. In Astroneer that was much worse, with the added pressure of falling cutting your connection to the oxygen tether. The terrain tool can both add and substract terrain, but again I failed to create gently sloping ramps. And the camera and light problems didn't help. So I just uninstalled the game. I didn't enjoy it enough to try to overcome my video game motion sickness.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:27 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Tuesday, April 04, 2023

The incentives of early retirement

One of the channels I am following on YouTube is TLDR News. Yesterday they published a video called Is Early Retirement Hurting the Economy?, with an even more clickbait thumbnail, containing the question "Are old people lazy?" and Rishi Sunak telling an elderly gentleman to "do some damn work". The video itself is a lot more factual, but I still thought that the discussion about the reasons for early retirement was missing one very important factor: Companies actively pushing people into early retirement, something that happened to me.

This is mostly a problem of medium to large sized companies. They have large HR departments, which due to having hundreds or thousands of people to manage tend to do so with statistical tools, not having the time to look at each employee individually. So what do HR statistics reveal about employees over the age of 50? Well, due to often having worked at that company for decades, the salaries of these employees compared to starting salaries are obviously higher. On the other hand, younger employees often work longer hours and are more motivated earlier in their careers. Thus to an HR department it seems preferable to hire harder working young employees who are paid less. In many places there are worker protection laws in place that prevent companies to simply fire older employees who have worked for decades for them. Thus the interest of HR in schemes where they incentivize older employees to leave into early retirement.

Of course that doesn't apply to everybody. Some older employees have made a great career and are in senior management by the time they are 50. Age discrimination isn't something that happens in senior management, in fact in very many companies old white men make up the majority of senior management. In senior management, experience is valued, when obviously experience aids at all levels of business. But of course in a company not everybody makes such a career, and there are older employees who are still filling standard jobs that never evolved into taking account of experience, the kind of job where they can be easily replaced by somebody younger. The lack of any further career development and the feeling of their experience not being sufficiently valued by the company encourages them to accept those early retirement plan offers. Small companies, and especially one-man businesses, tend to find ways to adjust the work tasks of the older person to his increased experience and lower energy. Larger companies with standardized job descriptions have a much harder time to adjust job positions to the age of the job holder.

I believe a lot of people who left work for early retirement would have stayed if they had felt that their experience was still useful and valued by their company. And schemes that plan to encourage longer work participation and less early retirement will never work without a contribution from companies creating a work culture in which the experience of older employees is utilized better. There are a lot of cases where somebody leaving for early retirement is just a missed opportunity both for the employee and the employer to adjust work conditions to age.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (11) comments

Monday, April 03, 2023

Saltmarsh - Session 8

In my ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign, the group returned to their home base at Saltmarsh with their pirate ship. Not having any particular leads to follow, they decided that they could turn their ability to breath under water into a profitable enterprise, by looking for sunk ships. So they went to the lighthouse, operated by the mariners guilds. There they were greeted by the lighthouse keeper, Major Ursa. Major Ursa was quite happy to have some company, and readily answered the heroes' questions.

They found out that recently some ships had been sunk by sahuagin, also they seemed to only go after very specific targets. The most recent case was the Aurore, sunk 20 miles east of Port Torvin. A surviving sailor, currently in Saltmarsh, told stories of a giant two-headed shark controlled by sahuagin who had sunk the ship. The ship was transporting a crate with a magic item from Port Torvin to an island near Saltmarsh. The group was able to find the sailor, Edwin, currently drowning his sorrows in a local tavern. He told them his fantastic story about the attack of the two-headed shark, who had ripped a huge hole into the side of the ship to sink it. There had been sahuagin riding other sharks around, but they seemed content to sink the ship, and didn't go after the survivors in the lifeboats.

With the help of their religious knowledge and the local priest, Wellgar, in the temple, the group managed to get some more clues: The shark was probably the Maw of Sekolah, an avatar of one of the sahuagin gods, kept in their underwater city of Akriloth. While Shayla, one of the group's clerics, worships a more common aspect of Helm as a god of protection, the sahuagin, who hate magic, worship a lawful evil aspect of Helm as a protector from magic. This is because Helm had to destroy Mystra, the goddess of magic, during the godswar. Due to that event, Helm shed a tear, which crystallized into a large elongated gem with strong anti-magic powers, the Guardian's Tear. The group believes that the sahuagin are somehow identifying the ships that carry magic items, and sink them.

After letting their crew celebrate in the evening, the group's pirate ship sets off the next morning towards the general location of the sunk ship. As sunk ships don't leave traces on the surface, that turns out to involve two days of searching while diving. Finally they come upon the Aurore, with a big hole in the side. Entering the ship through that hole, they come across a huge floating fish eye. The group attacks the eye, but it turns out to be insubstantial, so the eye just looks at them, blinks, and disappears. Searching the ship the group comes across several drowned wights. After defeating those, they find the crate with the magic item, plus a large stash of 500 gold and 3000 silver coins, as well as the cargo manifest, protected from water by being bound in a leather case.

When trying to leave the ship with their loot, the group comes across a sahuagin patrol, alerted by the eye earlier. Shayla contacts their leader telepathically and tries to negotiate. The sahuagin are willing to the group go, but they would have to leave their magic treasure behind. Not willing to do so, combat ensues. Bubu, the tabaxi wizard and captain of the group, particularly enrages the sahuagin by his use of magic. The heroes manage to defeat the sahuagin, and with the help of their crew and ropes transport the treasures onto their ship. As usual, the crew demands half of the cash, which they are being paid, despite some reluctance on the part of Bubu.

The crate contains a staff of healing. They also looted a sahuagin trident from the patrol that Gris can use. The cargo manifest reveals that the Aurore was in fact run by the pirates of the Hold of the Sea Princes, as part of their smuggling operations. Apparently several transports of magical items had gone to the Isle of the Abbey, a small island near Saltmarsh.

Back in Saltmarsh the group asked the lighthouse keeper for information about the Isle of the Abbey. It turns out that the abbey in question is one of some evil cult, who is protecting the island with skeletons buried in the dunes at the south tip of the island. There are also rumors that the northern part of the island is not only hard to access due to rocks in the water, and cliffs that need to be climbed, but also a bone dragon guarding that part. Major Ursa can also tell the group of recent events, observed by people from Saltmarsh fishing near the Isle of the Abbey: Several pirate ships came and raided the island. The pirates landed in the dunes to the south. A column of smoke was seen from the center of the island later. Then the raiders returned to their ships and left the island.

The next day the group heads out with their ship to the Isle of the Abbey. They land at the same spot as the pirates, trying to find the way the pirates used to cross the dunes safely. That mostly succeeds (with a series of survival checks), but at one point they take a wrong turn and are attacked by 10 buried skeletons. However the group has 2 clerics, both of which use turn undead, and now at level 5 that actually destroys skeletons. This makes the encounter rather easy, and the group manages to cross the dunes without further problems. In the center of the island they find the burned-down abbey. A search reveals a staircase leading to the cellar. They sneak downwards and come into a large cellar room with several doors. A burly draconian warrior is sitting with an acolyte at a table, playing at dice. At this point we end the session, to be continued next time.

Note that hunting for treasures was an idea of the players; the events on the sunken ship I invented myself, using a generic battlemap of a sunken ship; and the Isle of the Abbey is one of the adventures in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh published book.

Labels: Dungeons & Dragons

- posted by Tobold @ 1:25 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

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