Palfrey's life

I have this wedding to go to next weekend. Up until a few hours ago, I had neither booked the hotel, nor arranged travel. As this thing is a good 236 miles (never really used Google maps before) away from my parents, this is a very bad thing. Some prodding from the good Mr. White later, I was reminded that I meant to deal with this. Luckily, there were others in the same boat, and so I was able to be pointed at the hotel next door with one free room, and then manage to get a lift down there. Because of the fun logistics (5h+ hours travel, 12 noon start = overnight stop in the middle), I am going to be very briefly in Bristol on friday evening, but unfortunately I will be unable to attend rikrose's bday stuff. So close, and yet so far...

I've gotten addicted to Dawn of War. I think I've talked about this before when I played the demo, but now I have the full thing. Imagine a resource-management RTS game with no harvesting. Everything comes down to resource points (and power points, but less so, and you get those just for building things), and you get resource points for taking and holding certain objective points. More accurately, you continually get more resource points, but taking, holding and generally reinforcing objective points increases the rate at which you get them. When I say increase, I will note that that it seems to scale on most maps so that when you start up, you start running short on points pretty quickly, but once you've actually explored a bit, grabbed a few objectives, and spent some time fighting enemy forces vs. sitting in your base and building stuff, you've basically got more points than you'll ever use. The only thing that stops you from building the vast super army is the squad/vehicle caps. OTOH, a set of two squads of fully loaded Terminators plus a couple of upgraded Hellfire Dreadnoughts can pretty much kick anything's ass (including the enemy super armies).

In short: It's like my childhood fun of playing with Space Marines, Tactical Dreadnought Armour Marines (aka Terminators), Heavy Bolters, Melta-guns, Twin-mounted Lascannon, and memorising the minutae of Games Workshop manuals, only this time I get to have more flashy effects, interesting animations as a Dreadnought decides to go for the theatrical death for this particular infantry unit (spiky hand, flame thrower, etc). Any game that describes one unit as a "meat shield" (each unit has short notes, and this is in one of them), and then lets you demonstrate this with the business end of an assault cannon has gotta be good for lowering my stress levels....