Life, the Universe, and Everything

Despite loving technology of all sorts, I have been hesitant to join the whole social networking game. I have even been skeptical of the blogging concept. When the social networking websites started showing up all those years ago, I had really just written them off as a passing fad, like so many other things have been.  Obviously that hasn’t been the case.  Social networking sites like digg.com and del.icio.us are quite popular, along with several others.  Far be it from me to counter the masses anymore.  I’ve started playing with digg and del.icio.us now, and I have an account on technorati to keep track of the blog’s statistics.  I can see the attraction to the social networking concept, even though I’m sure I have yet to see the full benefit.  If you haven’t joined any of these sites, I can actually encourage it now.  If you’re already a member, please feel free to add me to your network.

Rather than spending an excess of time on a bunch of posts about my Eve Online activities over the past year, I think I’ll just make this post a quick summary, and consider this the ‘starting’ point for further posts about my in game activities.

My first six months in eve were spent with the Venus Brotherhood. Overall, this corporation was a good place to learn my way around the game. I spent that time building up skills, primarily on the manufacturing and research side of the game, building ships at minimal profit for the corporation and various other similar activities. As time went on, I got delusions of greatness and decided to start a sister corporation to launch a POS tower in high security space for Venus Brotherhood. As I was raising funds for this process, several things happened that made it evident that I didn’t want to maintain too tight of ties to Venus Brotherhood. Even though I still consider many Venus pilots to still be friends, the lack of leadership while at war was very disappointing, and with the launch of the POS tower, it was time to take my own path in the universe.

In February of this year, I launched VNRI (Venus Research Initiative) and spent approximately 600 million isk to launch the POS tower. After getting a bit of business very early from Venus Brotherhood members and some brief advertising through some of the trade channels, I found out that a friend of a coworker had started an alliance, Empire Research, whose purpose is to provide POS based research slots to alliance members. After a quick vote, I joined the alliance and converted the labs to be available to alliance members. This simplified the process of handling operations and increased tower income tremendously.

Well… That covers most of it. Since joining Empire Research, I have made a sizable amount of money from the POS. Business was very good for the first 3 months or so until the alliance had war declared against it by another alliance, ‘The Privateers’. While the direct damage from this war declaration was minimal, it did cause several customers to leave the alliance. The past two months have shown pretty heavy losses as a result. So far, business seems to be picking up significantly for September, and if losses are posted again, they will be much smaller.

Now that I’m up to date, it will be much easier to provide updates that will perhaps not be quite so long. Well… they might still end up on the long side, but they won’t cover as much ground anyway.

I’ve been playing a wonderful game, ‘Eve-Online‘, for the past year or so now. There really is a lot of variety available in this game, which makes for a game that stays fun for a very long time. Unlike many other MMORPG games, skill training in eve is completely time constrained – skills train whether you are logged on or not, and skill training can’t be pushed faster by skill “grinding” that is common on most of the other games. Training times are affected by character attributes, which can be enhanced with implants and learning skills, but of course those cost training time and in-game currency.

Eve has a number of professions to engage in, including mining, manufacturing, trading, mission running, pirate hunting, exploration, and piracy. Of course, most players engage in some combination of these activities, particularly over the life of their character. PVP is an integral part of the game throughout all areas, including the elements that are not typically thought of as PVP. While “empire” space is generally considered safe, there are still plenty of ways for other players to cause problems.

With this to provide some background, future posts about my in-game activities will make a bit more sense, although to really understand much, you really need to join and play the game. The price is very competitive with other games, and with some work, you can actually pay for the game time with in-game currency. Whether you join or not, you can expect to see regular entries about the game and various in-game activities and events.

Have a great week and I hope to see everyone flying around soon!

IMG_2587
Originally uploaded by av8or
Of all things to collect, how about those AOL cds. Well… I guess we all have to have our hobbies, right?

I’ve been somewhat hooked on the tower defense games lately. Among my favorites has been onslaught
, which, in addition to the typical features of the tower games, includes multiple tower combos and booster towers. Onslaught has seen several new features recently, including the addition of audio and some new combos. Today adds some new features, including a new ‘super tower’ and several bugfixes.

Strategy:

So far, the best strategies I’ve found have been the ‘nuke flower’ concept, and laser rockets. So far my best game has been played using laser rockets, although I tend to get impatient sometimes and start too many waves at once, which swamps the rockets. The nuke flowers (a rocket tower and 2 cannon towers, repeated a bunch of times around the map) seem to be more resistant to this problem, but unfortunately the nuke damage does have a practical upper limit, which ends up leaving a fixed lifespan for the nukes effectiveness. By chaining the laser towers, the laser rockets can get into massively high damage levels to handle the creep spawn for a much longer time period.

Summary:

Overall, I like the tower defense games. They are fairly simple to play, and have a fair bit of variety. I’m in the process of planning a compiled tower defense game engine. Look for updates on the progress of this project to be coming over the next several weeks.