Hoo-Riding

In the war for Los Santos' streets, most people agreed that the  Grove Street Families were back. Though reduced greatly in size from former preeminence following the Ballas' crack-fueld rise to power,  once CJ returned home from the East coast things started rolling Grove Street's way. They kept the Ballas and Vagos on the defensive, launching raids into their territory.

Of course, not every raid or attempt at a raid was a success. Witness the night of June 16, when -- following a raging party -- C.J. and a few of the Grove Street boys decided to go hit a Ballas neighborhood.

Of course, every hit begins with obtaining transportation. This guy is doing the family a favor. Yeah. 

The Families crew were far too drunk to drive, let alone make their way across town and work over a hood, but that didn't stop them from trying.

Their drunken recklessness caused things to go south in a hurry.

They took refuge near a Ballas-controlled factory, opening to spot a few of the hoods standing around while simultaneously hiding from the police.  

That didn't go so well. 

With more cops coming and their car mostly done for, they decided to steal the police cruiser to hit the Ballas with -- and then decided to use the police scanner to harass a few low-lifes.

Of course, on the way they hit Ballas.

It didn't take long for the cops to spot the four GSF gangsters laughing in a speeding squad car, so while CJ chased a crook on a bike, the police attempted to stall the cruiser.

Daylight was approaching when they finally caught up with a criminal.

At dawn, with half the riders asleep, CJ heads back for the Grove at full speed.

The police escalate their search....

...but fail to apprehend the drunken riders after their night of chaos and revelry.

Most agree the night went badly, for the Grove attracted far too much police attention and gained nothing.

The Valley of Diosa

Long ago, I purchased SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition and found myself stymied. I'd long played its predecessor, SimCity 3000 (Unlimited Edition) and knew the rules, but SimCity 4 operated on considerably more intricate mechanics. I could arrive at nothing other than blocks of nondescript houses: my cities were devoid of personality.  A few weeks ago, though, I purchased a strategy guide for SimCity 4 and began reading it to prepare to take on the game again. After reading through most of that -- but more importantly, reading through a SimCity 4 Let's Play -- I felt resolved to try again. After playing all of the tutorials through, I started a new region and tried to wrap my head around what I wanted it to look like.



I approached my first city with a definite idea in mind of what I wanted it to be: it would be a small, unassuming, and clean place. There would be no large industrial base barring one or two larger factories: the Sims who lived in this town would commute if they were not content to work in commercial services. Accordingly, I shaped a delicate little place for it, named it Diosa, and went to work.



As a matter of fact, I had forgotten to arrange for power. Oops. Thanks for the heads up. I exited to the region after saving: time to build a neighbor city that provides the dirty stuff like power and low industry. Since it would be a polluted cesspit where the welfare of people was subordinate to profit, I named it Reagan.  I soon got the opportunity to provide power to little Diosa.




...hey, aren't you the city planner in Diosa?!  Guy gets around. Anyway, now that Reagan has a few industries developing and is selling power, I return to Diosa. I find out that I made Diosa's initial connection to "Reagan" on the wrong side of the map:  consequently, I had to drag another road across the map. It worked out nicely, though.



Pretty place, right? Nice place to drive.



My nondescript homes begin appearing, but hopefully with the right improvements, they'll start posessing character. I make my first MySim, a lady-type named Tory Shephard, and drop her in the lower income housing neighborhoods.


She immediately informs me that her commute to Reagan is like a "sunday drive".


I accidently botch up the planning for a new neighborhood and get this. Ugh.  Terrible. All of these neighborhoods have commercial-service strips: they provide some jobs, and I want Diosa to be more of a collection of little communities and less of a characterless expanse of homes. Commmercial service lots only develop if there's traffic, though:




See?  Although SimCity 4 has a hard financial model, with the right tweaking of budgets -- adjusting facilities so that their total capacity only slightly exceeds demand -- it's easy enough to stay in the black. I run into a problem only once during these opening periods, and it's resolved by my expanding the tax base and building new neighborhoods.



In the center of town, roughly, you can see Diosa's first sanctuary.  Note that the highway running through town provides an ideal place for commercial expansion. The circle you see is a medical clinic's ambulance range, which I tweaked to cover the town and nothing more.



I soon notice my first high-income family move in: they immediately complain about not having jobs. Perhaps they should have thought about that before building a massive house.



Here's that commercial expansion I mentioned before: note that they're bigger. These are commercial offices, and I'm building them to provide jobs for middle-class Sims, as they're coming to Diosa in greater numbers. Consequently, I create a middle class Sim named Vic Cardoni and move him in to inform me on what the middle class thinks.




Note how pretty houses are becoming. I take a break from Diosa to expand Reagan more, then build another town in the north called River's Edge. River's Edge quickly becomes the most populated. Its economy centers on agricultural and industrial production.



This looks quaint, but there are heavy manufacturing jobs in this town as well. It may be better than Reagan in that respect, actually.  Here's a parting shot at part of Diosa, with both of my MySims nearby:



Note that Vic's job description is "wage slave". Living in that house, I kinda doubt it.

That'll be it for this update. Next time...well, we'll stay in Diosa, expanding jobs in Reagan as needed.

Discovering the Age of Discovery

I'm playing Age of Kings III: Age of Imperialism for the first time, borrowing it from an acquaintance to make sure it runs on my Vista before buying my own copy. I'm well acquainted with its predecessor, the Age of Kings, a medieval real-time strategy game. I'm not terribly good at it -- I'm far too lazy and indulgent to bother getting "good", preferring instead to play on easier difficult levels where I can be wasteful but still win with a bit of effort. I'm the type of player who likes building towns and amassing armies, but not using them. After playing through the tutorial, I decided to play a skirmish match, set on easy. I'm playing as the Germans, mostly because I've gained an affection for all things German after four semesters of German language classes. Hearing a sturdy "Jawohl!" when I tell soldiers to march around is rather gratifying.

I chose a New England map, and as it happened the map was divided into half by a trading route with controllable areas. After my explorer "Klaus" uncovered that portion of the map, I made haste to start claiming them. Apparantly on "Easy" difficulty the computer spends most of its time contemplating its navel or some other such thing, because despite my woefully inefficent resource gathering -- directing settlers to chop wood, produce food, and mine silver for money -- I claimed all four trade route spots and build two outposts along the road.

I quickly found the enemy colony -- here you can see one of my "Uhlans" encountering rival woodsmen. The coin emblems on the map represent trade route spots, the little huts Indian villages, and the X's treasure sites. I'm rather lazy and never got around to taking any treasure. I parked a tower just south of the Dutch colony to  keep an eye on Dutch troops that might try to raid the trade route:  I could only support so many troops, and so preferred instead to keep my army at a central location and then move them to wherever they were called for if the time came.






As it happened, by the time Dutch troops started wandering southward, I'd already made the tower into a forward base: it was quite near a silver mine, and so I had workers there mining it. I also had a barracks and an artillery foundary. The Dutch would attack it numerous times, getting slaughtered and each and every time. There was no contest: my soldiers were massed and mixed, consisting of crossbowmen, heavy swordsmen, and skirmishing riflemen. Once I got cannon -- and an upgrade from my "home city" that allowed me to turn cheap cannon into field artillery -- the game was effectively over.




 I soon began reducing their town to rubble. After destroying their two barracks, all resistance stopped -- I needed only to keep reducing their colony to force them to surrender. Meanwhile, my cavalrymen were hunting down Dutch settlers and giving them a taste of silver.




The slaughter was not all on land, either: the tower I built just north of the trade route blew up a Dutch ship while I was busy watching my cannon reduce the Dutch town to rubble.






I decided to try another game, this one on a different kind of map, one that promised a river.




German Soldier:  Llamas....rheas....and dirt. Where the hell did we land? 

Again, a trade route lay roughly in the middle of the map, which was intersected vertically by a river with shallow spots. My explorer Klaus stumbled upon the Portuguese colony by accident and began throwing things at it. He would do this for a while longer.Once my economy started to develop, I militarized the middle of the map.



Where we see my troops attacking a pirate and an Indian with a blowgun to claim their treasure. Geld ist gute, ja?  I again built a tower just south of the enemy colony to help stymie any invasions on their part, then turned it into a forward base at my leisure. This turned into a nice move on my part. The location I chose allowed my soldiers to take over in the woods with a tower at their backs when the enemy tried to attack them, leading to a slaughter greater than before.




I soon began raiding the colony, at which point the Portuguese took great offense at Klaus throwing things at them and started shooting at him. He took refuge behind a rock.




 As my troop numbers grew, so to did my aggressiveness: I started attacking the Portugese workers. They would flee, only to find themselves facing another band of German crossbowmen, knights, and muskets: it was rather sad, almost.








I had the Portugese bottled up nicely. They were doomed. Rather than waiting on cannons, I trained pikemen to take on the town center directly. I lost quite a few during the siege of it, and afterward when villagers armed with muskets poured out of its sundered entryway, but was able to crush the colony quick-time.