Seriously, in multiplayer, the way to turtle is to slowly expand your turtle to new areas with more resources and more strategic advantages, but I'm sure you know that.
The point I thought you were making about the multiplayer angle, however, is the point I'm about to make. Namely, when most RTS games REALLY get interesting is when you're playing with more than one opponent - 2v2, 3v3, free for all, team free-for-all (2v2v2v2), et cetera. Now, not only does the tactical combat game become more complicated (I have fond memories of one epic Brood War free-for-all where four people committed their entire armies to one massive battle), but the resource management becomes extremely complicated. The winner in a free-for-all is generally the player who expands most aggressively without being wiped out for expanding too aggressively. Team matches are even more complicated, because strategies become so much more intricate once you have allies to interface with. If either conventional RTS' or World in Conflict are too boring for you, just up the number of players competing.
Seriously though, in Brood War (regular Starcraft too to a regular extent), yes, resources make a huge difference, and so does scouting, but in the higher-level circuits, your ability to scout, manage resources, even use tactics and strategy is to some level moot, because everyone is at roughly the same skill in that regard - it's a finite game with predetermined maps that both players know intimately and a limited unit selection that both players know intimately. All the possible strategies have been played out hundreds of times, and most good players are excellent at spending the minimum of resources required to keep very good tabs on their opponents' movement.
Instead, what matters is your multitasking ability, how well you can micro goons and zealots versus hydras and lings while you produce more units, mine, expand, drop your opponent's base, and storm the workers at his expo against his ability to micro hydras and lings versus your goons and zealots, mine, expand twice (zerg, after all), muta the workers at your main base, and send speedlings to rape an expo.
Brood War is admittedly on the simpler side of RTS', but that isn't the real reason for the devolution of strategy and tactics into a speed contest - the problem is that it's been played SO much by SO many people (there's an international pro circuit, for chrissakes) that nearly everything has been tried before. Yes, there's a new strategy once in a while (recently we got 1 rax/expo/early armory for terran) but it's impossible to keep your strategies secret, because even if they're not scouted and figured out in realtime, an innovation only works until one of your opponents not only watches the replay, learns your strategy, and prepares counters, but PUBLICIZES it so that everyone else can counter it. This just happens faster on the pro circuit, where thousands of people watch every game and analyze the bejeezus out of it.
Starcraft 2 is coming out soon, so for a while it'll be about the strategy and tactics again. But if that game's even remotely as popular as Brood War (and considering how huge its fanbase is BEFORE RELEASE, it will be), within six months (definitely a year) everything will have been played out again already, and we'll be spending our time working on clicking faster in more places again.
That response was longer than I meant it to be (can you tell I have a rather low speed compared to most starcraft players at the know-everything level?), but the point was, don't fool yourself into thinking that where the game gets interesting is the balance between the units. That's only true at the very low levels and on the varnished surface of the high levels - below that, it's just which Korean teenager can click faster.
I was just referring to the DRM crap, in this instance. I realize that other than that, Microsoft really is trying to make things better for the end user.
Maybe I wasn't clear, Chiphead - I don't have anything wrong with the shoddy quality of the computer itself. In fact, especially considering the price, the parts themselves are very good. What I object to is deliberate sabotage of one's own product for no benefit to the consumer.
Considering the price, there's nothing major wrong with the Inspiron line. However, spending $100 or more EXTRA to sub a "mini-Inspiron" for the EeePC seems ludicrous.
I don't know anything about Asus and I'm the first to admit that. The fact that Dell is basing this line off of what we both admit is a low-end, crappy line of notebooks is what worries me.
Finally...I'm not complaining about my "glaringly bad decision". I'm a university student with practically no money and I did as well as I could with what I had. It just annoys me that companies like Dell are going out of their way to make the low-end PCs lower, just like it annoys me that Microsoft goes out of their way to make Vista less friendly to the consumer and the recording industries go out of their way to make their products less friendly to the consumer.
Please stop flaming, nobody appreciates it. If you disagree with me, that's fine, and telling me that is also fine, but don't inflict all your prejudices and stereotypes (Did you do NO research prior to grabbing the first Ubuntu mania inspired laptop you could find?) on me just because money's tight for students.
Buy your RAM separately and you'll save a lot of money. Make sure you get the fastest SPEED of RAM that they'll offer you, though - Dell, for one, has a nasty habit of making sure no RAM will be recognized as faster than the speed they originally installed in their laptops.
I'm typing this from a non-mini Inspiron, and I'd pick ANYONE over Dell based on any characteristic but price - and "under $500" doesn't come near Asus' price for what you get. Main issues with Dell after this purchase:
-Shoddy craftsmanship - the keys occasionally snap off under the normal force of typing, and sometimes aren't replaceable. If I hadn't shelled out a hundred bucks or so extra for a more comprehensive warranty, my F11 key would be permanently gone.
-Bad installations - when the laptop originally arrived with Ubuntu on it, a full 5 gigs of the hard drive was wasted on Dell-created partitions that served no real function to me, without asking whether I wanted them or not, and the install itself had many strange options selected. I reinstalled the whole thing from scratch.
-Stupid lock-ins - Since I bought the laptop without a graphics card beyond the integrated graphics, they locked down the motherboard's ability to accept a hardware graphics card. Since I bought the laptop with memory that runs at 533MHz, it refuses to run my 800-whateverMHz memory that I bought separately any faster than 533MHz, even though they offer 667MHz memory and there's no reason it can't accept even the speed I have.
-Horrible purchase packages - They charge something like a hundred extra bucks to upgrade from 512MB memory to a gig, and a hundred more on top of that to go to two gigs. For comparison, I bought 4 gigs of much faster memory on eBay, brand new and unopened, for $90 including shipping. Newegg would have charged me about $130.
-Ugliness - Dear god, look at the standard Inspiron for a bit. It looks like a brick. They can't really be that bad at design, the XPS line isn't anywhere near that ugly. They just want to make a killing selling the higher-end models, which cost less than a hundred dollars extra to them to manufacture.
For these reasons alone, not just the simple fact that Dell's been convicted of fraud and God knows whatever else recently, I'll take Asus over Dell any day. Besides, the eeePC originally only ran Linux, and that's something I can get behind.
A recent update (No clue what, as it doesn't TELL YOU, at least not the way I have it configured, and I have no clue how to make it tell me) destroyed my entire user settings directory. Everything overwritten. Custom themes, desktop shortcuts, even the start menu entries.
Thank you thank you thank you. This pretty much sums up exactly what I think about the issue.
I have found by asking around that there are plenty of third world countries, particularly in East Asia, where you can basically live without any contact with the government. This is as close as we're likely to come to what we both seem to want, I think.
Netherlands has already been debunked, I'd like to point out that Canada is on many issues as bad as or worse than the US (intellectual property, for example). Only difference is, they have the "the Americans are making us do it" excuse.
Personally, the only thing INSPIRING me to pirate games (cost isn't really that big a problem) is that the companies are treating their customers worse than the government treats death row inmates. You want to put this crap on my disk? I want to get a free copy that doesn't include it. Either neither of us gets what we want, or both of us do.
Well, assuming they're flying at the same thousands-of-feet altitudes as the other planes, and put in their own paths with nothing intersecting, just like the other planes, and given their own slot for landing in, just like the other planes, what's the big deal?
Got it. Unfortunately, while you can get 3rd-party tools to watch Starcraft replays made with different engines (old patches, and such) I'm guessing it's rather harder to do that for Halo 3.
On the bright side, that lets you change perspective and such without saving a multi-gigabyte file for a ten-minute game.
Or like Starcraft, which had this maybe ten years before Halo 3. Of course, that game's so old that they decided to save your hard disk space by just recording every action taken and running it through the engine again when you replay a game, so sometimes there are bugs.
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The interesting thing is that the game you picked is one of the strategy games LEAST like war.
You play Terran, don't you? :P
Seriously, in multiplayer, the way to turtle is to slowly expand your turtle to new areas with more resources and more strategic advantages, but I'm sure you know that.
The point I thought you were making about the multiplayer angle, however, is the point I'm about to make. Namely, when most RTS games REALLY get interesting is when you're playing with more than one opponent - 2v2, 3v3, free for all, team free-for-all (2v2v2v2), et cetera. Now, not only does the tactical combat game become more complicated (I have fond memories of one epic Brood War free-for-all where four people committed their entire armies to one massive battle), but the resource management becomes extremely complicated. The winner in a free-for-all is generally the player who expands most aggressively without being wiped out for expanding too aggressively. Team matches are even more complicated, because strategies become so much more intricate once you have allies to interface with. If either conventional RTS' or World in Conflict are too boring for you, just up the number of players competing.
I thought the zerg rush was HOW you scouted?
Seriously though, in Brood War (regular Starcraft too to a regular extent), yes, resources make a huge difference, and so does scouting, but in the higher-level circuits, your ability to scout, manage resources, even use tactics and strategy is to some level moot, because everyone is at roughly the same skill in that regard - it's a finite game with predetermined maps that both players know intimately and a limited unit selection that both players know intimately. All the possible strategies have been played out hundreds of times, and most good players are excellent at spending the minimum of resources required to keep very good tabs on their opponents' movement.
Instead, what matters is your multitasking ability, how well you can micro goons and zealots versus hydras and lings while you produce more units, mine, expand, drop your opponent's base, and storm the workers at his expo against his ability to micro hydras and lings versus your goons and zealots, mine, expand twice (zerg, after all), muta the workers at your main base, and send speedlings to rape an expo.
Brood War is admittedly on the simpler side of RTS', but that isn't the real reason for the devolution of strategy and tactics into a speed contest - the problem is that it's been played SO much by SO many people (there's an international pro circuit, for chrissakes) that nearly everything has been tried before. Yes, there's a new strategy once in a while (recently we got 1 rax/expo/early armory for terran) but it's impossible to keep your strategies secret, because even if they're not scouted and figured out in realtime, an innovation only works until one of your opponents not only watches the replay, learns your strategy, and prepares counters, but PUBLICIZES it so that everyone else can counter it. This just happens faster on the pro circuit, where thousands of people watch every game and analyze the bejeezus out of it.
Starcraft 2 is coming out soon, so for a while it'll be about the strategy and tactics again. But if that game's even remotely as popular as Brood War (and considering how huge its fanbase is BEFORE RELEASE, it will be), within six months (definitely a year) everything will have been played out again already, and we'll be spending our time working on clicking faster in more places again.
That response was longer than I meant it to be (can you tell I have a rather low speed compared to most starcraft players at the know-everything level?), but the point was, don't fool yourself into thinking that where the game gets interesting is the balance between the units. That's only true at the very low levels and on the varnished surface of the high levels - below that, it's just which Korean teenager can click faster.
I'm wiping away tears while I mourn my lack of mod points right this instant...
The US government already was.
They actually replaced the broken random seed in OpenSSH with a function based on Amtrak arrival times.
Though the mods apparently don't, I found this hilarious...
I was just referring to the DRM crap, in this instance. I realize that other than that, Microsoft really is trying to make things better for the end user.
Maybe I wasn't clear, Chiphead - I don't have anything wrong with the shoddy quality of the computer itself. In fact, especially considering the price, the parts themselves are very good. What I object to is deliberate sabotage of one's own product for no benefit to the consumer.
Considering the price, there's nothing major wrong with the Inspiron line. However, spending $100 or more EXTRA to sub a "mini-Inspiron" for the EeePC seems ludicrous.
I don't know anything about Asus and I'm the first to admit that. The fact that Dell is basing this line off of what we both admit is a low-end, crappy line of notebooks is what worries me.
Finally...I'm not complaining about my "glaringly bad decision". I'm a university student with practically no money and I did as well as I could with what I had. It just annoys me that companies like Dell are going out of their way to make the low-end PCs lower, just like it annoys me that Microsoft goes out of their way to make Vista less friendly to the consumer and the recording industries go out of their way to make their products less friendly to the consumer.
Please stop flaming, nobody appreciates it. If you disagree with me, that's fine, and telling me that is also fine, but don't inflict all your prejudices and stereotypes (Did you do NO research prior to grabbing the first Ubuntu mania inspired laptop you could find?) on me just because money's tight for students.
Well compared to the crap Dell's trying to sell here...yeah, I'd call it a desktop replacement.
Buy your RAM separately and you'll save a lot of money. Make sure you get the fastest SPEED of RAM that they'll offer you, though - Dell, for one, has a nasty habit of making sure no RAM will be recognized as faster than the speed they originally installed in their laptops.
I'm typing this from a non-mini Inspiron, and I'd pick ANYONE over Dell based on any characteristic but price - and "under $500" doesn't come near Asus' price for what you get. Main issues with Dell after this purchase:
-Shoddy craftsmanship - the keys occasionally snap off under the normal force of typing, and sometimes aren't replaceable. If I hadn't shelled out a hundred bucks or so extra for a more comprehensive warranty, my F11 key would be permanently gone.
-Bad installations - when the laptop originally arrived with Ubuntu on it, a full 5 gigs of the hard drive was wasted on Dell-created partitions that served no real function to me, without asking whether I wanted them or not, and the install itself had many strange options selected. I reinstalled the whole thing from scratch.
-Stupid lock-ins - Since I bought the laptop without a graphics card beyond the integrated graphics, they locked down the motherboard's ability to accept a hardware graphics card. Since I bought the laptop with memory that runs at 533MHz, it refuses to run my 800-whateverMHz memory that I bought separately any faster than 533MHz, even though they offer 667MHz memory and there's no reason it can't accept even the speed I have.
-Horrible purchase packages - They charge something like a hundred extra bucks to upgrade from 512MB memory to a gig, and a hundred more on top of that to go to two gigs. For comparison, I bought 4 gigs of much faster memory on eBay, brand new and unopened, for $90 including shipping. Newegg would have charged me about $130.
-Ugliness - Dear god, look at the standard Inspiron for a bit. It looks like a brick. They can't really be that bad at design, the XPS line isn't anywhere near that ugly. They just want to make a killing selling the higher-end models, which cost less than a hundred dollars extra to them to manufacture.
For these reasons alone, not just the simple fact that Dell's been convicted of fraud and God knows whatever else recently, I'll take Asus over Dell any day. Besides, the eeePC originally only ran Linux, and that's something I can get behind.
I'm no fan of either Apple or Microsoft, but can you please back up your claims of horrible evil on Apple's part? Besides, it's not cute.
A recent update (No clue what, as it doesn't TELL YOU, at least not the way I have it configured, and I have no clue how to make it tell me) destroyed my entire user settings directory. Everything overwritten. Custom themes, desktop shortcuts, even the start menu entries.
Thank you thank you thank you. This pretty much sums up exactly what I think about the issue. I have found by asking around that there are plenty of third world countries, particularly in East Asia, where you can basically live without any contact with the government. This is as close as we're likely to come to what we both seem to want, I think.
Netherlands has already been debunked, I'd like to point out that Canada is on many issues as bad as or worse than the US (intellectual property, for example). Only difference is, they have the "the Americans are making us do it" excuse.
Personally, the only thing INSPIRING me to pirate games (cost isn't really that big a problem) is that the companies are treating their customers worse than the government treats death row inmates. You want to put this crap on my disk? I want to get a free copy that doesn't include it. Either neither of us gets what we want, or both of us do.
Well, assuming they're flying at the same thousands-of-feet altitudes as the other planes, and put in their own paths with nothing intersecting, just like the other planes, and given their own slot for landing in, just like the other planes, what's the big deal?
What are the major security implications of an unmanned aircraft?
Got it. Unfortunately, while you can get 3rd-party tools to watch Starcraft replays made with different engines (old patches, and such) I'm guessing it's rather harder to do that for Halo 3. On the bright side, that lets you change perspective and such without saving a multi-gigabyte file for a ten-minute game.
Read his post more carefully - it's not illegal until you commit fraud based on the false info you gave them.
Thanks for the explanation. That seems reasonable.
They DO realize that they're just now adding a feature to their console that's been on their mobile platform (admittedly through a hack) for years?
Or like Starcraft, which had this maybe ten years before Halo 3. Of course, that game's so old that they decided to save your hard disk space by just recording every action taken and running it through the engine again when you replay a game, so sometimes there are bugs.