| The Road |
[May. 4th, 2009|01:10 pm] |
I learned this lesson a long time ago, when playing an old computer game called Populous. In retrospect it taught me a great deal. I used to enjoy playing the game, until the computer got "stupid" It appeared to get stuck, and truth to tell, damn near wiped me out, It volcanoed me until the mountains hit the roof, but the game didn't end since I still had one hut. Surrounded by boulders I was hemmed in, (he couldn't attack) so I set the behaviour of the hut to "accumulate" so that there was one man pacing about outside, and as a new one spawned very minute or so it just merged with the pacer. This went on for hours. The computer, following it's only directive kept up with the volcanoes. I was however, determined I was not going to lose. At some point in what was probably a glitch, my pacing man, was jumped by the force of a volcano onto the rocks, "with one bound Jimmy was free."
Thus it was the man walked down from the mountain, and singlehandedly went to every computer owned building in turn and took it over. I nominated the pacing man the leader and set all buildings to accumulate. He walked around personally and even though the computer got somewhat desperate towards the end, sending in knights, en mass, my man was implacable. I never played the game the same way again. Humans I noticed play populous in a very specific way. You could only build on flat ground, so the game was one of making flat ground then building on it.
So in playing the game against other humans I would find out where it was they were flattening land, and then earthquake it. A low power drain miracle, do three of those on the trot, and it would really mess up the land. Humans would then retaliate. Unlike them, if they earthquaked me, (though often they'd escalate and volcano if they could) I would ignore the disruption and go elsewhere, and set what remained of my huts on that patch to accumulate. To be honest with you, harassing people was the most fun, because you were playing back to back, (pre-internet) you see the emotion on their faces. Once I had a man that was "big enough" and I had enough power, I'd do the modern day equivalent of cluster bombing, only with volcanoes, right in the middle of their green and flat population center; you only needed five or six in a checker pattern to really screw up a map. Then I'd send in a few knights, on random attack, and steer my Goliath around personally, knowing I had plenty of time as they were busy flattening land I'd just volcanoed.
Truth to tell, that in playing like the computer I was able to sweep all before me, as people were expecting to play against another human, not a smart computer, but it also took all the joy out of playing other humans, even after I explained how I did it, it became about winning and not about playing.
Why this sudden reminiscence? Because after that I stopped playing against humans and came up with a slogan "attitude beats technique" Which is mirrored in this rather discursive article by Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, entitled: Why David beats Goliath. Who knew that Basketball could be so interesting :)
HT Paul Kredosky |
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
praxis22's journal