Words from an evil hippy

I was advised to post this:

gimme some permissions to that site or post this for me: 

i find this game interesting as its really empire building with lots of crap to do and how you want to play it

http://www.imperiumnova.com:8080/Imperium/

wanna run all political and try and become emperor - you can 

wanna run like we did in our early days of eve online, or at least my early days anyway,  moving goods around for profit - you can do that to but watch out where there are monopolies on trade or you can have people get feud scores against you and come fight you 

wanna be all covert ops and steal info, money or even assassinate someone - you can do that as well 

wanna mine for geological deposits - you can do that

wanna be an explorer and find new planets - yep you can do that as well 

wanna team up and kill the poohbahs - send me a message -  oh wait - different game - you can't do that here 

The  level of involvement is based on what you feel like really and as long as you haven't pissed someone off by attacking them first or your covert operations against them haven't been discovered you are golden to do just do your thing 

downsides: 

you don't really get to choose where you end up - the game discourages being able to set up with your friends as you will end up getting thrown into a random self contained galaxy with other players- this prevents asshats from running a whole galaxy themselves- however an alliance feature can still make asshats do this but these asshats wouldn't know each other in rl 

there doesn't seem to be a lot of players in this game (my galaxy only has 16 currently) so opportunities to do things are there but any really old house or a subscriber is going to have an advantage 

subscriber has an advantage due to being able to work in more than just two spheres of influence (im currently runnin psionic and geological) but being able to make more money n other spheres gives you more options to accumulate wealth etc 

old houses will have advantage of time really - their covert ops guys have been around longer meaning they aren't rookies like yours will be so they get bonuses to do missions - same goes for their military - the only way to really hurt an old house is to do it politically from what i can tell and it helps if you have an alliance backing your politics to get senators elected and cause some chaos

Advanced Civilization

I was pretty jazzed when I found this link recently and I am eager to do a bit more research into it.  Some fine and noble souls have build an Advanced Civilization site.  The game takes about 8-12 hours to play in meat space so I'd expect the computer game taking a similar amount of time.  Playing over the computer would have advantages, not least being that it appears games save their state so you can play it over a couple sessions.   After a quick eyeballing it looks to be pretty good, there is even an option to pause your game if people are going to be on vacation or whatnot - a big plus with you sketchy lot.  Requires you create an account to play the game, but that's pretty normal and I don't see how you could do it otherwise.  There is an indexed help system you can check out first, and looks like a PDF of the game rules from the box.

Playing Advanced Civilization at Hammercon 2013

I love me some Civilization so this might be a real find.  I'd be very interested in doing a 8 player game of this over a couple nights.

Conqueror!

There is a pretty nice little web based game called Conqueror! that might be fun to play.  Its real time medieval European war game with elements of Risk and Diplomacy/Machiavelli. Games take between 1-4 hours depending on number of players and this game will support a pile of players and AI opponents.  The turns are submitted and executed in a semi simultaneous manner so there isn't a long wait for all your opponents to move before you can go.  It's very well done and the rules are in that sweet spot between easy and complex so that it is interesting but you don't need to devote a month to running simulations in order to compete.  You can set the play time and player limits, set up open or locked games, advertise for players in the lobby and do all those other fine management things.  You can even log in with a guest account if you are one of them hippies who doesn't like to have any long term commitments.

Preview of the Conqueror! UI I snapped from the help system.

I played this as a shockwave flash game a couple years ago, but they have redone the interface in HTML 5 now so it should run on anything.  I would be down with playing this some evening for sure.

M.U.L.E

M.U.L.E (see wikipedia) really is a special game, probably the first original 'boardgame' that I played on a computer.  I say original because there was always checkers and cards and chess and things that had been translated over.  I mean remember Archon?  That game was awesome, but it wasn't a whole-cloth new strategy game.  M.U.L.E was a good game and was a hell of a lot of fun on the Commodore 64.

Human for the win.

And it's still a good game, although someone please tell me why it isn't available on the Playstation or Wii marketplace?  What is up with consoles not having this game when there are 10 versions of eMonolopy out?
There was recently a M.U.L.E game on the iPad and I bought it, but I didn't like the interface.  It felt weird and the art was a bit off in my opinion.  I do like art and the the interface for Planet M.U.L.E on the PC.  It plays much like the original except for the joystick, which is a shame because the joystick was a good bit.  Planet M.U.L.E is free but you need to make an account which some people are weird about.    Its a 4 player game and pretty short as strategy computer games go - maybe an hour or so.  I say go get it and we can play a game.  There is even a spectator and tournament feature if you are feeling like you can bring it.

Irregulars Assemble!

I got really sick of flinging around emails and trying to remember who was interested in what and then getting it wrong so I figured that a central place to meet up would be best.  We did this a bit on my old private web server for all my hoodlum friends many years ago and we did it again on Facebook, and one time I had a Left 4 Dead server running with a web page on it.  Oh the memories.

Anyway this is the lowest common denominator.  No registration required, no fancy instructions.  If you use the subscription features you can get updates of posts here.  It will also probably post to G+ if anyone monitors that.  I'm not going to try to add too many gizmos and doo-dads on here but I will add some if its useful.  A calendar might be nice - maybe some polls or whatnot.  Mostly I wanted a place to post information to the group about games we like, games we might want to like, games we don't like and most important of all - games we are playing with each other.   Maybe you are interested in posting pictures of a recent game you played.  Maybe someone wants to write a series of posts about the time they played Civilization II or a dissertation on why everyone should give the ET videogame another chance.  Someone might like to post a game review or make comments on one someone else has written.  We can put up pages for the longform games we are currently playing so we can slag each other about it.

If you want author rights to this blog let me know, otherwise some of us will publish posts about stuff and the rest of us will use the comments to make stupid remarks.  If you want me to add a link to your crappy blog or crappy website or crappy facebook page then let me know.