I had no idea! Graphics are incredible! If I'd had that as a kid I'd still be trying to graduate high school!
Still I'm looking for something that will actually teach some part of military history.
A few months ago, on the History Channel, I saw a simulation of what the battle of Troy might have been. The players were West Point cadets and the graphics were just red or blue triangles on a topographic map. I think it would be very cool to watch re-enactments of actual historic battles in a similar program.
Does anyone know if those programs are available from any of the academies? Or even from a source outside the academies?
Uh...just out of curiosity, can you play that game online with just a mouse and key board or do you have to get
involved
?
The game is a mouse and keyboard game. You don't have to go all in on the voip headset but most multiplayer games these days - where teamwork is required in order to succeed - will use them.
EVE isn't for everyone. Its not World Of Warcraft by a long shot. Its whats described as a
Sandbox
where the game developers create a world, and then leave it up to the players to determine what happens in it. Right now, over 40,000 people are playing simultaneously, on the same server. Some are in whats called
high security space
where the space police will catch and kill evil-doers. People like me, are in null-security space. Meaning, the only safety I have is the guns mounted on the hull of my ships, and my space stations.
There are approximately 10,000 solar systems in the game, 3/4ths of them are conquerable by the players. The more systems you control, the more resources you control, the more money you make, the more ships you can build, the more pewpew you can cause. The economy is real - meaning that its completely player driven with very little NPC seeding. Some toons never undock from the
Wall Street
station in the Jita system - they are effectively stock brokers who buy and sell. There are player run banks, politics (I just got through with helping to negotiate a non-aggression pact between my alliance and another).
Its a completely engulfing universe - but its also very unforgiving to solo players. The
PVE
(playing against the computer per sae) is not very strong, and Player Vs. Player combat heavily favors working as a team (not always numbers) So if you don't have buddies to play with and get to know, it can be quite off-putting which is why it'll always play second fiddle to WoW which any dweeb can play in a pointless, never-ending quest to acquire
stuff
. EVE is so much more about the interactions with people and what happens when interacting with others.
(Don't f*ck with the Russians in EVE btw, they're aggressive and don't take well to being provoked)
Here's a video they put together about what they think the sandbox is all about:
Here's another one - which is based on a true story about how a single person brought down one of the biggest alliances in the whole game - Band of Brothers. It was such a story that it made
real life
newspapers. (They've since modified the mechanic by which the guy did this - which was allowed to stand because he never exploited anything. He just used the rights and roles that the alliance had given him to screw them over)
Yep Eve FTW. I am going to hit my 1st birthday in EVE.
Are there any smugglers in Eve? I could see me doing that.
Yep, I have a pilot who does it all the time.
There are contraband items. You could be a drug runner if you'd like.
Nah! How about a sniper or assassin?
This thing sounds obsessive and I already spend too much time online. I'm considering a
cyber diet
as a New Years resolution. Of course the expectation is that I'd be as disciplined with that as with all my other diets!
I just finished up Assassin's Creed 2 on PS3. The first one was fun, but became real repetitive, and I beat it in a couple of sittings. The second one took me almost two weeks, and was a lot of fun. Puzzles, killin' folk, some Italian history, a whole mess of things that I enjoy.
Uhm, well ... you're in a ship all the time - so your combat role is dictated by a couple things, first of all is your ship.
You can fly a battleships or heavy assault cruiser that is kitted out for long range alpha strikes - known as
sniping
.
In the same vein, there are a whole slew of covert ops ships that you can fly, from your basic cloaked reconnaissance vessel - to a stealth bomber, to a force recon cruiser.
Being a loner in EVE is a good way to die though.
Is eve a one time payment of $14.95 or is it monthly?
Monthly, but a lot of players including myself pay with ingame earnings called ISK. You can pay for your subscription with roughly 380 million isk monthly, which isnt really hard to achieve.
A funny fact that EVE accounted for like 33% of Iceland's total GDP last year.
if you want the war-strategy thing, doesn't the US army have an RTS game out there? I think you even have to do boot-camp and weapons training course in that one...
Its not an RTS - its a FPS.
Its called Americas Army, its a free download actually...
http://www.americasarmy.com/
Pete,
try Empire Earth or Age of Mythology. I don't consider them historically accurate, but they do utilize a rudimentary strategy. And you can single-player those.
My favorite was the Command & Conquer series, but I'm too old to get into those new RTS or massive multi-player online games...
No,no,no! I don't do grunt stuff. If they had an armor section, maybe!
I think I'm going to give the Total War games a look. There seem to be some historical monographs that look interesting.
I've defeated Hannibal at Lake Trasimene.
back to epic time-wasters (aka video games)... How much time (Tad) would you estimate you spend in front of the screen playing these MMORPGs?
Has this average time changed since your nuptuals?