GameLog 47

Battle of Tiles (17h) - Got back into BoT while I was sick. It was an easy way to pass the time while the HDD had a long overdue defrag.

Modified the strategy somewhat this time with the pick of the elite archers frontlining the show to get as high as possible. I didn't pick up anything apart from Priests (6), Thunder Wizards (4), and a boatload of slimes if they had 250+ health. The slimes made a corridor themselves below the main archer s that if needed they can push up through to sacrifice themselves when I need to retreat. This is mainly for boss time, but it's convenient enough to just leave them there in that formation for the whole trip.

Spent aaages levelling up both mages and priests to level 50. Priests are easiest by simply backing up any melee unit that goes up against an archer. The archer stays in place happily plinking away into your meatbag while you level up your heals. Hardest thing is choosing a decent archer with damage close to maximum healing strength so that it doesn't take forever. Wizards need a squishy isolated priest to pound on for their levelling pleasure. Just need to check that the thunder defence is low enough to damage them, but not enough damage that they can't heal themselves in one turn. Takes far longer than the priests though as the damage is usually pretty small. I'm still not sure what dictates whether you get area effect or 3 range as your additional skill. At first I thought it was getting longer range if you levelled up to 50 with a 2 range attack, but that proved incorrect later on. Although the area effect healers are great, I had 5 of the suckers and I would have dearly liked another ranged one to reach the front man.

Through all the levelling I took a couple of notes in my spreadsheet about how they progressed. It looks like at each level they gain the same amount of attributes with only slight variation between different tiles of the same type. The change is nothing like the initial stat spread (~20%), so i'm still going to spend most of my efforts optimising the choice of tile based on initial stats.

The money savings were to be ploughed into a golem on the 4th level at 200,000 a pop, but with ~6400 HP it is double the elite archer at level 150. no defence is also a good thing for extra XP from healing.

Finally lost all this great buildup by accidentally closing the game with the windows close button rather than saving it. Restarted it again to find it had wiped the save. Aaaaargh!!!


Football Manager 08 (7h) - Gateshead Season 3 finished 10th - After a brief hiatus I went back in to finish off the season, only to find I had just 2 games to go. We draw the first and keep 14th place, then win the last against 12th placed Aldershot to finish 10th. Moderately happy with the season, but i don't seem to be getting any serious replacements during the off season so it looks like more or less the same team will need to make it to the playoffs next year.

We do the usual home game bonanza for next season's friendlies, getting 5 championship division teams to fleece on each Saturday with more modest Blue Square Premier team to check our progress on Wednesdays. Wigan even wants a friendly at our place after our schedule is packed, but club is flushed with cash at the moment so there's no real need to push it.

Lots of staff turnovers planned for the end of the season, but 2 unexpectedly get bought out from under me. One awesome scout was pretty hard to replace, but Gk, Atk, and Def coaches all roll over to make way for fresh blood.

First friendly in the new season has Birchall break his leg! Now I'm definitely on the hunt for a striker. Maybe Byrne can step up and play as good as his stats suggest.


Guitar hero III (7h) - The PS3 is now living upstairs and it does make it simpler to pop into GH3 for a quick session after brekky & lunch, usually with Cameron in tow for drum support. Managed to go back through easy and 5 star pretty much any song I play. I'm so close to getting a 100% too. Only a matter of time.


Team Fortress 2 (4h) - There's been a couple of new updates coming through, so I hopped on for a bit of 2FORT fun to see if there were any drastic changes. I can still top the pub charts as rocketman, but there must have been a pyro skillup akin to the medic one recently as they now can blow back rockets :/

TMNF (2h) - A little race here and there to keep the stats up