Beyond Barbarians, Main Characters, and Bronze Ingots

Daily Ramble 132: Beyond Barbarians, Main Characters, and Bronze Ingots

I managed to get quite a bit moving today and I feel pretty good about it all. I was able to make some further progress in FFXIV and Bronze Ingots became my friend. If you ever have a desire to learn Armorer in the game be prepared to make tons of Bronze Ingots. Beyond that, I also finished off Magician: Master by Raymond Feist and I liked it as much as I did when I first read it years ago. The worlds of Kelewan and Midkenia are well defined and I really like the characters so I’m looking forward to continuing the story next month. Finally, I got another 10 turns in with Spain in Civilization VI. I’m learning the details of religion so I can pursue a Religious victory but of course there’s a bunch to do beyond just collecting Faith. Beyond that I am hoping the Barbarian threat starts to die down soon.


 

Armorer to 10

Today I continued working on my crafting in FFXIV. I ran over to the Armorer Guild and started building up my abilities. Everything is pretty straight forward and similar among the different crafting professions from what I’ve been able to see so far. With Armorer you will quickly find out that you hate making Bronze Ingots. I had to make so many of these and after I thought I made enough…I had to make more. I must have made 100 of these things in the 30 or so minutes I was leveling from scratch to 10.

They are pretty much used for everything a Armorer does. Need to make some Bronze Rings…make some Ingots cuz you need one for each Ring. Need to make Rivets…make some Ingots since you’ll need them for that as well. Oh yeah and if you need to make a Bronze Plate…yup…you need Ingots, but you’ll need twice as many. If I had known how many Ingots I needed I would have bought all the tin and copper before I started and crafted all the Ingots at once so I could get the XP without having to figure out what else to make.

In all though, it’s pretty easy to level up. I got to level 10 in less than 30 minutes so I was happy and am ready to work on my next class tomorrow.


 

Finished off Magician: Master

Things really get going in this book once we get past all the background information dumped on us from Milamber’s (Pug’s) magical training and Tomas’s fight with the ancient Valheru presence. But while they remain the main focus of the tale, we learn more about the secondary characters – Laurie, Arutha, the various Tsurani Great One’s – but the biggest personality we see is Macros and his betrayal.

While I enjoyed the first book of this series, this one seems much more mature as the characters grow up and the war fights to a conclusion. The ending is a bit weak in that so many people get what they want, but if this were the end of the saga I suppose that would have been fine. Instead, we’ve got a bunch of resolutions to problems and I wonder where things could be headed in the long term since I know there are another dozen or so novels following this one.

On the whole, I liked the story and I’m glad I read it again. Like the first volume, I think this one holds up over the years and even in my more mature and worldly reader’s eye, this was an enjoyable tale.


 

Civ VI: Spain 87–98

So after attracting John the Baptist to Madrid last session and founding Catholicism, I started working further towards a religious victory. Jesuit Education isn’t too beneficial yet but I think down the road it’ll come in handy to purchase stuff with Faith rather than gold. Right now I have plenty of gold and I need to figure out where to spend it.

Since nearly all my units were killed off by Barbarians I decided to spend a bit of gold on building up my pieces. I needed at least one more scout so I could try to find another continent and a Galley would be good too. One of Spain’s bonuses comes in the form of the Treasure Fleet. This makes trade routes between cities on different continents more valuable. The only problem is that I need to find a new continent to gain the benefit of it. On a small map where I think there are two or maybe 3 continents that can take a while. And since all my units keep getting killed off by Barbarians I’m not able to explore much.

One other piece of the puzzle I think I need to work on is expansion. I only have 2 cities so far and it’s turn 90. I think I need to build up another Settler to get a new base of development going. I can’t win a religious victory if I’m not producing faith and I need a few cities with Holy Sites to help out with that.

As I’m dealing with all this and fighting off the Barbarians, both Arabia and then Egypt move into the Medival era. I really feel like I’m falling behind in this game. Hopefully I’ll get going soon.