WH40K Tau experiment

So I played a "quick" game of Warhammer yesterday with my brother. Quick is that I threw together an army of less than 1300 points and didn't bother to double-check what options I gave my units (such as forgetting to add extra drones, or multi-tracker hardware, etc). But I played Tau - the army I'm most familiar with against his new Imperials. It was a grand experiment - he played with more Troops than ever before, while I attempted to make a fast-moving hit-and-run style army (a single Hammerhead tank and no Broadside battlesuits to speak of)... believe you me, I was having second thoughts when he started bringing out all those tanks and transports.

As it happens, I was fielding a freshly built Pirhanna model - it's one of the new unit types for this year's expansion. Kinda like a jet-bike, it's meant to be fast and be able to bypass terrain... the catch, I was stupid enough to pass on it when it first came out. Yes, yes, there was that 3-pack for a limited time and I kick myself everytime I remember deciding I didn't want 3 for the price of 2 for some strange reason.
So it was a single unit... and was blown away on its first turn... by a huge Landraider tank. Great. Lucky shot.

We played a recon scenario - the goal: to get as many scoring units into the oppoenent's deployment zone as possible within the 6-turn limit. I held him off from advancing thanks to some agressive deployments covering as many firing lines as possible. But Sentinel walkers tied up both my Hammerhead and Devilfish... leaving them frozen for most of the game (the Pathfinders escaped the burning transport wreckage and as luck would have it, I decided to field the rail-rifles this day... they spent the rest of the game taking pot-shots at the Sentinels.
The Hammerhead in the meantime, having been reduced to a "immobilized unit," took shots at pretty much everything on the field within its ridiculous 72" scale range of fire.

But as turn3 rolled around, things were looking bleak. My Stealth team was laid to waste and Kroot mercs were dying by the boatload... they had tried to rush a forested area where a unit of Stormtroopers had been holed up for most of the game thus far.

However a series of lucky rolls turned the tide of battle. A group of lucky shots from my Hammerhead, the rail-rilfe-carrying Pathfinders, the Devilfish's remaining Seeker missile... both of the Sentinels were down, an Exorcist went up, and a Chimera transport fell to pieces. And the poor troopers who poured out of the disabled transport? Fodder for the Firewarriors who I had advanced earlier hoping to outflank everyone - was it luck or strategy at work? I prefer devine intervention for the way things worked out.

When turn 6 finally came to an end, the official score was 1 to the Imperials (he had a witchhunter retenue dropped off in the scoring zone from earlier in the game - my Firewarriors were in position to score but I think by the book, they were just a few inches shy of being in the scoring area). But the real result of the grand experiment? Well, both sides were thoroughly decimated even tho I'm quite surprised I lasted as long as I did (I was about ready to call the game until that string of lucky hits).

As my brother pointed out, perhaps we really are playing smarter. The Sentinels aren't meant to be tank killers - just annoying, tying up the big guns with a constant barrage of lascannon fire. Kroot teams have to keep moving... no matter what. Stealth teams need to Deep Strike to get the best hiding positions to snipe from... The things you learn.

The DL irony

Well, the book is closed on the mystery of the Nero Dual-Layer burn: I finally found a set-top machine that will play back my "failed" discs. And of course, it's the cheapy no-name brand my father had purchased from (of all places) the grocery store.

Its brand is actually "Accura" and has all the feel of a made-in-taiwan POS. The tray is this heavy-set affair that opens up after what feels like an eternity. There is no LED read-out on the front panel and the only sign of life it will give you is the red light that comes on when you press into the hardwired power switch (no, the remote will not turn it on and off). To its credit, it does have an optical cable for digital sound output. Video signal is limited to RGB component cable. And wow, you can actually hear the drive spinning up the disc (listen to that sound of power). ^_^;;;

As babou said to me, "go figure."

downloading music - if it worked

Been to EBGames lately? Yeah - the signs are plastered all over their stores - buy a used game and get a PIN for 10 free song downloads. The on-line store turns out to be Puretracks. Dunno if you also buy frozen pizzas or anything like that but from time to time they give out coupons for free songs too ...and yes, those are also from the same subset of Puretracks.

And for the most part it's a great idea for publicity. But the problem is that as a subset, I hardly ever find anything of interest. And worse - I walk away with the distinct impression that that's all there is that Puretracks can offer me. Now I could be wrong (I'm not going to waste my time going to the actual Puretracks.com site to prove myself wrong), but that's their own damn fault for pissing me off.

And on top of that impression - I also have cultivated a distinct hatred for the web server engine there. Puretracks just damaged the reputations of all online music stores in my view. That is, if one store can't get their shit right, what's to prevent other stores from having the same buggy software running the show? I just spent an hour browsing their meager offerings attempting to find 10 songs I was remotely interested in. Mind you, this was for free music - imagine if I were looking for something to pay for? And then I went to click on the Checkout icon everything went south - firstly at one point the cart wouldn't refresh (switching between a full cart and an empty one). Then clicking checkout revealed that the store had tallied the full 35-track double-album I had previously accidentally clicked (and thought I had removed). Then upon logging in a second time later in the evening hoping to rebuild my shopping cart, clicking on the Checkout icon this time dropped me back to the main home page and zero items in the cart!!

What the hell - they can't even give this shit away. I'm not even imaginative enough to make this shit up, either.

The DL failure

Alright - gonna wrap up this topic for a little while because I simply give up at this point. I don't understand how I got a stable playable burn on that movie for my buddy last night and cannot do the same for the ISOs I downloaded.

Short of using the decryption method (which is used only for the ripping the test disc), I followed the same steps in CloneDVD including the "Clone" option - which performs its own reencode of the VOB set (which as far as I could tell, were identical anyway). In fact, the ending didn't suffer the mystery cut-off glitch that was in the test burn.

Sadly, as things would turn out, my concert disc still freezes at the layer change with my player unable to find the corresponding continuation on the second layer. And the rest of the disc is filled with glitches.

I got a successful (moderately) layer change in my PS2 drive so I'd like to say it's the fault of my old set-top box but that still does not explain why the test burn played fine. The fact is, the test burn and my final ISO burn, despite being on the same discs, coming from the same hardware, and created with the same process, yielded very different results - one playing very smoothly on my old Pioneer DV-333 and the other completely grinding it to a halt.

The DL conspiracy continued

Well, I have my answer - this whole time Nero was apparently not burning dual-layer format correctly on my discs. I don't know what the nuances behind the problems are; the discs work just fine on PC software like PowerDVD or Interactual Player. Nobody I know has a set-top DVD player capable of playing back a Nero burned DVD-Video format DL disc.

So I decided to take turns eliminating the differences between my burns and my buddy's Serenity burn (and I in no way endorse piracy, I'm just saying, it made for a good testing situation). And the first difference was when he admitted to me that he hadn't been using Nero after all (he'd confused himself, he'd later admit). He told me to look up CloneDVD for my ISO needs.

The result: a test burn worked... sort of. Because I was adamant I would follow the example from Doom9 to the letter, I even used the "clone" command in CloneDVD to actually reencode the VOB files I previously ripped to my hard-drive. The glitch was that for whatever reason, CloneDVD's re-encode is missing a few seconds at the end of the final title (including the "goback" chapter that tells a DVD player to return to the main menu when its done).

The follow-up: I tried to burn the concert again, but this time without a re-encode. The disc is better than the Nero attempt in that it plays (more or less) in my living room. However, it has a tendency to glitch a lot with pops, freezes, and skips on the second layer to the point of being unwatchable. Hmm...