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 Its been more than a year since I wrote anything here.

We were long past the worst of all the experiences of the lockdown in those days, and things have only improved and come to a sort of plateau since then. So I have only rosy things to say apart from a few illogical regrets on things I could have done better, but aren't important in the larger scheme of things.

The lockdown started off surprisingly with lots of confusion, as it did for majority of the folks on this planet. While we didn't rush to markets or shops to join the throng for binge-purchases, we did suffer from a lot of anxiety on account of the 2yr old child left with his grandparents, across state borders.

From 2020 end to 2022 end, it remains a topic I thought I would eventually find interesting to write about, but I haven't been able to sit for it yet.

In fact, fast forward from that to 2023, I am more often reading a lot of books, playing Age of Empires games, and engaging myself with the household and work related activities. I myself don't seem to grasp a very detailed view of most of these things, and so if I look closely, they are a pain to recollect, re-arrange and then re-interpret to make sense to a reader. But then I guess this practice is what makes a 'writer', if I may claim that title by unfair means of just having a blog freely published on Google Blogger.

Steaming ahead

 After all these years, I have lost my personal laptop to a motherboard failure, lost both by huge external disks to failures, and all the mega collections of CD/DVD are either unreadable or have no device to put them into.

If one wants to be sad about it, there is a lot of content in there which I can never recreate ( photos from camera, phones, notes ), and some that would would be punishing to collect ( e-books, movies, music, games). So I am definitely not wishing to walk that path anymore.

And as part of the moving on strategy, or general passion, I have now re-activated by Steam account and even purchased  a title - AOEII Definitive Edition. Of course, it had to be AOE. I can play loads of new civs in wonderful new campaigns, great tutorials or just play online. I can share account with family also it seems from Steam. 

I will probably put up more stuff about this later, but at this point I am excited by my own action. 

The only challenge would be to find time to play these games in an immersive fashion, especially with my son peeking over my shoulders, and the ethics of spending more time with the laptop. Only argument is to help boost productivity during work hours and motivate a healthy balance. Of course being a history buff, I simply love the game for its content, and not just the gameplay aspects. It is like an extra accessory to my various books and podcasts.

So that is the full steam ahead..

going back for a while to Anno 1404

 The peasants need only a bit of fish to eat initially, which is fine given the human nature.

Then as the population increases, their wants also increase. Now, how is this logical you might ask.

I can consider this in light of needs arising due to presence of resources or technologies to extract them.

And once people have a taste of these new goods, it never goes off. It is very clear in the game too that if you take away any of the basic needs once the population has advanced, they get very pissed off quickly and start leaving or raising rebellions.

You feed the hungry lion once, you need to keep feeding. There in lies the challenge in raising huge cities with large populations, surplus stock of all stuff and good control of the multiple islands. If there is also a military goal, significant amount of resources get redirected in that side too.

Most of the time, the supply and smooth running of resources between various islands requires a lot of micro management, until there is enough cash and population to support enough trade ships, large and quick enough raw material productions, huge storage and a large enough set of war ships to protect your shipping lanes. Due to the imbalanced nature of resources and development level in each island ( resulted by our own decisions to direct attention and vision to particular aspects), it takes a few attempts and a few rebellions to get the tempo going.

Now I know that before raising the population for a given level, I need to ensure a strong supply and it is prudent to spend time and pile up materials and ships as required to keep the supply up and running for the expected higher demands.

Combining this with the impromptu missions requiring a variety of resources, one would start expecting production lines to keep every single resources at a level higher than its need. This is practically impossible to achieve because even raw materials which are abundant might often need to be redirected to its next level of production to get a very efficient generation of the higher valued product.

A sudden demand for the underlying raw material might be difficult to satisfy, and one might have to resort to buying for the needs while borrowing from the existing stock or shutting down a few production plants to get the raw materials piled up. 

There is also a risk with shipping products in excess of its use across islands. Ships tend to get filled up with goods that are not needed, and take away slots meant for other critical goods and suddenly you might notice a rebellion and it might be too late to take recovery actions. This is why constantly checking your stockpiles and cargo loads on key shipping lanes helps keeping the lanes healthy.

The fun part of the game is the ability to keep switching between raising the automated systematic shipping lanes and production queues while also doing a tiny bit of exploration, investments in resources and strategically raising population levels, wars etc.