6 Years - Ninveah Greatest Hits : Pre Eve Online

This week I'm going to do a "greatest posts" retrospective in three parts (thanks Seismic Stan!).

Pre-New Eden

Simple math demonstrates that if I started Eve 4 and a half years ago and starting blogging 6 years ago than I must have been blogging about something else other than Eve. Well, I was an avid Warhammer 40,000 tabletop miniatures games for about 17 years before kids made me give it up and this blog started as a place to record battle reports, painting progress, army ideas, and miscellaneous other gaming bits.

The posts were more like status updates so picking some gems from that era would not be very easy or good. Instead I picked three posts that capture what I feel was the pinnacles of my Warhammer career.

Post #1 - April 3rd 2006 - Eldar Megabattle Report

In terms of Warhammer, standard games are 1 versus 1. A Megabattle is where more players participate on each side allowing for games of massive scale. I've been in a lot of megabattles in 17 years but this one was one of the best ever.

The local gaming club I created and managed had a number of Eldar players (i.e. space elves) of which I was one. Six of us got together and planned an epic Eldar only megabattle and one of the players went so far as to create a custom terrain set and board representing a deserted Eldar Craftworld, staying up very late with my help to do the finishing touches. The battle of 3 versus 3 lasted an entire day and at the end my side edged out the slightest victory. The best games were always the closest ones and its rare for a megabattle to be so balanced, it was the single greatest game of Warhammer I had the pleasure of playing.

My post is not spectacular, and the Flickr gallery is lost to the sands of time, but I link to another player's posts and he still has the images for those so inclined.


Post #2 - June 26, 2007 - Chaos Versus Imperial Megabattle Report

Another megabattle, I choose this one for very different reasons. For one thing, it was the biggest megabattle I had ever participated in, with a full 18 players. The gaming board was 20 feet long and the armies were epic in size ( I forget the number but somewhere around 20,000 per side).

It was a massacre. My side, Chaos, ripped the Imperials to shreds from start to finish, a domination that was not expected at all. But that is not what made this a high point for me; the fact is I was the team lead of the Chaos side, the Marshal of the forces you can say, and the architect of the victory. It was like I was an FC of a 300 ship fleet and led it to utterly destroy an enemy fleet, supercaps included.

Now, I make no claims to being a brilliant strategist. If anything, I am pedestrian in my tactical capabilities. But this victory was not built on battlefield genius but on the ability to come up with a plan weeks prior to event, get buy in from the other 8 players, organize them into complimentary task forces, and then adapt our plan on the fly based on the actual terrain and enemy deployments. The Imperial side had nine guys show up with whatever they wanted and threw them on the table with no plan other than Shock and Awe. Well, we were veterans of Warhammer and were neither shocked nor awed.

Again the post is not very engaging and the image gallery lost, but it represents the greatest moment I had as a leader in the game.

Post #3 - November 26, 2007 - Golden Marine XII

As I mentioned, I formed and managed a Warhammer club in Ottawa for years called Deep Space. One of outputs of this club was a tournament called the Golden Marine which still goes on this day in Ottawa. I ran the tournament for years but finally passed the reins on in the twelfth iteration to people in the club. It was nice to participate in the tournament and my Eldar came in 6th overall out of 14 players.

The reason this post is mentioned is because it marks the winding down of my Warhammer career. My wife was pregnant with the twins and I suspected that weeknights rendezvous with my buddies at the local mall would be ending. I didn't organize or help run the tournament for the first time. And I had started Eve online a couple months prior and realized I had found a replacement hobby that was less time intensive overall. I had a few more Warhammer games before April in 2008 but nothing major; this tournament was my last hurrah, the end of a hobby spanning decades.

Do I miss it? Yeah, there was a lot I loved about that game and a lot that frustrated the hell out of me. Now that I'm free of it I realize just how expensive and frustrating it really was. I don't plan to go back... but all my models are still in storage in the crawlspace of the house.

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Tomorrow, best posts from my first couple years of Eve Online, Sept 2007 to Dec 2009.