Golden Anvil

For those of you who aren't familiar with some of the terms in the title, let me give a brief explanation.

AAR - After Action Report - In gaming terms, this is when someone writes up a detailed report covering the events of a particular game. You can actually find quite a lot of these around the internet. Some are extremely well written. Some are presented in a highly fictionalized fashion. Some are pretty focused on the specifics of the gameplay. Some are intended as tutorials. Most are fairly long, as they are usually written about games that take longer to play, and most cover the game in detail. In many cases, an AAR can be interesting to read even if you've never played the game before. AARs are frequently decorated with screenshots taken while playing the game.

You can actually find one of my poorly written AARs on the forums, but it has some highlighting that doesn't work well for the default theme here, and all of the screenshot links are broken. It covered a game called Titans of Steel (now available for free), and I named all the characters in the game after people on the forums.

You could also technically call my logs of the Jannot roleplaying game a form of AAR, although it was not for a computer game, and contains no screenshots.

EU3 - Europa Universalis 3 - This is a computer game I've been playing lately. Its a historical simulation type of game covering 1453-1820 in detail. You can play as any nation in the world, starting at any date in the available range. You use diplomatic, economic, and military means at your disposal to do your best to get ahead in the world. There aren't really any particular goals or winning (unless you count surviving until the end date). It's very much a sandbox game. Difficulty is extremely dependant upon which country you choose to play, and the game is balanced to tend towards historical outcomes, rather than to make countries even or fair.

So, combine these two concepts and you have the potential for an interesting story about semi-historical events. You can find a whole forum full of EU3 AARs. Some of them are quite long, and some of them are amazingly good reading (as in, the author should seriously consider writing historical fiction and getting it published).

I will be starting an AAR covering my feeble attempt at playing the nation of Georgia. I will be using a special user-created modification of the game call Magna Mundi. It adds realism to the subsystems in the game providing more interesting results and interactions. It does tend to make the game a little harder.

Expect another post sometime later in which I will go into detail on the task that lies before me in leading Georgia to a bright future. After that, I'll actually start playing the game. I hope you all enjoy.