Neferata

There has been an update to Total War: Warhammer 3. They’ve released Nagash as a playable character and there’s also a Lahmian faction, led by a character called Neferata. Apparently the first of vampires. In my occasional downtime, for example when I’ve exhausted myself physically or I need a mental break, I will play a few turns of a campaign.

I have restarted the campaign four or five times, each time learning something important about the way the faction works or about the way the characters work. Which skills perhaps I want to go for first. Neferata has a campaign mechanic where she can start vampire covens inside other people’s cities, and you get benefits and money and things like that from the activity of these covens.

All well and good, but part of the problem is I didn’t really know how to run them efficiently. So I set them up in the wrong cities, too far away, too indefensible, in places I was going to conquer or take over anyway and it’s only with a practise and experience I’ve learned how to use them better.

It’s very likely there is much more headroom and that I could perform much better than I currently am. I restarted the campaigns because I felt I had dug myself into a hole that wasn’t irretrievable but was going to be less fun to dig myself out of. Here’s the thing, I’m now playing perhaps my 5th campaign and it’s going well. I’m building up some momentum. I have an excess of cash, my characters are getting skills regularly, I’ve managed to subvert some of the surrounding factions. So I have two or three vassals and if anything, the question is how fast can I expand, which is a different kind of challenge to whether or not I’m simply going to be ended.

When I sat down to write this morning, I was thinking about satisfaction in gaming and how there has to be always this very real chance of failure. Or it feels like you’re going through the motions. On Wednesday evenings I very often will play for an hour and a half, two hours with some of my friends. It is so much more enjoyable to play games with other people as opposed to playing them on my own. Don’t get me wrong, I do like playing games on my own. But there is an entirely different league when you’re playing with company, especially good company.

M has been in touch and this coming Sunday I’ll go into Canary Wharf and we’re going to play a board game. He and a couple of other friends and I and I’m looking forward to it. It’s an opportunity for some social time, to sit and talk around the turns, to play a game. I think one of the people we’re playing knows the game really, really well, so I’m unlikely to win because they will know all the nuances and the cards and the tactics and strategies. But I know M is pretty new to the game too, so perhaps it’ll be more of a competition between he and I.

There are two factors in board games which make them enjoyable to me. One is having a chance and two is the sociability of the people you’re playing them with. If you play a game where you have absolutely no chance of winning it can be quite disengaging and even if the people you’re playing with are quite entertaining it’s not automatically a good time.

I did think to myself, how would I feel playing chess against Magnus Carlsen? He would win. Every time. I suppose it comes down to his attitude if. If I may as well have been playing an AI that was acting like Magnus Carlsen, then there’s no value, there’s no interest. If, on the other hand, he shares some thoughts or tips, or talks to me or engages with me in some way, or if I left feeling like I was a better chess player when we had finished, then then there’s value, there’s fun had. So perhaps it’s the people you play with after all?