Updates and News – May 16th, 2018

Hello again.  Admiral A7XfanBen reporting in.  XD

What have I done with the site since the last blog post?
-Added youtube channel page (gallery style shows newest uploads, easy to navigate and see a lot of vids at once)
-Added daily blog category description

I’m super happy to get the youtube integration going, since I’ve been going kinda CRAZY with youtube lately.  By that I mean as of 5/16 I have uploaded 8 videos in the past 5 days!  Along with about 4 in the week before that.  You can see the camera icon I added for the menu part; I might experiment with doing that for other pages as well if I can find something fitting, or I may do away with it altogether.  I’m immensely enjoying the youtube stuff right now and more feedback and video suggestions are always welcomed and appreciated.  For the first time, I also have a slight backlog of videos lined up for release.  XD  Nothing too crazy or long, but I’ve got 3 more ready to go and who knows, I might record tomorrow and/or friday.  😀  I just don’t want to overload the subscription feeds people have, so I probably won’t do more than 2 vids per day.  I think I’d be happy with about 2 videos per week on average, but right now I’m feeding off the suggestions video and making a lot of short content in a short period of time, hence the flurry of uploads.

The new youtube page will show my latest video in the feed, with the other recent videos below in the gallery format.  This is fantastic since the site will update automatically, unlike weebly where I had to paste each video url individually (which was fast, but the page got big and slow to load, and this will be even faster – ZERO time required!  XD).

I added a daily blog category description because it looked a little weird as-is, and because I want it to be known I plan to do this every day so people can tune in and check things out often.  Just trying to bring as much value as possible through all of my content, so please reach out to tell me how I can improve or add to things.

Right after I publish this blog post I’m planning to add another page.  From there I need to get some features going and try to figure out the sidebar issue.

 

Pirates CSG News

-VASSAL Campaign Game 4 has continued, updates here.

-Godmason has a new Rankings thread up.  These are a great way to learn about the game and learn about all the ships out there.  More posts mean more attention for the game, which is always a good thing!

-As for personal news, I have literally thrown out what was left of my black spray paint I was planning to use for future ideas in Ocean Terrain Contest #3.  I feel very strongly about the negative health effects, even more so than before.  Even with little exposure, I just don’t feel like putting myself at any risk whatsoever.  My extremely long term health matters infinitely more than a few more islands or winning a contest on the forum, so I’m just done with any kinds of paint right now.  However, as I said recently on this blog, there are a few more things I’d like to do for my entry, including some new pieces.

 

I LOVE the idea of the news section for the Pirates CSG Podcast, so I hope to do the same here with reasonable regularity.  It may not always be new for the game itself, but more personal news that affects my piratical activities.  Once I get more readers and figure out adding commenting features, I’d like to do a question of the day series as well.

 

Deal of the Day: Long gone, but here is eBay. This site contains affiliate links for which I may be compensated.

**Disclaimer: I will be using affiliate links with things like this, so if someone buys from it, I could make a few cents.  XD

 

Pirates CSG Card of the Day

Set number: 9 – Ocean’s Edge

Collector’s Number: 124 – Shipwright

2 points

This ship may repair at sea or at any island.

I’m not super into reviewing the essential basics like this, but perhaps I’ll do it as they come up until I’ve done one of each type of generic crew/etc.

Shipwrights are in my opinion overrated by new players, who sometimes lack the experience of quick battles happening often.  In most games (30-100 points), battles end before a shipwright can do his work.  He might have an opportunity to benefit the victor, but they already won the battle anyway.  Trying to repair during battle almost never seems to work in my experience, unless you can repair multiple masts in one turn with extra actions and/or have defensive abilities to make it worthwhile.  Shipwrights still have a place in the game and it’s quite possible at this point that I underrate them, but they’re not a staple of competitive fleets at all.  99% of the time you should choose a helmsman instead.  Even if you have 2 points left over and all the ships in your fleet have helmsmen, I’d still probably recommend a cannoneer on your main gunship, or possibly two oarsmen on different ships rather than a shipwright.  All that said, I would like to revisit shipwrights a bit in the future to see if I’m too harsh on them.

Game Piece Rating: 5/10.  A nice ability that can be great when it works, but sounds much better than it actually is practical.  Like I said above, great fleets that win often never seem to have shipwrights in them, since they don’t need them and are using the points elsewhere for speed and efficiency.

 

Picture of the Day

VASSAL Campaign Game 4 a handful of turns into the game.  My Pirates had the first launch of the game this past turn; you can spot them at the bottom in the southeast.

Thanks for reading.  Off to make more progress!

It’s a Pirates’ Life for Me.

Ben