Sunday morning....

I woke up with a terrible headache and cotton mouth. I had two beers last night with Adolph after not having so much beer at one time in such a long time. In that respect i am feeling old, old, old.

In addition to that, i think i'm just barely holding off a bug that seems determined to make me sick.

Adolph and i started up a game of AOE just after we got back from Ernie's last night. The game: deathmatch, population 200, post-imperial age, spanish vs. the chinese. i took a good portion of the map pretty quickly and picked up the two relics in my area. Adolph seems to be holed up in the bottom of the map pretty good. He's got a wall of towers at every entrace point. He has so many in fact, that it must be that he's mined all the stone, used it all up and built a market to buy stone with the gold his relic's are generating.

My strategy, so far, is to just kinda eat away at his towers forcing him to build more and spend more gold, not to mention up the price of stone so high that he can hardly afford it, and attack his most expensive (but most effective) units: his cannoneers (those little guys that push those cannons around). Anything made of stone, i attack. I took out one of his outlying castles, while losing about 5 trubuchets. At 2:00 a.m., we saved and exited.

This game is going to last a long time. Ultimately, the chinese don't have the tools for a direct assault on spanish towers and walls, so a more patient assault is needed. i can wear him down, provided of course that he doesn't attack.

Looking at the way the map is...he hasn't very many attack options. The avenues out of his domain are thin corridors. A large attack force would be chopped up if he tried to send them through that.

It's going to end up being a long game.

Sometime this afternoon we're heading to St. Lawrence's annual bazzaar.

Also: i'm turning my computer in for repair this evening, so i won't be around til Wednesday (the projected return date.)