teaching the neighbor kid

[bvanevery]

I have one certain fan of my AARs.  The neighbor kid.  We've worked on a lot of physics type projects in the past, so maybe he's just a fan of me, whatever I'm doing.  I showed him my AARs the other week, and he became interested enough, to ask me how to play SMAC yesterday.  So I walked him through the basics.  "What faction should I pick?"  "Chairman Yang".  "You're a really bad guy.  You should probably get your citizens killed early and often."

Started him out on "Citizen" difficulty of course.  He had the good luck of starting very close to Sister Miriam!  "She's a religious nutjob.  She's gonna hate you.  You're gonna want to kill her."  Over 2 days and multiple play sessions he's built up some bases, explored stuff with Scouts, and now finally he got in a war and attacked her.  That last bit, with no help from me at all, although I told him where he should line up his Impact Rovers to make an attack.  Seems he took 2 cities and she took 1 of 'em back.  No matter.  He's got good infrastructure, thanks to my earlier tutelage, and he's playing Citizen.  I think victory is assured.

I was impressed that he put aside the game after initial fatigue, but picked it up on his own again later.  I thought if I was going to lose him, he would just stop playing and never resume.  The game definitely tests patience, but I do think he has the mind for it, with all that interest in physics etc.  He's just been fed a diet of "too many mouseclicks" most of his life, so one of the 1st things I had to do was almost but not quite scream at him slow down!  You click too fast in this game, bad things happen.  He's getting it though.

I'm gonna figure out how to do this multiplayer over local wifi, because otherwise watching him play and advising is like watching paint dry.  I haven't played a LAN game since sometime in the early 2000s.  I had a neighbor who was into it, and we played a few times.  I'd always kick his butt, since I don't think he had his own computer.  We also used to play Axis & Allies and I'd beat him at that too.  He was a good player though, to not give up just because he lost a lot.

[Buster's Uncle]

I 'spose you've noticed Draz' stickied thread: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=1437.0  Them realtime connection dealies are a pain, and don't seem to work consistently, from what I've seen of people trying to learn and people trying to talk them though it - you will need to be patient.  The first human being I ever had to perma was trying to learn to do a tcp/ip connection, and lost it after couple days of not getting what he wanted...

[bvanevery]

I don't think I needed to do TCP/IP back in the day.  I just ran it on the LAN somehow.  Windows networking.

[Buster's Uncle]

I gather setting up LAN's are one of those problems.  [shrug]  Dunno how it works out on recent Windows iterations, either, and there's a probable problem of its own...