Here's My Story

One night, while I was reading Robocraft's forum and Ban was playing Civilization 5 (with its expansions Gods & Kings and Brave New World), I heard this voice from his game saying, "Our treachery has grown." Me: Our treachery has grown? That's 'interesting'. *imagining the backstabbing manoeuvre Ban was doing in his game* Ban: Our treasury has grown lah. Me: Ahhhh, that makes more sense.

I think it was my 1m RR medic bot, Mercy , in this Battle Arena ("BA") game. Although I was at the bottom of my team, it's obvious that the team was dominant. Look at the number of kills by the top 3 scorers. Unbelievable! Anything about 20+ kills is amazing. The amount of damage done by them were astounding too Also, look at the overclock of my team (the numbers besides the players' name at the top left). They are all more than double their counterparts in the opposing them. Game over in less than 14 mins. Normally it takes about 20 mins. On the other hand, this was a dismal team performance in a Team Death Match ("TDM"). I'm 4th overall and 1st in my team but no amount of healing (I healed the most) could save the slaughter of my team. I can't remember which bot was this. This is the best TDM performance by my 96k RR plasma bomber, Baby Forest . I was lucky that aside from one SMG tank, nobody on the opposing team was paying attention...

It's been a long time since I blogged about this game. The last post was about my 17th Swiss win :) Since then, I probably dueled fewer than 10 times. The community has weakened significantly due to the static nature of the game currently. There's no new content for a long time until recently. Top players have stopped playing. Streamers have left. No more 9-month long competition to keep players going. I decided that I would actively play it again once they fix the "spectate" mode. I viewed that as a sign of commitment by the developer. Unfortunately, more bad news came in the latest announcement " Draft Mode Deployment, and the Future ". Duel of Champions will not be receiving any additional updates after the Draft Mode. We know that this is not what many of you were hoping for. However, this does not represent the end of the game. Oh no, you're wrong. It is definitely the beginning of the end of the game. If there's no new content, expe...

Came across this recent:  6 Signs You’re An Extroverted Introvert I was intrigued because I thought maybe I am one. However, looking at the list, 1. Likely not applicable. 2. Maybe but not for lack of time but because of laziness hahaha. I know that if I just get on with it, I will likely enjoy the outing, like many times in the past. 3. Not true because I don't think I make friends easily and also often I put much more effort in maintaining the friendship than the other party. 4. This is the one that resonates most with me, especially the word "empty". I dislike huge gathering of friends because I find that I simply do not have time to catch up properly with everyone and we're merely stucked at "how's the weather" kind of conversation. I almost always make it a point to organise a few small gatherings, rather than one huge one. 5. Hahaha nope, not at all :) However, if those people in the group are not already my friends or they converse abo...

Suddenly the plane plunged and there was nearly a disaster! The pilot somehow managed to pull up the plane in time to avoid crashing into buildings. Omg, I nearly had a heart attack! Plane managed to arrive at an airport in Japan and (apparently) in transit to US. Since many people disembarked the plane, I followed suit to explore the airport. The first food shop I came across was McD @@ Lol, fancy that. Well, I thought why not try Japan's McD. I know OZ's McD's burger tasted a little different to that in Malaysia and Singapore. However, there was a long queue and to my surprise, I didn't have any Yen and not even USD which would be needed at my final destination. Then it occurred to me that this may not be real! I could be dreaming. I said this to a fellow passenger and (I think) she looked at me strangely. She did, however, urged me to try McD. Out of the blue, a "friend" lent his phone to pay for it. Wow, McD in Japan's airport accept phone cred...

Share market has been going down for past few months. STI is down by about 10%. Some of my shares are down much more than that. The Great Singapore Share Sale is on! Lol. Unfortunately, I run out of warchest. I took the opportunity to sell some SBS Transit shares (it was significantly in the black for some time). Its dividend yield has been below 5% for years already and that's more than enough time I've given them to turn around. Yes, I reinvested the proceed into some other shares. Then came some bad news: my tenant, due to family health issue, has to move out (with my consent as otherwise he is bound by agreement to run the course of the lease). So now my agent is looking for a new tenant. He said that rental market is bad now. Some units took 6 months to rent out :( Hopefully I'll get a good tenant soon. Wish me good luck!

Spotted this restaurant after a dinner at Tappers. Ban agreed with my suggestion to dine here one day, which we did after gym on a Sunday. I had their Lobster Basque Pasta. I wouldn't have ordered it if I had known it was tomato based. Oh well :) Luckily the sauce was mixed with cream as well and so it wasn't as "sour". In fact, it was quite delicious. There was only one piece of tiger prawn (but it was good) and no other meat. Stingier than the normal stingy seafood meal, in my opinion. As expected, I got hungry sooner than usual. I can't remember what Ban had but it tasted better than mine and even he liked him. However, the portion was a little small for him and he too got hungry soon. Will we go there again? I'm willing to try a non-seafood there but it seems that Ban isn't that keen. Let's see whether I can persuade him to do so one a good day :)

Saw this at lower ground floor of Tropicana City Mall. Interesting. Flat fee of RM1.50 and so I guess it's best to charge an almost-drained battery unless time is an issue. I don't think "5 to 20 mins" duration can be called "Instant" :) If you have tried it, please let me know how well it does.

After honing my medic skill with Mercy for quite some time, I decided it was time to build a MK10 version of it. I had planned to follow someone's build but changed my mind because I believed my build might be better. Here it is, at Robo Ranking 34m: Based on an earlier estimation, there was no way to simply upgrade Mercy (which now has an extra gun, at the expense of the 2 side small shields) with MK10 parts because of CPU limit. So at the outset, I decided to forgo 2 sets of MK10.7 shields on the sides. That gave me more than enough CPU space to upgrade the guns. To compensate, I made use of MK10.1 and MK10.2 shields to protect the sides as much as possible. I also used MK10.1 shields to protect the top and bottom guns, although it's arguable whether they're needed for the latter or not. After I was done, I still had like 30+ spare CPU. I was surprised. Aside from the shields I forgo, the more compact size (a little puzzled how I did it hahaha) of the buil...

After the last glorious campaign , I started another campaign but this time on ironman mode! Yes, no save scumming. No take-back. Every decision is final. Since this is my first foray into ironman mode, I decided to play an Irish count again as I'm most familiar with that setting. Ok, results first: 16 rulers in total, including 2 female rulers. A score of 83k, much lower than my previous 2 campaigns :( Still, I consider this to be a good achievement given that it was on ironman mode and the immense difficulty posed by the Wigeriche dynasty (elaborated below). I started using Elective Monarchy as soon as I formed a duchy. Yes, that meant that at one point, there were only female family members available as successors and therefore they suffered negative opinion penalty with vassals. It was in this game I realised one major disadvantage of Elective Monarchy: slow expansion. It was difficult to expand wildly via inheritance (a common strategy when using Primogenitu...