The best castle in Heroes 2

It's magical that Heroes 2 doesn't age. The graphics is still nice as it doesn't attempt to be realistic, but indeed stylized. And it works. It works so well that time to time I return to play it. And as I switch castles all the time to increase the variety I try to imagine an ideal castle with ideal creatures.

My ideal castle would have following creatures:

1. Skeletons. They are expensive, but that's not a concern as your dead enemies are a free source of them. And they have extremely high damage (2-3) for a first class creature.
2. Gargoyles as they are fast and you get them with each recruited hero. Hence if you need a hero just for exploring, you recruit a hero and leave the relatively slow skeletons in the castle. As the hero's troop now contains only fast units the hero can now move further each round. Additionally flying troops are handy for blitzkrieg in the first week.
3. Elves. Each castle should have some shooters. And you really want to have some shooters for the blitzkrieg in the first week. Furthermore they have average or above average speed hence they don't slow down your heroes and that's quite a unique feature for a low-level shooter. The only problem is that in the first week you are going to have just a few of them.
4. Vampire (Lords) as they can resurrect them self. You just have to wait until you collect 15 of them and then they are invincible as with each attack they refill their rows to the full rank. The only problem is if the enemy concentrates all his power to vampires and kill them all in one round. Or if the opponent has only strong units as they die slowly and you can't fully benefit from vampire lord's special feature.
5. Hydras. They are ridiculously slow but as they have a lot of hit points and they are cheap they are perfect for defense. And they are usable for attack as well. Once I didn't have enough money to buy dragons but I had teleport spell and I could afford to buy 40 hydras. So I have been decimating the enemy with just these 40 hydras. It was satisfying to see all enemies troops to get bitten by 40 hydras at once.   
6. Paladins. They have ridiculously low number of hit points but they cause extremely high damage. Their secret of successful use lies in getting resurrect spell because for each spell point you can resurrect one paladin. And six resurrected paladins each turn is not bad at all. Additionally it's commonly easier to build the cathedral than a dragon tower. Of courmage by giving up of the dragons you also give up of dragon and Armageddon combo. But as you commonly have many skeletons in your group you don't want to cast Armageddon anyway.

Overall I think the castle is reasonably balanced. It has two fliers. A shooter. And a defender. The first level unit is useful during the whole game as skeletons are available from the beginning of the game and the number of skeletons grows so quickly that they are one of the most important units inlate game if not the most important. And the last level unit is affordable enough to enter the field in the middle epoch when others are still collecting resources to recruit the last level unit or even to build the dwelling structure (yes, black dragons, we are talking about you). The strategy in the first week is to build dwellings for the first four lowest units, the well and the statue. You are left with one free day which gives you some extra money to recruit units, build a ship dock or a market. In the first two weeks you recruit only skeletons, gargoyles and elves. On a small map you have good chances to successfully attempt for a blitzkrieg. In the case your castle is attacked you build swamp for hydras to have a defensive unit with many hit points. In the second week you commonly build swamp and the cathedral. At the beginning of the third week you should have plenty paladins and even enough money to recruit them. At the beginning of the fourth week you should have enough resources to update vampire's dwelling and recruit all 18 vampire lords. From now your forces will compose only from skeletons, elves, paladins and vampire lords as gargoyles are now rendered obsolete. In each epoch you are using three to four different units thus you can always accept some new units that wish to join you.

The castle is dark oriented - skeletons, gargoyles, vampires and hydras are already dark and in the dark fantasies there are always some dark elves and dark knights. Hence from a design point of view the castle makes sense and there shouldn't be any penalty for mixed troop just because you have elves and skeletons together. However, the castle is mixing undead and living creatures and that is causing some troubles. Even if we omit morale penalty for undead in the troop there are some spells for entirely live or undead troops like mass bless or dead ripple and their usefulness is now crippled. But it's possible to live with that till you don't get them in your own mage guilds (just like you don't get death ripple if you play as a knight).

What's your opinion about my castle?

Why am I reluctant to updates?

When it comes to updates I am careful. Once I have left Windows Update to update my computer and my network printer stopped working. I discussed the problem it with uncle Google and he found out that it's because of the withdrawn support for Raw Sockets in Windows XP SP2. But the funny thing is that this update is not present in only one particular patch. Indeed it's present in about 60 patches including the patch for Spider Solitaire. Does Spider Solitaire has anything to do with networking? No. It's an offline game. And even if you go to update detailed description there still isn't any note about any change in networking.

In another case I couldn't connect to WebDAV on Vista. Windows Vista was a new operating system and I expected some problems. Hence I updated the system to a newly released service pack. It took a whole day to download 6GB service pack and all the updates. But WebDAV still didn't work. Fine. I asked uncle Google and he found a patch from Microsoft, which is not automatically deployed with Microsoft updates. And it somehow helped (I have got from the second step of a wizard into the third step. But after two days of debugging I gave up in the fifth step from seven steps and installed Total Commander with WebDAV plugin and I got connected in less then five minutes).

If the updates I want aren't automatically deployed with Windows update and updates that I don't want are sneaked as Spider Solitaire update, how can I trust Windows update?       

What I Hate on Fairy Tale Dimensions Website

I love the idea that fairy tale can be described by their mood. And www.mot.us/fairytale does that. However, the chosen style is inappropriate:

1. Fairy tales are written on paper, which ages. Hence the dominant color of the style should be beige and not red. An example of a webpage that respects that was Studentský Underground. And even youtube and mixer.cz are using paper background:
   
   

   

   Youtube

   
   

   

   Mixer.cz

2. The front logo shouldn't be just a generic text but a picture characterizing the content. My idea is five colorful vertical stripes, each decorated by a white pictogram, depicting five fairy tale factors. The reference picture depicting the idea:
   
   

   

   Here we can see four cups. But hey, they associate strong emotions.

3. Fairy tales are written with a serif font. But the web is using sans serif. That's plain wrong.

My Firefox Addons

My favorite Firefox addons are:

1. Adblock Plus with Element Hiding Helper. It's really easy with them to get rid of any flashing item on web including text and jumping frames.
   
   
   
2. Customize Your Web can automate clicking on dialogs that just slows you down.  
3. Locationbar2 can enhance your url bar so it's more tablet friendly.
   
   
   
   
4. OutWit Hub is a perfect tool for web mining since it can mine everything you can access with your Firefox. Hence no problems anymore with obscure security, which is there just to prevent automated tools from data mining.
5. Rewind/Fastforward Buttons add a button to quickly return to the previous domain. For example you are searching for something and click on the first link from Google. At the beginning it looks good but after 5 clicks you want to return to Google and try another link. Traditionally you would have to click back 5 times. With this extension you just click a button once.
   
   
   
6. BugMeNot helps to quickly bypass registration forms.
   
   
   
7. And finally Nightly Tester Tools that allows to run old addons even in new versions of Firefox.

Distribution of Friends on Facebook

I looked at the distribution of friends' friend count. I thought that I will just see an another example of Pareto distribution. Little did I know...

The distribution has a long tail but once the number of friends hit 150 it goes down quickly.

I thought ok, it's because they are mine friends and not a general population. I am more likely to be friend with someone who has many friends then with someone who has just a few friends. Hence my tail must be clipped at the tail.

I sampled people of the same frequent name and I have got the same strange result. I thought ok, it's because Facebook truncates the output to the first 300 people who are likely to be my friends. Hence the plot contains people with many friends.

 

But if I sample a rare name I still get a deformed curve. I have concluded that it can because of some power users with many friends. By Dunbar number our brain is designed to accommodate up to 150 friends with whom we maintain friendly relationship. And if we cross this limit we begin to neglect some of our friends. Hence I filtered all people with more than 150 friends.

And guess what, Pareto curve fitted the data perfectly!

To take away from this exercise:

1. Be careful about the population you sample. If you ask people in a bus how far do they travel you will get a higher average than if you ask people at a bus station of the bus. A nice article called Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do describes it nicely.
2. Be careful about the extremes. They are likely to be somehow biased.  

Edit: once I wrote this article I found a similar article directly from Facebook and they observed the same things as I did! 

Co dělat, když jste neplodní

Máte tři možnosti:

1. Být se s někým, kdo je taky neplodný, a adoptovat děti. Protože ani jeden z vás nemůže mít vlastní děti, partner vám nemůže vyčítat, že kvůli vám nemá vlastní děti. Navíc k dětem se oba dva budete chovat jako k vlastnímu, protože ani jeden z vás nemůže mít vlastní děti.
   Tenhle přístup není nerealistický, protože asi 10% populace je neplodné.
2. Být s někým, kdo už děti má a další nechce a jen hledá partnera k výchově svých dětí. Nevýhodou je, že partner bude asi o dost starší než vy a pokud děti jsou už vyrostlé, tak vás špatně přijmou jako rodiče.
   Pravděpodobným partnerem je vdovec/vdova.
3. Být s někým, kdo nechce mít děti ani v pozdějším věku.

Adwords pro Dropbox

Tak jsem si zvětšil dva Dropbox účty a to zadarmo. Návod v Angličtině je na lifehacker.com. Principiálně použijete $100 nebo $75 od Googlu, co dostane zdarma k novému Adwords účtu, k propagaci vašeho referral linku. A za každého uživatele, který si nainstaluje Dropbox pomocí vašeho linku dostanete 250MB (stejně jako ten, kdo instaluje Dropbox), a to až do 16GB.