Children of the Nile

[Chesspieceface]

Well my gamestop has this in stock today. I didn't even see a shipping press release, how odd. I'm gonna hold of for reviews but I'm excited about this one. The citybuilder series was awesome.

Strange the release was so quiet though.

[Mr. Sparkle]

Strange the release was so quiet though.

Not really, seems like everybody is in pause mode, while they wait for the hubub of Halo 2 to subside.

As far as the game, I'm curious about it but I'm going to wait and see what the reviews say... I don't have enough gaming dollars to go around.

[tgb]

EBGames shows it shipping tomorrow. However, here's a ringing endorsement from a typical customer :

-=LOOKS INTRESTING=-
this is like a game i have played before called Pharaoh and other same based games, this 1 is by far the best iv seen in its kind of game. pix look nice, graphics are awesome too. i wiuld get this game, if i knew if i could build an army and actually counquer small cities and stuff like that

Sorry, Ironrod. De Debbil made me do it

[Kraken]

I am as interested in the public reception as anyone else. Don't let my presence stifle discussion here; I'm keeping my opinions to myself.

[tgb]

Yes, but is this the public you are writing for?

[Lee]

I am as interested in the public reception as anyone else. Don't let my presence stifle discussion here; I'm keeping my opinions to myself.

Oh come on, I would love to hear your opinions.

Did no one pick it up yet?!

[Jeff V]

Did no one pick it up yet?!

I was counting on Ironrod to filch me a copy.

On the plus side, an unexpected copy of Knights of Honor arrived from Germany today! It always pays to be nice to the PR girls. 8)

[Mithridates]

Gamespy wasn't too thrilled with it, giving it 3 out of 5. I guess I'll wait and see some other reviews.

[username]

Gamespy wasn't too thrilled with it, giving it 3 out of 5. I guess I'll wait and see some other reviews.

Actually, he did like it a lot, or so he told me. He was just disappointed that it wasn't the worldchanging experience he was hoping for, and he had some complaints about the interface and what he saw as a lack of necessary info while playing.

I differ with him on the necessary info complaint because, in my view, a Pharaoh wouldn't have had polling data at his disposal. We're pretty much in agreement as to the interface, however: functional, but way less than ideal. On the worldchanging experience thing, I think CotN is at least as worldchanging as Caesar was. That is to say, it's not a siren blaring in the night or anything, but it will garner a solid core of faithful players who will appreciate the design and grow with it over the years as new installments come out. It's certainly a better and more logical design than CaesarPharaohZeusEmperor.

Just forget everything you think you know about it from having played Pharaoh. CotN works in exactly the opposite way from Pharaoh and if you don't get your head around that squarely from the start, you'll be lost.

[The Meal]

I'm keeping my opinions to myself.

Not permanently, I hope. I'd love to hear your take on the game you were associated with. In fact, that sounds like fascinating front-page content...

~Neal

[Kraken]

Yes, but is this the public you are writing for?

Whenever you see a "quote" that is glaringly and obviously wrong for the real audience, suspect a marketing plant. Typically these things are placed by volunteers working without the oversight or even knowledge of the developer, although the publisher is probably coordinating their efforts.

The review looks to me like some 40-year-old marketing guy trying to rope in konsole kiddies with 7334-speak. Historical citybuilding games typically don't appeal to children, but the kids who DO play them are intelligent and literate. Guerrilla marketing (aka viral marketing) has caught up with the games industry.

If it IS a legitimate customer review, that would be depressing.

I'll share my opinions of CotN when doing so isn't likely to sway potential buyers one way or the other. In the six months that I worked for TM, I put in a lot of evenings and weekend hours at home, even taking the game on vacation with me, to hit my deadlines...then I was laid off after I delivered. As you can imagine, I have strong opinions and mixed feelings. It would serve nobody's interest for me to spew them here and now.

I would like to read some honest player feedback outside of the TM forums, and I don't want to taint whatever players choose to post here...if anything. If this thread peters out without any real player reviews, that will be informative, too.

In fact, that sounds like fascinating front-page content...

Know how you can tell the difference between amateur and professional writers? The professionals get paid. Seriously, when you do launch a front page I would consider writing for it.

[dfs again]

In the six months that I worked for TM, I put in a lot of evenings and weekend hours at home, even taking the game on vacation with me, to hit my deadlines...then I was laid off after I delivered.

Oh. dude. I'm so sorry.

FWIW That really taints my view of the game. I've not purchased it yet because I've got far too much gameplay to go spending time and money on another one right now. But that pushes my desire to buy the game down to into the bargain bin area.

Bet you've had a real good month.

[The Meal]

Know how you can tell the difference between amateur and professional writers? The professionals get paid. Seriously, when you do launch a front page I would consider writing for it.

Awesome! You're one of the people I was hoping would be willing to volunteer when we started proposing various site schematics.

And I completely understand where you're coming from regarding wanting some time to pass to allow customers to form their own opinions and for your own emotions to subside a bit. I got the rug pulled from under me a few years ago when Western Digital made a brief (4-year) foray into SCSI hard drive design. We put out some kick-ass drives but had some marketing failures and then lost the wind from our sails when corporate decided to shift tacks and eliminate R&D and instead become a manufacturing-based company. We had product out in the field that I was really proud of, but it was attached to a corporate name for which I held a great deal of enmity. Conflicted times...

~Neal

[Kraken]

But that pushes my desire to buy the game down to into the bargain bin area.

See, now that's just the kind of effect I am trying to avoid having. FWIW, I think Tilted Mill is a talented group of dedicated, hard-working people who deserve to succeed in a brutal, cutthroat industry. Just judge the game on its own merits. I'm going to shut up now.

[hitbyambulance]

i was one of the beta testers on this game. i just couldn't get into it, at all.

[mathfed]

i was one of the beta testers on this game. i just couldn't get into it, at all.

Have you played any of the previous city-building games? What type of game do you like the best?

I am planning on picking this up after work tonight. The Impressions city builders are some of my favorite PC games. I hope CotN addresses the shortcomings of those games and expands what made them fun. I've been following this game for a while, and look forward to playing it.

[Biyobi]

i was one of the beta testers on this game. i just couldn't get into it, at all.

Same here. I loved the Impressions empire builders but this just didn't do it for me. Maybe since I spend all day appeasing people at work the thought of a bunch of ungrateful peasants didn't really catch on.

[Kelric]

i was one of the beta testers on this game. i just couldn't get into it, at all.

Have you played any of the previous city-building games? What type of game do you like the best?

I am planning on picking this up after work tonight. The Impressions city builders are some of my favorite PC games. I hope CotN addresses the shortcomings of those games and expands what made them fun. I've been following this game for a while, and look forward to playing it.

Caesar 3 is one of my favorite games of all time and I enjoyed the other Impressions city-builders as well. I beta tested CotN also and it didn't grab me like the others did either. I stopped with the beta about halfway through. I feel bad since I really wanted to like this game and support Tilted Mill (since they were a group who had put out games I really enjoyed in the past) but for now it's not worth picking up until it drops in price in my mind. I'm thinking $20 or bargain bin. Part of that is that I was expecting more out of the game due to their history in that genre and part of that is because I have a lot less spendable income these days.

[hitbyambulance]

i'm into most genres (twitch FPSes are my favorite, i guess) and i did like playing SimCity. it should be noted that i've never really spent time with prior Impressions games.

[Draco]

Ironrod, you've been laid off by TM? I can't believe that!

BTW, who is that who posted above, his forum name is, er,"username." He spoke as if he was on the CotN dev team.

BTW P.S., I think Ironrod would be a great front-page writer!

[jonsauce]

http://consolegold.com/forums/viewtopic ... 9515#29515

[MeSlayer]

Well BUMMER

I was looking forward to this game bigtime, being a fan of the old Impressions games

Went to gamestop and grabbed it, but it uses a nasty form of secureROM copy protection built around the idea of "not letting me play". Dawn of war uses it too.

So I guess I'm gonna wander around this here internet trying to find a no-cd crack (the only way I can get wh40k to boot up too)

:/ A real bummer when a legitimate customer gets it right where it counts

[Lorini]

FWIW, I really like it. To me, they got the essence of a great city builder and got rid of all the BS elements of the previous games.

Lorini

[MeSlayer]

Well BUMMER

I was looking forward to this game bigtime, being a fan of the old Impressions games

Went to gamestop and grabbed it, but it uses a nasty form of secureROM copy protection built around the idea of "not letting me play". Dawn of war uses it too.

So I guess I'm gonna wander around this here internet trying to find a no-cd crack (the only way I can get wh40k to boot up too)

:/ A real bummer when a legitimate customer gets it right where it counts

haha, well nothing a format and reload didnt fix : )

Anyways, played through the first two tutorial missions so far I'm enjoying the hell out of it. It feels really weird playing a city building game based on "bartering" but I'm loving it so far.

[Blackhawk]

Went to gamestop and grabbed it, but it uses a nasty form of secureROM copy protection built around the idea of "not letting me play". Dawn of war uses it too.

DoW doesn't use SecuROM, does it?

[MeSlayer]

Went to gamestop and grabbed it, but it uses a nasty form of secureROM copy protection built around the idea of "not letting me play". Dawn of war uses it too.

DoW doesn't use SecuROM, does it?

securom 5, same as cotn - according to the site which may not be named

[mathfed]

I've been trying to get into this game for a few days, and I am having a hard time with it. My main issue is that everything takes SO long to happen. If you build a home, then you have to wait for it to be built. Then, you have to wait for a resident to show up. If the home requires a graduate, you have to have a graduate before anyone will live there. I'm about to give up. Am I doing something wrong? It seems like one of those games you start up, then go and see a movie to give the game enough time for something to happen. I can usually only play in the morning before work or after the kid goes to bed. I'm not sure I want to spend that time sitting at the computer waiting for something to happen in the game.

[Jeff Fiske]

www.immortalcities.com/cotn

I will only say a couple of general tips as anything lengthy or detailed as this is your forum, not mine. Check out the above url for more info.

In general, the pacing should feel about the same as any other builders. Place down one stage of development, monitor, expand, monitor, etc. One of the nice things, during 'down time' is to enjoy the 'real world setting & behavior' CotN provides. Zoom in and follow. Rename some people. Or plan your city with roads, and check out the world level map to plan your long term strategies.

You can change the gamespeed. If 2.5 is not fast enough, you can modify it in the CotN.ini file. I would not go above 4 or 5 even if you have a fantastic machine, unless you are building small cities.

Play the tutorials as well, if you have not already. Gamespeed increase works there as well. Hope this helps.

[Meghan]

Let me start by saying this is just a first impressions post. So far I've played the first tutorial, read the whole manual and listened to 3 of the walkthroughs on the bonus disk. I've played all the City Builder games going back to Ceasar 3. Pharoah was always my favorite but I've enjoyed all of them enormously.

SO my impressions thus far:

1. The walker system is gone. That changes everything.

2. Fundamentally the old games were about bean crunching - a city block this shape supports X number of people, needs Y amount of food, produced by Z number of workers, etc. The new system is much more organic. Buildings can be placed anywhere but you need to balance the distance between resources & shops & farms & government buildings. I'm sure there's numbers underneath but it doesn't feel like a math problem.

3. My system - 2ghz, 1gb ram, geforce 4mx, turtle beach audio. LCD monitor running the game 1260 x 800, 32 bit color. Controls are easy use - the mouse is very sensitive. Didn't see any slowdowns or bugs so far.

4. The walkthroughs on the bonus material are really interviews with the devs about game concept. They aren't scenario walkthroughs. The three which I've listened to so far were quite interesting.

5. You can layout and changeyour city while the game is paused. The buildings take time to be constructed and for the family to move in and build up their resources. That all happens in real time. Also, many of the building in the game cost nothing to build. This means you can plan out out your city at your leisure and correct things as necessary. The downside to rebuilding is that it might disrupt your good and worker supply, partly do to build time and due to changing the ratio of building types.

Keeping that building type ratio in balance is the real key to the game.

6. The tutorial that I played was thorough and leisurely paced. Between the terrific manual and the tutorials I think it will be easy to pick up the mechanics and concepts of this game.

7. The interface is also very well done. The only downside to this is that it needs more hotkeys. Also, I miss the overlay buttons from the other games. For example, in the previous game you could click a button and see if there was any unrest anywhere in the city. Here, you manage things by clicking on people categories - farmers, servents, etc. And you can see by category if each house is doing ok. That works well. Overall, the interface gets high marks for information conveyed and no wasted space.

8. I'm not sure how combat works here. You can recruit a variety of military types and the manual mentions foreign raiders in passing. There don't seem to be any forts or defensive structures. Frankly, combat was the weakest part of the previous games. I'd be happy if they skipped it here.

9. The game really wants to emphasis the personal life of the various people of in your village. I'm not enchanted personally. That is, I don't want to hear about the sandal maker's plans for his son. But that's just me. The game does make it easy to keep in touch with the people and their satisfaction - and keeping them satisfied is a large part of the game's challenge.

So far, if I was going to compare this to one game it would be Tropico. But it's Tropico with a City Builder's polished and intelligent approach. BAsed on my very preliminary look, I think it's a winner.

[Jeff Fiske]

RTS conventions are used.

You can group select the entire screen, which is often a huge amount of your city. Fun to see who is going where, and which homes are having issues.

You can use control groups. (For example #1 for healthcare buildings & #2 for religious facilities.)

Double clicking on any object, selects all of those objects.

Not exactly what you were looking for, but handy tools.

Before you jump into the game, make sure you go through the 2nd & 3rd tutorials- particularly because you have played the other CB's.

(Also remember there is contextual help on anything selected. That is the small question mark in the selected object area.)

[mathfed]

I finally got through the first mission this morning. Playing the game at a faster speed makes it more enjoyable, at least for me. I played the other city builders at a faster speed, too. I am starting to get the mechanics figured out a bit. I played the tutoirals, but it is still taking some time to figure things out. That's probably just because I have played the previous city builders so much that it is taking a while to let go of the techniques I used in those games.

A few niggling things are still confusing to me. So far, I haven't been able to keep my scribes happy. They always want bread and goods. They still want them even when they are right next to stocked bakeries and common/luxury goods shops. I click on them to see what they are doing, and the woman of the house seems to always be just sitting there, doing nothing. So, I'm not sure how scribes every get bread and goods. Eventually, the man of the house starts to picket, the woman sits on her butt, and the scribe eventually leaves town. Also, it is pretty mysterious how noble homes upgrade. In the first mission, I had 3 large estates and 3 medium estates. They all looked the same. I clicked on each one, and couldn't see any indication as to why the medium estates weren't evolving. I think it was because they didn't have personal boats. I'm still not sure, though. They all eventually evolved to large estates. I just couldn' t tell what they were missing when they were hovering as medium estates.

It is also a bit confusing how food works, but I think I have that figured out. The amount of food that is listed in the interface (under the number of available bricks) seems to be the food I can use to explore, buy stuff, etc. So, this number can be at zero even if there is still al lot of food in the threshing area. The food in the threshing area is what is available to the people in the city. I was confused for a little while becasue I would have no food to spend, but I could see a huge pile of food in the threshing area. So, having a scribe tax the fields is crucial to having any money to spend for expansion.

The game is definitely growing on me. It is challenging, and seems to have a lot going on under the surface.

[Jeff Fiske]

Page 10 of the manual shows how food works. It is a feudal 'trickle down'.

Scribes are government elite workers and have a family. All govt employees consume prepared food from a bakery. Elite educated workers consume a lot of it, almost one bakery per scribe is needed!! Notice that the baker has to make the bread- so just because a bakery has wheat in it, does not mean there is bread available.

Lots more tips on our forums.

Glad you are getting into it a bit more. Yes, there is A LOT more going on. One of the problems with creating a model that really does function like a real economy- but most of it should be looked at as parallels to real life- not parallels to game mechanics. The reason it looks like a real place when you walk around, is because it functions like a real place.

[Meghan]

thanks for the tips Jeff. The command controls helped.

More impressions, having now played all three tutorials.

1. Monkeys!

2. There is combat although it's not in the manual. Combat is divided into two parts - city guards who fight against raiders and robbers and the army/naval forces.

Army, Navy & City commanders are all drawn from your educated workers. Barracks can be designated for archers, guards, spears or chariots. Commanders train their forcers at the Army training ground. Military Equipment workshops make weapons and armor.

The Naval commander caused me problems. I had built a shipwright before the tutorial told me to so I had a the shipwright there and it had three yachts parked at (I wish the yachts would sail around!) The Navy commander wouldn't give the order to build a warship. I waited AGES but nothing. So I built a second shipwright who immeidately built a warship.

Is there some way around this that I'm missing?

Also - be sure to assign that warship to a command number it you want to find it again. Mine got beached aways from the city and I only spotted it by accident. There doesn't seem to be anyway to select the boats.

Defensive structures appear to be minimal. There doesn't seem to be Naval combat - the Navy is just troop transports, if I understand correctly. Combat is simplified and largely automatic. If you have the basic defensive walls and a city guard they will handle the raiders on their own. You're given strong hints about who and how many to send and they leave on the ship automatically. Eventually you get a message that you won.

So far, combat is uncompelling but mostly painless. This represents an improvement, imo.

3. Is there some way to attract more villagers? I had a situation where I was out of villagers but all my farms were understaffed because I had too many laborers. This went on for years, at least. How do you increase your population and attract new people?

4. I had an overseer and laborers roughing out basalt statues. I had an exchange with a dedicated scribe. I had sculpters. How do I get the basalt to the scuplters? The rough stones just sat at the quarry and the sculpters played with the mud.

5. Music is pleasant and unobtrusive. A few of the tunes sounds like one or two from Pharoah? Nice soundtrack, overall.

6. I wish there was a way to highlight all the natural resources so that when you're laying out shops it's easier to spot the oil trees and the kohl and so on.

7. When my assorted educated people retire, I built nobles, which let me build more farms, but no one came and lived in them

8. I love the holidays!

9. Is there something to do with the envoys after you've opened up everything you can.? I hate to think of them just lounging around the palace snarfing the beer.

Overall, I think this is a terrific game and I can't wait to start the next mission.

[Meghan]

Just a post-HL2 bump to say, don't miss this one! Lots of tasty city building - lots less annoying babysitting.

I forgot to say in my earlier posts, the people in this game are much smarter. You have to plan your city so services are convenient for the citizens but you can trust them to look after themselves and get their jobs done if you manage your planning rihgt.

[mathfed]

I got Half-Life 2 yesterday, and am still playing CotN a good bit. It is really starting to grow on me. I play it in the mornings before work because I don't feel like blasting things while I'm drinking my morning coffee. HL2 at night after the kid goes to bed lets me unwind after work.

I really like CotN. It is very involving. There is somewhat of a steep learning curve, even more steep if you've played previous city builders. Once you get it, it's a lot of fun. If you do play the game, be aware that there is a bug in the campaign mode right now. If you start a map on the campaign, decide it isn't going well and hit the replay button, you will hose your campaign. After you finish the mission you're on, there will be no option to proceed further in the campaign. You'll only be able to access a scenario list or start a new campaign. You won't be able to proceed to the next mission in the campaign you are on. I had this happen to me, and the CotN boards say Tilted Mill is aware of the problem. So, when you start a new map in the campaign, make sure to create a save game file before you build anything. Hitting replay if things go wrong will kill your entire campaign progress.

Another weird thing is that every quicksave is kept. I played through a scenario and had about 30 quicksaves by the end of it. I had to go and manually delete them all one at a time.

Overall, I am really enjoying the game. I have a hard time tearing myself away from it to go to work. This game has much more of a "big picture" feel to it than the previous city builders did. It seems to be more concerned with people's happiness on average. It takes a lot of unhappiness before it starts to show up in the worker roster.

One thing that would be cool to add to this game (maybe in an expansion pack) is to give you the ability to enslave citizens of your city. This is Egypt after all. It would be awesome to build a slave complex, hire a commander to oversee it, and throw any protestors in there to pull granite blocks until they decide they don't have it so bad. Protest my ass. Fear the whip, ya rabblerouser.

[Chesspieceface]

So here's what I've been wondering, and what's kept me from diving in (aside from HL2 and Bloodlines):

After the Tutorial, What's fun about it? How are the scenarios stuctured? Is it "Build 25 foos before Ramadan" or "Have 5000 people in 5 years" style objectives? Or is there something new here? Is there a sandbox mode also?

Everyone has written about the tutorial, and about how the building works, and the city functions. But I keep wondering if there is a game in there? I liked the citybuilders, even though the objectives were trite, it kept you busy and in the later ones you could carry-over your city from mission to mission. I thought I was gonna love SimCity4 for nostalgia and all, but truth be told I get bored without some vague sense of purpose.

Anyone care to elaborate?

[mathfed]

I haven't played through the campaign enough to have a good feel for the overall campaign. I have gone through a few missions so far. The tutorial basically holds your hand and gives you step by step instructions on what to build and where to build it. Plus, if I remember right, the geography is pretty benign.

The campaign maps I have played so far have been interesting. For one map, you have to get your prestige level up to 60 and evolve 6 noble houses to large estates. That's not too hard, but it seems to take a while to evolve nobles. I'm not entirely sure what makes them evolve. I have had a medium estate and large estate right next to each other. I checked both of them, and the occupants were happy in both. They both had all of the goods they wanted. So, why was one estate still only medium? I don't know. There must be some time requirement for an estate to evolve to the next stage. Maybe a medium estate has to be maintained at medium for at leat 10 game days before it evolves or something. I don't really understand that part. It seems unpredictable when estates evolve.

Another mission I have played required importing luxuries from all over the map, getting a prestige level of 120, and embarking to another Egyptian city to impress them. To do all of this, you have to have sufficient farming and city infrastructure to keep the supply of luxuries going. That mission was pretty fun.

The mission I am on now involves conquering another city on the map. I have just barely begun that one, so I can't give you any more details about it.

So far, none of the missions have been interconnected like they were in Zeus. I have had to start from scratch for each mission. I don't know if it is always like that, though, because I haven't played all of the missions yet. I'm not sure if there is a sandbox mode. I jumped right into the campaign. There are about 20-30 additional scenarios included besides the campaign. One of them is probably a sandbox mode. I honestly haven't checked, though.

[Meghan]

I think there's some replay value in the maps as well (although I too am not very far into them.)

The Grand Campaign seems to be set up for three passes: You play one game in each of 5 era of Egyptian history. So far, I've been offered Easy, Normal and Hard scenarios in each era. I'm playing through the easy ones so far. Then within each scenario you can adjust the difficulty setting as well.

There does seem to be variation on the map too. In the first map I chose to reach my prosperity goal by pyramid building, but it could be done with military means as well if I'd wanted to focus on that instead.

Also, as mathfed says, the maps themselves are very inriguing. I find myself spending an hour or more just staring at the landscape and visuallizing where I want things. In game one, I put my palace and nobles up on a really dramatic set of cliffs which looked stunning but noticably impacted my city's efficiency. I would guess that on harder games I would be in trouble with that approach.

[Chesspieceface]

Giving this a bump here and at CG, just to say that I've finally got around to the tutorials in this and am pleasantly surprised. The game has a very fresh take on the genre and seems to have some very interesting depth. I'm looking forward to more.

[mathfed]

I'm still playing this game, and have had a lot of fun with it. I'll probably be finishing it up pretty soon, though. There are three campaigns (easy, medium, and hard) and I am toward the end of the hard campaign. I've beaten the other two. Almost all of the scenarios in the scenario list are from the campaign, so there isn't much point in replaying them. There are a few sandbox modes, but I have done so much of the game in the campaigns that noodling around in a sandbox mode seems pointless. I have almost played this game to death. I mean that as a compliment. The game has held my interest the entire time, and I have played the hell out of it. I can't say that about too many new game purchases these days. Plus, support on the CotN boards is really great. I've had several posts addressed by Tilted Mill on those boards. They are really supporting their game and really seem to care that players are getting the most enjoyment from the game.

It is a pretty good game. Obviously, if I have been playing it and enjoying it for so long, I am definitely a fan. My only big criticism would be that the initial part of the missions is very repetitive. I wish that there were missions that built on each other like in Zeus, but there aren't. So, I go through the same inital steps over and over at the beginning of every mission. I could practically write a little code to automatically do the beginning of every mission. It would go like this:

1) Increase game speed to 10. (I've tweaked the .ini file to be able to do this).

2) Pause the game

3) If number of villagers is over 150, build 10 noble houses, 3 groups of common wares, 3 groups of luxury wares. Build 8 brickmakers and 4 bricklayers. Build 24 farmhouses near the river. If there are less than 150 villagers, do everything the same same except only build 8 noble houses. (Terrain needs to be taken into account here so that different buildings are in the right place.)

4) Unpause

5) Once there are 20 bricks, build a school and a priest's home near the nobles.

6) Once the priest shows up and there are a few graduates, reduce speed to 5 and actually start playing the game.

I basically do this same thing over and over. The early game was hard to figure out at first, but once you get the hang of it you end of doing the same thing practically every time.

Fun game, and I definitely think I got my money's worth from it.