Gormongous

For those of you who were wondering how Paradox was going to balance the Abbasid Caliphate, a strong and centralized power that was at its greatest extent in 769, covering nearly a quarter of the in-game map, the answer is... well, they'll just make it ahistorically weak and give random border kingdoms independence just because they can't be bothered to find an anti-blobbing mechanic that works. For reference, here is the actual extent of Abbasid power in 750 (with 786 being the actual height): And here is what Paradox thinks is an accurate reflection of this. Observant people will note that, besides Egypt, there is little practical difference between the Abbasids in 769 and in 867. So much for a century of decay, right? I think I might just have too much knowledge of this historical period to enjoy this game like I used to, which is sobering because I'm not even halfway through my dissertation.

No, it's not. There's nothing I hate more than people who are knowledgeable about a topic talking about said topic.

Yeah, I guess I'm just disappointed because the ideological factions in SMAC worked so hard to submerge you in a totalizing worldview that invariably bled over into your play style. Even though there weren't any unique units or anything, thanks to the much-hated component workshop, you'd never mistake a Hive game for a Peacekeepers game. You could theoretically pick any play style and win condition, but the fiction and the mechanics of the different factions incentivized different ones so heavily that it's almost inconceivable. It's totally just reactionary bullshit, but I do resent the "build your own faction" feature because I feel it'll discourage any kind of synergy that strong again. I am of two minds about the factions. In one moment, I think, "Great, there will be AI factions that'll stick with me through thick and thin," and in another, I think, "Great, there will be AI factions that hate me for no reason despite mutual interests." It's bound to be a mixed bag, but if they make Affinities these grand meta-factions that can specialize their components, it'll be cool to push hard on science because I know my AI buddy has my back militarily. Or they could just be a +4 opinion modifier in the diplomacy screen that also unlocks certain victory conditions, who knows. I really hope, with all the little tweaks they're making to the formula, that Firaxis manages to tune the AI to something less rabid and unpredictable. My biggest complaint with Civ V is not all the systems that still fail to gel, with their soft caps and easy optimizability, but the fact that the AI plays the game at almost any difficulty level like a particularly impulsive and greedy human. The fact that I have to keep a bunch of military units stationed on the border with my longtime ally, lest he think I'm weak, no matter what game I'm playing, is really tedious. I want the chance to play a 4X where there are viable ways to avoid military conflict besides just taking my licks every so often.

I am maximally excited because Anita Sarkeesian is on this podcast and skipping to a random point in the middle has her dropping Baudrillard on Disneyland. It literally can't get better than that.

As far as I can tell, "sponsors" are limited to just a single big bonus you choose at the beginning of the game. If we're talking about a faction as something that dictates unit and tech progression, play style, and win conditions, then the Affinities are a better fit for factions, with sponsors and colonists as perqs.

The Affinities seem like a natural outgrowth of the Ideologies. I'm glad they're taking the chance to root them in the core design, but they seem mostly to me to be a workaround for the poor diplo AI and a better way to force an interesting endgame. I am also kind of irked that they essentially took seven SMAC factions and boiled them down into three, but maybe they'll be more complex for it.

Right, wasn't that the cause for the mid-stage theory that Quinn had enslaved even 4chan mods with her vagina?

I remember you talking about this friend a year or so ago. I thought you said he was getting better at not just spouting out ignorant shit...? Not that the current cultural climate doesn't bring out the loudmouth in us all, for better or for worse.

I am having trouble with any thoughts that aren't incredibly cynical, because my relationship with Firaxis has approached the level of mine with Creative Assembly in recent years. I will say that I have grown to like Civ V, although I doubt I'll ever really love it, and a lot of the little design touches here signify to me a team that has considered both the low- and high-level shortcomings of moment-to-moment Civ play. That's a good thing, it shows an ability to reflect critically on what is certainly a flawed but still interesting game. However, I'm going to echo brkl (and myself, earlier in this thread) saying how crushed I am by the lack of imagination on the macro level, in spite of some improvements like granularity in faction creation. Besides the sci-fi setting, which seems to be the most rote "New Wave" standard anyway, there is nothing here that goes beyond the purview of a mod of middling ambition. It's an inane comparison, but Civilization NiGHTS changed the game more than this, and it was a vanilla rebalance mod. The fact that this game seems to be Civilization V, Mk. ii with a sci-fi theme because we can't have Civ VI yet is really disappointing, but it does explain why they pulled back from "spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri" to "Civ in space." Basically, they had the chance to make any 4X game they wanted, and those fifty minutes of gameplay footage suggest strongly that they decided to make Civ V again. It makes me feel incredibly suspicious, despite my best intentions.

One of the most common revise-and-resubmit comments I see for high-density academic articles is the suggestion of adding sub-headings to break it into sections. It's not new, although the use of numbering and a title to call it out is, at least a little bit.

You're right, I was buying into the article's own terminology, which I don't actually think is valid because it sets the best of the thing the author's for against the most common of the thing the author's against. "Young Adult" is a marketing term created for a genre that encompasses many of the greater works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it's really only been seen as a social and cultural problem since the term itself gave defenders of "real" literature something to focus on.

More infantilizing than not reading anything at all, though? That's usually the split, not between Hunger Games and Joyce. Isn't there something in the basic act of reading fiction that is more uplifting than the supposed difference between reading YA fiction and the classics? I also take issue with the idea that simple pleasures are somehow inferior than more complex ones, because I feel that says more about our zeitgeist than the actual functioning of the human psyche. Ascetics live on bread and water, gourmands on exotic feasts. Neither really reflects on their emotional and intellectual maturity independent from their own reasons for doing so. Actually, for a more personal example, I have a bad sweet tooth and eat a lot of candy. Given the choice between chocolate and any other kind of food, I will eat chocolate. I don't eat it exclusively, but it dominates my "pleasure" eating to a conspicuous degree. I don't see how it infantilizes me to make the choice to indulge in a simpler pleasure like that, not unless it damages or inhibits me in some substantive way.

Isn't the issue more that articles like this one are saying, "People who don't like what I like are going to be emotionally and intellectually stunted, unlike me?" That's what's fucked. Anybody who peddles a specific form of media consumption as conspicuously useful and beneficial is immediately suspected by me.

I didn't mean it as an absolute point. I meant it more to indicate that people decrying ways of reading and enjoying literature with which they aren't personally comfortable is very old, and that it's always framed in terms of the running concerns of the age. I have no doubt that someone five hundred years from now will view these "thinkpieces" on YA fiction as reactionary pearl-clutching, just like we do the fifteenth-century German's protestations about lack of moral turpitude.

I was surprised at the compassion that's palpable in the last point. That's not something I expect from a Cracked article. Of course, every single comment interprets that compassion as self-righteousness, because kindness and consideration for people who disagree with you is obviously some kind of ploy, right? That's the main reason I'm not optimistic about the large-scale effects of engaging #GamerGate. Sure, some of those people were going along with the crowd or were ill-informed or just wanted their own voice to be heard, and there's merit in opening a dialogue with them, but so many others are people who are literally unable to imagine anyone not speaking from the same place of anger, confusion, ignorance, and fear as them. I've just seen way too many attempts to extend an olive branch or elevate the discussion slapped down as a rhetorical tactic that is even more despicable than spewing bile on Twitter.

I was so heartened to read that, an excellent summation, and only have reasonable discussion in the comments... until the last one at the bottom, which trots out the tired old "anti-#GamerGate people are guilty of stalking and harassment too, why won't anyone talk about it" shit that is entirely unsubstantiated but a favorite of people trying to reclaim the middle ground for their hate.

I also think it's a very Western and twentieth-century thing to think introspection is always useful and that fiction is an effective vehicle for it. I generally feel uncomfortable reading articles that use the assumptions of one cultural framework to evaluate another one that is often also newer. Invariably, the latter is found wanting, especially if they phrase their conclusions using various imponderables like "adulthood." And yeah, not that this is what the article's saying, but I'm always reminded of a fifteenth-century German chronicler describing someone reading silently for pleasure, how disturbing it was for them that the person spent hours sitting in one place, not noticing or talking to other people who entered the room, and going away with memories of events that weren't even real.

It is definitely the Great Leap Forward of video games.

Is it common for Anglophone sci-fi in other languages to have its jargon translated so literally? I've read a small number of German and French works, but it's never occurred to me.

My favorite instance was from when I was living in Greece and saw a listing for "Σε Βλέπω" (I See You).

This has happened to me repeatedly. If it were possible to look at my achievement on a scale larger than a single week, you'd see me doing seven or eight lessons a day for four or five days, then miss a lesson and not touch it for four or five days, until guilt and the urgent need to learn Italian for my dissertation brings me back. I'm sure a computer somewhere in the database is having a good laugh. It doesn't help that half the quotes are about cars, the way I'm hearing it.

The amazing thing about Bois, both in Breaking Madden and elsewhere, is the willingness he is to do an ungodly amount of work to achieve his comedic goal. The "Death of Basketball" feature is a brutal slog, and reading his latest football one where he tries to get over two hundred sacks by a single player in a single game actually involves him breaking several different ways that Madden 15 keeps track of the number, to the point that he was forced to keep his own tally on paper. They're all well-written and hilariously dedicated reads, and I don't even like sports!

I hate to say it, Twig, but I think "irony" needs the result to be contrary to the expectation, so this doesn't really qualify. Poetic justice, maybe?

Having a big interest in the doujinshi scene and having been fairly active on 4chan nearly a decade ago, I've played more than a few "porn" games in my time. Corruption of Champions is far from the best, by anyone's standards, but its creator is active on the various 4chan boards, updates regularly, and is generally well-liked, so it's definitely the kind of game that a no-budget site looking to flatter 4channers would review on launch. Still, in the time I was there, he also happened to be a fairly indifferent writer and programmer who frequently took fan donations to implement content and then wandered off with the money when the content being requested no longer interested him. Just checking the site again, it looks like it's as full of half-finished features and fetishes as it was five years ago. It's a wonder that no one's got an axe to grind there (or even sees the creator as being worthy of mention). I'm also really miffed by the whole "boy howdy, looker there, a porn game" tone of the review, punctuated though it is by Objective Game Reviews-style lists, but maybe I shouldn't be.

I just had a game as Greece where I'd gotten to the Medieval Era. I'd been backing up Rome with money and military support while it dogged the Mongols and the Celts, who were ahead of me in score. Rome was half of my score but punching above its weight because trading with me and exchanging resources for GPT were keeping it solvent with a huge military. I'm sure you can see where it's going. Rome attacked me out of nowhere immediately after ending its latest conflict with Mongolia. I killed all the units it initially fielded against me, but they wouldn't make peace even with their crashing economy, so I just quit my game. Overall, it was boring and implausible, but that's what happens when you program an AI to play like a human.