Gormongous

That's rough. Once Russia forms, it's never going to be very beatable without scorching all your land in the winter and letting them burn away troops. I don't suppose Austria or the Ottomans have blobbed big enough to be a reliable counter?

Wow! See, I had my smart theatre friends and then the group of dudes who all started hanging out because we heard each other talking about the first Diablo in gym class. Up until about halfway through my senior year, I hung out with the latter way more. I guess the question is more about how high schoolers can navigate two completely different circles of friends simultaneously, rather than how I could be such a little shitheel. Come to think of it, we broke into our school too, and ended up setting every cash register in the cafeteria to play their audio diagnostic on repeat, which made the stone-and-plaster space sound like the cacophony of hell by the time we were finished. I think I ended up being the beard for a lot of these things, since I had a high GPA, a good reputation, and a talent for quick but sincere apologies. It's pretty funny how completely I left that behind when I went to college out of state.

Also, I think Chris and I might have been pretty darn similar in high school. What is it about quiet intellectual types that predisposes them to occasional shitty near-sociopathic behavior in their youth? There was a period of time where my friends and I would walk around hitting the hidden "stop" switches on escalators and automatic doors, which would be the most annoying thing to me now.

Honestly, the only way to beat Britain from eating your lunch in the North Sea is getting them trapped in a series of wars until you can destroy their navy or get them to release Scotland. It's not as bad as it sounds, if you do want to look west then Britain is your main competition, but you'll have to spend a century or so making it happen, chances are.

Interesting. Do you think it's a software issue? How old is the laptop and does it have heat issues or anything?

If any of you can't tell, I've kinda cooled on EU4 and I got bored halfway through my first try at a CK2 world conquest, so I picked up Victoria 2 again. I described my current game up until 1904 in the thread on video games and capitalism, but things have taken a tense turn since then. Basically, it's 1920 and I've become a paper tiger. Communist Britain has rearmed and I failed to do anything with the millions of pounds in reparations money that they paid me besides piss it away in the Congo. Almost all modern nations have caught up to me economically, so all I have over them is an incredibly high prestige from my golden age in the late nineteenth century, when I actually outpaced the research curve and had to let my universities sit idle until new tech unlocked in 1900. That'd be great, prestige is the way to stay on top as a small country, except my prestige is over twice the next highest Great Power, which is France, so I have a nine out of ten chance of being a leader whenever a crisis breaks out. If you haven't bought the Hearts of Darkness DLC, crises are a new mechanic to start world wars with frightening regularity. If a nation with a high combination of militancy and consciousness holds cores of another nonexistent nation, tensions built slowly until a crisis breaks out. Two Great Powers with the highest prestige get assigned for and against the status quo and the rest of the Great Powers have to pick sides lest they lose prestige themselves. If neither side backs down, a war breaks out, and if both sides have at least two Great Powers, which is a virtual certainty, a Great War breaks out, which is like a regular war except there are no separate peaces and the losing side gets fined millions of pounds over ten years for losing, which tends to break nations pretty quick, hence the Worker's Commonwealth that replaced the United Kingdom. Anyway, I've now been the aggressor in five crises. Two I've averted by buying the friendship of France and Russia, one turned into the Great War over Istria in Austria-Hungary that I used to break Britain, and two have been Great Wars over Hungarian independence. The first was a mild scuffle between Britain, Germany, and me, which yielded no results, but the second destroyed Germany and Russia, who are both suffering massive Fascist revolts that I'm not sure they'll be able to put down. If they flip, all their diplomatic relations reset, so I'll be left with no allies besides France, which has a massive but shockingly backwards military and a secret hatred of me over my nonexistent designs on Luxembourg, and the USA, which just sits on its ass afraid to move because it managed to avoid the Civil War and now won't move for fear of slave revolts. I can't fight these wars by myself! I tried to grow my army, but it just took workers from the factories and tanked my economy so I couldn't afford the army I already had. Against all odds, I do have half a million men under arms, but most of them are poorly trained levies from the Congo that I recruited and brought to Europe to convince the AI that I'm a threat. In a battle they'll crumble, I'll be partitioned into Flanders and Wallonia, and the game will be more or less over for me. Sooner or later, the Hungarians are going to want their independence again and they're going to ask me for help. I don't want to say yes, but I can't say no. And then the Worker's Commonwealth will eat me alive.

Apparently, since after a dozen patches the base game still can't produce anything remotely resembling the iconic moments of ancient history, Creative Assembly's just going to package them into DLC instead. First we had Caesar in Gaul, now we have Hannibal in Italy. I'm really not sure how I feel about it. I replayed an entire grand campaign a couple months ago and found it still to be the most bland Total War experience I've ever had. I know these DLCs add some much-needed specificity and endgame, but still... EDIT: For those keeping score at home, I played through an entire twenty-hour campaign as the Suebi and had maybe an hour of fun total. The game is still so bland and unfocused, full of gameplay choices that are meaningless but insistent. But wait! I've just been turned onto the first big "total conversion" mod for the game, Divide et Impera, which looks to have ambition on par with the original Rome: Total Realism, so maybe when they release their next big patch I'll try again.

I really don't know. They haven't been terribly forthcoming on how the DLC changes will affect the base game. Then again, maybe they don't know yet. The WETN was an eleventh-hour change inspired by a particularly contentious game of office multiplayer, which is mostly how Paradox goes about balancing the game now.

Have you ruled out it being a signal issue? Some of your symptoms look like drops from Bluetooth interference or something, but I don't know how to diagnose or fix that.

Yeah, Shogun 2 has a much simpler rock-paper-scissors combat system and a more contained campaign, so you don't just start drowning immediately trying to decide whether to recruit hussars or jaegers to conquer a map the size of the entire world. I can't recommend it enough, plus once you beat the base campaign, there's the Fall of the Samurai DLC that flips the game on its head in pretty interesting ways.

Yeah, you're probably having trouble getting anything past the 'Western Europe' trade node, right? That's been one of the more controversial decisions Paradox has made lately, designed to keep Spain and Portugal from making infinite money routing trade around Africa but in the process making small-time colonizers without huge naval range unable to compete at all. If you can't go through Hudson Bay to the North Sea, I'd just take the penalty for not collecting in your home node and collect in the New World.

There's really no reason you should be driving yourself bankrupt colonizing. Sure, most national economies can only handle three or four active colonies at a time, but that's usually all you need to box out Spain or Portugal from sniping a province in the Chesapeake Bay trade zone. In my most successful colonization run as Britain, I had maybe ten heavy ships to chase off pirates and twenty transports to ferry troops. Maybe it's changed with colonial nations now, but the AI has always been very poor at being aggressive over colonial possessions (probably because they're worth almost no warscore and so the AI doesn't prioritize them), so I've never had to work that hard defending my colonies, except from natives (and the genocide option is so cheap, only a few military points and your own sense of decency!).

I really wonder about who could claim to own what from the original Defense of the Ancients characters. As I've pointed out a few times before, beyond even the huge number of characters taken directly from the Warcraft 3 main campaign, there's a character, Lina Inverse, whose class is the title of the Japanese anime she's taken from. Her appearance in Dota 2 is no longer a dead ringer for her appearance in the Slayers franchise, but all her skills are still signature spells used in the anime. Judging from that, maybe there's just a general willingness for none of these companies to step on each others' toes? I don't know. I'm sure Kadokawa and Kanzaka Hajime both couldn't care less, but Blizzard and Valve have both borrowed a lot of their characters from all over.

Beyond the issue of grade inflation for kids who else discover to their dismay that what would get you an A in high school often barely nets a B in college, it's a mid-semester report, after all. Their aggregate grade is missing a paper, a final exam, half their discussion sections, and several pop quizzes. It's going to be tentative and somewhat unrepresentative, as I took the time to explain in class. Moreover, if you haven't come to some of the discussion sections (most haven't, God help me) and got Bs on all the other assignments (with ample explanation from me via rubric), there's no reason to send an email vaguely threatening to get Mommy and Daddy involved. You know what you earned thus far, you just don't like it. Sorry, the onslaught of whining immediately after midterm grade submission has me on edge, if you can't tell.

I wish I could shut it off, but in academia, unless you've got tenure and especially if you're a grad student, you're expected to be accessible at all hours. I just got an email at ten this morning from some kid who'd complained to his parents that he got a B. I wanted to be like, "Bitch, you get an F now, how about that?" Complaining about a B, God in heaven...

Man, that is ten seconds away from just "OBEY". I love it.

It takes a lot of patience and a willingness to make mistakes, but anyone can just find a wiki, boot up Brazil or Belgium (two countries with a lot of room to grow, one through resources and the other through people), and take it as slow as possible. Even if fascists seize control of your government, the game doesn't end, it just becomes very different.

Tariffs are chump change. Colonies are all about routing trade goods back to the motherland.

They photoshopped the woman out, then realized her blouse provided a lot of the warmth in the picture's color, so they amped the only other bright color up even higher. Simple solutions for simple problems!

Having retaught myself how to play Victoria II after it went on sale this week, I wonder how many of the things discussed find expression in that game. There is very little winning or losing in Victoria, at least on the battlefield. It's mostly about managing populations and riding the wave of modernity where you want to go (or usually, unless you're very good and very lucky, where it wants to go). You need money for the state to run, but if you tax too much, the rich won't build and the poor won't eat (although you come to find that people are a more renewable resource than coal or steel). Education and literacy drive all your research, but also make the people more aware of and desirous of change (not to mention, the purveyors of education are mostly clerics, who'll be one of the most conservative groups when those winds of change start to blow). In short, Victoria is an excellent lesson both on the limits of the state's ability to control its people and the power of money and violence to change the state. For example, I played as Belgium, which is a good place to start the 1836 campaign so long as you roll over when the Netherlands come knocking for Limburg and Luxembourg. You have a large population, an advantageous position, and several Great Powers to whom you can cuddle up. I buddied up with Britain, worked on building literacy, and was a Great Power myself by 1850, with Spain, Portugal, and most of South America in my sphere. I had a tiny military, but no one attacked me, because annexing my two pitiful provinces would just wipe out the wealth and industry that made them desirable. Better to trade with my citizens and enjoy their low prices thanks to subsidized exports (which I paid for with a 45% tax on the poor; I didn't want them buying my exports anyway). Eventually I had near ninety percent literacy and started trying to build my army, stripping the farms bare of fathers and sons to put me on par at least with the newly unified Italy. I always gave social and political liberties the moment they were requested, because long-term stability was more important than short-term profitability, and in general tried to shift my population as Liberal as can be, although never Socialist, so that I could have a happy, educated populace that didn't fight me when I tried to act in their interests. I think it all paid off, mostly. I'd won the scramble for Africa by 1890, thanks to a healthy and technologically advanced army, so now I'm exporting huge amounts of rubber and cotton. A world war broke out in 1896 over Slovak independence in Istria, mostly because I wouldn't back down, knowing a conflict would give me a shot at British possessions in Benin and Kenya. Britain and Austria fought against Belgium, Germany, and France. Austria was immediately occupied and Britain lost ground in Africa over the course of several years, eventually losing everything north of Zambia, the economic and cultural shock of which brought the government to its knees and replaced it with a communist dictatorship. I know I got lucky there, because I know too well that war is expensive and risky in Victoria 2, unlike almost any other strategy game. In the end, no matter how you play Victoria 2, you can't help flexing your muscles as the state. It doesn't hurt that Paradox designed a game that vindicates nineteenth-century ideas of how the state (and how people) work. Still, Victoria 2 is great because it asks the player to make a choice between direct but inefficient control or indirect but efficient influence. A Reactionary government with a state-run economy will allow you to manufacture all the goods your population needs at home, but you might lose out to a Laissez-Faire country that just lets its capitalists spend their money where they want. Or not! The capitalists might spend all their money building luxury furniture factories, go bankrupt, and start a depression that drops the country into second-tier status. The presentation of a toolbox and multiple avenues, both political and economic, to success feels so much more interesting and authentic than your typical positivist and capitalist framework for grand strategy and 4X games. I became the fourth-biggest power in the world by being an enlightened and prosperous Liberal constitutional monarchy, but a friend I know united Germany as a Reactionary absolute monarchy and even managed to push Britain out of its first-place status by 1910. It's not for everyone, but it's sure something.

There's this thing called a smartphone, it contains the entire internet in the palm of your hand.

I was up until six this morning finishing up midterm grades for my boss. It was tough, some kids that should be passing aren't right now because how I'm grading participation, but whatever, I got it done and twelve hours before the deadline, so I'm a goddamn hero in my book. And of course, I slept nine hours before being woken up by an email from my boss telling me thanks for nothing because my grades were submitted in numerical rather than letter format, which apparently messes everything up to the point that I shouldn't have even bothered. I love teaching so damn much, but I hate working for another prof. Of course, I hear this is the delusion of every TA...

"...Noteworthy..."

Right? Why do all the worst shows have cool, intriguing names?

Oftentimes I'm fascinated by the name of a show, rather than the premise. My "user title" to the left there is one that's stuck with me forever, but recently it's been The World God Only Knows and now Unbreakable Machine Doll. They both sound like awesome highbrow speculative fiction, rather than softcore sex harem adventure/comedies. There's a couple that use the word "horizon", I think one's been talked about a lot here, that also intrigues me only if I stick with just the title.