Dewar

Heh, It's funny how EA hate ebbs and flows inversly to Activision hate. I missed what caused the EA hate to swing back around, unless this still has to do with the Sim City launch. Speaking of Sim City, I wonder how well that game works these days.

Sweet, I've definitely gotta shoot for the moon this weekend. Kerbal might be one of the games I try to get an actual Steam badge for.

Guys (and gals,) I'm seriously shocked at how good this game is. If I had to guess, I'm about 1/3 of the way through after around 5 hours and I had to pry my hands off the mouse to get ready for bed. My only nitpick so far is that I wish that the other runners you can hire would get some sort of loyalty bonus (either in cheaper costs or better stats) if you grabbed the same ones over and over again. Actually, maybe they do and I just haven't noticed yet.

I don't know if I've ever played a Civilization game with nukes since the first time way back in Civ 2. Somehow, I usually manage to avoid the Manhattan project being built until it's too late to be worth building a bunch of them.

I spent a lot of time making an adventure in Neverwinter, and it ended up being a let down. I am, however, thinking of picking up the new edition of the tabletop roleplaying game and then letting that sit on the shelf forever.

I hope this is a trick question. Oddly enough, I spent a lot of time on wikipedia trying to figure out what countries were least involved in the war as I figured that "winning" was not fighting in the first place. I settled on Cuba as the winner due to best k/d ratio. One German submarine sank, no losses. Also acceptable are Turkey, Afghanistan, and Tibet which, as far as I can tell, stayed completely out of the fight and didn't lend troops to either side.

Can you try to take a screen shot at similar position to your last one? I'm curious how different it is.

I'm still undecided, leaning toward PS4 at the moment, but it seems to me that where Microsoft is currently failing is poor messaging. I haven't heard Sony talking a whole lot about these sorts of features, barely anything about PS Move (if it even still exists,) barely anything about how indie devs will be able to self publish, and nothing about how downloadable games will license themselves on the PS4. One thing I can say about Microsoft is that they're being much more communicative, even if those communications could use a couple more trips through the speech writting corps. What I think is silly is how pretty much all of the first release consoles are sold out already, when no one has any real solid details about them, let alone which E3 games are actually going to be release titles. It boggles my mind that people are willing to throw away that much cash on something that they don't even know the release date for.

Sweet, I lost track that this was today. I'm looking so forward to getting home and trying it out.

Hmm, I might need to finally make a moon trip then. I've spent so much time monkeying with orbits and pod intercepts that I've never actually tried for the moon.

Hmm, I'm getting tempted to back this. I wish it was ending after my next payday though. That's something I'd add to the kickstarter tips list, schedule so the kickstarter ends the first Friday after the start of the month. Hopefully that would catch the most people right after payday

Wow, a lot of interesting thoughts came in over the last few hours. I think this is a good thing, because twelve year old me would have probably gotten curious about Rommel and who he really was, and maybe I would have checked out an encyclopedia.I did that sort of thing a lot when I was younger (one game I remember doing this with a lot was Castles.) I accept the idea that a lot of other children may not be as curious, but I'd like to think few would accept what happens in the game as historical fact. I like a lot of games without win conditions. I've put a lot of time into Minecraft (which I guess you can technically win now) and Dwarf Fortress. However, I do think there's value in having win conditions in Civilization because, if there was no end, then wouldn't that imply to most people that you win when you conquer the world? There are so many world conquering games (even before video games there have been board games) that I would assume if handed a map an no instructions that my goal is to take over the whole thing. An additional small point, if you don't wish to respect the win conditions, you can always keep playing after the game has given you your score. I think there's value in setting something in a hisorical context as there's a lot of information there that a good portion of the game playing public shares. For instance, I don't really need to be told what a musket is in Civilization. I have a decent idea of what makes a musket, and a stats on the unit tell me the rest of what I need to know. It's not trivial to create a new space-musket and accurately explain what it does as well as enough backstory to make it fit into a new game. Now multiply having to do that a hundred times for each unit and technology in the game, and you're talking a decent chuck of writting time. A lot of folks seem to really like Alpha Centauri but, when I played it, I had a hard time figuring out what most of the stuff there actually meant (I was young at the time) while the surface level of Civilizations 2 spoke a language that I immediately understood. That being said, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a Sci-fi or Fantasy version of Civilization (Elemental: Fallen Enchantress tries this but doesn't quite make it.)

There are five win conditions in default Civ 5 (not sure if any were added in expansions) Cultural - Make your way though several of the social policy trees then build the Utopia Project Diplomatic - Build the UN and win the ensuing vote Domination - Kill everyone Science - Research your way to the top of the tree, then build a space ship and make it to Alpha Centari Time - Have the highest score at the end, tallied from the following factors from least important to most important (according to the manual, which may also be out of date) •The number of tiles in your borders (least important factor) •The number of cities in your empire •Your population •The number of techs you possess •The number of “future techs” you possess •The number of Wonders you have constructed (most important factor) I'm seriously all for adding more victory conditions, but I'm not sure where to start. Happiest civilization like Chris mentioned would be interesting, though happiness pays off in other ways through giving you Golden Ages. Additionally, as I'm looking at this list, I just realized how unbalanced the victory conditions are toward industrial societies. Three of them directly require building an expensive structure, score favors many expensive structures, and of course you have to build lots of units for a domination victory. Edit: Correction, diplomatic victory does not require you to construct the UN, just that someone does. Edit2: I've had a devil of a time getting the cutural victory with a lot of cities as the price of policies goes up so much per additional city. I'd say that victory type requires you to stay small and focused. Additionally, it's much easier to keep hapiness up if you're small and focused, making it easier to get golden ages, in turn making it easier to get money, in turn making it easier to bribe city states for the diplomatic victory. Not as required to be small and focused as the cultural victory, but still a valid play style.

Ah, real time, so that's what seperates it from XCom then? Does it all take place on one map the entire time, or are there management phases and fight phases of some sort?

The idea of a career mode in this really has me really interested. I wonder if it will ever really come out. Edit: Shammack, now you have to make another pod to go and rescue him

It still sounds to me that you're making the same arguments about Civ as game censorship folks are making about violent games in a realistic setting such as CoD or Spec Ops. That doesn't make it an invalid arguement, but it seems to me to be impossible to make a game that gives you want you want, while still being actually fun to play and at least somewhat marketable. Perhaps me pulling out Spec Ops as a particular example out of that list was a bad idea, as I didn't think it was a terribly good game. So, to take this discussion on another tack, how would you improve it? I guess make it more Sim City like, where it's a nation building game with no real goal? Abstract it completely from reality, so it's a game about the Naciremas with space muskets on the moon?

For someone who's never played Syndicate or Syndicate Wars, can you recommend an article or two that talk about what this game is trying to be without using too many refrences to the older stuff?

When I play, I usally stay at Medium with Elective Monarchy, but I realize I'm not the typical player. I very rarely do anything to piss of my vassals, assasinations are saved for particularly important moments, so I'm usually able to elect whomever I want to be my heir and most everyone agrees with me. Here's a couple of posts from one of the dynasty games I was in on my other forum that illustrates my style of play, scheming and guile.Applogies for broken HTML, we have some custom codes over there and I can't post regular images yet.

High Crown Authority is basically great if you have it and a huge pain in the butt if anyone else does I recall at one point somehow drumping a huge portion of Norway and Sweeden into the HRE by accident due to being inattentive to succession laws.

Interesting. Crusader Kings has the opposite slant, where it's all about the person/family and not really (unless you make it a personal goal) about the kingdoms at all. People seem to find that distasteful as well.

I would argue that "Winning" is a typical game thing. There are certainly examples of games that don't have a win condition (Sim City was mentioned earlier, Crusader Kings doesn't have a real win condition either) but most of those games have either a high score to hit, or the goal is simply not to die (which I guess is a different variant of high score where score equates to time.) I (and apparently Chris as well) often have the most fun in Civ games where I don't try for the win conditions, so maybe it's a white european thing to feel the need to create win conditions as a delevoper and then strive for them as a player? Either way, I don't think that its a historical inaccuracy that Civ has them. Edit: Removed a bit that was re-hashing the same ground.

Maybe I'm too white euro-mutt to get what what you mean (not trying to be flippant, just saying I often lack perspective on these matters.) I have a lot of options on how to win in Civilization, I don't understand how one way is more european than another.

I'll pick Spec Ops out of that list as it's the only one that I've really put a lot of time into. In Spec Ops you can get shot hundreds of times through-out the game and survive. That is not acurate. It's also a poor comment to make about a game that is obviously not trying to model realistic combat (even if it's trying to model other points of its theme well.) It's ok at that the Spec Ops folks chose to make the actual combat gamey and unrealistic, which is why it seems to me it's ok that Civilization doesn't attempt to model history accurately. Edit: I Saw Dasein, I hadn't considered that, and it's an interesting point. "A lot of other games do it too," is not an acceptable answer to that point, anymore than it would be to sexist issues. I guess I never saw any harmful normative dimensions to Civ, as any Civ can go any way it wants without restriction. Where I think it would be harmful to start restricting one civ over another or trying to otherwise degeneralize the different groups.

So what games accurately represent their theme then? That's where I'm confused. We're leveling historical inaccuracy complaints at a game that isn't trying to be accurate. Should we level the same complaints at mario because plummers can't jump that high?

This is true unless Crown Authority of your daughter in law's kingdom is High, in which case counties of that kingdom can't pass outside the relm. That's where it gets a little complicated. I think that if your Grandson inherits first before you die, he will become a count under the kingdom his county is currently in. Then if you were to die and he were to inherit your lands, they would become part of the same kingdom (if possible.) If you die first and your Son or Grandson inherit, I think they'll leave the county and take your throne instead. Usually this only happens with the Holy Roman Empire, but it's possible that England has marched its way up to high crown authority as well.