billt721

I've been slowly making my way through Chandler's works for the last few years now, and as I've yet to make it to this book I haven't listened to the podcast yet. That being the case, I don't have a ton to add, except.... My favorite thing about reading Chandler has been that as soon as I opened The Big Sleep, I was immediately familiar with his prose thanks to Bill Watterson and Calvin's Tracer Bullet character.

So I'm a few weeks behind, but Jake's mention of Xerox/Photocopies reminded me of this, which is highly recommended if you've never seen it before:

She was on the Dwarf Fortress episode.

I have no strong memories of reading the first book. Looks like I was in high school when it came out, and while my much younger brother was really into the whole series I didn't pick up the first one until I was looking to pass the time on a short plane trip in college. I think I read the first on the way down and then the second on the way back, and while I thought they were fine for blowing a few hours, I wasn't really compelled to pick up the others. However, I DO have much stronger memories of the second time I picked them up and blew through books 1-5 in about 4 days. I had just graduated college and while I had a job, I'd pushed my start date back a month so that I could have a bit of a break. Unfortunately, I was so broke that I had to ask my roommate if I could pay him for rent and food after I started working. With nothing else to do but not wanting to start work, I sat around and read books. And it was awesome. I had loved reading through high school, but reading for pleasure completely stopped in college. The Harry Potter books are what got me back into reading and I will forever have fond memories of them if only for that reason (also, they're really fun reads). Now I've got a 4yo daughter who I desperately want to start the series with. I purchased the illustrated version of the first book right when it came out just in case it went out of print before my daughter was old enough. We can't start it yet, though. The books get pretty dark, and while the first one probably isn't too bad, I know that once we finish the first she's (or at least I am) going to want to move onto the second, and then the third, etc. So we wait. Maybe reading and following along with this podcast will hold me over for a few more years.

Re: How friendly the digital version is to someone new to the game -- I think it's good but not great. As a listener to 3ma from the beginning, I'd heard of game but had never actually seen it. I started by reading the rule book and playing the tutorial. That gave me a good idea of the mechanics of the game, but no clue as to why I'd choose one action or another. After badly losing a couple of games I went looking for some general information on the game and found out about Twilight Strategy. After reading that and playing a few more games, I feel that I've got a pretty decent handle on the game now and have managed to beat the AI a few times. The biggest frustration after the initial 'I have no idea what to do' phase has been the accidental DEFCON suicide. That's mostly on me for not thinking through all the possible ways that an event could be used by the other side, but it'd be nice if the game would throw up some kind of warning in such a case. Example: played Lone Gunman as my last action of the current round, figuring that letting USSR see my cards at that point would do the least possible damage. USSR used his 1 op point operation from the card to perform a meaningless coup of a battleground country in Central America, thus lowering DEFCON and costing me the game.

I certainly never expected to hear Voros McCracken and/or DIPS brought up on an Idle Thumbs podcast! Really interesting discussion, especially seeing how many of the things discussed in relation to XCOM: EU/EW made it into XCOM 2.

Thank god you showed up to tell us which games it's acceptable to like. I used to enjoy Civ V, but this post has changed everything! Now that Civ V is out, which game would you choose for me to play? And given that I clearly have no idea what I've been doing with my gaming time, I'd appreciate it if you could tell me exactly the right way to play whichever great game you choose for me. Edit: I guess I should actually add something to the thread. So .. uh .. great episode. My favorites are always when you guys get smart people on and let them talk about design. Always fascinating.

Good news! I haven't actually played the re-releases and have no idea if they actually hold up, but they were fun in the early 90s as one of the first CD-ROM games that my neighbor had.

It may not have made a difference other than for shock value, which admittedly would have been pretty funny. The Aztecs invaded in my most recent game and while they took over the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, France and a chunk of the HRE, they never made it up to Ireland or England before their empire started to fall apart and France started to re-form.

Yeah, just purchase BNW. If you decide later that you want the civs or scenarios from G&K, you can pick it up for $5 during the next steam sale.

That was never going to happen anyway, given that the creator of FFH is now employed by Stardock.

Re: The Stack of Doom discussion at the end. I don't really have a problem with Civ IVs combat model so much as I've never enjoyed Civ as a military game. Though in defense of SoDs, as Rob said, it's awfully satisfying to take your huge army and steamroll over your neighbors with it. Anyway - as someone who prefers to play peacefully unless it's obvious that conquest is my only route to victory, I quite like that the 1UPT change has limited army sizes. Rather than having to build 2 stacks of 10 units to go take a few cities, I can instead manage it with 4 ranged units, a siege unit, and a few melee units. And whichever panelist was wishing for the SDK to be released so modders could get into it like they did Civ IV -- the SDK has been out since sometime last year. I play on a Mac and so don't really keep up with mods, but to the best of my knowledge nothing approaching the various total conversion mods we saw with Civ IV has yet been released.

Rob, I'd be curious to read your thoughts on Star Wars Rebellion since you got distracted from that topic and never got back to it. The thread Jon linked to earlier actually addressed the game in the original post: That pretty much describes how I feel about the game as well. I was disappointed in the game at the time because I thought I was buying a Star Wars themed MOO-type 4x. What I got was something far more focused on characters and character interaction than what you'd see in a typical space 4x. In a lot of ways, I'd compare it as much to something like CK2 as I would to MOO. I wasn't a huge fan at the time, but I think it actually holds up better in retrospect because it was so different. And, if I remember correctly, the game avoided some of the pitfalls you mentioned in the podcast. Specifically, you were dumped into an established universe, both as far as the fiction was concerned (obviously), and in the sense that your task wasn't to search blindly and colonize a bunch of empty planets but rather to get systems on your side (I guess that's really the same thing, but it feels different for some reason) and eventually take over systems controlled by the other side (thus having a central goal for your 'civ').