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Regarding the difficulty curve of the game, it stuck me in playing the game that being cruel and evil is the easy way to play, and it's much more difficult to play as a good person. Being a sadist, for example, can be the game on easy mode. As a sadist, you can torture and execute people willy-nilly and you get dread (very useful) plus stress relief. Try being generous instead, that's much harder as things like revoking the titles of vassal who took up arms against you creates stress. So it becomes easy to snowball if you're playing as a despot, and the game often subtly encourages you to play as such. It's effective. But if you take a step back, you as a player realize you've created a murderous tyrant. It's generally more difficult to play as a good person. There are tools to help with it, true, but it's so much easier to kill your foes than befriend them. All of which is to say that there's a lot of different ways to approach the game, and those different approaches reward players differently. Which is great! But it also means that if you just sort of go along with how the game initially presents itself to you, if you play the game as a game, then you're often going to find it easy. Sometimes you need to find your goals from outside what the game presents on its surface, and CK III is great at providing some of that depth.

Did you dress up in black on Friday nights and pretend to be a vampire? If so, you might remember a gaming company called White Wolf, it made atmospheric table top RPGs. A few years back it was bought by CCP, the owner if the spreadsheet what walks like an MMO,Eve Online. Now I get news that the WW properties have been sold to Paradox. Wow. Having just recieved initial fulfillment on my Exalted kickstarter, I hope that Paradox takes a long, close look at WW licensees to see if they are properly servicing the fans. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/29/paradox-white-wolf/

Hey. Can anyone recommend to me a good space 4X game. I've got Gal Civ II and that's not bad. It is a little rough and sparse in some ways. It isn't bad, but there's just not a lot to it. I also have Distant Worlds and that's just too much. There's an awful, awful lot too much in that game, and so much of it ends up being automated. What I want would be a sequel to MOO II. Relatively simple game (relative to, say, Distant Worlds) with some cool flash and combat. I'm looking forward to Sid Meir's Spaceships, but I think I need something to wet my whistle with now. I've heard good things about Endless Space, but I've also heard some shade thrown on the game, particularly related to its expansion. What do you think?

Wargamming, the people that brought you World of Tanks, is publishing a Master of Orion reboot. You can find the launch trailer on youtube and stories on Joystiq and other places. Apologies for not providing direct links, this forum software doesn't work as well for me as some other pieces of forum software.

GC 3 is good and fun, but it needs more polish. I bought it day one b/c I am a total Space 4X whore. It is very similar to GC 2. It has a nice graphical upgrade and a neat ideology system similar to Civ 5 but driven by GC's colonization and random events. It was initially very unstable, but this was quickly patched up. Now it runs for hours just fine on my laptop. It does need a coat of polish. Its UI is awkward in some places. Not every turn places, but semi-regular places. For example, moving a building to the top of a build queue is a frustration, as is upgrading your custom ships whenever you get an upgrade. If you love Space 4X and GC 2 then I recommend it now. Otherwise I would wait until a few more patches come out.

Thank you for suggesting Endless Space. I picked up this weekend and have been enjoying it. It is pretty darn good, albeit with a number of noticeable problem areas. I'll have to look into Sins.

I wish I played more of the later start dates. It is hard to shake the false notion that more game is the same as a better game. There's lots of fun stuff in EU IV, and other games, that is readily available from a later start date but would be hard to develop from an earlier one. Forming Holland, for example.

Re Gormongous's statement that the converter doesn't work. I used it yesterday, and it worked. I'm not sure what anyone else's experience is like, but it was fine for me. That said, the eventual ease in creating a massive empire in CK II becomes a problem in EU IV. You can fairly craft a significant and large country in CK II which doesn't translate well into EU IV. Not because of a technical issue, but because starting with a large empire in EU IV takes away a lot of the fun. At least for me.

Great show. Every time I hear about EU IV, or CK II, I think about how interesting the converter from CK II to EU IV is. The converter is really interesting, and I would love to see it discussed in some detail.

After the discussion on officers and generals, it would be interesting to see a war game that focuses on, or even considers, the master sergeants and other NCOs that train enlisted troops.