LadyCrimson

You know you're an "apple" shape (wide shoulders, narrow hips/legs, straight/not curved in waist) when losing maybe 3-3.5 pounds in 4 weeks = 1.5 inch smaller waist. ...while I don't have a "weight" problem per se, like many (lazy) ppl my age I typically have just lived with that extra 8-10 pounds over time, and most of that is in my upper body. Always had great legs, but never had a waist smaller than 26.5", even as a 113 pound athletic pre/early teen. Most of the time if I lose a little weight it doesn't hit the upper body fat much/quickly, my legs just get skinnier instead so I guess this "ketosis" really does work for that better, for me at least.

It's almost Keto! ...if you reduce the beans a little and the sauces aren't 90% sugar. ...occasionally I go to Nob Hill and get 2-3 of their hot-food BBQ pork ribs. I'm sure the sauce is a sugar bomb to speak but eh, in such small portion it won't kill me. Goes with the big bowl of rabbit food etc. nicely at any rate. ...I miss potato salad sometimes. Wasn't a huge fan of such overall but there's a style (extra egg and maybe mustard in it I think, it's kinda yellowish?) lots of crunchy pickle, onion bits etc) that I liked a lot.

Just watch the first 15 seconds, no need to watch the rest (unless you really want to).

I've been wondering why they want to knock him out for the endoscope, since I've heard of many where they don't do that. Maybe the size they want to use is too large to tolerate awake or something. Whatever. As they keep ruling things out I've been wondering if some kind of body-core-weakness/posture/spine issue could be a cause (he's prone to back issues and his neck bone curve is abnormal since forever, stuff like that), but I'm no doctor. Bodies are complicated, could be 1000 reasons outside of specific organ-cause.

Well, hubby is not constipated. Nothing in there. They still can't find anything wrong, he's "fine for his age" across the board. They wanted to run a massive urine test so he came home with a "pee cup" the size of a milk jug. On Fri. they want to do one of those camera down the throat into the stomach things, since CRT's don't see inside the somtach. They'll knock him out for that one so I gotta drive him home. Dunno guys. He's barely eating because it causes that swelling/pressure sensation. Still no severe pain or nausea tho, and he can desk-work/walk around ok most of the time. Just something's not right. Well, we shall see.

Patron - they keep putting out these small tweaking patches every single day. Which on the one hand is nice re: active devs. But on the other hand it's annoying to me because every time I try to learn game stats/maths/systems etc and plan, they change a bit the next day. Sure nothing extreme, but I still have to start over to "test" things again (because I'm like that)...I may take a break from it for a little while until they decide they're done with most balancing/small bugfixes. Overall I still like the game but the longer I play the more I think Banished was the better game (for the moment) in terms of programming polish and certain kinds of ... efficiency self-challenges. To me it was hugely fun in Banished to see how high a population you could get before things started collapsing (or your PC started chugging) but I don't see myself getting that obsessive here. The early/middle game is fun (and can be really rough!) but the late-stage "challenge/interest" isn't as strong, is all. Still worth buying/playing tho - and as they balance things more it may get even better, of course. We'll see!

It's intended, or the best they could make the AI do at the time. Their preference went (I think) Wheat > Vegetables > Fruit > Meat/Fish. So if they think 'their' market is currently low on Wheat, they will continually try to get Wheat first (if some is suddenly available somewhere) before going for meat. If they reach the Wheat granary and it is empty when they actually get there, then they may turn around and go to the closest non-wheat food granary. As someone once advised on a forum: Mixing foods unnecessarily has caused many players problems. Let's say that enough fish and non-food goods are available in part of a city which is running fine. But if a small amount of vegetables becomes available, market buyers will try to get it, spending much of their time in a (perhaps futile) attempt to get vegetables, letting their markets run out of other goods (causing house devolution). In this case, the obvious solution is to not introduce vegetables (unless there are enough vegetables available to satisfy the demand). Hence sometimes wanting to build road separated housing blocks (this block gets only Fish, this one wheat and fruit, etc), to prevent market buyers from marching all over town trying to buy something when their block area doesn't even "need" it. Later Impressions city build games inserted a feature where you could define what goods market ladies were allowed to buy, to prevent them from trying to get "everything" as soon as they detect some is available halfway across the map...

Something is wrong with the hubster. No severe pains but strange upper abdominal issues including some growing pressure/under-ribcage belly swelling that's worse when he bends over or sits vs. stands. So he went in today and they did a scan and plethora of blood tests. Most of them seem average/normal, ascites (fluid buildup) not evident, kidneys on the scan supposedly nothing too abnormal. Not all the results in yet. We're a little stumped so far. Hopefully it's just the weirdest case of gas/bloating/constipation ever or something.

Yeah, the "War" side of the campaign had such low Prosperity values you didn't need rich houses. I would still use them so I didn't need a whole town that wanted oil/higher entertainment etc. for evolution. I guess I had too many early experiences where blocks would become unstable and evolve, devolve over and over, drove me crazy. It was overall easier/more stable for me to keep 98% of population in small/large casa's. Edit: Patron -- I'm starting to feel like the super long research tree becomes almost irritating after a while. You only need such if you really want the "rich" citizens but so far I don't really see a *need* for them. You can over time make enough cash thru trade or other means, for example. So there's a zillion things you can grow and make and it's kind of overwhelming and makes me go "why bother." eg, I think it should've been about half as "big."

My appetite and size of my 2 meals keeps going lower and lower. Simply not hungry, ever. It's so weird. At this rate, before long I'll have to force feed myself with a bacon grease IV (haha) to keep weight up.

I remember the first desert map I think it was, first time I played it I didn't understand Prefects/fire danger and everything was catching on fire. Probably restarted that one several times. Patron updated again, supposedly fixed a storage/production problem or two ... so this time I patched it. Which means, of course ... I have to start over! Not because the patch means you have to. But because ... well, I just must, is all.

Mmmm I don't like his methods very much. Also, all you need is a few legions and ranged spear throwers, that wall o' towers is excessive, lol. Well, if it works, everyone is different. I was never good at making "pretty" C3 cities tho, only efficient ones. Not that C3 would be easy to prettify, lol. Used to know the exact number of tiles for reservoirs and fountains re: Palace/bathhouse layouts .... other stuff like that. The key is a good general housing block loop design that you can use/repeat in almost any map, both for Palace and non-Palace blocks. That way workers just walk in a square/rectangle and you put a gatehouse at the entrance end of the block to keep them in. IIRC granaries/warehouses don't need to be inside the gatehouse loop because the market ladies that pick up the food can go through them - the gatehouse simply stops the distributor lady or priests or firemen or whatever from wandering off. I think sometimes I would entirely close off the "palace" block (no connected road to the main city) to make it easier but I typically tried to keep it all connected. Something like that anyway. It's been ages. As I recall you only need about eight Palaces for the Prosperity of any scenario (edit - looking at an old save file, it would appear to be only six Luxury Palaces), and almost every single other house can stay at the large casa level, something like that). From one play of that map: Example of a casa-housing block: I'd make a few or more of these + a palace block. Example palace block layouts - I had a basic maxed out concept (the lower image) but I'd constantly adjust it.

But, but, it's 10% off at release (17.99), meaning you save a whole two dollars! Yeah there's no huge rush to get it, waiting will get you a few patch improvements (not that I have any big issues personally). Usually better to wait till you're finished with other currently playing games anyway, in case this one sucks all your time away. And don't bother with that little 'supporter pack' - it's just a few cosmetic things if you love them to death and want to give them a tad extra money. The dev's are very active/responsive on the Steam forum, it's nice.

I always get mixed up re: high vs. low sensitivity definition, but I and many others had to use/set hardware mouse setting in the Launcher, cause while mouse movement was "ok" it still felt sluggish. Meaning the game's graphic cursor goes away to be replaced by Windows white desktop pointer ... which means in winter it's almost invisible. I changed Windows default pointer to "larrow.cur" in Windows mouse settings - so it's still white but has a thick black line around it. I think the 1st patch made hardware mouse the default instead. I didn't install it yet tho - waiting for the 2nd one that supposedly has some AI changes.

Patron: Year 7 to 10 may be when one starts to have enough population/income etc. to start speeding up Research (Easy/Normal/Hard probably affects this because of reduced/increased resource fees/costs - I think, probably ). I finally got Stone houses. Annoyances: ---not enough descriptive UI info. "This lets you upgrade to Stone houses" ... but it doesn't tell you what that means, really. One thing is it increases family capacity by two. Nowhere in-game is that stated. Stuff like that. They may be working on bettering that but right now... --Like many similar games, the number of houses you need and the space they take up becomes rather absurd. I'm constantly building extra empty houses so there are always some immediately available for kids moving out of their parents houses. --Why are city planner square grid-based layouts schemes, but the effective radius coverage of something is usually round? That's not efficient.

Almost 4 "years" and my ramshackle town looks like this...because worker-gain is so slow I'm awash in food but struggle for wood - so much wood needed for everything. I finally had to/was able to build a 2nd Forester (on the left). I'm half tempted to start another of the maps for variety too. Photo mode!

I love C3. Once I learned to use the gatehouses I abused the heck out of those. Played 5 hours or so of Patron. They're already putting out an update to address a few minor issues/bugs and probably balance stuff. I've encountered nothing distressing gameplay wise myself. I was correct it's a lot more of a slow pace than Banished, because the speed of growth of new workers available is sooooo slow for at least several game-years. I started with 12 "workers" (not the same as total population) and late Year 4 I now have ... 29. You'll get a few from children growing up, a few from Event messages. A trickle. Sometimes you'll put the game on high speed waiting for children to grow up, lol. Upgrading production buildings/slow minimalism is key, probably until late stage. The research tree ... also a long time to get very far down into it, imo. Don't expect stone houses or the larger Warehouses quickly. I sort of like that, and sort of don't. "Events" are just simple messages you get occasionally (from the King, from the Church, others) that give you options to choose from, which give rewards or negatives, so pick what you want, is all. I turned off disasters, no clue on those. It's not perfect, there's some mild annoyances here and there, a few things feel a little clunky, but overall I like it quite a bit, and I certainly find it addictive in that city planning way. Edit: starting position for each map is fixed, not random. I would have preferred at least 2-3 possible locations and having it be random. Oh well.

There are dolphins in my island bay. Cute. Random trader ships are nice for photo mode shots. Graphics are "ok" overall, nothing special (especially if you zoom in close to the citizens...), but good enough for game type and the way you're going to largely view the game while actually playing. Now...let's see if Patron keeps me up all night or not.

Played another hour of the Banished Patron demo. I liked a little bit more every 15 minutes or so. It's going to be more of a patience game at the start than Banished. You may be "stuck" with only 10-25 workers for the first 3-4 seasons, waiting for resources and cash to pile up (there's citizen taxes so you get some all the time). I think increasing workers/citizens is going to be slow going most of the time, outside of getting randomly lucky re: a few wandering immigrants offering to join your town. so rapid expansion/growth will be hard to force. Which to me = possible efficiency challenge and I start drooling. Another big difference was you can upgrade most buildings a few tiers. So it may be much more efficient (because, workers) to have one upgraded Hunter building vs. three lvl-1 ones. Reading a bit more, sounds like the demo is out of date and the full release will likely have some improvements in AI, UI, QoL, who knows what else. So I didn't want to play too long only to have it be super different tomorrow. Maps were a decent size too, for future expansion. Dunno if I'll play it as much as Banished, but ... efficient layout planning is my jam!

...leafy greens, veggies, leafy greens, veggies, leafy greens, veggies. Yes I can have a bit o' bacon and other non-plant protein/fat sources and I don't feel deprived. Still, sometimes...

Tried the demo for about an hour. Based on a forum post it may have some time-played limitation re: resource generation (so you can't play the test map forever in one go/save). Anyway, it seems pretty cool. The research tree is massive, you can research one item at a time and it has short branches to make you choose what you want to do first re: resources required to research it. Can't build farms right away, for example, you need to research upgrade to Town Hall for that and it'll take a short while. Not sure how you get new immigrants if any, vs children being born/turning into adults. Anyway, seems worth $20 to check out full version. Even has a photo mode of sorts, which will clip through ground/things. Not that it's really a game for taking major shots of, lol. But at least you could get better angles or maybe distance for town design shots.

I seem to be recovering ok from whatever was going on with me. I will still see a dentist to see if there is some dental infection related thing or something (still odd it was painless tho, if so). Key is I can hopefully now do so (in a week or so) without fitfully coughing and sniffling right into someone's face. Keto styled diet/two meals a day also still working/feeling great? Still no insulin required and that's felt like freedom, but still hoping glucose will go even lower over more time. Oh ... after watching me get cheerier and more energetic all the time (and seeing me not need insulin), hubby decided to try the same. Which meant he had to quit beer, because (his) daily beer consumption and Keto don't get along. He was quite grumpy for the first few days.