Humanoid

Absolutely, play at a level that's "fun" - it's not dissimilar to Diablo 3's difficulty really: I don't play it personally but it seems silly to me that people complain about the highest difficulty as if they needed to play at that level to enjoy the game. In the case of Civ4, I could play and on occasion, beat up to Emperor difficulty (not with any regularity, and also bearing in mind I haven't played for over a year now), but at probably a 10% success rate. Further, by that point it no longer feels like an empire-building game but just ceaseless micromanagement, and I wasn't particularly enjoying it (or the long long losing streaks ). In the end, the vast majority of my play is just at Prince level because it's where I have the most fun playing in the style I prefer to: alternate phases of conquest and consolidation before employing air superiority to win a delayed conquest victory. I play the occasional game on Monarch but usually don't as it's probably too harsh on mistakes for my relaxed ways of playing (I lose more often than I win still).

I recommend Sisiutil's starter guide, but only after playing a couple games unaided first to get a feel for the general game concepts in isolation. Note that Noble is the "balanced" difficulty level, i.e. neither you nor the AI gets any specific bonuses. My own personal advice follows, but again, probably best to wait a couple games before applying any of it. - Civ/Leader selection for beginners: Try to pick at least one expansion/economic trait: i.e. one of Financial, Organised, Charismatic, Expansive, Imperialistic. Then consider starting techs. Agriculture and the Wheel are the most generically useful, and Mining and Fishing are probably the biggest traps if you're unlucky with terrain. Also consider starting with a Civ that gets an early unique unit/building. This gives a leg up over Civs that get late ones such as the Panzer or F-15, since the game is often over by the modern era. - Chopping. Cutting down a forest tile grants 20 production, or 30 after researching Maths. This is a huge benefit early on and is essential on mid-to-higher difficulties, learn it early and do it often. - City placement. Having a tile that can produce at least 4 food is considered almost essential early game. Sure, endless fields of grassland might be appealing in the long term, but early on, relying on farmed grassland for growth is just plain too slow. This means a flood plain or a special food resource like fish, wheat, cows, etc. The exception to this rule is to try to grab essential strategic resources quickly - early game this means horses, copper, and iron. Do *not* however, build the city directly on top of a special resource. Once your core cities are built, specialise heavily, e.g. science city, military production city, and so forth. - Civics: Don't think that just because you've researched a nominally more advanced civic, that it's more powerful and should be used. More likely, doing so will bankrupt you. A lot of people tend to be reluctant to take up Slavery for example, but sacrificing population that will probably end up unhappy anyway is a much better deal than it might look. This act is generally referred to in the Civ community as "whipping" and is an almost essential technique. - Research. There is no "best" research order, what you should research is directly related to what kind of starting terrain you get and what's needed to improve it - e.g. Farming if you have wheat nearby, Animal Husbandry for pigs, etc. Once food is done, then a safe bet is to go for Bronze Working, to enable chopping, Slavery, and also the Axeman rush on your neighbour(s) if you're so inclined. Religions are easy to found on easy difficulties, but I suggest not getting into the habit because it flat out won't work on higher-than-neutral difficulties. - Diplomacy. Leaders generally behave like the commonly-accepted real world traits of each. Gandhi will never declare war if you're above neutral with him, while Montezuma might be your bestest buddy ever but still backstab you at any moment. Isabella will have a fit if you refuse to adopt her religion, but Stalin couldn't care less. Mao will get annoyed at your Democratic government but Lincoln will love you for it, etc. - Automated workers are stupid, don't do that - at least not early on (it's always sub-optimal, but the lazy can get away with it in the late-game). Don't spam roads like in earlier Civs, instead build them towards specifically required places only. 1.5 workers per city is the commonly accepted rule of thumb. - War. Axemen rush is probably the earliest possible war option in general, unless you play a civ with a unique warrior unit replacement. This only remains viable while your foe is mainly defended by warriors and some archers at most however. Once that moment has passed, you'll start having to worry about combined arms instead of a mad rush - which generally means catapults, and a lot of them. 1/3 to 1/2 of a typical attacking stack in the mid-game are siege units. Example: - Once your opponents get Longbowmen, it may be time to consider shutting down the war effort and instead focusing on advancing to the next era. The medieval era is absolutely the hardest era to conquer in, as defensive units generally outgun any firepower you may have. Instead, bide your time, then blast them away with cannons and riflemen. Huayna Capac of the Incas is the strongest leader *by far*. It's estimated that using this combo roughly lowers difficulty a whole notch, and you will find that he's banned from competitive multiplayer games. Trait analysis, spoilered for space:

I wouldn't be surprised if they made the trial version of TOR indefinite though. I don't think there's really any reason to restrict it anymore to guest passes and free weekends - it's not like they've got a shortage of server capacity. When I did the trial weekend thing, I only had time to really sample one subclass to the level cap, and it turned out to be one I didn't enjoy - so there's good business reason to allow anyone to at least try to find one that they find enjoyable without having to rush them.

Civ4 only got good after an expansion (or two, some may argue) so I still hold out hope for it, with the first expansion due later this month. But yeah, Civ4 Complete is probably the best bet for now and should cost next to nothing. Alpha Centauri has a lot more personality though, contrast with Nimoy's narration in Civ4 it's a world away (in a literal way, too). The downside is that the technology tree, being sci-fi based, is a lot more abstract and less 'natural'. In addition, some might say Brian Reynolds' passion for philosophy might come off as pretentious, but I enjoyed it. Its stablemate, Master of Orion 2, is also probably worth trying. Going back further, there's also Master of Magic and Colonization, but that's getting close to the original Civ time, in all its EGA glory. The ones to avoid are Civ3 which I didn't think was any improvement on Civ2, and the rival Civ:Call to Power series (which arose over a trademark dispute between Microprose and Activision over the original Avalon Hill wargame of that name). Some random reminiscing: I started with the series when Creative bundled the first game with my Sound Blaster, along with a few other legacy Microprose titles such as Railroad Tycoon, F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 and Silent Service 2. In a way I'd say that was the dawn of my life as a PC gamer: sure I'd had access to the family PC for year, but aside from a few casual games like Tetris I mostly gamed on my NES. That Creative bundle changed my life!

Only ones in the list I don't already have on my account are WC4 and U8 - and I have multiple boxed copies of both. Will buy them anyway though, beats having to user-mod WC4 for the DVD quality movie version and U8, well why not. The expansion thing is a bit weird though: LOAF on wcnews.com claims to have contacted both EA and GOG: "EA tells me there's no problem with GOG including the mission disks. GOG tells me EA won't give them permission. I have literally yelled myself hoarse at these people. (And maybe it's telling that GOG apparently doesn't realize they're already selling Privateer and Wing Commander 2 with the speech packs?)" Sounds like there's a communication breakdown somewhere there. EDIT: Back in the 90s, WC1-3 were rereleased in a compendium called The Kilrathi Saga. It didn't come with the expansions, but they were available to download free from EA's FTP. I remember grabbing them through dialup. I have heard some people have had success adding it to the GoG version.

I would have thought that Larian being Belgian would, if anything, cost more per head to run than Obsidian. Heard somewhere that Belgium is the highest-taxing country in the world?

The Essence ST/STX (the difference is that the ST is PCI and the STX is PCIe, otherwise pretty much the same) also has a headphone amp so it's the absolute best option for both a headphone setup or a 2.0/2.1 stereo setup. It does however require an add-on board to do surround. But yeah, it'd be the first thing to cut if you wanted to reduce the overall cost. As for stereo speakers, I'd recommend a quality set of powered speakers, such as: Audioengine A5 (or the smaller A2): http://audioengineus...e/Audioengine-5 Paradigm Shift: http://www.paradigm....ers/index.shtml Aktimate Mini: http://www.aktimate.com.au/

You sure you want water cooling? My take with my own personal biases: http://www.cyberpowe....aspx?id=435127 The only recommendation I would really really push is to get the Crucial SSD in lieu of the other options, it's the best reliable option there is. I'd also strongly suggest the PSU upgrade if only because I have no idea how good their own-branded one you listed is. The rest is me going nuts for a quiet build as per personal preference, and adding both the best sound card option and big IPS screen because of my crusade against onboard sound and TN panel monitors. [*]Case: Antec P183 V3 Advanced Super Mid Tower Black [+35] [*]CPU: Intel

CPU and GPU upgrades aren't an either/or. Sticking with both the i5 + 670 is plenty sensible, and either pocket the excess or get a better SSD. Further, I would personally never recommend a Sandforce-based SSD (of which the Force is one) both from personal experience and wider feedback on their questionable reliability. Either go with the Marvell controller based ones for best value (Crucial m4, Corsair Performance, Plextor M3, or the discontinued Intel 510) or with the dearer Samsung 830 as the best of the best. But yeah, backing the 3570k, or even 2500k if the price difference is more than say, 20 quid. Ivy is only a single-digit percent improvement on Sandy Bridge at the same clocks, and they clock more or less the same due to Ivy having inferior thermal interface. I don't think there's any reason to go for the 680 either, if you need more than what a 670 can offer, then better to save for another 670. I also don't think upgrading the RAM latency is worth anything to this architecture - if there's any difference, it'll be closer to a 0.1% than to a 1% gain. Memory frequency is also a tiny, but slightly bigger gain, in the event of DDR1866 being available for a similar price - again a sub-1% improvement.

I thought, like it's gameplay, HR's art direction veered wildly from segment to segment - the whole game is like a multiple-personality disorder turned into code. Brooding man in black and femme fatales in Elizabethan collars. Generic and sterile office environments and grey abandoned warehouses against a vast floating cityscape. Heavily armoured paramilitary forces and naked muscle-man. Intercontinental hover-copter (!) as your primary means of transport amidst conventional 20th century transport options everywhere else.

It's a world away now, but the time limit was the reason I never played Fallout 1 until after I did Fallout 2. This was before the time I was smart enough to look up stuff for myself, so really all information was sourced from print magazine reviews, so in the main all I saw was the time limit mechanic as described in the review and thinking to myself "that doesn't sound fun" and more of less ignored the title. A regrettable incident in hindsight of course, and one that I imagine lessened my perception of the game when I finally got around to it years later. But that's a digression that adds nothing to the discussion really. I'm still not particularly in favour of time limits, though it's not a firm position. Hard, binary, "you fail" type limits I don't feel are particularly compelling, especially in longer time scales. Even on the shorter scale, like "run away from the time bomb" or "get in and out quick before the radiation kills you" I can take or leave. It becomes either a case of save-scumming in examples like the former, or a maintenance chore in the case of the latter. It's not an interesting decision point, it's just either a case of doing it and being allowed to move on, or not doing it and having to replay that section. On the other hand, I'm very much in favour of time as a variable in terms of choice and consequence - a third axis if you will - in which time elapsed contributes to the outcome, not in terms of success or failure, but in terms of story divergence. The most basic implementation of such a system would be some linear scaling, where your task would get incrementally more difficult if past certain thresholds; the next would be as outlined by chamr, where certain options would be closed without completely denying you success. But the concept could be taken even further, with things like a completely different narrative branch possibly resulting - neither positive nor negative - leading to potentially different ending scenarios. This leads to the tangential issue of, in the case of "failure" to meet a time limit (I don't like the use of the term "limit" in this context), the handling of failure in general. In a perfect RPG world, there would be no concept of failure in the metagame sense, just the in-universe consequences of the player character failing. Or before I muddle myself up even more in the phrasing, "being allowed to fail." This was discussed here in the forums earlier this year I think - my favoured example is as always, Wing Commander's losing path. Wing Commander 3 in particular had a very long, detailed, and fleshed out (and mostly unrecoverable) losing path where the tide of the war would sweep you up into a final, doomed, last defence of Earth. In the context of the game, this path was just as significant and compelling as the winning path.

Yeah, COTD regularly pull stunts like this to draw traffic - the amount of stock they have is probably something in the low three digits, and apparently the deal has notched something like 20000 Facebook 'likes' so you can calculate your odds from there, if you can even get onto the site the minute it goes up. This practice just barely skirts by consumer laws about having a reasonable number available when advertising a sale. Still, if you want to chance your arm, create an account there now, and within the sale period, stay logged in and spam refresh on the hour, every hour (since they change the item every hour "randomly") and have your card details and such ready to paste in. It's almost a perverse sport or such - thousands of people will be doing that exact same thing and you probably have less than a 30 second window to complete the transaction to actually buy one. I have to admit even I'd be tempted by a $20 D3 deal, speaking as someone who personally despises the genre, but I won't personally deal with COTD so no competition from me.

I can definitely see the benefits of the Steam cloud but am very much glad it's optional - I'm not so cynical as to automatically assume it's there for nefarious intentions, but I can also see how it could potentially be abused by some ne'er-do-well (whether inhouse or external) potentially causing some sort of data privacy issue. After all, there's no guarantee over how much info could potentially be stored in what's nominally a saved game file when we're possibly talking about any arbitrary number of Steam games.

Not really a lot of specifics I can give, but if you do go for the pre-built route, the traps are usually two: one is the typically anaemic video card likely to be shipped with it (advertised with misleading specs like "Amazing 2GB graphics!") and the other is a possibly proprietary spec and/or underpowered power supply that could prevent any reasonable upgrading in future. That and the usually cheap and noisy plasticky styling, but that's more an issue of taste.

I recall more than a few games coming with both CDs and a DVD in the same box in the late 90s - Tex Murphy Overseer certainly did - but not sure publishers would bother going to the extra expense nowadays unless they had a vested interest in the BD format being adopted. An important difference I suppose is that now, even if a PC game came on several DVDs, it would still only be for installation, whereas in those heady "multimedia gaming" days, disc swapping was more akin to what consoles do today.

So with TOR expired for good, I still can't muster up the willpower to install ME3 - as much because of the side decisions as anything else: wait for story "fix" or no, and whether to try create a usable import or no. Instead I decided to have a short bash with Privateer for the first time since going to Win7, on account of finally having a USB flight stick. Ended up playing about 6 hours straight, with the "one more upgrade" syndrome. Tarsus went to Orion - the first time I've tried the Orion seriously - and hated it, and went on a mad push to buy the Centurion. A familiar problem of course, is having the cash to buy the ship but not having any to actually make it usable. So there I was, flying a Centurion with no engine, no shields, no guns - just an afterburner, a missile launcher and a handful of IR missiles, desperately afterburning around trying not to be hit, knowing that even one pirate Talon could kill me with ease. With the hefty repair bills incurred from playing like that, it took a few trips to even be able to buy a set of basic lasers for 4000 credits, let alone the recommended set of Tachyons for 80000. I think I'm just about ready to leave the Troy system now.... It occurs to me that this game is basically the same itch that MMOing gives. A gateway drug? Maybe.

I'd hazard a guess that given the plan was to move on to an MMO based on the Amalur IP, maybe they overreached early on perhaps an overoptimistic schedule.

It works if you go through alts fairly methodically I suppose, with weeks or even months between repeating the content. Thing is, over the last week - my sub ran out today incidentally - I'd been pretty much sampling every class after abandoning my "main" smuggler. That means repeating content in quick succession, and not having any time to build up rested XP - I find myself borderline underlevelled for a lot of content. Admittedly I also do zero group content, so no heroic quests - I get out of all the public chat channels as soon as I create a character. Doing a full clear of Coruscant and Dromund Kass twice each in the space of a week does colour the perception a bit, sure. And yes, the minor dialogue changes depending on class are a pretty nice touch.

Abstaining second round - if it's a new city either way then it doesn't really matter to me whether it's New York, Phnom Penh, Timbuktu or Atlantis.

I have no problem with an MMO that encourages alts - but TOR doesn't really succeed at it beyond two (one of each faction) because of the linearity of the planet progression beyond the tutorial planet. Now granted, creating independent, parallel levelling paths would multiply the development effort required, but if they're insisting on this "levelling over endgame" design then it's sort of a necessary thing. One thing that happened to WoW after the last expansion was an explosion of all the launch zones and reconfiguring them such that they ended up with three, sometimes even four zones you could choose from at any given level. Now this didn't do much for the veterans who had no reason to go back, but it's great incentive for the newer players to go again on a completely different trip around the gameworld. re: Free weekends - they're mostly obsolete now that any subscriber can send out 25 week-long trials (previously limited to three).

It's being given away with AMD cards now, lost value pretty fast so I'm not convinced anything is forthcoming.

It's a lot in absolute terms, but actually less than the previous generation - both the 6990 (dual 6970) and 590 (dual cut-down 580) were significantly more power hungry cards, and also more power hungry individual GPUs. At 170W, a single 680 is the most "efficient" top-end GPU in a long time. A technical aside is that 300W is the paper limit they stick to because of the PCI-E specification, but there's nothing stopping them from enabling an alternate mode that blows right past that - that previous gen, as mentioned, with some voltage hikes and overclocked cores, would blow past 400W - the 6990 in particular had a BIOS switch that when toggled to the alternate mode would essentially unrestrict everything, allowing it to fly past the nominal 450W that its stock cooler was rated for. On the plus side at least both vendors are finally working on idle consumption as well. AMD in particular has a "long idle" state it can fall back to which sips just a couple watts. It's offset, unfortunately, by their load power being a fair bit higher than nV's this generation, but still.

Australia in general has an odd relationship with cheese - raw (read: unpasteurised) milk and products derived thereof are generally banned from production and sale because of perceived health risks. It is one case where it's hard to argue the overused "nanny state" cries aren't accurate. That said, there is a loophole for milk at least, that permits its sale for external use, e.g. for milk baths - and obviously there's nothing preventing the internal use of said "cosmetics" product.

Way back when the Annual Pass thing was first announced I thought to myself, yeah, may as well, not like it'd cost me anything. But I waited a couple of days and on reflection decided it wasn't so great a deal - it'd lock me into a game which in the timeframe may well see no new content but would nevertheless be paying for, in exchange for a game that costs less than 4 months subscription anyway. I think I made the right choice in hindsight - pretty much bang on six-months after, I'm without a WoW sub and without D3, and not feeling like I'm missing anything. It's no doubt been a success for the devs on both teams however - they've managed to stop the "subscriber bleed" KPI for the former game and can claim numbers are absolutely steady, even if a significant subset of that subscriber base have just prepaid for something they no longer actually play.

It's basically a community site run on the side by my ISP, heh - all the ads for example are just for the ISP and no external advertisers. I suppose gives it a decent degree of editorial freedom but also the impression it's just a hobby site run by the gamey techs, not that I mind that.