injurai

Is that from the wiki page? Looks incomplete but where are #10 total, and most of that appears to be suicide. We're still 16th with a rate of 4.6 homicides per 100,000 people. Though it's significantly missing a lot of the most violent places in the world. I guess war fatalities and insurgencies aren't being counted but cartels and gang violence are... US is very peaceful for what it is. Not everywhere can be Japan.

I only ever play as Rome. Sort of amusing how much content I miss out on. You should really try a civ that focuses on building tall some time.

Apparently a listing of all the new civs was already leaked. The rest would be:

Oh ****! Luther Series 5 is here! Christmas has come very early this year :D

Damn, congrats to Civilization VI. Looks like it might be making bank this year as well. Even V managed to come up in bronze last year.

Blue Milk at a bar? What a light weight, back in my day we start off with death stick shots.

I have so many questions

I need a movie about Bro-code yesterday. Kathryn Bigelow, you know what to do.

Well, I'm speaking more in relation to how a lot of it's features have been made deeper in later entries. So when you look back, IV has a lot of systems but the mechanics of each is shallower. In VI systems are richer but you have a bit less off them. In IV, you as the player make less meaningful decisions and less interesting variation unfolds from game to game. Systems that basically give you rote chores to make optimal choices gets old pretty fast. Outside if exploration, choosing where to settle, and your basic victory path, the rest played itself. Stacked units and workers were always such a boring part of the game to me. Civ V sort of inverted the issue by having one unit per tile, which made open combat more interesting but frustrated siege efforts. Also just working the map with workers is always a really boring exercise in chores. So Civ VI in my mind really fixed a lot of the foundational issues in creating interesting map play, and breaking from the more optimal build strategies that dominated IV and V.

Right now! Ooof, you just missed it...

So Vanilla V was a hot mess, though I agreed with the shift to hexes, and city-states are one of the best features to be introduced to the series and has only gotten better over time. Gods & Kings was really cool, but still a bit lacking, and Brave New World was incredible. Ed Beach was the lead-designer on both those expansions and is now the lead-designer on Civ VI and all it's expansions. Civ VI fixes a TON of bad design from V. It just has some really stupid AI behavior, probably because they hadn't yet internalized all the new system mechanics. World Congress for example was intentionally deferred to be an expansion feature because it's implementation is so dependent on it being tuned around the rest of the game. But AI that has to be there day one just suffers. At least warmongering penalties/bonuses and agendas improve the depth of diplomacy even if flaky at the moment. Besieging cities in V was no fun because you are trying to wrap single tile units around a single tile. Though open field combat was better since stacks were gone. Civ VI legion feature is a fantastic middle ground. Now you can sanely escort settlers/workers and even pair with support units like a battering ram for a siege. Plus now cities are spread out so that pain-point is far less anyways and combat is noticeably more dynamic in all forms. Districts improve the actually planning of your Civ which was previously rote and dry and usually had a right answer based on what your long term build was supposed to be. The harbor district is great as you don't have to have your city right on the water to have a navy. This as defensive implications and opens up land invasions as being more important. Workers being single use is nicer as you don't end up with a bunch of idle unites that you feel you need to spend your resources keeping occupied. Roads being automatically generated based on trade routes is secretly the best feature. Separating Civics into their own tree which progresses with culture is way better, and makes culture finally more meaningful all game long. Government policies are super fantastic, and really enrich the game. Religion has way more sane mechanics than it did in V. Really the best part of religion in V was it was another system by which you could dominate, but it was also really poorly envisioned at the time. Happiness and golden ages in V are much better handled in VI with Ages. The fact that you can rise out of a dark age is cool. Emergencies are a nice feature that came out of Beyond Earths more quest oriented design, which helps give rewarding objectives to the player beyond coming up with your own strategic goals. Yeah, check out Civ V for sure if you can't wait. Gathering Storm though just looks immaculate and I haven't even mentioned the features that it will be bringing to Civ VI, well other than World Congress coming back.

V Complete is probably the best overall. Though I think VI could be the best very soon with Gathering storm. The best part of VI is they have finally unstacked cities and made land-development finally a meaningful task. I really don't agree that 4 was the pinnacle of design, it just had a lot of sub-par features which made it over all more complex. But V Complete is feature rich, and VI launched with most of V's features and has since added in the rest and is now expanding.

It's been the case that through enough discussion and critical consideration there was always at least some small kernel of a mutually beneficial resolution between branches that check power. Sometimes an impasse required a more pressing matter that would encourage the consolation to a previous sticking point. Trump has no interest in navigating that realm of thought and policy. His game theory is one of pouring gasoline on near an area that has routine sparks then blaming the ever present sparks for starting the fire, then refusing to put it out until he gets all of his demands. There is nothing about that experiment that will de-cluster**** the sort of ****-shows that had already been going on in our congress.

Who watches the watcher?

Warren means at least there will be no Hillary, no need to split the neoliberal democratic base votes. Not sure if Sanders will have enough fire against Warren tbh...

Half-Life 3 is my white whale. If Valve could deliver some 4K VR 120 FPS Raytraced RTX Lit Physically Based Rendered Mocapped Narrative Driven HL3 with all those great physics puzzles the series is known for, then I will be over the moon.

But the publishing deal was struck with Take-Two, and Microsoft has acquired Obsidian's legal obligations and contracts. I would not expect a full turning of the page to happen right away.

Gromnir, I know the history of my country. I know what the founders wished as balance. What we have now is a degree of representation that is bad in a manner that the founders would too fear. The legislative branch is very powerful, and the levers it's structure offers to the political parties allows for planning in relation to how representation is currently derived. Seeing as the state is the primary political unit of the federal government (even federal circuits are derived off of this underlying structure) it is no wonder that small easy to placate homogeneous states which provides 2 senators, and densely populated high electoral college with lots of house seats hold all the value, but differ in how the people are able to participate in their government. You can tell this is true by the manner a free state and a slave state were always admitted to the country in pair, up to a point. Checks on representation can still be instituted after first resolving a fairer more genuine means deriving representation itself. It would also allow of us to put more emphasis on making the checks too robust against prying power brokerages. Since this is all broken the current structure is used in the same self-interested manner that the founders feared. The founders prescience for the existence of a certain type of problem does not mean that formulated a means to mitigate it, instead we have a facade that puts on the face of working as it was intended.

Define genuine representation. It's hard. There is more to representation than proportionality. You have jurisdictions to consider, imbalance in degree of power for sub-populations, populations with extreme autonomy in police making, populations divided and thus stagnated in their ability to self-determine. Whatever would be considered truly genuine by metric, and whatever sort of representation derivation needed to generate a representational government off of that would have to be some sort of fluctuating mathematical model more aking to a legislative economy. Hopefully it would tend towards some sort of steady state for periods of time long enough so people could rely on constants. Conceiving such a thing is just unrealistic. Some sort of more granular approach is more reasonable but has been crowded out by the assumption of the local governments being the proper abstraction of granular government. The true problems occur when trying to tie arbitrary geological jurisdictions to the distribution of political influence. Populations aren't distributed as such. I think the amount of low-hanging fruit to move in the right direction is immense though, even short of some sort of absolute model. Just it will never happen because that sort of fair structural thinking is not exactly trusted. People would rather be ****ed over by a simple model, and the ****er-overers would rather ****-over with a simple model.

Everything about the US's representational organization is severely misaligned with the underlying structure of the people from which the representatives of democracy derive their legitimacy. Sadly I see very little progress being made because powers that be don't want a neutral systematization that the have to work to influence, they want the system itself to have a feedback loop that they have a firm grip on.

Saw Mary Poppins Returns over break. Fell asleep for at least a half hour in the middle of it? I haven't fallen asleep in a movie in years. It was well put together but I guess not very gripping. Emily Blunt is also way too cold as Poppins, it was weird. Oh, and it's ending moral is invest your tuppence and you can stave of your families destitution assuming you can navigate the predatory nature of banks. Oh and I guess it assumes interests rates that actually yield returns. Can always count on Disney to be the paragon of value dissemination. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did it better, 6/10.

I still maintain they should follow through with a proper Pillars 3. Especially while they have the momentum. An open-world arpg is certainly the best step for the IP afterwards.