Enoch

Also, on topic, I'm actually messing around with BG2 for the first time in many years. Playing a good-aligned multiclassed fighter-mage, and have just assembled my core team of Keldorn, Anomen, Jahiera, and Jan, to which I'll add whichever NPC makes most sense for the quest I'm doing. I haven't decided yet which stronghold to keep, though, and I probably should soon because the Keep is the major quest I'm planning to tackle first. (So far I've just done minor stuff like the Circus and the slavers in the Coronet.) Anybody remember what the advantages are for owning the Keep and the Planar Sphere?

Heh. One of R:TW's biggest balance issues is that sea trade-- and sea trade in the Aegean in particular-- is so freakin' profitable that the whichever faction manages to unite Greece and the surrounding area (which is usually the Brutii) becomes redonkulusly rich.

Is the game anything like driving on Interstate 76? Because I've done that, and it wasn't fun.

Warfare is, indeed, laughably easy. Here's how to win the game: Select "Pangea" map. Open tech tree, and click on "Horseback Riding." Settle a city next to a horse resource. Build 4 horsemen. Win.

Eating some awesome lentil soup I made. Based it mostly on the spicy variant of the lentil soup in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (the best generalist cookbook out there). Simmered about 6 cups of stock (the "Kitchen Basics" brand is the best of the pre-made stocks) with a cup of lentils, diced carrot, diced celery, and a few sprigs of fresh thyme. Meanwhile, I cut 2 strips of bacon into small bits, cooked them in a pan, removed the meat, cooked a diced onion in the bacon fat (plus a little olive oil), and added some garlic. When that was cooked, added about a cup of diced tomato, some cumin, some ground chipotle, some ground ginger, some curry powder, the bacon bits I had previously removed, and a fistful of chopped fresh parsley. Once the lentils were tender, I added the contents of the pan to the stock, tasted for seasoning, and removed the thyme sprigs. Delicious.

The original Railroad Tycoon?? Many fond memories of playing it, but I was probably at least 12 at the time. And the game basically taught me how to read financial statements, which has proven to be a useful skill in my working life.

I'm sure that the official Obsidz response will be "pricing is a question for the publisher and/or the retailers-- we have nothing to do with it."

It's October, so you know what that means-- time to switch from clear liquor to dark. In that vein, I'm on my second Old Fashioned of the evening. When in doubt, always remember: the drinks that get the glasses they're served in named after them are pretty damn good.

That makes 0 sense to me.. the larger you are > your world culture should be not less. Meh. The whole idea of translating "culture" into a number that can be compared and rated between two peoples makes 0 real-world sense to me. If it makes gameplay sense to do it, the means by which you do so doesn't matter all that much to me. Small empires create more culture because the game designers wanted to give the players a victory option where the key gameplay element involved caring for and ensuring the survival of a small empire that spends most of its resources on city development rather than on empire expansion. BTW, I recall reading something on the Civfanatics forums where someone did the math and calculated that the optimal # of cities for a cultural victory on the default speed and map size was 4.

One of the AI's blindspots seems to be making way too many Workers. You can see this in your advisors' recommendations of what to build in your own cities-- if there's an unimproved tile within your borders, they want you to make a Worker. But the tile improvements aren't quite as important as they were in Civ4 (no +3 food for farming a Corn tile, for example), so the drawback for working unimproved tiles, and thus the practical value of Workers, is lower. Plus, with 1-unit-per-tile applying to Workers as well as to combat units (which is really irritating if you want to hurry a road connection by having 2 Workers 'leap-frog' each other), you can't stack them for quicker project completion. (FWIW, it's actually much cheaper to capture early Workers from a neighboring City State. You can make peace again pretty easily, and the negative influence will probably have eroded back to zero by the time you might want to befriend them. They're essentially free, especially if it's a lower-value Militaristic or Cultural City State that doesn't have any resources you need hooked up yet.)

Yeah, I only got far enough in BG&E that I was past the first big factory stealth sequence. The explorating, photographing stuff, and light puzzle, combat, and race sequences were fun for a while, but when the stealth and platforming started to amp up in frequency and difficulty, the game got a lot less enjoyable. Also, the PC interface was lousy.

The game is starting to disappoint me as I'm discovering just how easy it is to roll over the opposition militarily. It seems that when an AI makes a decision to "go for culture" or whatever, it sets on a build path that totally fails to produce anything close to enough military for self-defense. As a 3-city Greek empire (one of which was the captured Siamese capital, so it's not like the AI had no warning that they had an aggressive neighbor), I went to war with China after they founded a city (their second) in a spot that was most incovenient for me. After eliminating the inconvenient city with a pair of Hoplites, I took my sweet ol' time assembling my forces to head to Beijing. (I was fighting with Hoplites, Archers, Swordsmen, and one Horseman that an allied City State had given me.) The town had an Archer garrisoned there. I would also encounter another Chinese Archer in the field later on (easily dispatched when it ended a turn next to my road network just after I had produced my first Companion Cavalry). Those were the only military units I fought. And the garrison Archer fell for the most lame of tricks-- I sent my Horseman in and captured the 3 Workers that were out in the fields near the City (and then pulled out to beyond City-bombard range). The silly Archer sallied to re-capture one of the Workers, leaving him a sitting duck for the Horseman on the next turn. Idiotic. The other two remaining AIs on the continent have 2 or 3 cities each, and have done nothing of note except for a Wonder or two and a couple of futile wars against local City-States. (I, on the other hand, have allied with 4 City States, mostly by simply destroying local barbarian camps and returing captured Workers.) There are some serious balance (magical City-State food) and AI issues here.

Wait, someone actually thinks that? I thought we were all on the same page, laughing at Kojima's ridiculousness. The presentation is great, but the underlying material is laughable at best. EDIT: It was deep, right off the deep end Well, something can be "interesting" without being "good" or "deep." E.g., the long history of laughably ridiculous storylines in daytimes soap operas and superhero comics hasn't stopped either from gaining and keeping the interest of millions of fans.

Speaking of Wayne, I was feeling ill and left work early yesterday. When I got home, I found that The Searchers was about to start on TCM. Not a huge Western fan, but it's a good way to spend an afternoon when you're feverish and weak as a kitten.

First, is your happiness negative? That will hurt food production. Also, did you let any alliances or friendships with any City States lapse? Getting chummy with a Maritime city state gives you bonus food in all your cities. That's actually the quickest and best way to solve this kind of problem-- give some cash to the nearest maritime City State for an alliance.

I've become convinced that if you plan on doing any warring at all, your first two Social Policies should always be the generic Honor and the first rank "Discipline" in that tree. The bonus against Barbarians is nice early on (and increasingly necessary as you climb to higher difficulties), and the immediate notification when a Barb camp spawns in previously explored territory is quite useful. But the real gem is Discipline: +15% combat strength when a unit is adjacent to another unit. Since nearly all of your important military engagements are going to rely on grouped units, this is a huge huge bonus that can't be matched by any of the other early Social Policy options (leaving aside boutique strategies like wonderspam cultural games).

You lose all city growth, your production from hammers is halved, and you get a 33% penalty to combat. Oh, and you won't get any Golden Ages from happiness. The theory is to play normally until around the Renaissance, then launch your War Machine. At the point where you would normally stop to fix your empire's happiness, don't. The key point here is that the game makes no distinction between being at -20 Happiness and being at -200 Happiness. Annex all cities, build no Courthouses or other happiness improvements, sell off all your happiness resources, and switch all your citizens to working high-Gold tiles or as specialists. You'll make loads of cash from conquests and trade deals so you can buy all the production you'll need, and you'll have a higher tech rate than your rivals because your population is so high. You'll also get a good amount of Great People (from the Specialists) that you can burn on Golden Ages or on trade missions. The combat penalty will hurt, but you can make that up by being technologically advanced and by having loads of Great Generals. Here is the thread on Civfanatics discussing this.

Agreed. I just bought and downloaded the game from GoG and it looks terrible. I made it past character creation and buying a few things at the inn in the beginning before I had to turn it off lest it destroy all fond memories I have of the game. Can't you circumvent the rez with just the wide screen patch (and some gui hack), or is my memory really that faulty? When I last tried to get BG1 up and running, the G3 widescreen patch was working only with the 6-CD original version of BG1+TOTSC. If you had the 3-CD "The Original Saga" publication (as I do), your only options were the BG2-conversion mods. However, the newest update to the patch claims to have fixed this issue, making it compatible with the GOG version. Try it out and see. (explanation).

So, what are we all doing with conquered cities? Annexation? Puppet states? Burn baby burn? The Puppet State concept is neat, but the AI-controlled building in puppeted cities generates some inconvenient decisions-- mostly buildings that do me no good and that I have to pay the upkeep on forever. Annexation is similar in that you've pretty much got to build a 5-gpt-maintenance Courthouse in annexed cities. It's looking like, in a lot of cases, the best option is to return to the Civ III practice of razing most cities and sending a squadron of settlers along behind your invasion force. (Or, more insidiously, annexing a city, having it build a settler, disbanding the city, then settling a new one on its old location.) Also an underdog strategy: Ignore happiness entirely. Take even the most extreme happiness penalties as a cost of doing business, and instead pour everything into keeping your war machine running. The penalties can be pretty bad, but they don't seem to be game-stoppers. Merits further investigation.

It doesn't. It's just the vanilla game without the need for a CD. Still need tutu. Tutu ruins the experience. 640x480 ruins the experience more. I know that's the way I played it a dozen years ago, but I just can't do it anymore. The field of view being smaller than the area my characters can see has me unconsciously rolling the mousewheel back every 20 seconds trying to zoom out.

Block party day! Brought a pineapple upside-down cake and a 12-pack of beer over to meet with the neighbors. Fun group. Although my enjoyment may have been influenced by the volume of said 12-pack that I consumed personally.

Gold-to-Hammer ratios need to be tweaked. Build Warrior: 40 Hammers (H) or 200 Gold (G) Build Swordsman: 80H or 410G Upgrade Warrior to Swordsman: 90G. Why would anybody ever build/buy a Swordsman directly, unless they absolutely needed one in a single turn? Again: Gold rules all. Have one Hammer-heavy city to build wonders (which can't be bought). Other than that, focus on bringin in the cash.

Related:

I think I've been getting different maps than you have, Maria. No shortage of space, and my neighbors (Native Americans; Arabs) not particularly eager to expand. @Calax, I could have sworn I was getting bonus food from City States at merely "friendly." I could be mistaken, though.

Last night was my first "Civ V kept me up too late" night. Kissing up to City States is a very powerful strategy. For example, just being "friendly" with a Maritime City State gets you +1 food in every city, and +2 in your capital. Get a start with two of them nearby, build trading posts or mines instead of farms, and buy your population growth from them! Also, the cost for bribing a militaristic City State (who will donate a unit to you every 10-ish turns) is pretty cheap when compared to buying units yourself. Production is hard to come by. Stuff gets made much more slowly, and while there are ways to get more Gold and Food through diplomacy, city improvements, etc., it's not as easy to generate more Production. I find myself buying a lot of my production with Gold. Golden Ages are pretty frequent, at least on the lower difficulty levels. They have the same bonus as in Civ IV-- +1 production and +1 gold in every tile that already produces at least one prod/gold. Thus, it's best to improve tiles in such a way that they produce a little bit of everything, rather than a lot of one thing. Two "2 food, 1 gold, 1 prod" tiles are more valuable than a "2 food 2 gold" tile plus a "2 food 2 prod" tile, because the former will get a lot more out of your frequent Golden Ages. Oddly enough, this (combined with the two above paragraphs) reverses the trend in past Civ games-- brown "plains" tiles (unimproved: 1 food, 1 prod) are more useful than green "grassland" tiles (unimproved: 2 food). There is almost no 'land grab' as in past Civ games. The AIs I've been running into have been content to sit at 1-3 cities through the Middle Ages. Given that Social Policy trees unlock based on the technological "Age" you're in, there's an added incentive to "beeline" techs rather than progress evenly along all branches of the Tech tree. Also, looking at the social policies available, if you're not being pressed by Barbarians or pushing for early war with an AI, you might be best served by skipping the 3 ancient age Policy trees and saving your culture points for something like Piety or Patronage.