Enoch

It's not in Energy's jurisdiction. Federal involvment in resource extraction stuff is under the Dept. of the Interior.

The Eastwood film was not particularly good. There were a few neat scenes, but it was otherwise slow as hell. And it really bugged me that Forest just seemed to be wiggling his fingers randomly in the scenes when he was playing. Would it have killed him to take a enough lessons to at least make it look like some of those sounds could credibly be coming out of his horn??

Isn't all that true of the US also? Not really. There's only one government issuing bonds in the U.S.-- the problem in the Eurozone is that the banks can access the ECB lending window with government bonds issued from any member government. So it benefits the riskiest (i.e., most indebted) most. Also, during the boom years, the private commercial banks who were in the middle of these transactions weren't paying much attention to the indebtedness and risk being piled up by these governments. The market for pricing U.S. Treasury issues, on the other hand, is scrutinized more than any other, and by the most sophisticated financial players around.

History has shown repeatedly that when governments have direct control over the currency, they print like there's no tomorrow. There are basically two structures that have proven to be somewhat stable: Specie-based currency (which has the weakness that money supply can swing unpredictibly based on the relative growth rates of specie supply and overall economic activity), and independent central banks (which are not really "private" in that they are established by governmental action and can be disestablished by the same) composed of technocrats to manage the money supply and who are insulated from the pressures of politicians forever yearning for short-term gains at the cost of long-term stability.

It's not looking good. The core problem isn't in Greece-- it's in the fiscal and monetary struction of the Eurozone. Under ECB rules, countries can issue debt to commercial banks, and the banks, in turn, can use those government bonds as collateral for borrowing from the ECB at below-market rates via "repo" transactions. In essence, this makes government borrowing cheaper than it would be, based on a sober analysis of risk and return, throughout the Eurozone. Nations with profligate governments (and, by definition, half of the governments out there are below-average) had one of the major checks against their overspending greatly weakened. The powers-that-be in the core of the Eurozone set up this whole system and didn't have the foresight to realize that it might be a problem down the road-- really, during the boom years, they were pretty happy that this overspending in Greece and elsewhere was helping boost their exports.

It begins

Nice. @ Wals, nope; it's just what my inertnet radio feed happened to be playing. Charlie Parker -- Passport

This seems likely.

Holy Mercantilism, Batman!!

Krez, if you want to upload a savegame, I can take a look at it and offer some specific feedback on what you've been doing. Or, if you rather, just some screenshots of your cities and territory. @Calax, that can be fun to do. But getting 1 Gold per turn isn't actually all that great a return-on-investment on the Hammers put into making a Missionary. Also, at higher difficulty levels, a player-founded religion is almost always going to fall behind an AI-founded one, simply because the AI get big production advantages and tends to use said advantages to spam Missionaries. Also, adopting your own religion ties your hands, diplomatically. I like to see which way the wind is blowing and adopt the religion of the Civs I most want to kiss up to. If I go for a holy city, I do so by force of arms. I love starting next to Isabella-- she's guaranteed to found a religion and pour all her Civ's resources into spreading it to all her neighbors. Which means that: 1) I don't have to waste any hammers on Missionaries or beakers on the religious techs; and 2) I can pour all of my hammers and beakers into techs and units to conquer that incredibly lucrative Holy City after she gets it up and running. Edit: Here's a Civ4 BTS game that we played here on the forum a few years ago: http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showtopic=48156

I don't find it all that onerous to manage myself. I guess you could automate some designated 'road network' Workers, but it seems like that would be less efficient than having a simple pool of workers that you direct to do all your work. OK, in your city screen, you see the tiny map of the 20 tiles (plus the city center) that that particular city's citizens can work. Each city gets a certain number of Citizens to distribute across these tiles (or to assign as specialists). This number of citizens is the same as the City population number (although the production of the city center is always free). Each tile, when worked, will produce some combination of Food, Hammers, and Commerce determined by its type, improvements, and any special resources there. You can move your Citizens around from one tile to another by clicking on that little map. Food gives you city growth, Hammers speed whatever is in your build queue, and Commerce gets split up as I described above. So, if you want to build things faster, allocate your citizens to tiles that produce more hammers. (There are also some little "emphasize X" buttons you can select to tell your city governor what you want produced by a city's Citizen placement.) And, yes, Mines are the tile improvements that your workers can put on Hills and some special resources that most efficiently increase Hammer output. Yes, yes, and yes. Settlers and Workers are a special case. They are built by both Hammers and Food. Normally, and food that isn't consumed by a city's citizens (each citizen consumes 2 food per turn, so a citizen working a 2-food tile is self-sufficient; any less requires other citizens to be bringing in more food to compensate) is put into the city's food stores, and once these get high enough, the city will grow another Citizen. But when you're building a Worker or Settler, any surplus food is converted into Hammers at a 1:1 ratio. City growth is impossible while building these units. But, generally, there are some other things that impact production. Certain city improvements put multipliers on Hammers produced (Forge, Factory), and some Small Wonders do so, too (Ironworks, generally; Heroic Epic for Military production only). Also, building a Settler right off is an inefficient starting strategy. The goal in the very early game is to get your Citizens working improved tiles ASAP. That means that you need a Worker or Work Boat (and the proper techs to build Worker improvements) before you need a Settler-- the right improvement (Farm on Corn; Pasture on Pigs; etc.) can more than double the amount of Food/Hammers that you're bringing each turn. Worker --> Settler can sometimes be faster than just starting with the Settler. I often end up doing something like Worker -> Worker -> Warrior (build while city grows to size 2) -> Settler, with the Settler build sped up by chopping a forest or two. This is probably a little advanced for now, but, with some exceptions, it is generally most efficient to specialize your cities by building the terrain improvements and multiplier buildings to accentuate only one aspect of each city's production. So your Commerce cities get Libraries, Markets, and a lot of Cottages (as well as the Oxford and Wall Street small wonders), while your Hammer cities get Forges, Factories, lots of Mines and Farms, no Cottages at all, and Small Wonders like the Heroic Epic and the Ironworks. Great Person cities are the third variety-- they work Farmland, build little more than Specialist-enabling buildings, Granary, and whatever is necessary to keep the citizens happy, with lots of those citizens working as Specialists to pump out Great People. It's not really important just yet, but proper city specialization become crucial when the difficulty level gets up to Prince or higher. (A good ratio to aim for is 3 Commerce cities : 2 Production cities : 1 GP city.)

Ha! For some reason I love the fact that his twitter handle is just his first name. There aren't many people who can pull that off.

E.L.O. -- Mr. Blue Sky

Thanks, Josh. So are armor damage thresholds uniform, or are there different DTs for different damage types (ballistic, melee, fire/plasma, laser, electric/pulse, etc.)?

Oddly enough, I just installed Civ 4 last night on my new near-netbook. (It's a notebook with an 11.6" screen, but with strong enough innards to run older games like Civ4.) Direct2Drive has the "Complete" package on-sale this week for $10, so I bought that to play on the new machine (which lacks the CD drive that my boxed copy requires).

A little more on Workers: Your first priority with Workers is to improve any special bonus resources within the city's workable area (Get a farm on that Corn ASAP!). That'll be your biggest ROI. Secondarily, you want to improve enough tiles so that your Citizens aren't working an unimproved ones. A good rule of thumb for early on is to build Cottages on green grassland or flood plains, build Mines on hills, and avoid working flatland brown plains unless you have to. (If you have to, irrigate them.) But if a city is a pure Military producer, use more Farms-- you need the extra food to feed the citizens in your Mines. Early on, just worry about Farms, Cottages, and Mines. That's enough to get you going; the other stuff (Workshops, Lumbermills, Windmills, etc.) can be useful, but aren't particularly necessary except in certain specialized situations. After you research Bronze Working, Workers can also chop forests down for bonus Hammers in the nearest city. This is great for speeding up Wonder production, and for building a huge stack of Axemen or Chariots to take out a neighbor in the Ancient age. If you don't have a good reason to chop a forest (e.g., you want to build a cottage or mine there), save it for when you need the Hammers. You also want to make sure that all your cities are connected by roads to each other, and to any strategic resources you have. Only automate Workers in the very late game when your Empire is huge and you're counting down the turns to victory.

OK. The "War Academy" at civfanatics.com has a lot of good Civ advice (although many of them aren't up-to-date with the expansions). In particular, this article covers a lot of the basics for beginners. It's pre-BTS, but most of the BTS changes are late-game stuff (corporations) that you can ignore for now while you get a handle of the earlier concepts. When you say "production and science resources" do you mean the hammers and commerce produced in your cities, or the special map resources? The former is pretty easy: Commerce is produced by citizens working cottages, riverfront tiles, water tiles, and some special bonus tiles. It gets turned into one of Gold (for your treasury), Science (for research), Culture (requires a tech-- Music or Drama, I think), or Espionage based on the % sliders in the upper left of the GUI. (These Commerce products can also be produced directly by pulling citizens out of working the land and making them Specialists.) Hammers are produced by citizens working forests, plains, hills, mines, and some special tiles. They go towards whatever you have in the build queue in that city. The Special Resources show up on the map. There are 3 general types: Food resources (wheat, corn, cows, fish, etc.), Luxury resources (Gold, Gems, Spices, Dyes, etc.), and Strategic Resources (Copper, Horses, Coal, Oil, etc.). Strategic resources are unique in that they all require the knowledge of a particular technology to see on the map. Resources generally have 2 effects. First, if one is in the workable area of a city and you have a citizen working that tile, they produce bonus food/hammers/commerce. Second, if they are in your territory and connected to your trade network, they have effects for all of your connected cities. To connect a resource to your trade network, it has to be 1) within your territory; 2) have that resource's improvement (farm for grains, mine for ores, plantations for some luxuries, etc.) built in the tile by a worker; and 3) be connected by road or river to your capital (sea-based resources don't need roads, obviously). Once connected, Food resources decrease unhealthiness in cities; Luxury resources decrease unhappiness in cities; and Strategic resources enable the building of things that you couldn't otherwise make (e.g., you need Iron to make Swordsmen and Oil to make Battleships). All of these resources can also be traded with other Civs, if you have a trade connection with them. Specialists: To make one, open a city's viewscreen, and click on one of the tiles that your citizens are currently working. That citizen will then be accounted for in the specialist box to the right of the screen. Basic cities can only have "Citizen" specialist, which suck-- never use them. Buildings in the city enable other specialists (e.g., a Library lets you have 2 Scientists; a Courthouse lets you have 1 Spy; a Temple lets you have 1 Priest). (Some Wonders and Civics also enable Specialists.) Specialists produce what you would expect them to-- Science for Scientists, Hammers for Engineers, etc.-- and they also produce Great People Points, which speed the birth of more Great People in that city. In general, it is best to concentrate your GP production in one city-- pick one with a lot of food bonus resources (2+) and work only those tiles with everybody else Specialized. Hopefully that helps a bit. I could go on-- and maybe I will later-- but that should help get you going. Addendum: I can no longer conceive of playing Civ 4 without the BUG Mod. "BUG" stands for "BTS [the Beyond the Sword expansion] Unaltered Gameplay." It doesn't change the way the game works at all; it simply gives the player a lot more feedback in the basic UI that he would otherwise have to dig around in menus and do some math by hand to figure out. (E.g, it warns you when a city is about do grow, shrink, or become unhappy; it tells you when rivals have new techs to trade; it creates Great People and Great General progress bars similar to the tech progress bar; and much more)

The degree to which panties get bunched over a couple of extra items always bemuses me a little bit. Seriously, what percentage of one's experience with the game is actually going to be affected by having 10 Gs (or whatever) worth of extra gear? Games are balanced to be the most fun when played without any of that stuff anyway.

Yeah, it's bull**** Ever since the economy tanked, military recruiters have been having no trouble at all hitting their targets. There are plenty of good reasons to worry about obesity in America, but the prospect of not being able to find enough people fit for military service is about 397th on the list.

To me, the 'creepy' locations in the Fallout games (V15, the Glow, Sierra AD, etc.) were fun not because they were creepy but because they were mysterious. If anything, I dislike horror elements in games-- if a game seriously scares me, my first reaction is to resent it rather than enjoy it. But give me a good mystery to uncover or figure out, and I get pulled in. Anyhow, I don't see FNV's representations of kitschy Americana to be all that comparable to F2's lengthy procession of lame Monty Python jokes.

I think I've mentioned this before, but Feargus really needs to stop doing interviews where they transcribe what he says in-person without little-to-no editing afterwards. Some of the sentences in that interview only make sense if you speak them out loud at a very fast pace.

I should clarify-- I don't think that developers should spell out the strengths and weaknesses of every opponent to the player. (And, yes, I did overstate the, erm, universal adoption of player feedback ideals.) Rather, it'd be nice to at least give the player feedback that says "that didn't work as well as it could have." In a "realistic" situation, you'd get that feedback from watching the opponent. That's not going to happen in a game unless your animation and sound design do this for you (as I said, ideal, but a huge resource-sink), so some kind of abstract representation in the GUI is needed. FO3 already does this to some degree by putting an enemy HP bar on the screen. Still, in an ARPG without hard data feedback (like the damage numbers that more traditional RPGs give the player in dialog windows or float-text), the first step of experimentation-- the initial figuring out that what you're using isn't working very well-- can be rather difficult for the player. If the game has a way to communicate that to the player, then all the other methods you mention for players to learn about their opponents come into the next "what else can I try?" step in combat experimentation. (The efforts that both KotOR games made to inform the player about how personal shields work come to mind.) I do, of course, hope that the graphical representation Obsidz is using in FNV isn't, as you say, "ham fisted."

Hope that can be turned off. I wonder what they mean by that there are new camera modes during combat, or if that is just referring to being able to use the iron sights. If Sawyer's past wonkishness on armor damage reduction is any indicator, the PC and enemies are going to have different resistances to different attack types. So, I suspect that this is a way of communicating enemy damage resistance to the player. You generally need to communicate that to the player in some way-- the days when developers can simply trust the player to figure out why their assault rifle's hollow-point rounds aren't doing much of anything against that giant mutant armadillo are long since over. The traditional RPG way to communicate this was in text ("3 damage (15 resisted)" or whatever), but shooter-influenced ARPGs don't want to do that. Ideally, animations would provide this kind of feedback (seeing ricochets off the creature's carapace, etc.), but that would be very resource-intensive. Instead you get systems like ME2's separate Armor/Shield/Barrier bar. Presumably, the "red shield" will serve a similar function for F:NV-- tell the player when the weapon they're currently equipped with isn't going to work all that well against a particular opponent's defenses. I don't see it as any more distracting or verisimilitude-endangering than an on-screen representation of opponent hit points.

Primm, NV looks like it'll be a fantastic location. Wikipedia entry

Wasn't that a scene in Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? The motions of some religous hermit who perpetually stood on a pedestal bowing or somesuch harnessed as a source of energy by the title character? Also as they were putting this gentleman through all these medical tests, did they happen to include a polygraph?