Enoch

It's Halloween, which means that I have to bust out this: Eyeball Skeleton -- Eyeball Skeleton (the newer "Beast is Coming Out" which you can hear on the linked site is also quite entertaining and appropriate to the holiday)

Yes, that is the end. It caused quite a stir when it first aired a few months ago.

Leave plenty of time for traffic. I64 can be horrendous in the evening rush. My fiancee once missed a flight out of Nawfock (local pronunciation) due to backups on 64 (I was dropping her off). Other than that, it's a decent airport. Have a nice flight. Tonight I have to find an online course to fulfill 2.5 hours of mandatory Continuing Legal Education credit. The VA State Bar refused to credit me for some of the courses I've taken at work, so now I've got to get some last-minute classes in.

Good stuff! Beatles -- Maxwell's Silver Hammer

I got a bit tied up this weekend. The earliest I'll be able to play a round is tomorrow. If someone (Pi?) has the time to take a run before then, I'd have no problem with that.

Interesting. I hate it when people I'm in the process of conquering become someone else's vassal. Sure, it's a realistic way for them to save their skins, but it's damn irritating. Suggestion for the Great General: Make a M*A*S*H unit. Take a Chariot with Combat I, and attach the general to it. This gives the chariot lots of experience points. Use them all for the "Medic" line of promotions. At high levels, Medic gives a significant bonus to unit healing for all units in adjacent tiles. I like to use Chariots because they have 2 moves and can keep up with fast invasion stacks, and because they're low strength and thus won't be singled out as the defender if the stack is attacked. These guys are invaluable for keeping an invasion moving without waiting to recover after hitting one city (or after taking a few shots from enemy seige engines). I've had my Medic Chariot riding along with invasion forces of Modern Armor and Mechanized Infantry. I should be able to take a turn this sometime this weekend, but probably not today. If someone else wants to cut ahead of me, feel free.

Heh. All I know about Berklee is that it is the birthplace of the Real Book. That alone makes it a great place for music education!

FR isn't bad at this point. It wipes out the diplo penalties, and IIRC, we really don't have one religion spread to all our cities, so the benefits of the other religion civics would be pretty spotty anyway.

I hope you like humidity. Seriously, visit again sometime in July so that you know what you're getting into before you pack your things. I didn't spend much time in VB, but I did live in Williamsburg for 3 years. The summers are oppressive.

Beatles -- Savoy Truffle

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Before drawing my initial dotmap, I debated whether to have 2 spaced-out cities or 3 tightly-packed cities along our southern coast. I decided on the latter, because it's all good land, and keeping the cities tight makes it more likely that we'll be working all of the high-value tiles all of the time. (I especially like to have 2 cities sharing food resources-- it will often be the case that one of them will be at its happiness cap, at which point you can switch it to help growth in the other one.) The easternmost city could be a decent production center. Between the rice, lots of hills, the Moai Statues, and a Dike, it should be able to make most of our navy for us. On an unrelated note, I played the opening of a fun game as Ghandi this weekend. Executed a lovely axe-rush against Augustus Ceasar to eliminate him before he was able to make any of those nasty Prats. (I noticed that he lacked Copper or Horses, so I put the rush together to try to wipe him out before he got the chance at Iron.) It's a Monarch-level game, but I got a very very kind starting position-- with one move of my initial settler, I got 2 Gold resources in my capitol's workable area. That kind of start is almost like playing the next level down. Still, this particular game has helped me improve my early rush technique. You've got to recognize when the situation is ripe for a rush, and then go for it full-bore. As it was, Augie had researched Iron Working and got his iron on-line a few turns before my stack arrived at the gates of Rome. Any further delay would've been disastrous. Luckily, he had only used his Iron to rush-build 2 Axemen (with no promotions and little fortification bonus), which my City Raider 1 Axemen took care of surprisingly well.

Is there anything funnier than Gilbert & Sullivan in drag? (NTTAWWT!)

It all depends on what the city needs. In effect, the whip converts food into hammers. If the city is a GP-pump, with 3 food bonus resources and a granary but no mined hills, you can get the population back in a far far shorter time than you would've taken to generate those hammers. Capital cities early in the game are good candidates for the whip, too. They usually have a food bonuses resource or two that let them re-grow the lost population quite quickly, especially if a Granary is an early priority. Mostly, the benefit of the whip is that it lets you specialize your cities more aggressively-- you can forgo mines and workshops entirely in your big commerce/GP cities, building your necessary improvements with the whip (or, late in the game, with cash-rushing). The big cost of whipping is really the happiness penalty. If your city is near its happiness cap, you need to have a plan to deal with the additional angry citizens. The nice thing is that if whatever you're whipping would have a positive happiness effect (temple, garrison units in Hereditary Rule, forge w/ a jewelry resource, etc.), the conversion of food to hammers is essentially free.

Is it really any more evil than putting a city of 40,000 people to the sword just because their leader built the town 50 miles east of where it should have been? Yeah, it's probably not entirely balanced, but since it's the only way to rush production before the industrial age, I've got no problem with allowing a few thousand of my loyal subjects to give up their tiny, insignificant lives for the good of the Empire.

Cool. Razing that Iron mine should make Babylon's fall just a matter of time. As I think I noted on the old dot-map, Port Avellone will make an excellent Great Person factory. Allocate the wheat tile that XRK is currently working to it, corral those cows, and irrigate everything else. Build plenty of specialist-enabling buildings (library, forge, market, temple, etc.), the National Epic, and before we know it, it'll be popping out great people left and right. One thing-- Serfdom? Really? Slavery is sooo much better. Looks like you all need to learn the Ways of the Whip! If you want faster workers, just whip some extras! I usually stay in slavery until Emancipation becomes available, unless I'm running a specialist-based economy (in which case, it's Caste System & Pacifism as soon as I have the techs for them).

That is awful. I remember hearing a story on public radio a few years back about a support group for train conductors who had been the unwilling participants in others' suicides. Apparently, suicide-by-train is common enough that a meaningful percentage of the conductors have seen it once or twice. Some of their stories were really heartbreaking.

I don't know about Britian, per se, but I do know that very few of the job openings at places like the CIA in the U.S. are for anything close to covert ops. Most of their employees either do computer-based stuff (running satellites, monitoring business transactions, etc.), intelligence analysis (combing through information from all over the world and writing memos to their bosses with their summaries and conclusions), or support activities (accounting, IT, legal support, etc.). I'd guess that the advertising in video games is mostly to get employees who know how to keep their computer systems running and safe from hackers. They recruit on the "we do super-cool spy stuff" angle because they have too-- it pays less than a comparable private sector job and comes with some ridiculously thorough background checks.

Chris Chambers is the worst WR in football. This article is a bit out of date, and it does overstate the case, but the core of the argument is solid: When compared to other #1 WRs who have similarly awful quarterbacking, Chambers looks pretty bad.

He also comes with a $5M/year pricetag, which he is definitely not worth. Chambers is the prototypical "looks great on the highlight reel, looks bad in the game" player. He'll make an occasional amazing circus catch, followed by 5 plays where he either fails to get any separation from the defender or drops an easy reception. Sure, he should improve with better QBing and more offensive weapons around him to draw the defense's attention, but even so, I don't think he's better than an average starting WR. That's an improvement on what the Bolts have now, but if they don't win the big one this season, this'll be a move they end up regretting. As for Miami, it's a fabulous move for them. Given Chambers' cap number, they might well have been planning to cut him outright after the season. A 2nd-rounder for him is a coup. And how bummed must Craig Davis be right now? With Herm Edwards' propensity to run RBs until their legs fall off (see: Martin, Curtis), they may wish that they had kept the best backup they have for Larry Johnson by the end of the season.

FYI, the reason for the non-promotion of units is two-fold: flexibility and healing. The first is self-explanatory: there's no sense committing a unit to a particular function before you know for certain what role you need it to fill. As to the second, a unit gets some free healing after using a promotion, so, if you're not afraid of losing it entirely, it gives you a quick band-aid if you're attacked in the field (or, more likely, if you're hit with some collateral damage from an enemy siege engine). And good move for including a chariot in our invasion force.

Nicely played. We might want to think about opening our borders with Egypt. They're not much of a threat right now, and I think that their cultural borders on the coastline are preventing us from having sea-borne trade routes with the other civs. Plus, it'll help Hinduism spread to us and perhaps give us a relations boost that will help keep them on our side during the Babylonian War.

One quick recommendation: I think that Metal Casting should be a tech priority. (Maybe before CoL, maybe after.) We have both Gold and Gems resources, and Forges increase the happiness effect of both of these by 1.

And here's the save. God_Emperor_Feargus_BC_0375.zip

Okay, at the outset, I reset some production stuff: Irvine switched to Worker; DOOM switched to Lighthouse (to get the lake to 3 Food); research switched to Writing. As for unit/building construction, I didn't keep close tabs on anything. As I recall, Irvine built a Worker, Archer, Axeman, and a Library. Peragus finished the Settler, then built an Axe, a Worker, and some more military. DOOM built its lighthouse, then I switched to a Library. We were pretty clearly one of the last civs to discover writing, because I was able to get OB treaties with all of the non-neighboring civs. Speaking of non-neighbor civs, I met a new one: Huh, huh, huh... He said "Wang." I mobilized several of our backup defenders in cities to serve as fog-busters, to stop Barbarians from spawning in between our settlements. On Turn 6, Writing finished, and I set our research to Alphabet. Also, someone else discovered Confucianism. I found out the next turn that it was Zara Yaqob when he converted. This alarmed me a bit-- the opposition has a decent tech lead. Our aggressive settling strategy has been costly (although, IMO, worthwhile. Land is Power). Turn 8: Fourth city founded, on the "Black" site on my dotmap. Given the fact that it's in the middle of our empire and that we've been using locations from Obsidz games, I named it Crossroads Keep. Turn 11: Hatshepsut wants an OB treaty. I say no. Turn 13: Somebody built the Great Library. Turn 17: Alphabet finished. I start on Currency. Here's the state of the tech race: Since we aren't the only civ with Alphabet, I decide that it'd be best to trade it now while the value is high: Next turn, I do one more trade: Not much more of interest until my final turn, when someone founded Christianity. Here's the state of our Kingdom, first north, then south. I've added flags to the map where I think we should place future cities: That Babylonian Swordsman has been sitting on our road for a few turns. He's making me nervous. We're not ready for war just yet, but I'd recommend the next player to build a pile of axemen to build our forces. Hammy clearly has Iron, so he ain't gonna go down easy. Here's what we know of Babylonian territory. There's a Spy within 1 turn of completion in Peragus, so if the next player is feeling brave, he can sneak around over there to learn more. Otherwise, a spy is a decent defensive investment to leave sitting in a border city.

Okay, round is done. I'll be wrangling with the save and the screenshots for a little bit. Should be posted shortly.