Enoch

Okay, I'm taking it on now.

I don't want to hold anyone to that. If someone wants to grab it, go ahead. I'll post again tomorrow if I have time and it's still available. Personally, I often make a worker my very first unit. When, as here, I start with mining, I like to research Bronze Working right off the bat to open up forest-chopping (which gives huge production boosts early in the game). Either that or I'll start with a worker tech suited to the surroundings (like agriculture, if I see wheat/rice/corn). One citizen working a 5-yield square (yield = food + hammers) and eating 2 food is better than two citizens each working 3-yield squares and together eating 4 food.

Why on earth would you build an obelisk in your capital? +1 culture per turn is of virtually no use to the city with the palace already generating some culture (not to mention that Catherine is a Cultural leader, so you get +2 per turn for nothing). Get a worker out and mine those gems (grassland gems is, IMO, the best resource to have next to your first city)! Otherwise, it's a pretty decent start. I'm no big fan of the early religion strategy (too hit-or-miss; I prefer to focus on early worker techs and aim for Confucianism later), but, on Noble, it's viable. I might take a turn tomorrow morning; a bit busy now. If I am to participate, though, it'll have to be soon. Once the whole map is visible, the huge size will make my 64MB vid card cry. As a matter of general policy, everyone should probably post a notice in the thread when you start playing from a save, just so nobody else DL's it and we get alternate versions of history going.

People will generally list stuff from their generational influence as favorites. It's a rather human thing to do, not just something from 'this board.' There's a lot of very old stuff I admire for media/format impact, mostly from my parents influence, but they don't spring to mind immediately because I haven't seen them in years and years and typically it's the more recent that pops into your head when you're answering some random forum poll. Plus a lot of stuff that you thought was great when you first saw it - especially if you saw it when you were a kid/early teen - doesn't 'age' very well in the memory, no matter how 'classic' it may be considered to be. I Love Lucy was huge and influential but.... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I didn't mean that this is the only place on the internet where people have 'forgotten the classics.' I was just observing that it is interesting to see the ways the crowd here differs from more mainstream opinion in pretty consistent ways. The subset of the population who really liked, say, Angel and Farscape is pretty small (whence their cancellation) but rather heavily represented here. (And then I took a swipe at the 1980s, Xena/Hercules, and mediocre scifi shows, which made some people angry. Yeah, it's subjective, but I'm standing by it as backed up by a consensus of hoity-toity intellectual elitists. ) Lastly, I'd like to add 2 categories to my list: Childrens: Old-school Loonie Tunes* Spongebob Squarepants Documentary: Nova * This might not count considering they were originally made for theatrical release, but I'm betting that everyone here saw them on TV.

Not surprisingly, this is turning on the rather particular tastes of this board. Very little that aired more than 20 years ago... Lots of mediocre scifi being ridiculously overrated just because it's scifi... Nostalgia making people believe that the 1980s had any kind of redeeming value... People appreciating Hercules and Xena in a non-ironic fashion... To go a bit more mainstream, here's what TV Guide had to say on the matter a few years ago (the best link I could find was to CBS news, so all the CBS shows are annoyingly bolded). Personally, I'd break it into categories: Talk Shows: Meet the Press (so I'm a policy wonk...) Ed Sullivan (before my time, but you've got to acknowledge its influence) Letterman, pre-CBS Sitcoms: All in the Family Taxi The Simpsons Seinfeld Dramas: Not a big watcher of these. I suppose the Sopranos is pretty universally acclaimed (I only saw the first 2 seasons). I admire the Law & Order formula-- consistently watchable, but it's not can't-miss stuff. Miscellaneous: MST3K (the scifi show I prefer to ridiculously overrate)

PC: Civ 4 GBA: Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls

Ah, I hadn't noticed it in there. I think the author was being a bit sloppy in that case-- I don't think the Arlington VA ordinances were made to deal with full-on mansions. Lumping it in with Aspen is a stretch.

I quibble with your use of the term 'McMansions.' A McMansion generally refers to one of a series of large homes (3000+ sq.ft.) put up by a developer in previously undeveloped land (often former farmland). 3-car garages and ridiculously vaulted ceilings are common features. They're often substantially identical to one another. A 17000 square foot home, though, is probably an actual mansion, uniquely custom built to the owner's specifications. People putting down that much cash don't pick out of a floor plan catalogue. Anyhow, restrictive zoning is as old as the hills (or at least as old as Euclid v. Ambler Realty). Usually such rules place minimums on building size, but maximums are not unheard of (and minimum setbacks and building footprint to lot size ratios are quite common). Given the townie/ski bum class warfare that often goes on in areas like Aspen, its unsurprising that some anti-mansion rules have made their way onto the books. As for why people would build such gigantic monstrosities, well, your guess is as good as mine. I'm just hoping that the housing bubble deflates considerably before I have to move to the DC area in August.

As they have been traditionally used in CRPGs, there really is no difference. However, I'll make the case that magic has the potential to be far more intruiging. Magic can be mysterious in ways that technology cannot. Technology can always be explained; magic doesn't need to be. In fact, it's better when it isn't. Unexplained magic gives the player/viewer/reader a taste of wonder and awe of the pre-scientific worldview. Like the villain in a horror film, when it is mysterious, the viewer's imagination fills in something far more effective than anything that the writers could actually put on the screen. It also can make magic using characters far more compelling. How cool was Obi Wan the first time you saw the original Star Wars? You had no idea what the depths of his power and insight were. Likewise Gandalf in LotR. Of course, mentioning Star Wars brings up the best way to ruin magic: Explain it like Lucas did in ep.1. Most CPRGs, though, make this mistake even before the player opens the game box ("Wield 132 exciting new spells!!"). When all the magic that the player will confront or use in a game is spelled out in the manual (read: D&D), it's no different than any other character ability. The imagination factor is gone. Magic is best used as an unexplained force in the background of the gameworld. If it is to be used by the player, it should be unpredictable, situtational, and maybe even a little dangerous.

I concur with much of the above (random encounters, AI controled NPCs, rolled stats, happily-ever-afterness), so I'll just add a thing or two. Ridiculous power progressions. Nearly every RPG I've played starts out with the characters barely able to tell which end of the sword to pick up, and ends with them as the most powerful beings on the face of the gameworld. This transformation usually takes place over the course of a few mere months. I understand that this is a convention of the genre, and that the player has to feel some sense of progress, but doing so with boatloads of stat increases just covers weaknesses in the story-based character motivation. Vibrating controllers. I understand the desire to add a tactile dimension to the visual and auditory immersion in a game. But partial tactile immersion by having my hands shake when the bomb goes off just emphasizes that the rest of me didn't feel any effect. It is ultimately destructive of immersion. Also, high-end graphics that cause my ancient video card to weep. If I were feeling particularly snarky, I'd say multiplayer in non-sports/racing/fighting games. But that's really more of a preference in the games I buy than an annoyance.

Aqueducts in Civ4 can do funny things. This one is from the end of a game I played a while ago (Monarch level, Space Race win-- I could've had Domination pretty easily, but late game conquests of overmatched foes are tedious). It's the last time I'll do a 'terra' style map, though. The AI doesn't know to prioritize Astronomy and colonization of the New World, which gives the player far too great an advantage.

Don't get your hopes up. If you're not hooked by the general setting, the great background music, and the one character the devs put some effort into developing (Virgil), you're not going to find anything better later on. And it will become more and more evident that a blind monkey on PCP could design better systems for character skills and combat experience.

Tangent: for those such as I who bought and enjoyed the original, is the expansion worth buying? I've been thinking about picking it up when and if I tire of Civ4.

Meh. Arcanum had an interesting world, but none of the characters in it were particularly compelling, and the character skill progression and combat systems were awful. ToEE was just awful. Boring story, boring combat, boring game. I didn't play V:TM (goth-y vampire stuff ain't my thing). Yeah, Fallout was a great game (though it had flaws that we all tend to forget nowadays), but I wouldn't say that the Troikites have done much else to recommend themselves.

Bad head cold (mine, not hers) ruined it for me.

yeah they resigned my boy david carr and they will have bush in their possession soon, now all they need is 5 good fat guys (w00t) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Taking Bush would be a mistake. Dominick Davis + a decent O-line > Reggie Bush + the O-line the Texans currently have. They should try to trade back a couple of spots and take D'Brickashaw Ferguson. 'Cause who doesn't want a guy named "D'Brickashaw" on their team?

I can top that. Anyone else remember the Horse Racing game for the Intellivision?

I'm not a big fan of Fiddy, but I appreciate the genius of his producer, Dr. Dre. The lyrics don't particularly speak to me (like most here, I imagine, I am not really part of his target audience), but the beats he's chatting over are consistently excellent. Here's a Slate article on why Dre's proteges always end up at the top of the charts.

To bring us back to Spongebob, my favorite is the one where Spongebob learns a bad word from graffiti on the side of the dumpster behind the Crusty Crab. "Sentence Enhancers" are [redacted] great!!

As a completely neutral Giants fan, the thing that makes me mad is that the game was boring. (Eldar, you picked a bad year to tune in.) I doubt there's anyone in the country who really enjoyed watching it and wasn't either wearing black & gold or quite entoxicated (or both). The game wasn't a struggle between two great teams at their best. It also wasn't a clear demonstration of superiority by one team over the other. The Steelers didn't really win the game-- they just didn't lose it as badly as the Seahawks. Unsatisfying to watch. It's also frustrating because, if a few of the disputed calls had gone the other way (most notable the non-existant hold that erased one of the few balls that Jeremy Stevens managed to catch), it could have had a memorable, competitive ending.

Oh, and one more horrendous call that I forgot: The 'block below the waist' call on Hasselbeck (his tackle on the INT return). That was huge-- it set up the clinching TD.

Enoch is an US agent :D <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Close, but not quite yet. I've accepted an offer to work for a government agency, but I'm not starting until August.

I think the corruption in USA(and Canada by default...) is higher than 10%. More like 30-40%. but it's just better hidden. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yes, there are large underground economies (i.e., drugs) in Western countries (although I doubt it amounts to 10% of the $12 trillion U.S. economy), but it is far less pervasive. I mean that, in less-developed nations, a certain % of the start-up costs of every business will be allocated to bribing the right local officials. There is no way to function without getting your hands dirty. In the West, sure there are some bad actors, but there are also legitimate channels for businesses to take (and most do). Anyhow, here's a corruption perceptions index. Kazakhstan is tied for 107th.

The officiating wasn't awful but it wasn't great either. On the offensive PI, I understand the call. It was right in the ref's face--even if there was no meaningful 'push,' when a ref sees an arm out like that when a receiver gets separation, they'll throw the flag. I also agree that the Roethlisburger TD was good (by the slimmest of margins). But there were misses. There was the Stevens "drop" in the 1st half that was clearly a catch-and-fumble on the replay. On the phantom holding call, I could've sworn that the DE being "held" was offsides. Although lets not forget that Seattle seemingly did everything in their power to lose this game. They had some truly awful special teams play (how many bad touchbacks did they give up on punts? Penalties on returns?) and that horrid clock management at the end of the 2nd quarter. And all of Pittsburgh's big plays came at the expense of the inexperienced backup they had at FS.

I've played a few raging barbs games, and, yes, they will slow down your development, but they slow down your enemies just as much. The difference is that there is a prophylactic measure that you can take (posting cheap units in the wild to eliminate the fog of war) that the AI does not. Thus, raging barbs at Noble level actually helps a good player-- they are an annoyance to the human, but can cripple an AI Civ. (At higher levels, the AI starts with a couple of Archers, so raging barbs is more equivocal there.) As for the threat of the AI winning a space race, on the higher difficulty levels (it gets really hard on Emperor+), the AI gets such bonuses in research and production that it takes a very well-planned and developed empire to match them in the space race. The use of Spies to sabotage production is necessary, and even then, narrow losses are not uncommon. So good players do lose to AI space races, when they're on difficulty levels that challenge them. I understand that you don't want to be forced into one particular victory type. But why then do you go along with the AI's game when they start building the ship? Why not just get some allies together and wipe those techie Civs out? Or simply plan your conquest to eliminate or cripple the civs most likely to launch first (it should be clear who the main threats are as early as the middle ages)? You have options. The problem with eliminating it as a victory option is that the AI isn't particularly good at going for any of the other victories (except Score). On the # of Civs, it's a bit of a two-edged sword. Yes, the tech-trading does mean that the AI research will progess faster as you say. But when you start packed together with a few rivals, quite often (depending on your resource draw and UU) you can overwhelm one or more of them with a very early axeman or chariot rush. Many players find cramped maps easier for this reason-- they can quickly double-up on any competitor, and enemy capitals tend to be very good city locations (most vulnerable of which tend to be the few with early wonders or holy cities).