My first foray into long-form video analysis was a cathartic, hour-long, breakdown of how EA and Tiburon's design philosophy causes its Madden NFL video game series to feel disappointing and stagnant. That video was mostly about how EA's insistance on releasing the game annually forces them to come up with gimmicky features that they can plaster on the back of the box and on marketing material to try to re-sell the game every year, while neglecting the core problems and bugs that are the real thing holding the game back.

The fact that Ultimate Team is the biggest money-maker, and the impetus of the game's design efforts certainly doesn't help. You'd think that wanting to have a competitive, e-sport-level product would lead to the developers (and the competitive players) emphasizing and demanding solid, robust gameplay. Apparently not.

I will discuss how and why things are done in real football.

I'm starting up a new series of blog posts and video essays dissecting the failures of the Madden NFL video games' ability to simulate the sport of football. I'll start by talking about how and why something is done in real football (with an emphasis on NFL football). Then I'll dissect the ways in which modern Madden games (that is any Madden since 2008) completely fails to model that respective aspect of football. If relevant, I'll even address the silly ways that EA and Tiburon have tried to cover up the problems with band-aid solutions. Lastly, I'll even propose my own suggestions for how EA could potentially resolve the issues I'm going to bring up. So there will be some constructive criticism to go along with the complaining.

Before I begin the critique, I want to say that I'm not making this content simply to shit all over Madden or EA for the sake of shitting all over Madden or EA. Not that they don't deserve it. I'm doing this because I love football, and I love football video gaming, and I want our football video games to be better -- whether those games come from EA, 2K, or any other developer. I've also written reviews and done video breakdowns of the successes and failures of the indie football games in 2019, but I'm not going to go into the same level of nit-picking with those, since they are from studios that are severely limited by a low budget and lack of manpower. Madden, on the other hand, is developed by a corporate conglomerate with 30 years of experience making sports video games, hundreds of millions of dollars to throw around, and has a staff of hundreds of people working on it, almost a hundred of which are programmers. Bottom line is that EA has lots of money and the resources, and they have the exclusive rights to the NFL at least through 2026 (and used to have the exclusive rights to NCAA football as well). EA could make the definitive football video game. They just choose not to.

Besides, almost everything I'm going to say in this series will likely apply to indie games as well. Those indie games have been getting consistently better, so there's a chance they might get more of this stuff right before Madden manages to. So I'm going to be directing most of my criticism towards EA's multi-million-dollar Madden series because I expect Madden to be able to do these things right.

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March's announcement that the NFL had granted a license to 2K to make "non-simulation" NFL football games gave many in the football gaming community hopes that the monopoly that EA and Madden have enjoyed for so long would soon come to an end. Well, sadly, that won't be happening anywhere near as soon as we may have hoped -- if ever. Yesterday, EA and the NFL agreed to extend the "simulation football" exclusivity deal through 2026.

There was hope that the NFL was perhaps becoming unsatisfied with Madden's declining review scores and slumping sales, and that they were opening a door to grant a simulation license to 2k when the EA exclusivity deal expired in 2021. But that won't be happening now, unless EA does something egregious enough to warrant the NFL backing out of the contract or claiming that EA is in breach of contract. I wouldn't hold my breath for that though.

By the time this extended exclusivity contract expires (in 2026), EA will have enjoyed a lack of competition for 22 years, I will be older than 40, and an entire generation of adults (old enough to legally drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and gamble) will have grown up without ever knowing an NFL video game other than Madden, because the last NFL-licensed simulation football video game was released to store shelves before they were born.

Well, Firaxis is apparently not done with Civilization VI. They will be releasing new DLC packs with new game modes, new civilizations, and new leaders through March of 2021. The first such "New Frontiers" pack released in May of 2020 and included two new civilizations: the Maya and Gran Colombia. As usual, I try to give priority for my strategy guides to civilizations and leaders who have never been depicted as playable in the Civilization games before. In this case, we have a civilization that has been in previous games with a leader who has not, and a leader who has been in a previous game attached to a civilization that has not. I'm going to give priority to the leader who seems more straightforward to play, so that I can get this guide out to my loyal fans as quickly as possible. I will thus start by covering Simón Bolívar of Gran Colombia. Simón Bolívar appeared as a leader of New Spain in Civilization IV: Colonization, but has never been included as a leader in a mainstream Civilization game. And Gran Colombia is making its first appearance in the series as a playable faction.

For future releases that may include multiple leaders, I may put up polls on Patreon to let my Patrons decide which civ or leader to cover first. I may also put up polls asking if my Patrons would prefer that I make guides focused on the new game modes. So if you would like to vote on which content you would prefer to see sooner, I hope you'll consider supporting the creation of this content on Patreon.

Following Simón Bolívar's victory at New Granada in the Colombian War of Independence against Spain, political leaders of the colonies in Colombia and Venezuela established the Republic of Colombia (now known as "Gran Colombia") -- even though the War of Independence was still ongoing. The federal republic divided its territory into 12 "departments", each headed by an intendant (some of whom were also commandante generals in the military), with the nation as a whole being governed by an executive branch with a president and vice president. The country only survived 12 years before dissolving over in-fighting between federalists and centralists in its ruling parties.

Gran Colombia's president, Simón Bolívar, had a vision of all the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America being independent republics that cooperated in a league (similar in principle to the modern-day European Union) with a centralized parliamentary assembly and unified policy towards European colonial powers. The treaty was only ratified by Gran Colombia, and Bolívar's dream faded. A few years later, he became ill and died of tuberculosis, and his nation of Gran Colombia died the following year. Before he died, it is said that Bolívar stated that "America is ungovernable", as he became jaded towards the end by all the bickering and political in-fighting that had dominated Gran Colombia's brief existence. Though he failed to unite the entirety of Latin America, his prominent role in liberating Latin American countries from Spanish rule has him regarded as a father figure of many South American countries. The nations of Bolivia and the Bolivian Republic of Venezuela are named in his honor, and their currencies are know (respectively) as "boliviano" and "bolívar".

DISCLAIMER:
Civilization VI is still a "living game". Strategies for the game (and for specific leaders and civs) may change as Firaxis applies balance patches, introduces new features, or expands the game through further DLC or expansion packs, or as the Civ community discovers new strategies or exploits. As such, the following strategy guide may change from time to time. I will try to keep it up-to-date, and will make notations whenever changes are made. I'll also post links in the official 2K forums and CivFanatics, where I'll also report any changes made. If possible and practical, I will try to retain the original content of the strategy for posterity.

I welcome any feedback or suggestions that readers wish to offer. Feel free to post on the linked forums, or by posting a comment at the bottom of the page.

This guide is up to date as of the release of the "New Frontiers" Maya and Gran Colombia DLC pack (May 2020) (ver. 1.0.1.501)

Simón Bolívar is built to be an aggressive leader in Civilization VI who should use his units' extra movement, and his free Commandante Generals each era to wage lightning warfare against his enemies.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was one of the lucky ones who was able to keep my job and work from home. At least, so far... It's one of the benefits of working in computer programming: you can often work from anywhere, so long as you have a functioning VPN. One of my tasks over the quarantine period was to try to configure an application to support automatic updates. These applications are UWP apps built for a Windows IoT installation on a Raspberry Pi (RPi). It's an internal application that is still in a Beta stage, so it's not suitable to release over the Microsoft Store (at least, not yet). We had been manually updating the handful of devices in the field for the past two years, and as the number of deployed devices has grown, having to send someone out to manually update them was becoming a pain. Even moreso in this new era of social distancing.

Many Windows apps can be built in Visual Studio to support automatic updates.

Windows IoT has not been the best of environments to work in. It lacks a lot of functionality built-in to other Windows environments, and documentation for it is spotty, at best. Back in 2018 (shortly after we had started deploying the apps in the field), Microsoft released an update for Windows and Visual Studio that allows UWP apps to be built such that they automatically periodically check a specified server location for new updates. Awesome! It sounded like there would be a simple solution!

Be sure to update the version number.

I built the app with auto-updates enabled for every hour, deployed it to my test RPi over the Windows Device Manager, and deployed the update package and .appinstaller file onto our test server.

Then I waited.

Select an appropriate frequency to check for updates. I set it to check every hour while testing.

And nothing happened.

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I was starting to wonder if maybe Colossal Order was done with Cities: Skylines, or they had moved on to development of a full sequel. After releasing two expansions per year since the game's launch in 2015, we've now gone almost a year between expansions. The last one was the Campus expansion last May. Now here we are with a new Sunset Harbor expansion.

The announcement for this expansion (a mere week before its release) got my hopes up in a similar fashion to the Snowfall expansion. I thought that Sunset Harbor would add a slew of features that I had been longing for in the game for a long time. Sadly, Sunset Harbor disappointed me in much the same way that Snowfall's lack of a seasonal cycle and poor implementation of ski resorts did. Sunset Harbor lacks almost all of the things that I had hoped for, and it continues a trend of Skylines expansions that add new mechanics or content without revising or enhancing existing mechanics or content to utilize the new ideas.

When I saw the title of the expansion, I thought for sure that this would be the expansion that would finally introduce public beaches! No such luck. There's no public beach area. Sunset Harbor (despite having "harbor" in its title) does not introduce modular passenger and freight harbor areas, or upgrade harbors into a leveled industry like Industries did with agriculture, forestry, ore, and oil. I still can't daisy-chain my harbors to send shipping routes up rivers or canals, despite the fact that the existing passenger ferries and the new fishing industry can. It similarly doesn't convert tourism and leisure into leveled industry or commercial areas.

As always seems to be the case with Skylines expansions, I'm torn between whether I should review the expansion from the perspective of what it actually brings to the table, or from the perspective of failing to meet my own hopes and desires for what the expansion should be.

One of the things that was missing from Industries

Sunset Harbor does, however, check off a couple items from my wishlist. At long last, it has provided a desert biome map! As someone who lives in the American Pacific Southwest, I've long been frustrated by the inability to create a city that looks more like the familiar landscape of my own back yard. Now I finally can. Sadly, it's only one map, but the asset editor that's always been included in the game will allow me to make more if I want to, without having to resort to downloading mods that might destabilize the game.

I've long hoped for a desert biome to be added to the game.

The big feature of this expansion is also a feature that I thought was missing from the Industries expansion. I complained that Industries only added new infrastructure that replaced the existing agriculture, forestry, ore, and oil industries that have always been in the game, and didn't bother to add any new industries. Parklife, by comparison, added a couple new types of parks that hadn't been in the game before, including nature preserves and an amusement park. Personally, I thought that the most obvious option for a new industry to add to Industries would have been a fishing or aquaculture industry. Well, now we have a whole expansion that has added that one idea.

The new fishing industry doesn't follow suit with the Industries expansion industry areas, or the Campus university areas. You don't paint aquaculture areas and then grow them and level them up. There's no complicated production line or logistic element. The different types of fish that you can catch also don't do anything different. There's no fancy factories that consume specific types of fish (like a pizza factory that consumes anchovies), or that combine your fish with other types of fish (like a fish stick factory), or with other industry products to create a more valuable luxury good (like combining fish and seaweed with crops to make sushi).

Aquaculture does not level up or have production lines like other industrial sectors.

Instead, there's a handful of fishing harbors that act as resource-extractors, and then there's exactly two buildings that process or consume them. Your fishing harbors can either sell their fish to a market to be sold directly to consumers, or the raw fish (regardless of type) can be shipped to a factory that processes the fish and distributes them as generic goods to send out to commercial zones. In lieu of either the market or the factory, the fish will be exported to other cities for a small amount of money.

That's it! That's everything that fishing has to offer!

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