
Sid Meier's Civilization computer game seems ripe for conversion into a board game. The PC game is, after all, basically just a computerized board game that plays out on a grander scale. Sid himself was inspired by many classic board games, including Risk and Axis & Allies. Fantasy Flight has already taken a stab at trying to distill the core mechanics of Civ down into a digestible board game when they released Sid Meier's Civilization: the Board Game back in 2010. I really like that game, even though it is a bit bloated and unwieldy. Attempting to directly translate Civ's mechanics down into board game form unsurprisingly results in a fairly complicated game that takes a very long time to learn and play.
Fantasy Flight's approach this time around seems to be to develop an elegant board game, and then apply the Civilization license onto it. The result is a board game that feels much more distant from the computer game, but which plays much more smoothly as a board game.
Civilization, streamlined
Perhaps the biggest problem with the older Civilization board game is the game length and amount of downtime. Games could run for over five hours, and the fact that each player resolved their entire turn phase (city management or army movement) before moving onto the next player meant that you could end up sitting for 20 to 40 minutes, twiddling your thumbs and waiting for other players to resolve their turns. That is one of my biggest peeves with a lot of epic games: too much downtime.
A New Dawn is a very elegant game.
A New Dawn addresses that problem by having each player take only a single action in each of their turns. There are no phases; just take an action from your focus bar and then move on to the next player. Turns, therefore, are very quick, turnaround time is very short, and the game moves along at a rapid pace. This, ironically, serves to better maintain the "one more turn" addictive nature of the computer game. You might find yourself neglecting bathroom breaks for several turns because things are moving along so swiftly. Your turn is generally quick enough that you want to finish it before you step away or take a break, and other players' turns are so quick that you don't want to step away because you know it'll be back around to your turn in a few minutes.
Longer games with longer turns and more downtime can also often result in players outright forgetting what they were planning on doing by the time the turn gets back around to them. Either that, or the large amounts of moves and actions that the other players take changes the game state so much that, when your turn comes around, the thing you were planning on doing is no longer ideal -- if it's even possible.
That's rarely a problem in A New Dawn because each player does one thing on their turn, so the state of the board isn't radically changing between your turns. It's much more of a gradual change. That doesn't mean that other players can't disrupt your plans; they certainly can, especially when combat between players starts happening. It just means that you aren't going to be sitting there bouncing up and down in your chair waiting to pull off a spectacular move, only to have another player blow up all your plans at the last minute and leave you spending far too long wondering "What the heck do I do now?" when your turn starts... [More]
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Tags:Sid Meier's Civilization, Sid Meier's Civilization: A New Dawn, Sid Meier's Civilization the Board Game, Fantasy Flight, Firaxis, 2K Games, board game, strategy, empire-building, focus bar, cities, world wonder, technology, culture, war, barbarians, James Kniffen

Civilization VI's first expansion, Rise and Fall just launched this past weekend. The expansion does make some welcome enhancements to alliances that makes peaceful relations with other civs much more appealing. However, these enhancements do not address two of my most fundamental complaints with Civilization's diplomacy system in general: that it does not allow for truly cooperative victories, and that it does not really provide the player with any way to influence an A.I. civ's behavior. I've already written about ideas for cooperative victories for both Beyond Earth and for the core Civilization games, so I won't go into that again here. Instead, today's blog will focus on the second of my major hang-ups with diplomacy: that you simply cannot provide A.I. civs with any indication of what you consider friendly or hostile behavior.
Diplomacy has always been one of the major stumbling blocks of the Civilization games. Each game has certain mechanics or features that are good ideas on paper, but none of the games have ever really had a diplomacy system that really seems to work the way that it is intended, and which provides consistent behavior from the A.I.s. A.I.s are often erratic in their behavior -- both between games, and within a single game.
A single unit can be the difference between Cleopatra's abject disgust and her goo-goo-eyed adoration.
Civ VI introduces the agendas, which sound like a good idea on paper. It gives each leader an element of personality. They have things that they like, and things that they don't like. The problem is that these agendas lead to wild swings in an A.I.'s attitude, often based on rather trivial (and sometimes counter-intuitive) actions from the player. Often times the thresholds for activating these agendas are not entirely clear. Cleopatra tells me that my army is too weak and pathetic, and so she has a heavy negative modifier with me. Then I build a single Swordsman a couple turns later, and now suddenly my army is powerful enough to warrant her admiration, and she's looking me up and down with those goo goo eyes.
There's other legacy issues with diplomacy. The biggest one is the inability to ever warn another civ that their actions might lead to war. The denouncement mechanic of Civ V was a decent start, but since you could never provide a specific reason for your denouncements, they never seemed to have much weight in changing another civ's behavior. In a multiplayer game, you could always use the chat to inform other players' of your diplomatic desires, but there has never been any method for accomplishing this with A.I. civs in single-player.
Since the A.I. has no real clue why it is being denounced, there's no way for it to change its behavior. There's also no way for other A.I.s to understand if your denouncement or declaration of war is actually justified or not.
You can denounce a civ, but the A.I. won't really have any clue why they're being denounced.
Civilization VI tried to rectify this with the Casus Belli system, but that system also stumbles... [More]
892bf8a7-123e-470d-b094-32cec0a5eb7a|2|5.0
Tags:Sid Meier's Civilization, Civilization, Civilization V, Civilization VI, Civilization VI: Rise and Fall, leader, diplomacy, casus belli, friendship, agenda, denouncement, act of war, war, quest, city state, alliance, victory, AI

With the first expansion for Civilization VI due out soon, I wanted to try to get one more pre-expansion game strategy out of the gates. This time, I will be covering another of the DLC civs that is making its first appearance in the Civilization franchise: Nubia. If you purchased the Deluxe Edition of the game, then you received this DLC (among others) for free when the DLC was released. If you do not own the Deluxe Edition, then this DLC costs $5 USD.
Egypt wasn't the only grand ancient civilization that made a home along the Nile River. Starting around 5000 BC, into the 1500's AD, Egypt's southern neighbor was one of the many Kingdoms of Nubia that rose and fell. The Nubians who settled along the river were expert archers, and the contemporary Egyptians (who traded for Nubian gold, ebony, and pottery) referred to their land as "Ta-Seti", or "The Land of the Bow". But the history of civilization in the Nubian region goes back to the Neolithic revolution that occurred in Africa around 5000 BC. Archaeologists have found rock reliefs and even an astronomical stone circle that predates Stonehenge by roughly 2,000 years!

Kandake ["Queen"] Amanitore co-ruled Nubia from her capital at the Gebel Barkal in Meroë starting around 1 BC. The Nubian civilization had a maternal rule, with the mothers of kings having authority over their sons, and sometimes even deposing them or ordering them to commit suicide if the mother believed them to be unfit as rulers. Amanitore's kingdom was wealthy and prosperous at this time, and Amanitore oversaw the construction and repair of multiple Temples to Amun throughout her kingdom, as well as the construction of Nubian Pyramids. She is regarded as one of the greatest builders in her people's history, and is believed to be buried underneath one of her Pyramids in Meroë.
DISCLAIMER:
Civilization VI is still very early in its life-cycle. 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 DLC or expansion packs, or as the Civ community discovers new strategies. 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 Fall 2017 patch (ver. 1.0.0.194) (Southeast Asia DLC)
In Civilization VI, Nubia is a militaristic and religious civilization that specializes in rapidly developing city districts, especially in desert terrain... [More]
77d297db-8400-4835-a27b-1176e274e25d|2|5.0
Tags:Sid Meier's Civilization, Civilization VI, Nubia, Amanitore, Ta-Seti, Kandace of Meroe, city planner, pitati archer, archer, pyramid, Nubian Pyramid, mine, gold, luxury, strategic resource, war, district, production, adjacency bonus, Gebel Barkal, Meroe, Egypt, Neolithic revolution, stone circle, unique improvement, unique ranged unit

I finally got around to watching the entire first half of the first season of CBS's Star Trek: Discovery series. I'm running behind on this show since I don't have a CBS All Access subscription. I've been deliberately avoiding information about the post-hiatus episodes, so information and opinions in this post may be outdated by the time I get around to publishing it. Maybe later episodes have resolved some of these complaints. If so, feel free to ignore such comments, or let yourself be giddy with the dramatic irony. Oh, and feel free to comment, even if you do so with spoilers. I won't be offended or upset.
Before I go into the details, I want to at least try to dispel the idea that I'm just an angry fanboy who is butt-hurt that the series doesn't strictly adhere to continuity. That's come up when I've talked about this show to people in person. So I'm not going to spend this review talking about how the Klingons look different. I don't care that they look different. I've already addressed that. It does bother me that the Klingons also seem to be culturally dissimilar to the established Klingons, but I won't harp on that either. I'm not going to complain about how the uniforms and badges are anachronistic. I got that out of my system before the show even launched. I'm not going to complain that the tech looks more advanced than Original Series tech. These complaints are mostly pedantic and silly. In fact, the aesthetic look of the show is actually one of its strengths.
The visual style is one of Discovery's strengths, even though almost all of it is anachronistic.
I'm also not going to complain about Burnham being Spock's step sister, nor am I going to assert that Spock having a human step sister that we never knew about breaks canon. Spock was always very closed off about his childhood and family. In the Original Series episode "Journey to Babel", Kirk and McCoy meet Sarek and Amanda without having any idea that they are Spock's parents. Heck, this even happens in the second season, after Spock returns home to fight for his arranged marriage in "Amok Time". McCoy even later delights at the revelation that Spock had a pet "teddy bear" as a child -- even though that "teddy bear" had 9-inch fangs.
Kirk and McCoy didn't even know that Sarek and Amanda were Spock's parents.
Even more infamous is when Star Trek V created a half-brother for Spock out of wholecloth. When trapped in the brig, Kirk even says "I know Sybok isn't your brother because I happen to know for a fact that you don't have a brother!" To which Spock responds "Technically you are correct. I have no brother.... I have a half-brother." I can easily see the same exchange being made in reference to Burnham: "Technically, you are correct. I have no sister.... I have a step-sister."
Kirk confronts Spock in Star Trek V, saying he knows Spock has no brother.
So yeah, I don't really have an issue with Burnham being a step-sister to Spock. I would prefer that the writer have not ret-conned Spock's character [yet again] because I feel like this just serves as an excuse to eventually introduce Spock into the series as a cheap cop-out way of increasing fan interest if the show starts to tank -- just like how Into Darkness had Leonard Nimoy just sitting around. The writers have that ace up their sleeve, and it's only a matter of time before they use it.
Spock plays his usual game of semantics to justify his obscurance of the truth.
Instead, I want to talk about how I feel that the show betrays the series' foundation as hard science fiction, and how it actively avoids the very spirit that made the Original Series and Next Generation so beloved.
... [More]
32e74070-f8fa-444a-b6d4-207d5a08322e|4|3.5
Tags:Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, science fiction, CBS, all access, streaming television, Sonequa Martin-Green, Michael Burnham, Gabriel Lorca, Jason Isaacs, Saru, Doug Jones, Sylvia Tilly, Mary Wiseman, Harry Mudd, Rainn Wilson, Sarek, James Frain, Klingon, war, allegory, spore drive, parallel universe, mirror universe, Midichlorian, Star Wars, warp drive

I haven't played a Call of Duty game since World At War on the PS3 almost 10 years ago. I really liked the first two CoD games on PC, but after Infinity Ward stopped developing the games, they increasingly focused on spectacle rather than any attempt to accurately portray war. After throwing back more enemy grenades in the first mission of World At War than were probably ever manufactured in all of World War II (I'm exaggerating a little bit), I got sick of that game and basically gave up on the franchise.
After having a little bit of fun with EA's Battlefield 1, I decided to pick up a used copy of Call of Duty World War II from eBay. I was curious if the return to World War II would be taken a little bit more seriously by Activision. It wasn't. This is the same old stale Call of Duty that I've been actively avoiding for the past decade. The single-player campaign didn't do anything to pull me in.
A light-gun shooting gallery
Probably the biggest problem with the campaign is just how rote and repetitive it feels. Almost all of the game's missions boil down to moving from one shooting gallery to another. When you aren't in an outright combat tunnel (like a bunker or trench), you're only given about a hundred feet of lateral space to work with. The whole game feels very confined and small in scale, with very few opportunities for any tactical movement such as flanking maneuvers. Just sit behind cover and pop out to take a few shots, then repeat. It might as well be an on-rails shooter, or one of those pop-out-and-shoot light-gun arcade machines like Time Crisis. I wonder if this was maybe done to make the game work better in VR? Maybe they wanted to reduce the amount of movement so that players don't get motion sick? But it's not VR, so it just comes off as lazy and tedious.
Almost all the missions boil down to moving from one narrow shooting gallery to another.
Even when the game tries to do something a little different, it usually still finds a way to make it uninteresting, or to outright get it wrong. There are some stealth mechanics shoe-horned into the game -- because of course there's stealth mechanics. They are rudimentary and very unforgiving. It's clear that certain segments are intended to be played stealthily, but you just don't have the tools necessary to make it work, and the levels aren't designed very well for stealth. Your limited field of view makes environmental and situational awareness very difficult. It's hard to tell where enemies are, and it's also hard to tell if your'e hidden behind cover. Even if you are effectively hidden, you can't peek out of cover to monitor the enemy's position or movements.
After stealth killing one or two enemies, I almost always got caught and was forced into more shoot-outs. Many of these scenarios involve the player being isolated and usually disarmed, so that you don't have the firepower to easily deal with a shootout when it inevitably happens. Put simply, the stealth is only barely functional and might as well not even have been included.
The undercover "Liberation" mission is the only level that is actually built around stealth.
The only stealth level that worked was the undercover "Liberation" mission with the Marquis (which you mostly play as a different character). ... [More]
66c29444-437c-4e77-8f5a-591d0762a918|0|.0
Tags:Call of Duty, Call of Duty: WWII, Activision, Sledgehammer Games, Raven Software, World War II, Germany, Nazi, history, war, Holocaust, Jew, concentration camp, online, multiplayer, Skinner Box, loot box, micro-transaction, gambling, shooter, bot, campaign, ESRB, eBay
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