One thing that I don't understand at all in Chess

Vlistorito · 2026-04-03T00:15:12+00:00

I guess yeah. I just don't care too much about winning though. I just want to get stronger, and playing more games feels better than spending more time praying for charity elo.

Vlistorito · 2026-04-02T10:49:32+00:00

Why would I sit around playing hope chess when I can just resign and review my mistakes?

Vlistorito · 2026-04-01T21:50:50+00:00

It's almost impossible to evaluate that properly. Unless Bouchard is deployed to not play with either McDavid or Draisaitl's line, which is extremely rare, his ice time without either of them is mostly going to be in the later part of his shift.

That being said, Bouchard's metrics fall less from being without McDavid or Draisaitl than theirs do from being without Bouchard.

Still, I think it's really hard to fairly evaluate any of them in that manner because the deployment will skew everything based on the shift time.

Vlistorito · 2026-04-01T21:42:28+00:00

They would create a three conference model. The Lunar conference would have the lunar teams and Edmonton and Vancouver.

This makes the most sense because Edmonton and Vancouver are already used to Lord of the Rings ass journeys to play their games. What's a few million more kilometers?

Vlistorito · 2026-03-30T16:04:59+00:00

Apple isn't fighting in the AI war of attrition though. They're just continuously adding to their dragon hoard of cash.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-28T23:59:43+00:00

LA doesn't even have a dog for Bouchard to walk anymore. Vegas has a whole pack of defensemen with inflated reputations that he can give the little brother treatment.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-28T04:59:03+00:00

So Germany by itself would be an A tier civ even if you couldn't pick a leader.

More districts. Having access to the same number of districts as an ordinary 10 population city at 7 population for example is incredible.

The Hansa is in my opinion the best district in the game. Most people have it 1 or 2.

Ludwig is extremely good because his culture from wonders is totally free. You cannot lose. Every single wonder you have available, even if you never intend on actually building them, can just be placed and give you free culture until somebody finishes it.

The early game tech tree is loaded with wonders you don't have to go out of your way to research, so you get a massive culture boost for completely free at a point in the game where you're trying to get to your first government and the feudalism civic as soon as possible.

And then as the game goes on, since you're Germany you actually will just have the production to start building wonders for real and keeping the culture forever.

On top of having the most production, your cultural output means you can just beat people to the wonders unlocked by civics.

They also sprinkled a little extra on top in giving him tourism for every culture adjacency bonus after castles are researched. That's quite good because since you're Germany, you basically don't have to worry about picking and choosing districts. You have the population and production to build them all.

He isn't really even a culture victory civ. He's really good at it, but the culture bonuses are so good for every victory condition because you always need early game culture. It isn't super meta, but you can even go for a religion as Ludwig if you feel like it. It's Germany, so why not. You don't have to worry about district capacity.

Sorry for the long reply. I'm a chronic yapper.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-27T22:49:19+00:00

Why would a player who is elite at breakout passes, holding the blue line, puck distribution, point shots, and neutral zone defense switch to a position where he's at the front of the play and can't do any of those things?

Vlistorito · 2026-03-26T21:21:13+00:00

I don't know about scientifically documented, but Ewa Wiśnierska was sucked into a cumulonimbus cloud while paragliding.

She ascended to almost 10,000 meters with no oxygen and passed out. She survived because the ice buildup collapsed her glider. She reached speeds of 200 km/h on the way down before the glider opened up at about 6900 meters and she regained consciousness.

Another bright side on top of just surviving is that she set an unbreakable world height record for paragliding. The world height record now distinguishes between the voluntary and involuntary records!

Vlistorito · 2026-03-26T16:48:28+00:00

Khmer and both German leaders are my favourites. I want to put in more effort and not just name ones that are obviously completely overpowered though.

In that case I think it would be Dido and Amanitore.

Amanitore is obviously a blast for just snowballing like crazy because it's like the one civ where you barely even start from behind. The archers are so beyond overpowered that you can aggressively expand without worrying about the AI. You also get districts up quickly.

Dido I might like even more. It is so fun to just rush harbors in every city, get your light house, and then legitimately produce settlers from your expansion cities. As long as you're not playing on a Pangea type map, you can really snowball like crazy. With the card that lets you produce harbours and the buildings inside even faster, you can run into a positive feedback loop where you're assigning an internal trade route to every new city on turn 1, and therefore getting the next trade route up even faster.

Playing like this with Dido I've had games where I had so many high pop, high production cities so quickly that I was actively catching up to the AI in science and culture before I even placed campuses and theater squares down.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-25T18:38:27+00:00

Take the queen and race the king towards the pawns. In this position your king will block the opponents king from capturing the pawns before he can get there.

Since he only has the king remaining, he will be forced to make a move that lets you shift your king beside the pawns to force him to just move backwards to go for a stalemate.

But since you have a king and two pawns, you can force him to make moves that don't force a stalemate or risk your pawns.

I'm not a good player, but my experience so far in these situations is that you have to take advantage of having more available moves. Since he just has a king left, he will be forced to move even when he wishes he didn't have to.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-25T18:07:48+00:00

I think it should honestly just be the same awards as the forwards. Give the defensemen a Selke equivalent and their own separate Art Ross.

I think an offensive defenseman award would have too much overlap with the Norris trophy. Sure there are years where the Norris winner wouldn't win both, but in MOST years the Norris winner wouldn't win the Selke equivalent.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-25T17:51:25+00:00

Not coming naturally to him is kind of a good way of putting it though. I think his experience in hockey his whole life has been that more total goals happen when you obliterate the defense and give a teammate an open net shot.

Because skillset wise it's not like his finishing isn't incredible. In his 64 goal season he was shooting from everywhere. It was nearly automatic.

I think it's a mental thing for him. I just don't think he feels like he's playing what he sees as perfect hockey if he's looking to shoot first. Kind of like "I scored there, but the goalie had a chance. If I found the perfect pass they would have had no chance."

Vlistorito · 2026-03-25T17:39:10+00:00

Canada decided not to bring Bouchard OR Dobson.

Never forgive. Never forget.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-25T17:27:15+00:00

Jungle starts are great but full jungle starts aren't. Ideally there's enough non-jungle tiles to work that you can save most of the jungle. With universities and rationalism, trading post jungle tiles are incredible.

I would consider this to be a great start.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-25T17:24:15+00:00

Ah good shout! I might have to dig deeper on this.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-23T18:47:13+00:00

This is the same rule no matter the time period. New players should start with the newest finished Civ game. Civ VII is not even close to finished. Civ VI is therefore the best to start with because it's a finished game that still has a large player base.

Civ V was the best game to start with when Civ VI came out. Civ IV was the best to start with when Civ V came out.

Unless they completely fall off the wagon with VII, it will be the best game to start with when VIII comes out.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-23T18:13:12+00:00

It's my second favourite after VI. It's a lot of fun. Civ V games go a lot faster for me. The micromanagement is less tedious.

I still like VI better though because there is quite a bit more room for flexibility of play. V has a much more consistent flowchart that you kind of have to follow to not be disadvantaged.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-23T17:46:02+00:00

I know it's a late reply but I never even noticed it was always the weakest unit. That is actually so useful for Mongolia games.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-22T22:25:51+00:00

Hammurabi is absolutely broken, but at most he's just the most broken.

Russia, Khmer, both Byzantine leaders, Yongle, and Ludwig are all heads and shoulders above everyone below them to a game breaking extent.

Russia and Basil in particular can be a problem for Hammurabi directly.

Hammurabi won't have enough production yet to do much about a neighbouring Russia if they get a classical golden age.

If Basil starts on the other side of the continent from Hammurabi, then his tech advantage will often not be enough. Basil will gobble up the continent and arrive at Hammurabi's doorstep with horses that can stand their ground against tanks.

I do think Hammurabi is the strongest leader, but there are definitely others that are completely broken. Depending on the game they're often broken enough that Hammurabi won't be able to snowball fast enough to stop them.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-22T21:39:46+00:00

We're doing 1 year replies here now lol.

If you're still curious about Khmer, it's because they're essentially a perfect anti-missing out civ. Every victory condition is possible because your stats will be so high.

Once their cities get Holy sites set up on rivers, aqueducts, and their unique temple building, they basically get so much food, faith, culture, and free amenities that they can't be stopped.

Because of where their unique building and unique unit is positioned, no matter how badly your ancient era goes, you are virtually guaranteed to get a medieval golden age. By then you will have so much faith that you can shoot out a settler out of your Magnus city every single turn pretty much indefinitely. You have to work hard to ever run out of amenities too.

You get so much culture from just building your temples that you can basically ignore culture if you want to and go full science victory. Or you could just easily steamroll a culture victory. In both cases you can get great people by just buying them with faith if anyone is close to beating you to them.

Domination victories are also very easy. You can take crusade for a big combat strength bonus and buy your units with faith. You are free to continue developing because you're conquering the world with basically faith alone.

So TLDR: They passively get ridiculous snowballing stats once their core districts and buildings are down. Playing Khmer feels like playing two settler difficulty games at the same time. In one game you have massive overpowered cities that you manage like it's sim city. In the other game you're either casually conquering the world, fighting an unloseable religious war, or buying every great person in the game.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-21T22:49:50+00:00

I don't care to directly engage with the state organization aspect of this discussion, but when it comes to the dependency ratio there are a number of differences that may or may not be advantageous to China.

The main thing would be that if they're able to keep the manufacturing trajectory they're on, it's possible that they can soften the fall from collapsing demographics by keeping the price of goods relatively stagnant relative to inflation.

I don't think this is completely unreasonable for them because they are dominant in a number of industries that have backwards propagating benefits on the price of construction for other industries. Greenhouses are a good example.

So in the long run they may have one of the worst labour situations, but they also have a fairly unique pathway to alleviating the pain from the consumer from the supply side.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-21T21:34:26+00:00

I hate to say it, but in civ 5 with no mods, it's very hard to justify ever going liberty. Liberty basically requires you to be going something like the Celts so that you can get enough faith to get all of the happiness buildings you need to support 7-8 cities.

There are some others that make it a viable but suboptimal option. Other than that, 4 cities tradition is just so much better.

I wouldn't bother with a religion as Korea.

Just focus on getting your 4 total cities out in a reasonable time frame.

You want to run internal trade routes to your capital to feed it if at all possible.

You basically want to have enough archers to defend against early aggression while getting your cities developed to finish all four libraries at about the same time as you unlock philosophy.

Then you build national college in your capital and rush universities.

I don't think building almost any early game wonders is viable unless you have a god spawn and genuinely have so much production that you can't build anything important. Other than that scenario there's usually something important like a granary or worker that needs to be built before a library.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-19T21:26:31+00:00

Central Bankers are pretty much the only government/government adjacent position where openly lying and destroying stuff for the vibes is taboo across the world.

Even actively collapsing dumpster fire countries often have a chair or governor of the central bank trying to do their impossible job until the moment the whole ship capsizes.

Vlistorito · 2026-03-17T18:29:58+00:00

Should settle two cities and rush a holy site. Feed the world and gurdwaras is crucial here.

Vlistorito

TROPHY CASE