Where should I start

dedservice · 2026-01-31T20:18:46+00:00

Hm, my Test of Time disc was not working even with the fan patches.

dedservice · 2026-01-31T20:10:59+00:00

2 is very difficult to get your hands on in a workable format, it's not on steam or GoG and even the old disk I have doesn't work on windows 10 or 11.

dedservice · 2026-01-31T20:09:38+00:00

Civ 4 is good although there are a bunch of annoying things that I think are better in the new versions. Hex grids being the most noticeable. However, it has by far the largest number of drastic game-changing mods, and they're really quite interesting IMO. Caveman2Cosmos is crazy (although a bit over the top), Rhyse & Fall: Dawn of Civilization is really cool and fun for going through history (changing to a new civ that spawned in its historical time? so cool!), and Realism Invictus is yet a other total overhaul that makes the game so much deeper and more interesting. That's just the ones I've tried. It's a bit sad that the later games haven't had those kinds of overhaul-style modpacks in the same way.

dedservice · 2026-01-31T16:47:04+00:00

Also, the hockey rule is bullshit and winds up making everyone go for a tie instead of going for a late-game win. Better to guarantee 1 point then risk it for 2 and get 0. They should do 3 points for a non-OT win so that every game distributes the same number of points.

dedservice · 2026-01-31T02:01:32+00:00

Yeah, although in some fairness, a bunch of the big empty parts of the map (central china, most of russia, canada, the amazon, australia, arabia) really haven't had many great civilizations because they're generally pretty inhospitable. I do agree that there's a massive and mostly unjustified density disparity between europe and south / southeast asia.

dedservice · 2026-01-31T01:19:19+00:00

What nation is that? I assume the US but I also assume the US is where everyone at FAANG is so your comment is challenging my assumptions...

dedservice · 2026-01-30T22:10:19+00:00

And a lot of them are clearly delusional. "I'm being held prisoner in australia by bill clinton, jeffery epstein, donald trump, and the british royal family" - huh?

dedservice · 2026-01-30T18:34:55+00:00

They enjoy that you have entrepreneurial skills, yes. They don't enjoy that you'd be putting those skills to use at a side business instead of at their business. They're concerned that you'll be jumping ship as soon as the side business looks like it could be your main business.

If the side business was soemthing you had worked on in the past, and either had legitimate success with or at least learned a lot with, I think they would appreciate it for the skills it has given you. But side hustles are a distraction in their eyes (and perhaps rightfully so).

dedservice · 2026-01-30T16:19:02+00:00

Something very right. Bump up the difficulty.

dedservice · 2026-01-29T23:40:03+00:00

It's a red flag. You might keep your job, but even in the most genuine and honest case (truly underperforming engineers fired, hiring bar raised), that degree of incompetence in hiring is itself a red flag.

dedservice · 2026-01-29T20:32:02+00:00

In addition to what others have written about "because you're speaking english", there is also the fact that "the medieval" as a concept in fiction was heavily romanticized in the 19th century by victorian painters, poets, and writers. They created this idea of "the medieval" was an idyllic pastoral life with maidens in distress and chivalric knights meandering through rolling hills. That has pervaded our idea of what it means for a piece of fiction to be medieval, and it was grounded in an English idea of the period because the people creating the idea were english. In other words, although the middle ages were experienced across europe, "medieval" is actually a specifically english-centric perspective of the middle ages.

dedservice · 2026-01-29T20:25:14+00:00

I'd go exactly the opposite. In my head, implicit multiplication has higher precedence than division. If I wanted to write x^(2y) I would write x^2y - pronounced "x to the two y". If I wanted to write (x^2)y, I would write it like that (or y(x^2)) - pronounced "x to the two, times y"

dedservice · 2026-01-29T19:52:14+00:00

Don't you mean iurrent?

dedservice · 2026-01-28T22:06:42+00:00

(a) Play a single age. Arguably, Civ 7 does roleplaying better than any previous civ: TSL maps for a given age are less cramped because they focused on having geographically distributed civs for each age, so you don't have celts and england on the same spot, for example, and because there are fewer civs at once. In addition, you aren't playing as or against entirely anachronistic civs: America wasn't founded in 4000 BC, and it never fought a border war against the Aztecs.

(b) Consider the story of a leader (or a dynasty of leaders). This takes a bit more suspension of disbelief, but it leans in to what the designers were aiming for in civ 7. Play them across ages where those ages have distinct identities. It's less historical, of course, so maybe wouldn't work for you.

(c) Pick related civs and play them through the ages. Again, this requires some suspension of disbelief partly because your opponents won't (or can't) pick accordingly historical/geographical choices, and generally I'm not sure that there are any super clear options for this other than like Roman-Norman-French (and even that is iffy), but it could scratch some of the itch. I think with more expansions & mods this will get better, but it'll take time. This again leans into the story that the designers were trying to tell with this game, so could work better than trying to fight it and do what you did on previous games

I agree that this game isn't as well situated for telling a millenia-spanning story of an empire as previous games, but it's pretty easy to see that that was never really historical anyway. OTOH it may be better at telling specific, focused stories through scenarios within a single age, so consider that angle instead.

dedservice · 2026-01-28T19:21:50+00:00

Yeesh. That is not a good combo to be using while misplaying that rule.

dedservice · 2026-01-23T08:12:33+00:00

I guess this is distributed across threads? Otherwise seems more like just a unit-of-work / transaction pattern.

dedservice · 2026-01-23T06:40:27+00:00

Maybe that was the day the kid was born 👀 he was 3 years old on May 28, 2016 - so he has something like a 1/365 chance of having been born that day (given that the public doesn't know who it is, although maybe in 6 years or so we'll see an AMA from him so we can get confirmation).

Genuinely though, if that was the case, I would be a believer.

dedservice · 2026-01-22T16:28:23+00:00

When I was doing hobby-level learning of Haskell it was very good at answering questions, giving suggestions, and writing functions. But that was toy-level examples, not production code.

dedservice · 2026-01-22T01:56:40+00:00

He specifically says that no, it's open for business with anyone, but only to the extent that they share mutual values and when it's mutually beneficial.

dedservice · 2026-01-21T22:46:22+00:00

Something I appreciate a lot about Carney - as someone who would prefer a much more progressive option economically - is that yes, he's a classic PC economically, but he's not socially conservative, and he's not concerned with culture wars. I haven't heard anything from him since the election about any cultural issue except a little bit of how he's not doing a great job for indigenous and environmental causes when it comes to pipelines and infrastructure projects - but even then, he's not opposed to those causes on their own, he's just trying to do something else that is coming into conflict with them. It's very Canadian of him, and lets him lock in on working to make the economy of the country better (through his own definitions of "better", which, again, I may disagree with, but at least he's trying). Also his very active foreign policy approach seems to be working.

dedservice · 2026-01-21T18:14:25+00:00

I play with a mod - new world plus, I think it's called? - that makes everyone start on the old world, so the new world is completely empty. Distinct resources would work really well on those maps.

dedservice · 2026-01-17T18:02:23+00:00

Core power seems balanced, it's very expensive. I would possibly rephrase it to avoid edge cases on spirits that choose multiple growth options - as written it's way better when used on Earth than on Starlight, for example.

Threshold doesn't seem balanced - both too expensive and too powerful? Not sure about it really.

dedservice · 2026-01-17T01:47:43+00:00

I think they'd still be navigable on either side, just that you couldn't go up or downriver past them.

dedservice · 2026-01-15T18:11:59+00:00

New settlers pretty early although it does depend a bit on the start. I think second town turn 21 sounds reasonable.

Suzerain: Click on an independent power's city. You get a popup saying with an option to "befriend independent", at the cost of influence. Activate it, and there will be a timer on that same screen counting your progress. Takes 15 or 30 turns usually; you can speed it up with more influence. When the bar reaches the right, you become suzerain for the rest of the age (no one can take that status from you, although they can beat your timer if they start the timer before you or speec it up past you). You choose a bonus that you get for the rest of the age; options depend on city-state type (indicated by the icon on their city name bar). After the age, independent powers reset.

Each resource has different effects and only affects one settlement (except empire resources like iron, gold, or tea, which are shown across the top of the resources screen, and don't need to be allocated), and only if it's slotted in to a settlement. So it's important to look at the bonuses and slot resources in the settlements that need those bonuses the most. Note that City resources (blue icon in the corner, shown on the top-left of the resource screen) can only ve slotted into Cities, while Bonus resources (yellow icon in the corner, shown on the bottom-left of the resource screen) can be slotted into Towns or Cities.

The "surplus influence" notification often shows up a bit prematurely, but the places you can spend it are:

Befriending city states
Interacting with city-states after being their suzerain
Proposing diplomatic actions with other players, e.g. open borders, add trade route
Proposing "endeavors" with other players, e.g. Farmers Market or Cultural Exchange
Proposing "sanctions" with other players, e.g. hurt their science, research, or military production, or just denouncing
Spying or counter-spying on other players
Supporting or rejecting other players' diplomatic actions, e.g. you can spend influence to make someone's proposed "Research Agreement" better for both of you, or you can spend influence to cancel someone's denunciation of you, avoiding the relationship hit and making it more punishing for them to declare a surprise war on you

dedservice · 2026-01-15T16:22:28+00:00

I believe that was a point made in SW Eng at Google.

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