Quotulatiousness

May 12, 2016

Civilization VI to be released in October

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:50

Firaxis has announced the release date of the next version of Civilization, along with a number of changes to the game that may increase the challenge level (and disrupt the current “meta”):

Civilization VI

In many ways, Civilization 6 takes its predecessors and iterates on the systems that have come before. There are changes being made to trade, research, religion and more. Based on the limited amount of information so far released, these changes seem to be incremental.

But there is also a big change coming. In previous Civ games, city improvements were mere statistical boosts or manufacturing gateways, rendered prettily with a slightly different artistic representation. You built a wall and your defenses improved and your city, quite clearly, became encircled by a wall. They lived within the city, outside your control.

Civilization 6 is not the same. It demands that you place your city improvements in geographic locations in hexes around the city, which best take advantage of that building’s boosts and functions.

This means that your city upgrade path is no longer a rote event. It is a matter of geographic practicality.

In Civ 5, combat changed significantly. But combat is merely a system, albeit an important one. In Civ 6, it’s the city itself — the throbbing organ of all Civ games — that is being altered.

The improvements you build in your cities will now actually need to be placed in the tiles surrounding your city and can derive benefits from the terrain if built in better or worse locations. This will probably place an even greater emphasis on finding the best possible spot to found a city, as the long-term growth and development will hinge to a much greater degree on the city’s hinterland than in earlier Civ games.

While I’ve certainly enjoyed the most recent game, I found myself very often following an informal “script” or template when playing Civ V, which Firaxis developers think they’re addressing in the new game:

Why has Firaxis decided to make this change to how cities are structured, to merge the building elements of the city with its surrounding geography?

“We want players to adapt to the map every time they play the game,” says lead designer Ed Beach. “We want people to think on their feet, to respond to being put in different types of terrain, to being put in situations while playing different leaders.”

He says that the “number one” problem the team has identified about Civ 5 is that players often settle on certain strategic paths, and they play the same way every time. For example, when I build cities, I’m almost always looking at Monument, Shrine, Granary, Library, Walls, Coliseum. I rarely change this formula, nor others theirs.

This is why Civ 6‘s cities are different. “It’s as big a change for the economic side of the game as unstacking the armies was with Civ 5,” says Beach. “We want to throw different things at the player at different times and make them have to adapt.”

Suleiman the Magnificent – V: Slave of God – Extra History

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 9 Apr 2016

Suleiman’s empire stretches across the Mediterranean, but in the midst of his success, he suspects betrayal in his own house. His best friend, Ibrahim, and his most promising son, Mustafa, both seem to have designs upon the throne.

Suleiman was alone in his garden, unable to escape the doubts and regrets that shadowed him…

Suleiman and Ibrahim marched south upon the Safavid kingdom, where they met no resistance. Faced with an unbeatable Ottoman army, the Safavids simply yielded and scorched the earth behind them so Suleiman would not be able to hold the territory he took. Ibrahim suggested that he take on the role of sultan in this new territory so that he could govern it, but his words enraged Suleiman. Roxelana had been warning him that Ibrahim had grown ambitious and disrespectful, and now he saw it. He had Ibrahim assassinated and appointed a new chief vizier. But now his Western empire was in shambles. He allied with the French against his enemy, Charles of Spain, but they conducted their war in Italy, well beyond his usual sphere of control. The mismanaged war had to be called off after Charles and Ferdinand attacked Hungary in the wake of John Zápolya’s death. Suleiman defeated them and annexed it officially. Again war called. This time he sent his troops south without him, only to hear word that they felt Mustafa was a better leader than he was and Mustafa didn’t disagree. He joined them in the field and ordered Mustafa to come to him and prove his innocence, but it was a trap. He had Mustafa killed. The consequences rippled out. He killed Mustafa’s son, his grandson. One of his own sons died from grief. Roxelana died of old age. His two remaining sons, Selim II and Bayezid, began to quarrel for the throne, and he ordered them both out of the capital. Bayezid hesitated, and Suleiman turned against him. Even after Bayezid fled to the Safavids, Suleiman pressed for his execution and bribed the Safavid sultan to carry it out for him. Now, he had only one son.

The State is not actually monolithic

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In a comment on Facebook, Sean Gabb explains why even a government in a non-federal system sometimes seems to act inconsistently from moment to moment:

Sean Gabb In a country as large and rich as ours, The State is best regarded not as an entity with a single will, but as a collection of interest groups with agendas that sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict. The job of the people at the top is largely to try balancing these interests.

QotD: Non-religious religious mania

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The left are secularists, but they are extremely poor secularists. As you may know, I’m a secularist myself. I’m a nonbeliever, and to the extent I’m willing to entertain any belief at all, it’s only because I’m a skeptic. That is to say, I’m skeptical of my nonbelief.

It occurs to me — as a skeptic and secularist — that if you seek to put away Magical Thinking, you put it all away. If you disbelieve in God, then you really ought to disbelieve in Transcendence as well, and Rightwing Sorcerers, and Magic Words, and Sustaining Myth-Lies, and all the rest of it.

One amusement to me, as a lonely disbeliever on the right, is noticing this about the Left: The Left imagines that their disbelief in God frees them from superstition.

In fact it does no such thing. The Left’s disbelief in God does not free them from superstition — rather, it frees the superstition to infect all other modes of their thought.

Rather than thinking in terms of the divine and magic in the area of theology and metaphysics — which is really where thoughts about the divine and magic should be contained — the left, being Bad at Secularism, instead permits superstition, myth, and magic to flood into all other compartments of their ship of the mind.

Rather than keeping religious thought confined to religions matters, as the openly religious do, the left, which is intensely religious but believes it is not, instead employs religious thought in all modes of thinking, particularly in politics (where The Government easily steps into the place of God as the Large, Abstract Power That Lords Above Us), but also in what they call “science.”

You know, the science which personifies the Earth as a deity who seeks vengeance upon polluters and people who drive cars.

These Bad Secularists do not call this religion. They will not acknowledge it as fundamentally magical thinking, “pre-logical” and falling into the same primitive thought patterns still kicking around in the human mind which require that every extraordinary event be conjured by Mighty Sorcerers, or sent by the gods as punishment for a Grievous Sin.

And yet those who preen as being the most Free From Superstition are in fact the most shackled by it, because their very vanity will not permit them to see the ridiculous magical mythology they surround themselves in. Thus, within one single day, the Bad Secularists at the New York Times will posit that magical rightwing sorcerers directed the communist crocodile Lee Harvey Oswald to snatch the Princeling Kennedy from the river’s bank, and the Bad Secularists at the Washington Post likewise weave mythic strands around Lee Harvey Oswald, Marxist, Soviet Defector, and world’s first known Tea Partier.

And thus all the world’s Devils are grouped together, ranked in Might and put into their diabolical hierarchy, Satan on top, Baal and Moloch next, and so on, down to Sarah Palin and the Koch Brothers.

We live in an age of religious hysteria. And the religious hysteria is not coming from the usual quarters, the self-acknowledged religious. Instead it comes from the irreligious, whose liberation from god only loosens the leash of their illogic and preference for mythic structures over reality.

You don’t need God to be religious hysteric.

All you need is a Dogma and a Devil.

Ace, “Enchanted Crocodiles, Mighty Sorcerers, and Lee Harvey Oswald”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2013-11-22.

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