Civilization V

i mean these are just lategame gimmicks i guess but diplomacy was my favorite part of 4 and i miss the intricacies.

all sounds potentially pretty cool. i have been content to wait for them to do whatever tinkering with it before i go back to it.

the expansion's out. posting about homage to catalonia reminded me: i got into a small and distant war near the very end of the first full game i played w the new mechanics, because i was running the "freedom" policy tree and a combination of ideological friction and yknow, old hatreds, had started a war way out east on a different continent between korea/ethiopia ("order") and spain/carthage ("autocracy"), mostly for control of spain, that kept messing up all my carefully designed trade routes, and along with fellow freedom-lovers germany and austria (here the coincidental resonance collapses) i ended up sending a few aircraft carriers and battleships and using them to bomb and occupy madrid, during which battle i fought alongside a bunch of korean communist ships even tho every time i talked to sejong he glared at me and complained about my cultural influence and told my units to stay away from his borders. so this expansion has the popular front, is what i'm saying, which is good enough for me.

a lot of the new mechanics are just new numbers tho. those big ugly numbers that add to themselves endlessly. i read a negative review of the original civ5 that said "huge numbers perch at the top of the screen like crows" and i can never forget that image when i play. it's not a very elegant game in some ways. the new diplomatic stuff tho is way fun: being able to spend the ~20 turns before a congress sending diplomats to capitals and bargaining for delegates and counting votes. it's more robust than SMAC actually. more of those kinds of numbers please, less "you have 3765 culture out of 4221."

oh also: when you sack people's cities, you can take the great works of art from the museums and ship them to the museums in your home cities. YES.

whatever, fuck this, played 4 today for the first time in a while and it was balm. ultimately you do nothing in 5 but wait for numbers to accrue, and you can't even give firaxis $5 to make them accrue faster.

in retrospect the high point of my relationship with 5 was when a friend was visiting and immediately recognized king kamehameha's diplomatic-screen voice as his thesis advisor's. "they get him for everything," he said.

Downloaded this two nights ago and it's fucking up my sleep schedule. It's hard to pull away mid-game and then I look up and it's 3AM.

This, me. I've never played Civ in my life and I still have no real idea what I'm doing, but I... cant...stop... playing.