Civ 5 (70 hrs) - In March I fired up Civilization V for the first time since 16 Nov 2010.  What was the catalyst?  My wife asking what happened to all the enthusiasm for the game when it first came out.  Well, as I’ve mentioned before, right after I got the game I played it for a week straight.  Then I went on vacation to the Grand Canyon, to NYC for Halloween, had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house, and a stronger focus on my webcomic.  Her question reminded me of how much I loved the Civilization franchise.  So I started playing and was reminded of why I loved it so much.  It took me most of the first game to get back into the groove with Civ 5’s new quirks, but I really appreciated the improvements to AI.  Civ V is now my most played game with 117 hours.  (Finally surpassing Civ 4)  Most of that time was added in March as I got sick and spent a few days home.  The achievements in Civ 5 really played a key role in keeping me interested over so many hours.  I did things I never would have done in order to get those achievements and now I have a much better understanding of how best to use those Civilizations.

To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest - a new one for me.  I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory.  It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories.  I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best.  The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through.  So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with.  And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that.  Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games.  Great people now make their buildings outisde the city.  This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV.  Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification.  A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.

?At first I ridiculed achievements/trophies.  The idea that grown men and women (and, heck anyone over 12 years old) would care about getting these achievements enough to continue playing through their games until they earned them all seemed ludicrous.  Then, I acknowledged it was a fun way to compete with friends in games that are otherwise single player experiences.  In time I came to understand the idea behind achievements, both for compulsive people and regular folks.  From my non-scientific observations, it appears that people who play video games tend to be more likely to be compulsive people.  The video game companies figured this out and then realized that if they created trophies for all kinds of situations in a game, that most people would keep playing until they got all of them.  Perhaps this would keep them from trading in a game long enough that it would kill the market for used games.

Interestingly, the game appears not to pop up and tell you to choose city production, you have to notice that in the bottom right, same for science and so on…..At least it doesn’t let you skip a turn before you worry about that.  So I actually like it better.  It was far too easy to say you’d deal with something later and then forget.  And all the messages queue up there for you to read.  I used ALWAYS lose track of those in civ 4.  Especially since they used to appear when I was busy on something else and disappear before I could act on them.  And here’s what it looks like when you decide to what to build.

The opening movie is AWESOME.  Most of the visuals were from the trailers, but the frame story was great.  Best intro thus far.  I decided not to play the tutorial first since it appeared to be for those new to the Civ franchise.  I chose Wu Zetian of China since I’ve been playing the Chinese almost my entire time with Civ IV.  She has the “Art of War” which makes Great Generals spawn more often.  Also the Cho-Ku-Nu unit (like Civ 4) and Paper Maker.  I did a small continents map.  And I made myself Settler, marked “for learning the game” so I figure it’ll be tutorial enough.  And a standard game pace.  I REALLY like the new menu system.  It’s very well done.  Sounds like Leonard Nimoy is still the narrator.  I love how it describes my ruler and China in history.  Pretty awesome.  I let the wonderful narration read out before I “begin my journey”.  I take a while to look for the screenshots and it comes up with hints.  Pretty awesome.  The Chinese music is great.  Here are some screenshots.  Another post later.  Right now I want to play and the game gets annoying (freezes cpu) if I alt-tab out of it to get the screenshots.

By order of the Governor of Maryland, have a happy Sid Meier’s Civilization V Day!

14 Sept Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it.  My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go.  Later experience with my Emachine and the inability to tack on a DVD-writer (because they had blocked the slot with a metal mesh) confirmed this was the case.  Just under five years ago I was finally able to do this and built my [first computer](/2006/01/03/new-computer-built/ /2006/01/07/building-the-computer/).   I can’t believe it took me four hours to put that first one together.  Nowadays, if things go well, it takes about an hour.  In the time since then I’ve built 8 other computers.  Of course, those weren’t all for me.  I also built Dan and Dave’s newest computers, my father-in-law’s computer, his sister’s computer, and a bunch of others.