Civ4 AI Survivor: Season Three

[RefSteel]

SULLA you made ALL the northern civs the EXACT SAME COLOR. I see you took my advice and cared about color blind people.

I'm sure it's not deliberate. I think the problem is that Sullla can't easily tell which colors are most- and least-distinguishable from which others for color-blind eyes. Could you suggest a set of civs whose "normal" colors would be a good set to use? (E.g. I think the three northern civs in this game have the default colors for Mali, Russia, and the Ottomans. Now we know not to put those three together, but which ones should we use? I could probably figure it out by creating a bunch of new games, taking Turn 1 screenshots in Worldbuilder after everyone had settled their cities, and photo-editing them to greyscale, but I'm guessing you already know from experience. So ... what sets would work best?

[Kofiman]

Looking at it, it seems likely Fluffball is red/green colourblind. Probably the easiest way to differentiate those three would be choosing a light yellow colour for the upper middle AI, or Alexander. Maybe a bright white like default England.

That said, it's worth thinking about, but with the limited possibilities I wouldn't beat yourself up over it, especially in games with six or seven nations, where it gets increasingly difficult to differentiate everyone.

On a happier note, that last game was amazing. A joy to watch.

[Brian Shanahan]

I'm pretty sure Charlemagne is pronounced 'SHAR lah man' as well. I've tried to find any evidence of it being "shar la MAN ya" out of curiosity and I can't find any. In modern French it's 100% pronounced SHAR lah man. And CRISto reDENTor. 

It's actually pronounced Karolus Magnus.

[Sullla]

As RefSteel said, I'm not colorblind and it's difficult to know what causes problems for those who are. Civ4 doesn't have a colorblind option as a number of more recent games do. Furthermore, there are multiple different kinds of colorblindness, and what causes problems for one type may not cause problems for other types. I'm sorry to hear that those northern civs look similar; I'll try to avoid putting red and green colors next to one another in the future. It's going to be difficult to avoid ever having red/green/brown civs next to one another though - there's only so much that can be done in games with six or seven civs.

[Singaboy]

I watched the replay and it was a truly awesome match! Keep it up

[TheHumanHydra]

One little thing that kept nagging me on the stream, it's pronounced "Rohsevelt", not "Roohsevelt" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR9GYT8Du8I) it's a Dutch name in origin, meaning "Field of Roses". It therefore has the Dutch pronunciation. The "oo" in Dutch is pronounced as "oh" roughly. Fun Fact: Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt actually spoke Dutch in private, but spoke English in public. FDR, of course, spoke English but he did still pronounce it "Rohsevelt"

I'm pretty sure Charlemagne is pronounced 'SHAR lah man' as well. I've tried to find any evidence of it being "shar la MAN ya" out of curiosity and I can't find any. In modern French it's 100% pronounced SHAR lah man. And CRISto reDENTor. 

But Sulla's horrible pronunciation of various famous cities and J-man is half the fun of watching his streams.    Njimegan cracks me up as well.

Edit: And hopefully no offense, Sulla, just poking fun.

Thanks for the info, Japper! I was always confused by this.

Re: Charlemagne, we'll have to get someone French like Adrien in here to be sure, but two things I observed taking French are that:

1) The trailing e on a word is half-pronounced. I think this is difficult for us English-speakers to wrap our heads around; we either want a full-blown a sound or nothing at all. To get an example, try pronouncing the l or y sound on its own - it's that very brief uh sound at the end of your luh or yuh. In normal speech, this faint sound obviously gets lost. But in something like a song, you can hear it quite plainly - try listening to La Marseillaise and watching for how the words patrie and tyrannie, and a few others, are pronounced.

2) The emphasis is almost always on the final syllable of a word (excepting the half-spoken trailing e). Interestingly, some French-speakers I spoke to denied that any syllable is emphasized in French, but at least to English ears I think it's quite remarkable. Here's an example sentence (no accent marks in case they show up as squiggles on some people's screens): Je SUIS alLE au supermarCHE hier maTIN. J'ai conDUIS ma ChevroLET.

So I think it is SharleMANyuh (lift on the last syllable):

How to pronounce in French # Charlemagne

Edit: Brian Shanahan is of course right as well.

[Fluffball]

Yup, mixing up yellows and blues and reds is the best way (think Sitting Bull next to Napolean next to whatever the heck civ is red, also I learned in the last stream France is purple, I always through it was blue. Also always thought Monty was yellow but he might be green??), although if that's an insane amount of work in the set up I can understand why you wouldn't want to do it. I'll live, and there are ways to figure things out like reading city names to tell what civ it belongs to and etc.

Edit: Ugh just looked at the map again to make my predictions and realized Gilgamesh is the same color as all the northern civs. 

[AdrienIer]

Re: Charlemagne, we'll have to get someone French like Adrien in here to be sure, but two things I observed taking French are that:

1) The trailing e on a word is half-pronounced. I think this is difficult for us English-speakers to wrap our heads around; we either want a full-blown a sound or nothing at all. To get an example, try pronouncing the l or y sound on its own - it's that very brief uh sound at the end of your luh or yuh. In normal speech, this faint sound obviously gets lost. But in something like a song, you can hear it quite plainly - try listening to La Marseillaise and watching for how the words patrie and tyrannie, and a few others, are pronounced.

2) The emphasis is almost always on the final syllable of a word (excepting the half-spoken trailing e). Interestingly, some French-speakers I spoke to denied that any syllable is emphasized in French, but at least to English ears I think it's quite remarkable. Here's an example sentence (no accent marks in case they show up as squiggles on some people's screens): Je SUIS alLE au supermarCHE hier maTIN. J'ai conDUIS ma ChevroLET.

So I think it is SharleMANyuh (lift on the last syllable):

How to pronounce in French # Charlemagne

Edit: Brian Shanahan is of course right as well.

It's a complicated subject you tackle here. Short answer is that you're mostly right. Here's the longer answer.

I'll start off by saying that the link you posted is correct. If I was asked to pronounce Charlemagne in a "perfect" manner I'd say it exactly like him. In my everyday life I'd pronounce the e at the end a little less. For an english speaker, my advice would be to pronounce it like Sharlemanya, but cutting the "a" completely at the end. So some sort of Sharlemany-

To answer your specific points :
1) In songs, poems or verses of some kind you can sometimes hear some e actually pronounced. That can be because it's needed for the syllables to fit, or to focus on a word. For example in the Marseillaise the word patrie has a pronounced e sound. That because a long vowel is needed at the end (for rhythm), and a long "iiiiiiiiii" would sound terrible.

2) The emphasis depends far more on what you're focusing on than on a particular syllable. If you want to focus on a word, you'll usually focus on the first syllable (very assertive), or on the last in some situations (giving an information, or if it's the final word of a sentence). If not, don't emphasize a syllable. If in doubt, you can emphasize the final syllable ever so slightly. But yes, there are no rules as to which syllable you're supposed to emphasize. Not emphasizing any syllable (or making it very subtle) is usually best.

Now let's make it a lot more fun by reminding everyone that this is "normal" french pronunciation. Which is spoken by probably less than half the world's native french speakers (probably even less than that, there are a lot of french speakers in Africa). Basically those from the northwestern half of France, and some people from the rest of France. Just by going to the south of France you'll realize that everyone speaks every letter in every word, including the e at the end. Which means that Charlemagne is pronounced Sharlemanyuh there. With a lovely musical accent. And guess what, the Parisian accent (which has almost disappeared) also pronounces many e.

 

[TheHumanHydra]

Re: Charlemagne, we'll have to get someone French like Adrien in here to be sure, but two things I observed taking French are that:

1) The trailing e on a word is half-pronounced. I think this is difficult for us English-speakers to wrap our heads around; we either want a full-blown a sound or nothing at all. To get an example, try pronouncing the l or y sound on its own - it's that very brief uh sound at the end of your luh or yuh. In normal speech, this faint sound obviously gets lost. But in something like a song, you can hear it quite plainly - try listening to La Marseillaise and watching for how the words patrie and tyrannie, and a few others, are pronounced.

2) The emphasis is almost always on the final syllable of a word (excepting the half-spoken trailing e). Interestingly, some French-speakers I spoke to denied that any syllable is emphasized in French, but at least to English ears I think it's quite remarkable. Here's an example sentence (no accent marks in case they show up as squiggles on some people's screens): Je SUIS alLE au supermarCHE hier maTIN. J'ai conDUIS ma ChevroLET.

So I think it is SharleMANyuh (lift on the last syllable):

How to pronounce in French # Charlemagne

Edit: Brian Shanahan is of course right as well.

It's a complicated subject you tackle here. Short answer is that you're mostly right. Here's the longer answer.

I'll start off by saying that the link you posted is correct. If I was asked to pronounce Charlemagne in a "perfect" manner I'd say it exactly like him. In my everyday life I'd pronounce the e at the end a little less. For an english speaker, my advice would be to pronounce it like Sharlemanya, but cutting the "a" completely at the end. So some sort of Sharlemany-

To answer your specific points :
1) In songs, poems or verses of some kind you can sometimes hear some e actually pronounced. That can be because it's needed for the syllables to fit, or to focus on a word. For example in the Marseillaise the word patrie has a pronounced e sound. That because a long vowel is needed at the end (for rhythm), and a long "iiiiiiiiii" would sound terrible.

2) The emphasis depends far more on what you're focusing on than on a particular syllable. If you want to focus on a word, you'll usually focus on the first syllable (very assertive), or on the last in some situations (giving an information, or if it's the final word of a sentence). If not, don't emphasize a syllable. If in doubt, you can emphasize the final syllable ever so slightly. But yes, there are no rules as to which syllable you're supposed to emphasize. Not emphasizing any syllable (or making it very subtle) is usually best.

Now let's make it a lot more fun by reminding everyone that this is "normal" french pronunciation. Which is spoken by probably less than half the world's native french speakers (probably even less than that, there are a lot of french speakers in Africa). Basically those from the northwestern half of France, and some people from the rest of France. Just by going to the south of France you'll realize that everyone speaks every letter in every word, including the e at the end. Which means that Charlemagne is pronounced Sharlemanyuh there. With a lovely musical accent. And guess what, the Parisian accent (which has almost disappeared) also pronounces many e.

 

Thanks for all the information! It is very helpful. Canadian French has some interesting accents: some, like a friend of mine, roll their rs instead of doing them in the backs of their mouths, poutine is pronounced pooTIN (short i), and the same friend says pere with the English long i sound.

[Sullla]

For anyone who (quite reasonably) may have been unable to watch the Livestream recording, here is the written report for Game Four. This one was a ton of fun to watch, and as earlier posts in this thread hinted at, it had a fantastic conclusion.

Community predictions for Game Five should be ready tomorrow, Game Five itself will follow on Friday at the normal time. Thanks all.