[SPOILERS] Rhoanna's horse is actually a Trojan

[DaveV]

And Mr. Cairo shows up on turn 11. I covered my worker with my warrior; he can take a 10% shot to ruin my game, or keep exploring.

[DaveV]

Mr. Cairo wins the good neighbor award.

[DaveV]

Then Aurorarcher showed up. How do these guys manage to dodge animals? That never seems to work out for me.

[DaveV]

Post-blitz demographics:



I'm pretty much in the middle of the pack, which means the other guys must be as starved for commerce as I am. I ran a sim and concluded that my best path is Calendar->Mining->Festivals, then churn out a bunch of cheap Markets to keep the economy afloat.

[DaveV]

I suppose I should talk about my naming scheme. In case it's not obvious from my new avatar, it's going to be computer programming languages. The capital is appropriately named Assembly: assembly language (which some people contend isn't even a language) is the basic building block for all other languages. Assembly language commands usually correspond one-to-one with machine language (the actual instructions that the processor executes).

Assembly code is explicitly tied to the target processor. If you want to move to a different processor (i.e., in the old days when PCs used x86 chips and Macs used 68xxx chips), you have to translate the code for the new hardware. There are some automated scripts to help with this, but you'll still need to do a lot of debugging. For one amusing example, the x86 instruction

ADD   AX,BX

means "add the contents of the AX register to the contents of the BX register, and put the result into AX." So, add BX to AX. On a 68xxx processor,

ADD   D0,D1

means "add the contents of the D0 register to the contents of the D1 register, and put the result into D1." So, add D0 to D1.

While there are some pretty good high level debugging environments, it's still useful to be familiar with assembly code. There are times when something strange is happening, and you have to dive into the bowels of the processor and figure out what's wrong.

Here's an example from work (written by someone else, so don't give me any grief about the style). The target processor is a ColdFire.



The assembly language is in the center column. Anything following a semicolon is a comment, describing the code for future maintenance. The left hand column is the actual machine code. The address of external variables isn't known until link time, so this listing just shows them as zero.

[DaveV]

A turn arrived at lunchtime today. I'd forgotten how playing last gives a ringside seat for the barbs' turn. This turn, the highest rival power went from 14 to 11 after I ended turn. From the graphs, that appears to be Aurorarcher, meaning the barbs ate one of his warriors. Nothing personal, Aurorarcher, but yay barbs! There's a reason why all my guys are cowering inside my borders: I'm going to be running low on garrison troops soon, and I don't want to send any out to be lunch.

[DaveV]

Aurorarcher's GNP took a big jump upward:



Maybe it's just prereq bonuses? I'm currently wasting my known tech bonus by emphasizing hammers (13*1.075=13.975, rounds down to 13 ). With the 20% prereq bonus on Mining, it'll be 13*1.2 = 15.6, rounds down to 15. I'm guessing Aurorarcher has managed to squeeze out 15 commerce, which would produce 18 beakers with a 20% prereq. An additional +4 for culture would produce the 22 GNP shown.

At first, I was thinking that Aurorarcher had a better commerce tile than my wretched beavers, but this analysis makes me feel a little better.

[shallow_thought]

Oh, I do like the naming theme. Alphabetical?

[DaveV]

Alphabetical?

Yes. The list of languages is near-infinite, but I'll have to pick some with which I'm not personally familiar for some letters (E, for example).

[DaveV]

Here's another demographics screen, after my borders popped and research in Crafting finished.



I'm third in GNP, manufacturing, and land area, which is not good. I should be the first one to produce a setter, which may help a little.