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thank you kindly to whoever built this wonder! this may be enough gold to get to currency - and then i can keep expansion going...
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a lesson on why playing turns with 4 hours of sleep can be a bad idea... i moved a spear out of a city where dreylin has a chariot peeking. hopefully the fortified vulture can cover it!
at least it's only size one and founded a few turns ago.
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25-ish turns later - popped a golden age. It gets me HR, Bureau in some turns, and at some point I will swap into OR and roll with one of the religions that spread into my lands. I am hoping I have enough slack to then make it to engineering or at least longbows before someone attacks.
April 14th, 2024, 16:25
(This post was last modified: April 14th, 2024, 16:26 by xist10.)
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25 turns in 5 days ?
Okay, this turnpace puts the 72 to shame - and I read a comment on the lurker thread, that the 72 was to fast to follow.
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25 turns since turn 100, not since my last post. Should have clarified. The turns have been fast, but not quite that fast!
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another overview post to come later......
For now, I want to talk about a movie I saw recently. Since there does not seem to be a general movie discussion thread anywhere, I'll talk about it here. Also spoilers etc.
Alex Garland's Civil War has been described by a number of outlets as primarily apolitical film. While, in absolute terms, this can never be true, it is true relative to the current tide of emotional propaganda visible on the news. Civil War is primarily focused on the day to day living one could expect from an America living through such turmoil, with a fictional president who most clearly resembles the late colonel Gaddafi, rather than any current politicians. It shows a great deal of realistic violence, with gunshots that ring loudly rather than being the typical background noise one might expect in a popcorn action movie. It shows how just one man with a gun can be a million times more frightening than the nastiest sort of monster CGI can cook up. It is harrowing and gripping throughout, at least until the last few minutes, where one suspects the budget had finally caught up with the filmmaker's ambitions.
There are maps one can find online showing the factions of the eponymous civil war, and one such map does appear for a split second on the film, but the goal of the story is not to present the factions themselves as worth commenting on. Instead, one can glean the most information by seeing what the troops themselves look like, as they are captured in photographs by the protagonists of the movie, a small group of journalists on a road trip. Here is where the film can be seen to have a message beyond the most obvious one - that war is indeed bad to live through. The primary actors who fight this civil war are not irregular partisans hiding out in the woods (although such groups do make an appearance, they are clearly under equipped and undermanned compared to the security forces), nor do they even resemble civilians drafted en masse to serve a large standing army - as can be seen in the current Russian-Ukraine war. Civil War instead shows a war primarily fought by the men who fought the War on Terror, when split into groups on fault lines that would be hard to predict today. Indeed, the movie itself takes obvious and stated influence from the War on Terror, as the journalists describe how they thought taking pictures during the various civil wars in the middle east might help America avoid such a situation at home. In this regard, the movie is being too generous to journalists as a whole, as too many of them are far too eager in egging on such a conflict in the present day. But the prediction itself, that an American civil conflict would take the shape of these middle eastern civil wars, of the security state tearing itself to pieces, is a substantial message and worth taking seriously.
There are some pieces that felt like they were missing from this picture. Although there are gas station owners who shoot looters, one never sees any actual looters, or groups of starving civilians roaming the countryside. The one refugee camp shown is naively peaceful, with kids of all backgrounds playing games idyllically in the grass. The general absence of any ethnic or sectarian element to the conflict also seems odd, when the middle eastern conflicts that inspired much of the movie's content can not be separated from such sectarian strife. And if one is hoping for the characters themselves to find satisfactory arcs - they won't get that. But despite such flaws, Civil War still stands as a gripping and sober reminder of what might come, and what other nations have already gone through. And although the movie is not perfectly apolitical, I think most people would get more out of it by going in without assuming that it serves to deliver a polemic argument. Many critics thought that the audience was supposed to cheer at the end of the movie when the president is gunned down by the rebel forces inside the Oval Office, and the soldiers then gleefully pose for a picture next to his corpse. This message is incongruous with the tone of the movie, and if the director intended it to be seen that way, then he's one of those unfortunate few who is too stupid to understand their own creations. The death of the president is like the death of Gaddafi - even though he was hardly a heroic man, one can't help but observe that his nation of Libya has only gotten worse after he was dragged from his bunker and murdered.
I will probably put more movie reviews in this thread if I am not eliminated, as there suddenly seems to be a glut of movies coming out that seem to be worth seeing. A welcome change!
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Now I'm intrigued just to see Nick Offerman's portrayal of a Gaddafi-style president. Been watching a lot of Parks and Rec lately.
Suffer Game Sicko
Dodo Tier Player
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Sadly for Parcs and Rec fans, I don't think this was Nick Offerman's best showing. He doesn't detract from the film, but he hardly stands out. Jesse Plemons, given a similar level of screentime (only a few minutes), absolutely steals the show, along with the other actors who play the soldier characters.
Anyway, overview. Gotta show I am actually playing the game so people want to read my movie ramblings.
I just finished teching Civil Service, a crucial economic tech on this map not just for bureaucracy, but to enable irrigation. All of my workers are now going to turn this great swathe of plains forests into farms that my cities can use to grow above sizes 4-6.
The main concern now is getting midieval military tech online. I am making one last quick pitstop at Monotheism, so I can use the Buddhism that spread in my lands to get the OR boost on future buildings, and then I will be pushing for longbows, castles, the works.
Two of my three neighbors do not seem to be on the warpath at the moment. Mmjd and Dreylin have about equal power to me. Lljujbjana has more, and does have the traits to back up a war of potential attrition. But he has been signalling fish/fish or cow/cow trades to me, so I am hoping he is wanting to push in another direction.
Graphs, aided by my current espionage lead:
GNP wise, I have recovered since my lowest ebbs, getting to hang out with Mmjd and Superdeath(!) in the middle top of the pack, while my golden age is ongoing. I do not think maintaining the minimum level of credible military defense tech will be a problem from here on out, as long as I keep improving my lands. Mfg wise, I am also middling, but there is a lot of room to improve now that I can irrigate my cities and start to build windmills once I have machinery. Sadly, I will have to go back in slavery. Fronts are too wide to risk not having whipping.
Power is the scariest graph - but here, the top dogs are at least not near my, excepting lljbubjbubjhanana. I am hoping whatever conflict is brewing in the north will keep him busy - at least until I can fill out my cities with longbows, pikes, and castles.
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On the latest episode of "I have no idea what the hell this person is trying to say with AI diplo"...
I guess he is asking for me to help him with a war against Mmjd, even though he is already at war with Gavagai? But would I be going in in 10 or 30 turns? Or would he be going in at those times? I currently have no offensive forces to speak of. I'm trying to get the basics set with longbows just so I don't get steamrolled. It will be a good while before I can scrounge an offensive 2 mover force + cats.
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big fat no to this request. at least splitting mmjd would make some kind of sense if i had an army
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