Recent content by Blarg

I think you're right about this. This same issue comes up all the time these days, unfortunately. The standards are low and getting lower, and consumers are pretty much going along with it. I've seen this come up with WoW and with some of the reviews of AOE 3, also. The most recent one...

RAM. Consider 512 a minimum for anything these days, and 1 gig is really more like what someone who wants to play games should have. Some games show much improved progress with up to 2 gigs of RAM, and everything is just getting more RAM intensive all the time, including the Windows operating...

A 256 video card paired with only 256 megs of system RAM is a pretty hilarious combo. You've got a system that part almost maxed out and a system that's part par for the course six or seven years ago. The metaphor of driving a porsche with a volkswagen engine comes to mind. RAM is a heck of a...

I agree. This stuff in this thread is preposterous hero worship. The guy killed what, 12 million in China in a year's time? 30 million is no big deal? Gimme a break. Realize too that at the time he did that, it was effectively exponentially a larger number of people. Madrid only had about...

I got huge brownie points by adopting someone else's religion. :) He demanded it of me, and what the heck, why not. Plenty diplo points with him. Then I conquered him and kept his holy city and all his temples for myself. :)

I dunno about that. I had 18 cities last game. No way in heck I'm really going to know what's best for every city to build.

Man, if you have 7 catapults PLUS cannon PLUS your troops, you're going to be putting that city in serious danger. I wouldn't bother upgrading catapults just because upgrades are so expensive, and catapults are quite good however you use them. I'd just be seeking to get rid of the non-upgraded...

If you can defend it, having a holy city on your front lines can help a lot in the culture wars, if you have a great prophet to build his special building there.

Space definitely seems to matter a lot. It gets you negatives for being too close, and if your city expands and grabs a tile from an AI's city when you put in a theater or some other cultural doohickey, war the very next turn is common. That's what's reigned in my cultural nuking of everyone...

I find it kind of weird. Often they want techs even if they're way ahead of me, but either for free or at a ridiculous bargain. At the same time, no way will they trade equivalent level techs with me, wonder or no. Strangely, this is usually the case even if our relations are off the charts...

Catherine and Isabel are always all up in my junk. Quite a pain really.

I was trying to copy Sulla, and I found it hard, too. Building up huge culture and encroaching on borders, then gradually culturally stealing them, gets the AI fighting mad. I was constantly having them go to war with me, and because I put so much into culture, my miltary wasn't all that...

I think it's not complex in the way some games are, but there are a lot of little things to know. You don't have to have hugely deep or insightful thinking; you need to have brute force thinking, the kind that is about finding out about a whole ton of little things, and keeping track of them...

I just played a game in which I had like 20 cities -- at least 18 I know, because I saw I had 18 theaters at the end of the game screens. I kept every city except two that had no culture so were automatically destroyed. It made my research slow here and there, that's for sure. I was doing a...

I find the game fairly dull and exceedingly elementary as a war game. Therefore I enjoy building more than anything pretty much by default. When a medievall swordsman can take down a helicopter gunship, I don't know what you're getting into, but it's no kind of a war game by my standards...