Civilization Revolution’s Problems: Research

So, let’s start with science in Civilization Revolution. It has some problems:

First: resources. Every special/bonus resource on the map has a technology prerequisite. For example: to trade wine, you need pottery. After discovering a new tech, you get to choose which one to research next. Choosing the right tech for the resources in your empire is always a good decision. However, it’s very hard to do. That’s because the selection window covers about 90% of the map. And there is no way to temporarily close it. So unless you have memorised the entire map, there’s no way of knowing what’s where. One thing helps: moving the selection cursor over a resource linked tech moves the map (in the background) to a (random?) resource of that kind. That’s a clue at least. However, if there’s only 1 resource linked tech on the list, it moves only once. So if you missed it, too bad. The only workaround is: 1. select a random tech, 2. close all other messages (usually a lot), 3. check out which resources you want, 4. press select and 5. switch to the research selection screen, 6. change research again. Damn.

Second: Tech advisor. In all recent versions of Civilization you could just select any technology in the tree and your researchers would go to work researching every prerequisite tech and finally the one you had chosen in the first place. Not here. Why? I have no clue. It should be such an easy feature to include.

So, that’s Tech in Civ Rev. Stay tuned for more!

Civilization Revolution

I’m totally addicted to Civilization *again*.

Civ 1 started it all. What a classic! Civ 2 added some cool stuff. Added some uncool stuff as well. Civ 3 … Same thing. Civ 4 was great, but it kept crashing on me. Funny side note: it crash behaviour was exactly the same on my Mac after I switched from PC. But that’s another story.

Civ Revolution is, IMO, the best Civilization ever. I love the simplified rules. That said, there are still so many things I don’t like about it. I’ve seen the PS3 version. It looks gorgeous. But the version I’m playing, the DS one, has horrible graphics. Horrible style and horrible execution. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is also a grid based game and it looks ten times better. Style and execution.

But that’s just one aspect of the game I don’t like. How can I have so many gripes about the best game in a series I love? Well, I guess it’s because I care. A lot. I intend to post all my problems with the game here. Stay tuned for more ranting…

Forwarding Hotmail to Gmail

Apparently this…

…is impossible…

Everybody I know who has tried to do it ends up getting an error message from Windows Live.

But somehow, it works fine for me … Strange.

MobileMe Wannabe

So I switched from Google to Apple’s new MobileMe service. Transfered all my mail to my new @me.com mail account. Published some pictures from iPhoto, synced my Address Book.

This thing looks great… But it just doesn’t work well. Not well enough to validate its price tag. I know there have been some technical problems at startup. But now that the service is up and running, I am having some major issues with the webbased interface:

• Editing contacts in Apple’s own Safari (in Windows) is a nightmare. The dropdown for adding new fields to a contact doesn’t react. This seems to work in Firefox though…
• When I add a birthdate to a contact and switch to calender view, I *only* see the birthday. Switching back to my contact, the changes I made have not been saved.
• Outlook syncing doesn’t work.

And it’s SLOOOW…

I really hope these are just growing pains. This thing could be the holy grail for syncgeeks like me!

UPDATE: It’s also not very ‘pushy‘.

The Sims 3 should have a ‘gambit system’

During her three week break between two jobs, my wife had plenty of time to play The Sims 2. This eventually lead to us having a thorough discussion about the title’s game design choices. She surprised me somewhat in the amount of thought she had obviously put into thinking about these sort of things. I mean, game design is supposed to be *my* job, not hers. Anyway, we came up with some improvements for The Sims 3. The most important one: to get rid of tedious micro management a ‘gambit system’ like the one in Final Fantasy XII should be introduced, replacing the ‘free will’ function.

“[The gambit system] allows the player to program each character to perform certain commands [...] in response to specified conditions. Using gambits, the player may set reactions to different stimuli for each character. Each gambit consists of three parts: a target, an action, and a priority.” (Wikipedia)

Here’s an example:

1. Me / Bladder < 25% / Use toilet
2. Everybody / Hunger < 50% (average) / Serve food
3. Me / Fun < 25% / Read book
4. Me / Time > 23:00 > Sleep
5. Me / Job requirement ‘Charisma’ < Target / Practise speech
6. …

Obviously, this sim is good at cooking…

By setting priorities and ‘programming’ sims like this, the player will be able to focus more on high level choices for sims (long term goals) in stead of bladder management. Please Maxis, make it so.

Converting AVI files to iPhone/iPod Touch format

This is a tricky one. I tried using VLC to convert my AVI’s but it produced corrupted MPEG4 files. Here’s another solution: use Roxio Toast to create a DVD disc image and mount it. Next, use Handbrake to convert the files choosing the iPhone preset. There you go!