Omorka's Lair

So I've been playing rather a lot of the various Civ IV games lately, since bassfingers got the Steam versions of them for me as a birthday present.

One of them - Civ IV: Colonization - isn't really an expansion of Civ IV; it's a resource-management game (much more resource-management-heavy than regular Civ IV) that largely uses the Civ engine. And I suck at it. I've played four or five games through on the easiest level, and not only have I not won once, I've never successfully started a revolution.

See, I keep ending the game with a reasonably-sized territory, a huge treasury, strong relationships with my Native neighbors, good relationships with my fellow colonies, a decent relationship with the monarch, a handful of soldiers, and lots of fat & happy citizens who aren't particularly interested in revolting. While this is generally how I play turn-based resource-management strategy games, it is not a winning strategy when the game requires that my citizens rise up against oppression and tyranny in order for me to successfully complete the game.

Clearly, I'm Doing It Wrong.

What I really want is a port of Masters of Orion II for the iTouch. Or something quite like it.

The latest Quicktime update seems to have killed Civ IV on my machine. :-( Opening it causes the icon to appear in the dock, bounce once, and then disappear again, with no explanation whatsoever.

I realize the groups of "Mac people" and "video gamers" on my flist don't overlap very much, but is anyone else having this problem? Any idea what to do about it? I already snagged the latest update from Aspyr and ran it (successfully) - it didn't help. (I'm running 10.4.11, if that makes a difference to anyone.)

Edit: Nevermind. Aspyr did have a fix; it just wasn't where I was looking for it, and didn't come up up in the first two Google searches. Third time's the charm, I guess.

Here's an image of all the races that formally join the New Alliance of Free Stars (or the Empire of [your name here], depending on what you chose to call it) during the game.

There are several other friendly races, and one that isn't exactly friendly, but that you can trade with, that aren't in the picture. Also, the Thraddash - the big rhino things with the cigar - eventually turn against you (you have to steal something from them in order to save the galaxy, and they don't ever forgive you). Sadly, the artist has not done the Hierarchy, or the unallied races.

(Ran into T. the cute gamer guy at dinner tonight, along with his girlfriend. I never see him outside of gaming events! Nice to know he exists. Between that and seeing C. the 7th Sea player at Middle Market more frequently these days, I'm feeling that old urge to get out the dice again.)

I am going to do a GURPS Space Opera setting. I'm also going to try to polish GURPS Jorune into playable shape; it's actually mostly done - just needs stuff like equipment lists.

If I finish both of the above, then I'll also try to start back in on my old, old GURPS Bronze Age fantasy setting. I need to figure out which of the standard GURPS Fantasy races would be part of that world, how the magic system actually works, and all that - given how many of my old notes I don't have (I now suspect many of them didn't survive the fire) and the change from 3rd ed. revised to 4th ed., I'll be basically rebuilding the world from the ground up.

Now, for the space opera setting, I can either work on my own Three Masters setting (the galaxy is being colonized via jump-drive, by humans, an aquatic race with cephalopoidal and echinodermatic traits, and a bizarre race of methane-breathers), or borrow wholesale a universe that's already largely fleshed out and just adapt it. If I do the latter, there are two obvious choices: Master of Orion, or Star Control (in both cases, it'd be the version seen in the second game - MoO II: BaA, or StarCon II: the Ur-Quan Masters - since, oddly enough, in both cases the third game is widely seen as inferior, and in the case of StarCon3, written by someone other than the original authors). Both have interesting universes. The MoO alien races are better fleshed out as races (meaning that they'd be easier to put into game terms); the StarCon timeline and universe are richer, plus I wouldn't have to create a starmap from scratch. There are fewer MoO races, which has both good and bad aspects. StarCon would require that I pay more attention to starship combat than I really feel like, but I can sidestep that by setting the game outside of one of the two wars in the in-game timeline.

Hmm. Thinky thinky . . .

(Man, I need a StarCon II icon. I'm sure there are lots out there; it's a bigger fandom than Eureka is. I'll have to go looking later. Failing that, I can steal some screenshots and make one, but my 1337 Photoshop Skillz are not so good.)

I had never seen someone doing fake screenshots from a non-Infocom game before (well, All Your Base memage doesn't count). Indeed, the whole take-someone-through-a-game-in-screenshots was something I was unfamiliar with.

But - well, while this was a solution to the General ZEX/Shofixti Maiden problem I had contemplated at the time, and I know it's been toyed with in fic, I never imagined that anyone would actually write it up as gameshots. (Warning: that link is mildly NSFW, it's distinctly ficcish, and either it's slash or the Syreen relationship that's canon in the game is a lesbian one, depending on whether you think the 'Captain' in the game takes on your gender or not. Also, if you haven't yet played a game that came out in 1992, and you actually want to do so, and you don't want a major plot point given away, there are SPOILERS! Also, Darth Vader is Luke's father, and Dumbledore dies at the end of the 6th book.)

The same author has some more of these listed under 'The Secret Theater' here.