CV4: Colonization is so frustrating. It's like you can never avoid war with the Indians no matter what you do. Okay, maybe I haven't tried using the French, whose bonus is that they have better relations with the natives. But other than that, their other bonuses are quite useless to me.
Now I'm not going to expand so much, unlike what I usually do in CV4. In that game, I expand as quickly as I can as long as there is empty land. Now, since they inevitably declare war in about 100 turns, I cannot expand so much lest I don't have the guns to protect every single settlement.
The AI isn't stupid. It doesn't attack if it can't win. They always wait till they have more guns that you before declaring war, even if their attitude towards you is Annoyed, which is the worst possible in peacetime.
Worse is that it tends to concentrate most of its units on one settlement at a time. This is horrible if I have too many settlements, ie I have few men in each colony, ie overstretch my manpower.
Usually, I have enough for 2 Soldiers in each colony, but this isn't enough. Even with a Fort (provides 150% Defense bonus), 2 Soldiers can only hold out for so long. Several times, they overwhelmed me with sheer numbers, eg 10+ Indian Braves, some mounted and some with Guns and some both. Every single settlement is important to me because I always plan the role of each settlement, like the "main port" for my ships, or the "cigar factory" where all tobacco is transported to to become cigars for me to sell, or the "main farm" where food is in abundance and provides me with either a lot of food or a steady supply of new Colonists that pop out whenever the number of Food in the warehouse hits 200.
So I reload each time a settlement is razed. Okay, I cheat, but I don't care. I'm still learning the little tricks of the game and there aren't many forums out there for this game. I still find the map of the New World too small though, even at Huge.
Haven't played DotA for over a week. Kinda like a cold turkey, except I still play other games. Like Empires (HL2 mod).
Empires is a fun mod when there are many players. One server I frequent, Napalm, can have up to 46 players. That means a max of 23 on each side.
Empires, in short, is like playing C&C, except you're the Rifleman running around. In terms of RTS, it is a very simple game. As the Commander, who plays the game as an RTS, you build Refineries on Resource Nodes on the maps to gain Resources (ie money). With the money, you can build Barracks, which are our spawn points, Vehicle Factories, where we can buy tanks to pwn others with, Radar, which handles the researches and other interesting stuff.
If you're not the Commander ( 1 per team only), then you're able to choose 1 of the 4 classes to spawn as: Scout (sniper), Rifleman (heavy damage guy), Grenadier (mine specialist cum anti-tank guy) and Engineer (builder). All 4 are fun, only the Scout is useless most of the time because it takes 2 shots to kill unless you get a headshot.
I love being a Grenadier because I can lay mines, which doesn't need a good ping to kill others (I generally have about 350ms on that server) plus my anti-tank bazooka has homing missiles.
But if the situation arises where Grenadiers are useless, I'd be a Rifleman. As a Rifleman, there are 3 guns to choose from. 2 types of semi-auto machines guns for ramboing and a Heavy MG for camping purposes. This Heavy MG requires the player to be in prone position before firing in order to have decent accuracy. If not, it's almost uncontrollable when it fires. To offset its lack of accuracy, it has a magazine of 200 rounds. It's like a shower. Lead shower.
However, if I find that my team sucks and everyone keeps dying, I go Engineer who can learn the Revive skill. With this, I can run to any corpse of my teammates before they respawn and get them back up. Respawning at spawn points usually means taking some time to run back to the frontline. I help them save time.
I usually don't go for Scouts because if you can't kill with one shot, why bother? Scouts have become partly invisible though, depending on how many walls they're touching. Even without touching any walls, they are merely a vague patch. With about 2-3 walls, they become almost invisible. If they're in some shadowy corner, you can't tell unless you're shooting at him and blood sprays out. Or if he just shot you. Shooting causes the Scout to become visible again for a second or so.
Basically, the game is a hybrid of First-Person Shooter and Real-Time Strategy, inspired by my old favourite Half Life mod, Natural Selection. It's like playing C&C with intelligent units who usually follows orders, but sometimes follows their own ideas. Not listening to orders isn't always bad. Sometimes you get a smart guy who can ninja into their base and do something crazy, like build a Barracks behind their frontline or sneak an APC (fast tank cum mobile spawn point) into enemy base.
Ninjas are fantastic because they're so fun to cooperate with or watch. Sometimes, halfway through the game, you can suddenly hear the automatic message, "You have been defeated," and you see your Commander Vehicle destroyed by enemy ninjas and you go," WTF?!?"
You see, Engineers can build their own walls anywhere. If an APC manages to sneak to the enemy Commander Vehicle, and the enemy Commander is too busy watching the frontline and not paying attention to his own surroundings, an Engineer can spawn there and build walls around the Vehicle and raise them high enough to trap it within 4 walls.
Then, anyone can do anything to it. Of course, the Commander himself can jump out and try to defend himself, but that's usually quite risky since his death will cause a major lack of attention at the frontline till he respawns.
And even if he respawns, there is no guarantee that he can jump over the walls or even evade the attacks of the Engineers and anyone who has spawned from that APC.
And destroying the CV is the main objective of the game.
Usually, such sneak attacks don't work, since some morons always spawns in the main base which is damn far from the frontline. But it is these morons who can hear the APC or anything that shouldn't be happening there. And BAM! Half the team will commit suicide and respawn in the main base, effectively abandoning the frontline.
Which doesn't really hurt since a successful APC sneak attack means its own team will want to spawn in it too. Probably the whole team, since killing that CV = win. All or nothing.
Once, I even saw an APC sneak to our own CV while our team had pulled off what was described above. Then it was a race to kill each other's CV. We didn't win though, since they had more pros in their team. Managed to kill enough of us to buy enough time to destroy ours.
One game or two is usually enough for me. Each normally lasts an hour or so. Unlike NS, which takes about 15 mins per game.
NS, so different from the old versions, in which a stalemate can lasts hours. Now, 4-hour matches are an impossibility. Back then, I could leave halfway through for dinner and come back for the same round an hour later. Now, 45-min games are considered long games.
Somehow I feel like I rarely behave in a matured way.
Something funny happened today. My Tech Comm group was rehearsing our presentation and this girl was presenting her part on how the solar cell works. In a solar cell, there is a silicon wafer and she has to describe how the postive and negative side interact to form electric currents.
So she has to touch on the concepts of free electrons and holes. And at one point, she asked the audience," So you must be wondering what a hole is."
Honestly, I was thinking," Not really..."
I know, it's somewhat perverted of me, but still, LOL! I was trying so hard not to laugh I had to use my hand to cover my smile.
What a topic for a girl to explain!
So some guy I met actually does believe that Noah's Ark did exist! Wow! I was amazed when he tried to explain that it existed because they couldn't have known the exact dimensions of the Ark back then if they hadn't built it, which were written in the Bible. They didn't have the engineering skills to build a ship that big 500 years ago.
My thoughts were," Aren't you already killing your own stand? They didn't have the technology for building wooden ships that big. Where the numbers came from? They pulled them out of their asses!"
C'mon, a wooden ship as big as was described(137m long 23m wide and 14m high) cannot support its own weight! No wood is that strong! Noah would have needed steel supports for his Ark! (A ship this long needs metals to hold it together horizontally, at least, or it can just bend and break apart in the sea)
Plus what the ship looked like was changed several times over the past milleniums, from a nice ship with 3 stories to a large rectangular box with a sloping roof. Real life examples of wooden ships with similar dimensions have been built by the Chinese, like the Treasure Ships in the Ming Dynasty, but these were fit for rivers only. The waves in the open seas would have smashed them to bits.
Then food. They could catch so many fish? What about the carnivores like tigers and the herbivores? Tigers don't eat fish. Neither do the giraffes. What about the pandas? They eat nothing but bamboo shoots...
And the aftermath. Bringing all the species to all the places around the world would mean that Noah circumvented the globe. Why didn't the American Natives believe in God?
And genes! The disgusting amount of incest after the Flood would have caused fantastic genetic dilution and lots of retards among all species! So.. wtf?
Let us not forget the fishes! All the saltwater and freshwater would have mixed together! For 53 weeks! So it means the fishes adapted, which would have taken at least weeks, which implies the water arrived slowly to allow adaption.
So if the water didn't rise quickly, men would have time to build boats or ships, especially those living on mountains.
And now to the logic part. Millions of people died. Instead of rehab, God believes in the death penalty. "Thou shalt not kill" doesn't apply to him, even if he's your role model. (And why "He"? Why not create a special term just for God? It's so sexist saying God is a male! Christian feminists are such oxymorons!)
Just count how many people God has killed and compare with the number of people Satan has killed. If murder can be justified, then this won't make sense. But if murder is always evil, as people who are against the death penalty or abortions say, then God is millions of times more evil than Satan.
And back to my old argument, if God is omniscient, how could he have created humans that became evil? He'd have known! So he must have been evil to create lives just to kill them all in one fell swoop!
To argue all the above as good Christians, one can only use "Because God willed it."
And that is based on the reason "God exists."
Which is the basis of all Christian logic, which cannot be proven nor disproven.
Which, in the end, doesn't make sense if you actually believe in everything derived from it.
Anything that cannot be proven true, isn't true. Everything derived from a theory that isn't true, cannot be true. Until the foundation is visible, the whole structure is merely standing on thin air. Occam's Razor is very useful sometimes. The simplest explanation is usually the truth.
"I don't love you because you're beautiful. You're beautiful because I love you."
Does this sound romantic? Is it actually romantic? I mean, it contains all the right words, but arranged this way, it sounds like you saying she's not actually beautiful except in your eyes. Not really what one would want to say to a girl. Comments are always welcomed.
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