The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Alas, Babylon

Or not so alas, but. Spot the ref, win a point.

So the main OSU server decided to up and take a vacation for most of Sunday/Monday, which meant no Internet for me. This was horribly convenient, because I had a presentation due Monday which I was going to use it for. As it turns out I didn't need to talk. So it all turned out well.

So anyway. I'm very tired, and it's midnight, so I go to bed. Only to wake up at 3am, wide awake. What the hell? It's 3am. Can't sleep. The Internet is a fleeting memory. What to do? What to do?

Play Civ, of course.

Wasn't in the mood for a huge game, so I decided I'd try the mythical One City Challenge idea. Ended up deciding on Babylon to facilitate a 20k culture run (cheap religious/science buildings see, which are all culture), and because I've never played Babylon before. First run through, it's me and Hiawatha on a mini-continent. Hiawatha decides that Babylon needs to be purple and not red, and thus initiates a giant smackdown. Ok. Try two. The land is great. There's no resources, but it'll do. Better yet, nobody smacks me down because it's a Pangea and they're all having enormous world wars every 5 seconds. This, of course, leads to enormous AI armies roaming my little outpost, while I think "PleasepleasepleasegokillEnglandorsomebody. Pleasepleaseplease."

So they did, actually. And the Mongols ate it. And Persia. And the Ottomans. And I think somebody else did. Greece almost did after dominating forever and ever. Spain almost did. There was a LOT of war going on, fortunately never involving me. They were all afraid of my huge army of 4 spears, I'm sure.

Also, this was the first game I ever actually listened to the soundtrack to. It's actually a good soundtrack, although the addition of very soothing classical music to the Industrial Age is slightly disconcerting when there's dozens of AI units blowing the hell out of each other every turn.

To make a long story short, I missed Sistine's, I missed Shakespeare's, but I hit the Oracle, the Hanging Gardens, Bach's, and the Great Library. It was enough, eventually, for values of eventually = 1976 AD. Very nerve-wracking, though, watching the AI wars, and wondering if India was going to overwhelm everyone.

For the curious, here's a screenshot of Babylon and environs in 1975.

So I didn't manage to get back to sleep again until about 10am. Sort of. For like 20 minutes. Maybe. That sucked, especially because I had a very lengthy midterm at 12:30. Not sure how that's going to work out, since I went kinda out there on one question... "What is the Sambo Thesis? The Sambo Thesis says that the slaves were all happy-go-lucky and content to be slaves. This fails when you realize all these happy, content slaves were rebelling all the time, and everyone was so happy and content they were afraid of each other, which led to a happy and content low-level guerilla war between slaves and masters that lasted until the Civil War." I hope to hell the prof has a good sense of humor.

And in 3 hours, I can go to bed. I can't wait. I'm soooooo tired.

Posted by Dwip at November 4, 2003 8:30 PM