Continuing on this vein, let us further elaborate on why it is often a good idea to watch Highlander inebriated (Grey Goose, it turns out, fills plot holes excellently).

It also helps with the...somewhat questionable costuming choices.

To quote Sarah, "The 1970s! They flee! In terror!"

This would be the same episode where Mac randomly changes outfits mid-scene, and our azn gangsta friend up there has the same godawful shirt that he likes so much, he has it in both blue, and puke yellow. And no, I'm not going to post that, because you just can't handle the horror. Trust me on this.

And just to throw in a couple of oldies but goodies from Season 1:

Smug Mac is smug.

I think this one speaks for itself.

OTOH, we have moments of incredible awesomeness, which I don't highlight much but are why this show is so fucking awesome, such as, for instance, that bit where Richie drives a motorcycle out of a window.

So, you know.

Another reason why we must love GalCiv is, it allows me to do this:

Not that I'm actually playing this particular game, mind you, as I have ridiculous amounts of work to do, but. You know. If I DID have time.

[21:49] Dwip: Now then, box. What goodies did you bring me from Amazon?
[21:49] Dwip: Textbooks? Enh. But oh, what's this? New Scalzi? And new SM Stirling? Yes please.

[00:05] Dwip: Now we are faced with questions. Questions like "So, do I want to read a lot? Which book? Or do I want to finish conquering the universe?"

[02:57] *wins enormously easy game of GalCiv* Well, I'll just read Zoe's Tale for an hour or so.

[06:30] Man, that book was awesome! Also man, I'm tired. What time is...ohshi-

Thank you for that, John Scalzi.

In which three factors converge:

1. I just spent the last week sick, so I played video games.
2. I haven't blogged on a new game in a while.
3. My current game (and the one before it) of Galactic Civilizations 2: Twilight of the Arnor is indescribably awesome.

So, the game. It's a turn-based 4x space strategy game. If you played Space Empires III or Master of Orion or such, you know what I'm talking about, here. Aliens driving around in spaceships colonizing brave new worlds and blowing the bejesus (or alien equivilent) out of each other with exotic weaponry.

Rarely has this been done in such a polished manner, however. I mean, this game has everything - custom races, custom ships (to the extent that you can put together pieces in a Lego-like manner), pick your colors, pick your insignia, pick your abilities, you name it, you can probably customize it. Hell, even the racial tech trees (as of Twilight) are custom to each race. It's incredibly cool.

It's also backed up by a pretty decent AI, which is challenging even on the lower settings (at least to me).

In any case it's awesome and you should go to www.galciv2.com and check it out. If you have any interest in this sort of thing.

Anyway. So after a spell of getting my ass handed to me because I kept going broke because I never built econ buildings (oops), I came back to the game. Two games I want to talk about.

The first, as the Krynn (a religious pseudo-race that's big on spies and cultural conversions), was pretty unique, insofar as I was teching merrily along, doing my thing, when all of a sudden I got a random event, and gigantic swarms of pirates showed up. Pirates that, coincidentally, had better weaponry than anybody else in the galaxy. They quickly drove around, blew up everyone's navies, and proceeded to sit around because they couldn't invade (you need troop transports for that).

So I teched all the way up the appropriate military tech trees, built some ships, waged a guerilla war against the pirates for a while until I could built up a critical mass of ships, then eradicated them.

Then I eradicated some of my neighbors for good measure. Hey, I saved them from the pirates, right?

This seemed to be a good plan, at least until I got another random mega event, which spawned whole fleets of robotic death ships, who once again flew around obliterating all and sundry. Not to be deterred, I built my own death fleets and avenged my (many, many billions) of fallen comrades.

It's pretty unusual to get two massive events like that in one game, although you'll usually get many many smaller events - economic booms, recessions, minor artifacts, and what have you. The mega events are just that - real game changers, which can instantly reconfigure the whole playing field. And I find that I like this. Unlike some other games, GalCiv does this in a generally fun sort of way, and although I preferred the event a couple games back that spawned me a ton of awesome planets, the pirates and robot ships provided a decent challenge in a game I was handily winning.

Now, to my current game. I am the Drengin, I race who pretty much redefine the term assholery. And they're the soft branch of their race - unlike the Korath, who kill everyone who isn't them, the Drengin settle for enslavement.

So as you can guess, I decided to conquer the galaxy.

My plans got somewhat thwarted both by the map, which randomly generated me a dense starfield with many abundant planets - which is great, but offers a real slog when conquering. I was also thwarted by the Krynn (of all people), who got a really good start, and rapidly expanded, taking over a few minor races, one of the major ones, and then set their sights on me.

Cue the biggest, hardest war I have ever fought in GalCiv, and probably one of the toughest I've fought in any game, ever.

At war's start, the Krynn outnumbered me, outteched me, pretty much outdid me in everything that mattered, not to mention they were something like twice or three times my size and bordered me on two sides. Worlds were so many, ships so hard to build, and battle lines so fluid, it turned into a game of who could sneak transports past whom to capture planets. Couple that with the enormous influence of the Krynn, and I had some serious issues.

Fast forward a couple of hundred turns, during which peace just...isn't happening - he won't do it, meaning we're locked in a death struggle until one of us dies. My economy is going down the drain, but I've finally teched up to a point where I can fight the Krynn on an even ground.

This is the main Krynn heavy fighter, his latest, the M9 V14, which is brand new and features the best weaponry and defenses he can afford.

This is my main heavy fighter, the Starhawk M8, or the 8th version of the Starhawk, discounting a couple versions of its closely related cousin, the Starfire. It's a showcase for my tech advantage - my one psionic beam roughly equals the firepower of his four plasma cannons, and my shielding is such that I can withstand fire from multiple Krynn heavy fighters. Thanks to my excellent miniturization technology, I also have an excellent engine, which allows me to jet all over the galaxy - a necessity in this kind of war.

The problem is that Starhawks are expensive, and I have a scant few planets capable of producing them, whereas Krynn heavy fighters are very cheap, and he has lots of planets. I'm fighting entire fleets of Krynn every single engagement.

So I built a ship that can do that. That's the Starslaughter M5, the fifth generation of my medium-class ship. It's roughly equivilent to three Starhawk M8s, and one of them is capable of fighting fleets of Krynn heavy fighters and winning.

I have three of them. They're prohibitavely expensive, and only one planet in my entire nation has the ability to construct them at all. But they're single-handedly winning the war for me - the Krynn just can't touch them.

Here's a picture of some Starhawks in action versus Krynn fighters:

The green beams from the greyish ships are the Krynn firing at me, and the orange is me firing at them. At bottom, a volley of Krynn plasma beams are being stopped by my shields.

And here are some Starslaughters in a highly mismatched engagement versus some unlucky Krynn fighters:

Note how much bigger the Starslaughters are than either heavy fighter class. Too, that was about the end of the engagement - one volley from a Starslaughter can destroy multiple Krynn ships. It has the name for a reason.

As awesomely powerful as my ships are, though, they are not the best in the galaxy. That honor goes to the Yor, who have missile tech and ships of such size and power, they could take out fleets of Starslaughters like I take out fleets of Krynn fighters.

This is why I'm fortunate that the whole world loves me because I'm the only one taking on the Krynn menace. Also I just bribed the Yor to go fight the Arceans to keep them busy (GalCiv has a great diplomacy model), so there's that.

This is a map of my half of the galaxy, current time. I'm the obnoxious red and yellow stuff (red on the minimap), the Krynn are the greyish symbols, the Yor purple, Arceans yellow, and Torians green.

Looks like I'm doing pretty good, right? I'm clearly winning. But if you look at the thick red lines, you'll see how much I had to conquer to get there - 12 or 15 worlds in the north, a good 35 in the south, plus another 20 or 30 recaptures of my own worlds. This has been an exhaustive slog of a thing, and each of those worlds is costing me on order of 0.4 billion guys per world.

And it's destroying me. Check out Tiberius IV, here:

I've basically depopulated it, and another 5 or 6 worlds just like it, sending them off to die in the war. It started at about the 15 or 16 billion mark, and now? Well, you can see.

So the battle lines you see there may be my last push - even if I can continue to fight the Krynn ship to ship, I'm almost out of the troops I need to take their worlds.

It's been a hell of a game.

[EDIT]

Finished tonight. Scrounged up enough guys to take down basically all of the western Krynn empire, leaving them with whatever minor planets they had in the northeast and southeast corners. Declared peace.

Took a look at the effort it was going to take to conquer everybody else, sighed, and went straight for a tech victory. Meanwhile, my culture was apparently so vast, I was taking over planets left and right - probably about another 15 or so, including both Arcean homeworlds. To paraphrase the movie:

"This is madness!"

"THIS. IS. DRENGIA!" *zot*

Because numbers are fun:

I lost 127 ships while destroying 921 Krynn ships.
I lost 345 BILLION soldiers while killing something close to 863 billion Krynn.

Which is a lot of dudes. And a lot of ships.

Funnily enough, I skipped a lot of things I would have normally gone for, otherwise. I did almost no terraforming, for example, and skipped all of the fleet helper modules (which totally saved my ass when I was the Krynn, but just didn't apply here). Never made it to the end of the beam tech tree. Crazy stuff.

[23:50] TontoMarius: I almost want to sign up for the free 3 month Amazon Prime, but then I don't.

[23:51] serenadingwords: What does Prime do again?
[23:51] serenadingwords: Besides beat down Amazon Megatron a lot.

I think my last couple of days can be summed up sufficiently with this xkcd:

Mainly in response to this post of Samson's.

Still thinking I will more or less avoid the political stuff here, however. Last time I did...it was bad. Real bad. Hopefully I have learned something since 2004. Maybe.