Salamander8

I love me some cheese. In fact I probably love it too much since I have to force myself to stop eating it once I start!

A bit of a departure from my usual very heavy metal music, but I like a lot of stuff and after playing some Victoria II with it's period music, I dusted off my best of Strauss CD and played one of my favorite pieces by him, Die Fledermaus (The Bat): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPybrOxRoT4

Well I saw the:"Kindest, sweetest...no way you're a pessimist" part so it sounded that way, but part of the problem with message boards is the lack of inflection and body language so things 'sound' a bit off in your head when reading them at times. I can feel what she means with family. My father has moved several times after my parents got divorced and never told me where he went and didn't even talk to me at grandpa's funeral 3 years ago, so I know where Iliad's coming from. It took me years to 'unlearn' all the bigotry he spewed over my growing years and I'm actually glad we didn't spend more time together as I may have turned out with his inane prejudices. And one of my few friends from 25 years has decided to give me grief over a video game for Pete's sake. Not only is my glass half empty, the substance that is in the glass is toxic.

What? That can't be true. You are like the sweetest, kindest person I've gotten the pleasure to know; there's no way you're a pessimist. You don't seem like the girl who doesn't trust anyone or who has an angry family based on how nice you sound. Someone who loves to write and stargaze can't be anywhere close to that. Being pessimistic doesn't preclude one from being pleasant, as Iliad proves, although she scored more optimistic than I. I'm one of the most pessimistic people to be around that anyone who knows me knows, but I'm certainly not nasty to people without provocation. I do doubt their motives based on past experiences and I expect the worst out of any situation, but I also feel that if other people are having a bad of a time as I am, I don't need to make it worse. My friend Don, who is probably the only person I personally know that is darker than I am has a saying: "Every silver lining has a cloud", and I find that he's quite often correct.

It is quite complicated but it comes with several tutorials to help. If you can play Star Fleet Battles or Federation and Empire you should be good here. It's more detailed than Space Empires 4 gold (my favorite 4x game ever), but if you can play SE4 well, you should be ok.. As for specs, the box says: XP/Vista/7 OS, Pentium IV 2.4 Ghz or AMD3500+ CPU, 2.0 Gigs of RAM, Geforce 8800 or ATI Radeon X1900 or above. I have XP with 3 gigs of RAM, a 3 Ghz Intel E8400, and an Nvidia GTX 470 and it runs fine for me. It sounds like it might be too much for your laptop, but you can turn some of the effects down to help.

They've already patched to 1.2 and I'm trying Japan out as I grind my way to industrialization. I found to my chagrin that trying to build too many Men-O-War and Frigates with no indigenous supply of artillery not only costs a lot (which I knew), but it also slows production as my demand for the artillery was too high for world supply! Something to watch for in the future. I've added a couple of screenshots to possibly pique people's interest. I'm actually playing this game more than Civ5 as while I don't actually dislike Civ5, I find it a bit simpler than I'm used to and Victoria II is definitely in the other direction. I did not want to flood the forums with pictures of every single separate game screen, but wanted to share some of the game's features in some detail. Here's the Main UI. each of the buttons on the top Left displays some info and you click on them for more detailed info. The lower right has various messages and you can click on the flags on the far lower right to get details of things like who did what to who and who passed certain laws and who went bankrupt. By my small flag/symbol in the upper left just below the buttons you'll see my status as a nation in the global community. The star is my prestige, the factory is my industrialization, and the crossed swords my military power. The left number for each of these is the value of the attribute and the right one is my nation's spot in the worldwide hierarchy for that attribute. These 3 are then compared to give me nation's rank overall and that is displayed in the circle on the lower right of my flag. You can see that I'm ranked as the 48th nation overall, I started at 68th or 64th, so some progress there. The military unit's number is the thousands of troops in that unit and the color green means full strength, organization, and supply. It turns yellow and then red as this worsens. http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan1.jpg The trade screen is this one. It lists all the goods that are made throughout the world and how much you import/export and the costs. If you hover over on of the goods in the upper portion it will give you more details. http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan2.jpg The Politics screen! You can see that Japan is an absolute monarchy at this time and that the conservative "Court Faction" is in charge. You actually start with the reactionaries in charge, but while I want state control of industry (although I can't build factories yet), I don't like how tight the reigns are on the country with the reactionaries in charge. At the lower right are the various decisions you have and you can see that the Meiji Restoration button is greyed out. I don't meet the requirements yet, but I'm working on it! Hovering over the question mark associated with the decision will list the requirements. This is also where you can ascertain what the people think on various issues and where you can enact reforms. http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan3.jpg It's a great game, but also extremely detailed. In this new game above, Prussia annexed several northern Germanic states and formed the Northern German Federation, and Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Ottoman Empire are all fighting over the 'bottom' 2 spots of the great powers so a lot messages of them discrediting each other and the flip/flop of gaining/losing great power status are flooding my diplomacy messages UI!

So far you're the only one more cynical than my 84. :blink:

I do like the trade system overall. I was able to get a Vita-Saw last night by trading away the white paint I got out of a crate. I just wish people would play the game when they are on an actual game server and not spam chat like Orgrimmar.

These guys are insane! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0n2Ew2RS4o I bought this album (Antithesis) after it came up on Amazon as a recommendation after buying something else a couple of years back and after I heard this technical and brutal masterpiece, I had to grab all their other albums. This album and this song in particular remain my favorites.

He's bigger now as he's 14 months old instead of 3 months shown here, but here's Karl my new cat as a kitten when I got him last November. http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/PICT0004.jpg His favorite hobby is turning basement lights on and off by playing with the lanyards. :tongue:

Not too surprised I got 84 of 100. This is pretty accurate overall.

I strongly dislike the store. I don't like the whole micro-transaction model anywhere, although I am guilty of using it in CoH/CoX a bit. The trading spam in most servers reminds me of the various MMOs I've played, but more and more servers are telling people to shut up and play, you can trade somewhere else. I have played a lot of TF2 since I was in the beta in 07, I have over 500 hours on the game since launch as it's easy to jump into, and you can play in small chunks while doing other things easily. And it's fun to just blow stuff up like crazy! I've successfully destroyed at least half-a-dozen sentry guns with my fish, and nothing beats the feeling of killing a heavy with nothing but your fish. I had a medic uber me and of course I pulled out my fish and went crazy, I finally got the "Doctoring the Ball" achievement thanks to that.

I'm sure we have at least some TF2 players here, and I'm a big fan of the game. Even though the new Polygon pack adds a micro-transaction store I'm not fond of, it did add some great new items, including: http://www.freefrag.com/newitems/pack_final_graphic2.jpg That's right, among the new Scout gear, they give you a melee fish! Greatest weapon ever! Some of the new pay money for a hat or for paint ideas I really dislike but the other new droppable/craftable items are pretty cool, but none as cool as the fish! If I get a name tag to drop, which let's you rename items, I need to name my fish someday. :wink:

If you're a fan of Paradox game's various grand-strategic games, you'll like this one. I'm still trying to get to grip with the taxation problems I've been having, but it has a lot of potential. I never played the original Victoria, but I do love the Hearts of Iron and Europa Universallis series. This game covers the time period of 1836-1936 and currently only has the one grand campaign, but the modders are already at work, and I'm sure Paradox will make expansions for it. My one real gripe with Paradox is their spotty QC. As an example: when they first released the Semper Fi pack for HoI3, there was a bug where you could never or so close to never that it may as will be never, catch enemy submarines that were performing commerce raiding even with extra research focus on it, and sending out several patrols of destroyers. It's been patched to hopefully fix this, but my friend in CA. that plays these games with me online has been having patching issues and so we've been playing EU3 instead as our normal online game group is having "MMO-issues" and it's just us two right now. The premise is simple; take any selectable nation, and this covers pretty much any nation in the world at the time of the game, and lead them to glory all while balancing the budget, researching technologies, and trying to keep the populace working and happy enough to not rise in armed revolt. I have been avoiding playing any of the 8 great powers (Prussia, Austria, Great Britain, Russia, Ottoman Empire, Spain, France, USA) so far as I want something in the middle to learn with, so have so far tried Bavaria and Switzerland, as my Sokoto and Haiti games didn't go well and those two nations low literacy hurt my research. Japan looks interesting as you can try to research the proper technologies to implement the Meiji Restoration, so will have to try it in future games. The USA has to contend with it's slavery issues and could spark the civil war, many of the smaller Germanic states get Pan-German nationalists that want to unify into the German nation, and etc. It looks to have a lot of replay value and certainly has strategic depth.

It's hard for me to judge this one to be honest. They've simplified some aspects to the point of making the game a bit dull in some ways. It's not outright bad, but I prefer the original Civ and Civ II. I never liked 3 and 4 was good, but the first 2 look like they shall remain my favorites, even though I don't have the original anymore as my old roommate from the 90s stole it. :verymad:

Pizza! I only have it with lots of cheese and sauce though, not a fan of too much stuff on it. Pasta in various incarnations follows behind with the simple but enjoyable cheeseburgers and fries nipping at their heels.

More classic Death Metal. Monstrosity is an older Death Metal band and those who know of George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher of Cannibal Corpse fame should recognize him here before he took the vocal spot in Cannibal Corpse from Chris Barnes. I actually prefer Monstrosity as while I own several Cannibal Corpse albums, I don't really listen to them all that much and Monstrosity has deeper musical themes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaTiVbp0_oc

Erich Raeder: Admiral of the Third Reich. Since I'm back to work I ordered some more books, but I'm so far behind now! I still have half-a-dozen or more Terry Pratchett books to read, as well as an extensive collection of military history books. I mostly have WW2 stuff, but also some WW1 and some others like Alfred Thayer Mahan's book on the influence of sea power on history.