I'm just over a week/4000 years into Civ VI. It's about what you'd expect - iterative improvements over its predecessor. Here's the downlow:


The governing system has become more and less complicated. Your chosen government is pretty straightforward, but that dicates your available policy slots. Policies allow you to emphasize bonuses, e.g. build settlers faster or gain culture from trade routes. This is the biggest user-facing innovation. It lets you rule with your own style, but also react to the civilization lifecycle - growth, war, science.


Number two on the change list is the addition of districts. These are geographical tiles you set aside for certain types of buildings. E.g. an entertainment district allows you to build an arena or zoo, you need a harbor district for a shipyard. In effect, it primarily creates a dependency tree for buildings that that were just a flat list in previous games. It's deeper than that, of course, but not too significant. I'm mostly curious what the modding community will do with this.


Religion takes a page out of the policies book - each religion can choose to emphasize certain bonuses. Also you can name it. I went with Zoidbergism.


I don't remember if espionage worked this way last game, but in Civ VI spies are regular units (they've historically been consumed by their actions). Their repertoire has expanded and their experience system is the most unique of any unit. On the minus side, I haven't found a way to automate their behavior and you can accrue quite a few units.


City-states are back. They're much the same: non-competing factions for you to woo or conquer.


Great people are back, with a considerably more varied list of benefits.


Another minor change is research boosting. Basically an in-game event (positive or negative) will decrease the time required to research techonology. E.g. defeat three barbarians or find a natural wonder. This gives you a set of minor, short term objectives to go after.


Artifacts, museums, and galleries are a new way to get culture and money. There isn't too much to it, but it's fun to dig up relics of your own civilization.


Wonders are much harder to come by. For one, they take a hex in cities that (thankfully) can occupy more territory. And with the addition of districts, there's so much to build that you'll never have a city that's built everything and can just crank out wonders. Sure it was nice to have the Pyramids, Hanging Gardens, Colossus, (...) all in Athens, but that's probably not how it should be.


Roads are automatically produced from establishing trade routes. This significantly reduces the time spent managing workers, but also limits access to areas outside the shortest path.


Of course all the classic and neoclassic elements are there: self-defending cities, research, exploration, battle, natural wonders, ranged/melee units, blackmailing other leaders, and the space race. Workers have a handful of uses then disappear. This may seem bad, but I expect in the 20th century and beyond it'll be nice not to have a bunch around just because.

The game takes quite some time computing AI moves between turns. I'm hoping this is the sign of a well-developed NPC system, but cannot tell at this point. Thankfully you can still click around between turns, or watch football or whatever.


So it turns out even planing, sanding, and restaining the deck planks wasn't sufficient.

I wanted a permanent solution, so I threw down the extra bones for synthetic. The hidden fasteners are great and go in pretty easy.

I did a bunch of reinforcement, replacing the last of the wood-on-ground posts and adding supports where the thing was held up only by lag bolts into the house.

I left most of the frame in but was wary about just painting the tops of the joists. Arthur recommended throwing a layer of caulk on it to take the brunt of the heat and rain (what passes between the planks, anyway). Worried about even the caulk delaminating, I went one further and did 2x8-wide strips of roofing felt + caulk between each plank and joist.


I redid the step. Everything is redwood or pressure treated.


It looks pretty good and should be zero maintenance for quite some time.

Courtney brought her camera out to vball, so we switched off taking photos.


Same thing for the baby shower/bbq.



Morning game crew played a few rounds of a Magic figures game. It's pretty good although some combinations are gamebreakers. Derrick picked up Risk Legacy. It's a great variation of the franchise. It has some of the uniqueness that Star Wars and Halo Risk have, but making permanent modifications to the gameboard is fantastic.


Saw some cool weather in Idaho.


The work party downtown was... clubby.


Snapped a quick one of my girl Asuna at the best parking spot in La Jolla.


Strauss has a well-named experimental beer.


Still meandering through Witcher.



With J out on paternity, I've mostly been playing Witcher. But since Sony sucks, my PS4 likes to barf game discs. This is how you ragequit a single player game. Planetside is still there for me.


















While waiting for some updates to download, J and I played a bit more Broforce. Turns out we were spitting distance from the final boss.









Digital Extremes keeps kicking down new stuff for Warframe. It's nice to see.

I always knew I'd die at a circus.

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