Moar Food for the Hives: Mushroom Balance

When I fell down the rabbit hole, I had no idea that my tears would spawn a flourishing society - held together by the insatiable need for narcotics; specifically shrooms. Early in the development and planting stage of the queen’s garden, some drunken jungle folks with funny hats, and whose men wore dresses, soiled every tree in our great forest. We found it necessary to protect our borders from more raids by building forts to stop any more aggressive acts from those speech slurring baboons. As strong as our efforts were, we were not able to fortify quickly enough and our workers (perhaps persuaded by alcohol) left there projects. We haven't seen them or the escort that was with them since. It wasn't until an all out raid which landed by boat on our central coast did we understand the magnitude of our situation. Our trumpeters sounded their horns and all the woodland creatures that were able to wield a weapon answered the call and drove the bottle tippers back into the sea. Shortly thereafter their leader, "Armand" claimed that there was a miss understanding and that we looked like some "guys"... Being avid shroom addicts and not really sure of reality most of the time, we felt inclined to accept their apologies and begin a solid foundation for trade and commerce.

Since peace has come, many voices tell me that we should look to the seas and search for glory. We should have a message any day from the brave explores that search in the name of Wonderland!

Moar Food for the Hives

Our new game, Moar Food for the Hives, has gotten underway. Some critical technical lessons were learned with Seeds of Luv:

- Large sized worlds become progressively slower to play as the game goes on
- Large sized worlds are more prone to network errors
- Hamachi, the peer-to-peer VPN service, is the best way to play Civ with friends online

With all this in mind, we're playing a 6 player, 1 AI standard game with the Hemispheres configuration for the map: 3 continents of varied sizes, plus a good smattering of islands. Based on this excellent post at Civ Fanatics, this appears to be the kind of map we want to play. No more getting stuck with Ice and Desert in the south, etc.

I did like having more AIs to beat up on in the large world; but with six players in this new Hive, I'd think the Food should be ample.

Seeds of Luv: Post-mortem

It has been noted by Milo that MAD doesn't work in Civ. He may be right. The Caliphate, invaded for no reason other than religious hatred, set itself on a fateful course after defeating the Crusader's invading army. Offered a cease-fire, we declined in the interests of making as many nukes as possible and delivering them by ICBM to the Crusader's homeland.

The problem with this was that, while Mike was attempting to recover from the stark violence visited upon his lands, the Portugese AI got into the mix again, invaded Mike, took a city, dropped some nukes... it wasn't pretty. Sure, we got our thermonuclear revenge - and oh, it was sweet, to be sure - but the AI in BTS is more opportunistic than ever before, and if it sees a chance (like a capital city with two units in it - Mike had stripped his rear areas clean to defeat the Crusader army) it will take it.

If not for Joao II getting all jiggy with some tac nukes, we might have stood a chance. But it was not to be.

Permanent Alliances certainly seem to make things a foregone conclusion most of the time. It's easy to either bully your neighbor into submission or, as I tend to do, be a good neighbor and see value in a combined future. Our new game, in which Food is being provided for the Hives, does not have PAs enabled. So one of us is going to have to win, or at the very least, be the last one standing.

I wonder if we'll ever actually have a space race in multiplayer. We may simply be too bloodthirsty.