Gamer Keeps Civilization II Game Going for 10 Years 219
Have you ever wondered what a game of Civilization 2 would look like after running for 10 years? According to one gamer it's a "hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation." "Lycerius" says that he's been playing the same game of Civ II off and on for over a decade. Some highlights of the marathon session include: 1700 years of war, the ice caps melting over 20 times, constant guerrilla uprisings, and "Roughly 90% of the world's population has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm." It's too bad you can't build the Hanging Gardens more than once.
1984 (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtual machines (Score:5, Interesting)
First, I thought this was about a continuously running game... And my fist thought was dang, I bet he wish he started it in a VM, because he could have kept moving it to new hardware, rateh than keeping that old Pentium IV around. But I guess there's a save-game feature.
Re:He must not be that good (Score:5, Interesting)
I did that once with the original Civ. Played through until about the year 6000 AD. It was a long, hard battle at the start, but as the game progressed I eventually won out. By around 2000 AD I had virtually the entire planet and the AI had one civilization with two cities. In that situation the AI simply won't attack because you're too powerful, so the game continues peacefully virtually for ever. It gets boring pretty fast. Soon everything was covered with railroads and irrigation, the planet was effectively terraformed, all the technology was discovered, the climate was stable because there was no need for production and neither side had nucs. Almost all the cities had masses of happy people, it was basically a very boring utopia.
Re:MORONS!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
It is cool as frig to see that someone went the distance on it. More often than not, I just said 'screw it' and restarted the game after I reached the main goal and won, or after it was apparent that I was toast. I only went long-term once, and that was only for a month (same schedule, off and on as time permitted). Got way too bored with it at that point, nuked the remaining cities, and restarted the game (or sometimes I'd just go all Anasazi on it and begin to dismantle all my cities to see what happened.)
I usually won it by being the American team up-front, since the game engineered that particular role to be even more aggressive than the real USA could ever hope to be.
Best bet though was to find and identify the aggressive mofos up-front, wipe them out post-haste, and then quickly surround the weaker nations with your stuff so that they didn't expand. Eventually, you could leave them with one city apiece, and you own the rest.
Re:MORONS!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Screenshots here:
http://imgur.com/a/rAnZs [imgur.com]
the problem with reddit (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with reddit is that its even more of an echo chamber because of the way they do moderation. Basically its all determined by the masses, like digg was. It used to be (circa 2006) that differing opinions were more visible. Now they are completely buried.
Also 95% of the stuff on there is memes, pictures of girls or animals, people complaining, or self aggrandizing (bestof, iama, TIL) and also constant reposts of the same crap from 10 years ago.
In short, its now a "community" as opposed to what it was when it started, a site which didn't require any email verification and was trying to be as anonymous as possible. Now they have karma, anniversaries (cake) and other "features" which make it more like a social networking site than a link agregator. They want people to build up their reputations, but this stifles independent thought. The delays on postings for non long term users is horrible now. Was much better when it was pseudo anonymous and not as popular. I blame the diggers who came over in 2008 or thereabouts.
all that said, i read it every day, but not usually the comments. Slashdot comments and moderation are far far far superior.
Re:Virtual machines (Score:4, Interesting)
Hibernate -> Copy HD -> Start in virtual machine.
I've actually done this.
Re:1984 (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, IIRC theres good reason NOT to believe that there is a war. As I recall there are several clues point to the fact that there simply isnt any war, and that the entire thing is a hoax to keep the people under control.