Two posts ago I said: "I won't be getting Manor Lords on April 26th". Today I'd say that this statement is probably not correct. Unless for some reason the 26th is extremely busy for me with something else, I might very well download and play Manor Lords that day. Sorry! What changed? Well, it is a typical example of customer price sensitivity. They haven't announced a final price for Manor Lords, but it is rumored to be somewhere in the $30 - $40 range. And when I said I wouldn't play it, I meant that I had looked into the game, and decided that at this point in time it isn't worth $30 - $40 ..read more

Over the last decade or so, media have been full of stories of scientific fraud and plagiarism. And a rather cynical thought crossed my mind: I don't believe that scientific fraud and plagiarism is on the rise; rather we have simply gotten better at detecting it. I might be in a rather privileged position here: I have written a Ph.D. thesis and a number of scientific papers, but unlike most people, I can prove the originality. That is because I made my Ph.D. is synthetic chemistry; which means that my thesis and a number of my papers contain a description of how I synthesized new molecules, u ..read more

Manor Lords is the most wishlisted game on Steam, with over 2 million people. It will be released into early access on April 26th, and this weekend a large number of streamers were allowed to show the current version. Manor Lords is a medieval village / city builder, with an RTS combat part that resembles a small scale Total War. It is the first game of a small indie developer (which started out with a single developer), and the expectations are high, as early versions of the game are extremely pretty. By having some variation of looks for identical buildings, and by allowing for curved roads ..read more

I now have both a YouTube Premium and a Twitch Turbo subscription. In both, I am basically paying to watch ad free, and the revenue from the subscriptions is divided between the platform, and the channels I watch. Thus I rarely feel the need to pay for an added subscription to any channel. Once a month I can hand out my free Prime subscription on Twitch. And Twitch has a strange culture of gift subs, where sometimes I get gifted a subscription. I even have been gifted a sub to a channel I don't remember ever watching. I might have been on that channel for a few seconds due to a raid without re ..read more

It is A.D. 1909, turn 350, and my colony ship just blasted into space, winning me the game. I played through all ten ages, choosing the standard version of the age each time, and the age of departure as the last victory age. Most of the game was fun, but the age of departure is about collecting 5,000 points for your colony ship with production, which mainly consists of pressing the end turn button. I don't know how long this run took, but overall I have now 88 hours played in Millennia, so I am well over my 1 hour per dollar spent requirement. I think it is time to give the game a rest, and ho ..read more

Once upon a time, this was "Tobold's MMORPG Blog". So I played a lot of MMORPGs. Not only did I play some MMORPGs for thousands of hours, I also played a great number of different MMORPGs to try them out. And among the community of people who played lots of MMORPGs on release, there was a running gag: How bad is release day going to get? Because absolutely every MMORPG release had a bad launch. In some cases it was just login queues and some lag. In other cases the games were completely unplayable in the first week. Fast forward to 2024, and the discussions I see about the releases of games h ..read more

I don't generally care about achievements in games. But yesterday I couldn't help but notice that I got a Steam achievement for Millennia, that only 0.1% of players have reached: Age of Old Ones. Which is hard to reach, because you need to play incredibly badly to get there. In the Age of Renaissance you need to get to a negative culture income, which is easiest achieved by integrating a lot of vassal cities. Once you have played 20 turns with negative culture, your next age is locked to Age of Heresy. Of course, like always, you need to stay ahead of the AI opponents to reach the age first, w ..read more

I have played Millennia for over 50 hours now, but I haven't finished a single game yet. The furthest I got was to age 8 out of 10. I didn't lose any of these games, but decided they weren't worth finishing. Basically I am trying to achieve "the run", the perfectly balanced game, that is fun until the end. One problem here is the conflict between player agency and challenge. If you set the AI to a higher level, the game will be more challenging. Mostly because the AI just cheats more, not that it plays much better, but still, more challenging can be good. However, if you set the AI to somethi ..read more

I was reading a review of a game on Board Game Quest, when I stumbled upon the following passage: "Beyond current commitments, Board Game Quest is not planning on covering games in the future that use AI art". This was because the game reviewed did contain AI art, and the editor was uncomfortable with the "ethical issues" of that. I think this approach is backwards and far too general. AI generated images, in my mind, can have two big ethical issues. One is if you ask the AI software to generate an image "in the style of" some known artist. That will produce an image which is obviously mostly ..read more

Millennia can be played with a wide range of different strategies, which work best when taking into account the geographic conditions of the map you are playing on. But in this post I would like to describe a relatively simple strategy based on military expansion, which should work on most maps. If you find Millennia daunting in its complexity and don't know how to do better than the AI opponents, this is one possible way. We start our winning strategy by selecting the Homeland: +Culture perk on the setup screen for a new game. That means that at the start of the game, you gain 3 culture each ..read more