LIVESTREAM UPDATE:

Whoa, the next livestream will be this Friday, March 28th at 7pm est!  You guys have been serving up some strange doodle suggestions recently, what will you toss out next?  Once the doodle is done, we’ll continue the Dust: An Elysian Tail run!

Where we last left off, Dust learned some spoiler-y type stuff about his foggy past, and teamed up with a secret group of spoiler-y folks in order to do spoiler-y things!  Crazy!  What will Dust do next, and how will Fidget make it funny?

We’ll find out on Friday!

You can watch the stream here or here.

See you then!

END LIVESTREAM UPDATE!

I was trying to watch some of the NCAA tournament games last weekend but quickly came to the conclusion that outside of the final five minutes, they were kind of boring.  I’m not putting down basketball, I’m just not educated enough about the sport to really get into it until the pressure is on.

Anyway, I figured playing Civ 5 would be a good companion to watching the games.  After creating a new Civ and beginning to grow my future empire, I was quickly reminded of one of the most annoying parts of the game: the “Wonder” monuments can only be built once.

Not once per Civ, but once per game.

I totally understand why.  It’d be weird if, say, there were twenty Statues of Liberty.  In the event that you’re building such a monument and another Civ completes it first, you immediately halt construction and whatever amount of resources you put into it before that point are returned to you as currency.

While it’s nice to get something back for getting screwed over, it is beyond frustrating when the bad news comes only a turn or two away from completion.  The Wonders provide special perks, so the money is kind of a slap in the face.

Also, how does what was already built suddenly disappear?  If we spent fifteen turns building something, surely it’ll take time to deconstruct it, right?

I propose a different game mechanic.  Let the player choose to either take the money, or continue building the Wonder regardless.  Upon completion, the second Wonder provides reduced perks of the First, the justification being that it doesn’t inspire the people as much knowing that the architectural achievement has been done before.  The other Civs can build the same Wonder as well, each new version getting lesser and lesser perks.

This has a real life analogue as well, where countries replicate the famous buildings and statues from other nations for either educational or entertainment purposes.

Come on, it’s a neat idea!  I’ve only played Civ 4 and 5, so I don’t know if that mechanic existed in the first three, but yeah… Civ 6, make it happen!

Finally, I’ve been messing around with a twitch channel recently!  I don’t think it’ll be used for the regular, scheduled livestreams, but anytime I’m playing a game, I’ll stream it and put up a notice on twitter.

Hopefully I’ll see you around!