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Civ II game a decade old

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Re: Civ II game a decade old

#131

Post by lotharbot »

danudey wrote: post #130
lotharbot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons the US has a divided Congress is to induce gridlock. This was a design goal. Remember, government is other people making rules for you . The more efficient they are at changing the rules, the riskier it is for you to do just about anything. The more efficient they are at changing the rules, the more likely they'll take an extreme position on a contentious subject.

But this is why a two-party system can be a liability. You artificially create an us-vs-them scenario, with the other side as the enemy, and any agreement with them on the issues is capitulation. As a result, you end up with a scenario in which there is always one side with a majority, who are capable of doing whatever they like, and one side with a minority, who are left to scrabble for democratic scraps, pushing bi…

There was never an intentional move to create a "two-party" system. That's an accidental byproduct of the winner-take-all system, which tends to reduce the number of parties. But we've definitely had some time periods where there have been 3 or 4 viable parties.

But that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the divide between the Senate (2 senators per state) and the House of Representatives (based on population), and the inclusion of techniques like the filibuster. It's harder for one party to get a majority in both House and Senate than it would be to just get a majority in a single parliament. It's even harder to get supermajorities in both. It's even harder to also get a friendly president at the same time as all of those other things. This means that there's almost never a time when one party can just ram through its whole agenda. There's almost always gridlock.

From what I've seen of single-house multi-party systems (like parliamentary democracies) there's a lot more compromise, which is a good thing, but there's also a lot less gridlock, and that's a bad thing.

It's actually a good thing that successful bills tend to be either issues the vast majority of the country agrees on, or else very watered down.

Re: Civ II game a decade old

#132

Post by danielweber »

ralfd wrote: post #101
jonnathanson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't know Civ4's AI routines, but it might be such that after a certain year passes, it decides that the only way to stop the human player is total war. Before that it can be less aggressive." What seems more likely, at least in my experience, is that the AI is always trying to pursue a single goal: beating everyone else. It will select whatever means it deems possible at any point in time. It will make calculati…

Gandhi and some other like Abraham Lincoln wont ever declare war if they are pleased. For all other leaders you have to go to the "friendly" relationship status. The exception is Catherine the Great of Russia. That bitch is the only one who can be bribed into war even if she is friendly with the victim.

There is lore that Gandhi's nuke-trigger-happy code was fat-fingered from 1 to 12. And so he will always nuke if he can. It started as error, grew into joke, became accepted as tradition, and became expected in all the sequels.

Re: Civ II game a decade old

#133

Post by troels »

bdunbar wrote: post #127
troels wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope we've come at least a bit further since the renaissance. Diplomacy doesn't have to be a zero-sum game - indeed it rarely is in the real world. War, on the other hand, is very much that. So in that respect, war is the failure of diplomacy, not the continuation of it.

I hope we've come at least a bit further since the renaissance. I may not understand your definition of 'further'. People are no smarter than they they were in 1500. There are no new cultural institutions. Our toys are better, but people is still people.

Local regressions aside, I do believe that as a species, we're slowly getting smarter.

Re: Civ II game a decade old

#134

Post by gchpaco »

tomrod wrote: post #123
gchpaco wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War is actually a negative sum game today; even "winning" you lose a lot. It's not clear to me if this was ever different for anything larger than Viking raiding parties, though.

US-Mexican War, US-Spanish war. US came out far ahead in bt cases, iirc.

That's still possible in a negative sum game; all negative sum means is that the sum of the benefits to all parties is less than the sum of the costs to all parties. So if say the US hoses the Mexicans but good it can still come out ahead as long as the Mexicans go down hard.

Re: Civ II game a decade old

#135

Post by dllthomas »

troels wrote: post #133
bdunbar wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope we've come at least a bit further since the renaissance. I may not understand your definition of 'further'. People are no smarter than they they were in 1500. There are no new cultural institutions. Our toys are better, but people is still people.

Local regressions aside, I do believe that as a species, we're slowly getting smarter.

Clearly, we are building more knowledge, which is reflected in but not encompassed by our toys.

Re: Civ II game a decade old

#136

Post by bdunbar »

troels wrote: post #133
bdunbar wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope we've come at least a bit further since the renaissance. I may not understand your definition of 'further'. People are no smarter than they they were in 1500. There are no new cultural institutions. Our toys are better, but people is still people.

Local regressions aside, I do believe that as a species, we're slowly getting smarter.

I'd love to see evidence that people are smarter now than 500 years ago.

More education is available, certainly. But smarter ... I don't see it.

Re: Civ II game a decade old

#137

Post by Andrew_Quentin »

renegadedev wrote: post #55

We look ahead at 3991 AD and find it to be depressing. I've always wondered how past civilizations (Greeks, Egyptians, etc) would find our modern day civilization.

Its because we have had peace for so long, we fear we might loose it, so the dominant emotion is not hope of getting better, though that exists, but fear of getting worse.

Past civilizations mainly were in war with each other, so their dominant emotion was probably hope that things will get better, thus they dreamed.

We dream too, but fear a bit also. ha

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