Remembering PRESTAGS

What battle is this?

Hints: Three battles vs one, longbows against cavalry, first row dismounted, narrow battlefield, Python now owns Yeoman.

Question two: what happens next?

First thoughts on Civilization VI

I have had a three games of Civilization VI - twice on warlord level to learn the system and once at prince level to get more challenge. In summary, it is a much easier game to win at but very entertaining all the way to the end.

Easier to win at because I won each game. However, each victory was a cultural victory. At the easier levels, you get more wonders and all the culture from them pushes you over the line. In the chart below you can see I am leading on all metrics except religion - I failed to prioritise founding a religion early enough - but cuulture is half way full while the rest are fingernails (see how much the Sumerian circle is filled in from the bottom on each case.

While a victory is a victory, you do not get a high score for a cultural victory.

Taking cities remains super tricky in this invocation of Civilization. However, as none of the AI opponents bother to upgrade their armies, it becomes straight-forwards from the Napoleonic era onwards.

What makes the game quite captivating is how many things you can do. Unlike previous Civ game, not every city builds the same enhancements. You tweak you city towards what you want to achieve: Arts and Culture in the centre near you capital, and Industry and Military towards the border, where you need them. Notice below my capital is far from the border so has a Colosseum, a Forbidden palace, and Entertainment district and the Theatre district, but the obligatory Ziggurat (cos I'm Sumerian).

There are now two research charts - civics and science, but they cross over a lot. What is super cool is that to get a step up on a research project, you get a practical exercise. if you can do that, you cut the research time in half. Force example, if you win a battle with a slinger, you get a leg up on archer. If you build three musket armies, you get a leg up on rifling. You can't possibly get all the leg ups, but you find yourself desperately looking for iron to mine, or a space port to build at certain times of the game. These sub-projects are fun, and often get you into trouble, which make things interesting.

Tip for new players: If you enter a village, you can get a bonus leg up. The Sumerians treat every barbarian encampment as a village, and there are no shortage of those, so Sumerians are a good power for your first game. You build a mobile army early and wander around the map hunting barbarians to get leg ups!

Also note down the bottom you can see where you are relative to everyone else. The English (Victoria) are trailing badly, but me taking their capital did not help!

There are also other project you can get into. You can collect books, art, relics and curios for your libraries and museums. I did not do much this last game as I did not want to win a cultural victory too quickly.

I was annoyed at not having a religion, so took the capital of someone who did and proselytised for them, but the game did not pay that. I think it should. After all, who owns Jerusalem!

The end comes suddenly (for a cultural victory). You are just about to make you next attack when a movie starts. (One of many nice animated sequences in the game. I paricularly love the "construction of a wonder" sequence.)

The chart shows that I pretty much lead from the Medieval period. Time to try a higher level of difficulty. I don't need to sleep!

Jerusalem desolata est

Demetri has swept away not only my beloved capital city but my whole home island.

It brings to mind the lines from Byrd's motet setting of  Civitas sancti - "Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, desolata est."

 

Civitas sancti tui facta est deserta.        Your holy city has become a wilderness.
Sion deserta facta est,                               Sion is made a wilderness, 
Jerusalem desolata est.                            Jerusalem has been made desolate.

and meanwhile the survivors weep as in Palestrina's Super flumina Babylonis

 

Are We Heading For Another Galileo Moment?

On June 16 the Holy Father is going to release an encyclical titled Laudato Sii (Praised Be), which title is the introductory phrase to eight verses of St Francis of Assisi's famous prayer thanking God for the gifts of creation: "Praised be you, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who is the day, and through whom you give us light".

As always happens before an encyclical, the guessing game is on as to what it will contain. There are currently three theories: (1) the document will exhort mankind not to destroy and abuse creation (I am fine with this), (2) the document will condemn the unjust economic structures of the modern world which distribute wealth to a few at the top and which lay waste to the vast majority of the world's population and to the environment (I am fine with this, and I think it is overdue for the Church to condemn the world's current economic structures) and (3) the document will promote the climate change agenda (I am definitely not fine with this).

I suspect the document will actually include all three of the above. And if the document reads the way Pope Francis talks, it will be all mixed up with internal contradictions and ambiguities.

Speaking of Sir Brother Sun, the Church has form when it comes to the sun and science, and of getting it wrong. On 5 March 1616 Galileo was condemned by the Congregation of the Index and was prohibited from publishing works which supported the Copernican or heliocentric system. Undeterred, and ultimately subject to house arrest (a fairly mild punishment) Galileo still published Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems (1632) and The Discourse on the Two New Sciences (1638). Galileo has long since been proven correct about our heliocentric solar system, although he was not officially cleared until John Paul II's official apology in 1992.

If Francis I, who is not even a shadow of John Paul II, supports the anti-theory of antropocentric global warming it will be a step backwards 400 years to a geocentric view of the universe. Francis I, who has form with the 'ways of the world' rather than 'converting the world' (just look at what he is encouraging in relation to family and sexual moral matters) would be abandoning the sun's critical role in global temperature cycles and following the latest man made anti-science agenda with loads of un-Christian political baggage attached. It will be a dark day for the Church, in a pontificate that is not shining much light on the world at all.

The reason I am so worried is because the Vatican already hosted a convention on 28 April on climate change which featured some of the world’s leading climate "scientists" and included an opening address by the distinctly non Christian U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The conference was titled Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development and so assumed an untruth.

While I must presume Pope Francis’s heart is in the right place, he will do his flock and the world a monumental disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate, being the same United Nations that has a virulent anti-Christian agenda on so many other important issues. This is the same organization that facilitates industrial scale mass murder of unborn children, promotes sterilisation and eugenics, and whose idea of "peace" is to approve the carpet bombing of nations. It is incredible to think that any Pope would go and play with this bunch and their latest agendas for the world.

Even former global warming proponents, the real scientists amongst them at any rate, have woken up that the climate models and predictions of doom were wrong, and  there has been no global warming for almost 20 years and no global warming at all of statistical significance over a time frame of centuries and millennia.

Even Patrick Michaels (past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society, research professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia for 30 years, and a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has now stated in relation to the divergence between climate alarmist predictions and reality:

"It’s impossible, as a scientist, to look at this graph and not rage at the destruction of science that is being wreaked by the inability of climatologists to look us in the eye and say perhaps the three most important words in life: we were wrong."

It is an attribute of religious fanatics that they ignore data, even when it stares them in the face, and they never admit they are wrong. It is this fanatical aspect of the climate alarmists that is most troubling. If the Pope lends his blessing to this fanaticism he will ultimately reap the negative consequences of this new climate religion that is certainly not the Christian religion. It is just another dangerous false religion.

So I wait without any happy anticipation for Laudato Sii. Encyclicals are not infallible documents although on occasion they can include a doctrine that has been proclaimed infallibly. Encyclicals are expressions of the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church, with a range of weight. Sometimes these are of a low grade, and temporary. It looks like like this encyclical will be one of them. Hopefully it won't take 400 years to correct any errors it may contain, and the Church can focus on preaching the gospel and saving souls.

22 December - O Rex gentium

O King of the Gentiles - To listen click here

 

 

Now THIS is a counter!

So, do you think this is a counter?

Come on, really?

This is not a counter.

 

You want to know  what a counter is?

Now THIS is a counter!!

These images are to scale. The counter above is the swordsmen counter from The Renaissance of Infantry, a game in Strategy & Tactics No.22 (I believe published in 1970).

The counter to the right is the castle counter from the same game. Yes ... Wow!

The Renaissance of Infantry is the father of Yeoman, the fifth of the PRESTAGS games.

The PRESTAGS rules refined and streamlined the rules from their parents (such as Armageddon (S&T 34) father of Chariot and Centurion (S&T 25) father of Legion) however I think the magnificent castle counter should have been retained, at least in Yeoman.

 

It is intriguing to compare the counters from The Renaissance of Infantry with those from Yeoman. There are interesting similarities, and interesting differences.

 

I think we need to make our own castle counters, and use them in some of the PRESTAGS scenarios.