mayormommy

I think you need to make it clear where the PMs should go in the very beginning of this thread, and perhaps at the top of every page. Choco or I could clean out this thread for you, but I think you will still get comments on the reviews besides just the requests for reviews. It is hard to keep a thread like this totally clean.

Well, it looks like this has legs, so to speak, so I'll pin it. Let's keep the momentum going, the reviews have been really good so far.

Others may goof off at work to fill in their NCAA basketball brackets, but for me the least productive week of the year is when I'm trying to pick my favorites for the Kentucky Derby. With 20 horses in the field, many of them with only a few races under their girth strap, it's going to be a tough race to call. So far, I like Street Sense (lives up to his name with incredible toughness), Nobizness but Shobizness (fast but distractable), Dominican (cured of his distractedness by recent gelding and a good closer, but has bad post position), and Zanjero (another good closer). But I think I may be taking some chances discounting favorites like Curlin and Scat Daddy. And what about potential overachievers like Cowtown Cat and Hard Spun? Ack, what to do? Anybody got any advice? Which ones do you like? The field (in order of post position): 1. Sedgefield 2. Curlin 3. Zanjero 4. Storm in May 5. Imawildandcrazyguy 6. Cowtown Cat 7. Street Sense 8. Hard Spun 9. Liquidity 10. Teuflesberg 11. Bwana Bull 12. Nobizness but Showbizness 13. Sam P. 14. Scat Daddy 15. Tiago 16. Circular Quay 17. Stormello 18. Any Given Saturday 19. Dominican 20. Great Hunter

That thing is such a local landmark I'm actually glad to see it stay. So many of the buildings in DC are so bland. Here's another pic I found on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/army_arch/253419829/

Nice pictures! I have to say I haven't heard of this spectacular building before. What are the classrooms like?

Just when you thought this CJ couldn't get more bizarre - Albert Einstein, Billy the Kid, Jesse Owens and The Rock share a scene?

Originally posted by: Joesocwork Part of parenting is to help children to help them to have the internal tools to make appropriate choices about their lives, not to create clones of one' s self or one's aspirations.quote> I thought the most fascinating and fun time to be a parent was the 4-10 year range. That's when you discover that your kids are amazingly interesting and funny people, and the little glimpses you see of yourself in them are fleeting treasures that only come out when you least expect them. My son is older now (13) and it's interesting trying to be a fair negotiator with him while not relinquishing ultimate authority.

Me too. I was just thinking about picking up the series again, around Book 7 or so where I left off. But maybe I'll wait and see if someone will finish it. Too bad about Jordan - he was sick for a long time.

Love the low, low density - reminds me of a lot of small towns in Connecticut, with a little commercial cluster on the main road.

Monorails should be used to carry high-speed intercity traffic with few stops, rather than lower speed intracity commuters. They are not designed to be a substitute for the subway or el, though in certain situations you can use them that way. I like to use them in conjunction with parking garages and bus stops, to give sims an efficient way to get the stations. I've also used them with ferry and subway stops. They're tricky to place correctly to get sims to ride them, but you can get substantial ridership with careful placement/planning.

Wow, the nightlighting is 1000% percent better. The small towns and farms always looked pretty decent, but it's nice to see some improvement/variety in road textures too. And either there's more variety of buildings now and more street traffic or they're beginning to think like a CJer and choose their shots more carefully. Although it's goofy, I do kinda like the totalitarian mind control center or whatever that is.

I was at work and a friend of mine (who happened to leave for work later and was still at home) called me and said a plane crashed in the World Trade Center and they didn't think it was an accident. I logged onto CNN.com and got a glimpse of the burning hole in the building. I thought it was important news but went on with the morning. Then my friend called again and said another plane had hit the other tower and I completely could not believe it. I tried to get onto CNN again but then it wouldn't load that time (nor would it for the rest of the day). Someone who lived nearby brought in a small TV and set it up in the office kitchen, so a group of us huddled around it and saw the first tower fall. I knew it was just a matter of time before the second fell as well, and wondered what happened to all the fire trucks that must have been parked around the buildings.

I have the same one as beebs and just love it. The optical zoom is particularly good, and one set of batteries usually lasts a week of intensive vacation picture taking. It also does pretty well in low light situations but I wish it had a flash shoe instead of just the built-in flash.

I decided to set C4 aside for a lazy Sunday afternoon and try my other TM game, Children of the Nile, instead. This game is a few years older (2004) so I am more willing to forgive a few graphics or gameplay shortcomings. There are only three tutorials for this game and they much easier and more leisurely. There is no Pharoah breathing down my neck like Caesar was and I don't get the notion that the tutorial is more of a test I have to pass than a learning experience. Plus the map is much, much bigger, plenty of room to make dumb mistakes without to having to tear things down and move them. First off, you can see that my previous experience with the 3D camera is already paying off. The building in the foreground is a school, while behind is a nobleman's house. The Egyptian sims can be a little awkward but at least they don't scuttle around in the insect sort of way that the Romans do. And they aren't so picky about having their buildings on roads, though they prefer it of course. Never really having dabbled in Sims games, I tried following some around with the tracking camera. This is just a simple farmer (and they seem grow whatever they feel like, thank goodness) but it lets you see the interface. Starting in the upper left, the buttons are private residential buildings, government residential buildings (certain craftsmen, priests, etc., get government housing), government buildings, infrastructure, monuments, and clear buildings or roads (bulldoze). Below that is the map, with the world map (trade is like C4), play/pause, and edict buttons on top, while down the right side are the human resources, mayor rating, and bricks/bread supplies. Along the bottom are the take picture, menu, and save buttons respectively, although this game autosaves pretty frequently, just like C4. The space in the bottom middle is for the newsticker, while at right you can read about the person's household. The blue circles enable various views or tracking options for said farmer, and the green icon says they are generally happy, if a little low on bread and household goods. At the very bottom right you get the name of the town and the season, which can be kind of important for planning purposes I guess. Here you can see my second city - no diagonal roads but at leat there are a couple kinds of them to choose from. The area with farm plots by the river gets covered with water every flood season. I'm not sure what the white lines are here - maybe someone's path or angle of view? I've followed a few different people around, so I don't know. You see there is some terrain, which you can build roads on but not buildings. Finally, I haven't seen the moon or anything but the sunrises and sunsets are still nice. That giant ugly brown building is my palace, sheesh. The little huts are village hovels that I don't have any control over. Some people will apparently even become homeless and sleep on mats in the bushes. So far, the "society" aspect of this game isn't too overbearing. As others have pointed out, COTN seems a little more open-ended than C4. If it only had the lovely flowing diagonal roads of C4, I would actually like this game quite a bit better. And there's no annoying lag with the buttons. But I'll try both games a little longer before I make a final decision.

MoonCat: Welcome to ST! Interesting to get the background on the lost city journals. No matter how much we complain about the official EA SC4 site, at least it's still there after all these years. But we've had own challenges with picture hosting sites going down as well. MayorVieira: I do have a soft spot for the Egyptian theme of this game myself, having traveled to Egypt as a teenager. The scale of the pyramids in the game is pretty impressive but building them is mostly a matter of labor + time. Importing limestone blocks instead of quarrying my own seem to have made pyramid building move a little faster. Regarding your question on the game setting options, I haven't really studied them too closely, having left everything on default except the camera angle/free camera/snapshot camera type options. But there do seem to be a number of ways to conserve computing power. I suppose I should note that this game has only crashed on me once, while C4 has gone down three times. There are patches I am supposed to download for both games - in COTN, apparently sims can get "stuck" (treadmilling) though I've only noticed this with the traders' donkeys. I assumed they were just stubbon, like all the other sims in this game.

You guys should have heard me muttering to myself about how the darn www.titledmill.com website wasn't working yesterday...

Yes, I see the Titled Mill crowd hasn't perfected the art of the city journal as we have here at ST (no offense). I thought perhaps it was a limitation on posting pictures in the forums, but maybe it's the culture there - creative folks there seem to put more of their energy into scenario development (which can have their own complex story lines). Regarding your other idea in relation to SCS, I would have to say having some multi-player options for SCS would help overshadow some other possible shortcomings, as that has been very difficult to manage in SC4. I hope we can look forward to having some options in this area for SCS. What is Caesar Online like?

Okay, one last update - I think the usefulness of these threads has about run its course now that we're about to get some first-hand info on the actual game in question from Dirk and rybolton. So unless anyone has any objections, I think I'll move any other further commentary about these games to a more appropriate site like the TM forums (more on that later). First, a look at bustling street life of my growing city. If you love the "city as art farm" effect as I do, the amount of street traffic is really fun to watch. I'm up to what I would call Stage 7 in SC4 - here is a Large Pyramid under construction, with only the top tier Very Large Pyramid left to conquer. Note the laborers pulling the blocks at the bottom for scale. We will see if this pyramid will ready for Bethankhamun IV - after the untimely death of Bethankhamun III in a hunting accident, I always keep a finished pyramid in reseve as a resting place. Finally, a skyline shot of my growing city - you can see that despite my continued struggles with the graduates, things are still moving along. After building a few pyramids and vanquishing most of my military enemies, I now have plenty of prestige to employ all the graduates I want. The problem is that school building did not keep pace with my city's expansion and now I don't have any unemployed graduates to draw on! This game is quite devilish sometimes, which is why I think it has more long-term playing potential than C4. I decided it was time to crawl out of my coccoon and over to the Titled Mill forums. I was most curious to find out how to operate the scenario and campaign editors, which look remarkably like the ones in C4: Here we're looking at the "triggers" editing page. I guess the thing that I find interesting about scenarios and the ability to create and post your own on forums is the concept of a CJ as a custom scenario. It's almost like making a truly interactive CJ, where people can play your city, with far more customizable settings than just the base map. I think this is something our very creative community can really sink its teeth into, though it does require a little study. The TM forums feature a series of tutorials, written by a TM employee, on how to use these editors. If something like this is available in SCS, then it will be very customizable and interactive for a community like ours. Finally, I did register over at the TM forums as "magnanimousmommy." I posted a newbish question and it was answered by two people within 15 minutes, although it was a Sunday afternoon. It's a friendly group with plenty of TM staff involvement but it does hold that same intimidation factor I remember from when I first found ST - "These people are way too intense about this game!" I assume that I will eventually get over being intimidated about learning the ins and outs of these games, plus our CJs could easily kick their butts. And I see there's a new snow mod for C4 which looks interesting... Anyway, thanks to everyone who posted here and in my C4 thread for the encouragement - I am much more optomistic about seeing SCS than before I tried these games.

Originally posted by: wolverine ^ That used to happen at my college at one particular time. There was this event called the naked mile, where a group would run through campus naked. Eventually the university and the city got fed up with it, so anybody caught participating was thrown on the state's sex offender list and had to pay huge fines. Considering these were recent graduates, how do you think their future employer would feel about them being on this list for some stupid stunt. That's really really serious!quote> Yeah, we had that at my college too, where these frat pledges would be forced to run around naked in a courtyard between two huge dorms. One year it was icy and several fell (shudder)...that was a scene I really would like to erase from memory.

Originally posted by: DavidBeebe Tilted Mill's offices aren't in San Fran so stop trying to bribe Dirk to strangle me with my own phone cord... ;-)quote> So, when are you inviting Dirk to Boston?

Thanks, Ben. Well, I'm back in COTN and once again I've found the transition between a cash and non-cash society to be a little more difficult than you might think. And once again, I am still struggling with my lowly prestige. Here I've pimped my palace out to the max: Even the effects of the giant obelisk are temporary at best. Good thing I can erect a new monument for any puny accomplishment (a monument to opening a copper mine or trading for turquoise?). I'm getting old and it looks like it's the small pyramid for Bethankhamun II, as the medium one will never be done in time. I suspect that a good way to boost my prestige would be with a military triumph. There are some Bedouin raiders, but they don't seem like much of a treat if this little guard camp and gate can keep them out: You can see the medium pyramid site in the upper left corner. I have two problems with raising an army - a lack of prestige to inspire graduates to work for me as commanders and a lack of cedar for building chariots. I have a number of trading partners but nobody with cedar yet. In fact, I'm trading for stuff I absolutely don't need, like granite blocks, because that unlocks other trading opportunities. So, it looks like this game still has a number of challenges for me, especially that darn prestige issue. I've got numerous statues and monuments in the works at any given time just to keep what prestige I already have. At least I've got one commander of a fledging army in training just outside the city, just waiting for their chariots to be ready. I haven't found a quick way to get a total population count, as the human resources screen gives me the figures in households rather than individuals. Usually there's three to a household, so I'm guessing there's a little over 1,000 people at the moment. This city is a lot more sprawly than my C4 city, so it looks bigger but in reality is only one-third the size.

Nice work, looks a little slicker than the real Okinawa (I was there in 2004). Are you going to add the monorail?

Duplicate threads deleted - MM

Ben: Thanks, I've heard that from a few people lately. I've been thinking about it - it's only about five updates from the end, not including a detailed recap necessary to get restarted, of course. Maybe when I get done with this little project... DB: Actually, the Egyptians also kept cheetahs as pets, though I'm not sure how they got along with the monkeys. *Ponders domestic life with both cheetahs and monkeys* John: No apologies necessary - I can recall a great number of theories I had about SC4 (and often mentioned to others) which were later proven completely wrong. When the city empties out in a great flood at planting time, it's easy to think there might be some congestion issues. Well, good news, I've made it past the tutorials, woot! Now I'm sure anyone familiar with COTN will know which scenario an old SC player would immediately go for - the "Son of Ra" sandbox scenario in easy mode on the extra large map, with no goals whatsoever. And I'm sure anyone familiar with COTN will also smirk at all the newbie mistakes I've made already. I scratched my head for a few moments when confronted with this map. It is simply huge. It is not comparable to a SC4 large city tile, but is more the size of a SC4 region, all in one city. If SCS has maps this size, it frankly would make any discussion of whether or not there is region play moot. Of course, I'm not sure how much strain this will put on the computer in 3D when fully populated but I intend to find out. The city below takes up a tiny percentage of the map. Every resource you could ever want is in this scenario, but there are ample trade opportunities available too, so as to please any priests who miss their imported monkeys. So I just started building and soon got that familiar feeling of hours slipping away while tinkering with my city, a feeling I haven't had for awhile, I admit. I haven't figured out the coverage radius for services for this game like I have for SC4 and C4. John is right - my citizens will walk however far they need to to get what they want, but if you make daily life too much of a hassle, it affects their productivity. If only my boss could play this game... Even on easy mode, though, this game is not too easy. My first blunder was to construct the scribe's home before the priest's, not realizing I only had one educated graduate to work with. The problem with this is that the priest teaches at the school, not the scribe, so I would never have any other graduates to work with. D'oh! I bulldozed the unfortunate scribe's house, which had the desired effect of causing him to reconsider his line of work and become a priest instead. Phew. Although I was now producing plenty of graduates, I couldn't get them to work for me because of my rather dismal prestige rating. Here you can see I've gussied up my palace (in the background) to try and get a little more respect from the locals: That didn't get me too far though. I was stuck in a Catch-22: the only way I could raise my prestige was to build some monumetal public works, but I couldn't do that without some graduates being willing to work for me as overseers, which they wouldn't do because of my low esteem. I painfully puttered along building primitive small tombs for my nobles at 1 prestige point each until I could finally hire a statue quarry overseer. Unfortunately, I then croaked. Thus ended the reign of Bethankhamun I. Here you can see my laborers belatedly dragging a statue block past my lowly tomb, which is behind the interface in the lower right corner. And yes, I do enjoy clicking on cows and even occasional inanimate objects to see what they're thinking. This block is apparently thinking of becoming a statue, big surprise. But Bethankhamun II is doing a bit better, having cranked up the prestige points enough to open some monkey trade routes and finally get some graduates to contribute to society. Good thing this game is about dynasties and not individual rulers. Here's a sunset send-off to my first COTN city from scratch: My success at finishing the COTN tutorials and building a "real" city has inspired me to return to C4 for a few days to try to get to a similar level. But don't worry, we'll be back.

Thanks, Jeff, for explaining all that. I'm curious though - you mentioned in another thread that sims could be robbed of their possessions in SCS if crime gets too high, so there must be some goods in SCS. So do they actually shop for them or do they just automatically accumulate things with increasing wealth? Anwyay, back to COTN - I'm still on the last tutorial because construction of my pyramid is taking forever even though it's just the smallest pyramid I can build. No wonder the game constantly warns you to start on this early. I think I need to have my overseers reassign some of my laborers from quarry duty to construction duty, as the limestone blocks are piling up on their sledges behind the site. In the distance you can see an overly enthusiastic fit of granite quarrying left me with several black statue blocks ready to go. I put those paths in to the quarry sites but as Jeff pointed out, they only use the roads when it's convenient and are just as happy to tromp cross-country. Here's a little map I made while playing around - note this is four pics pasted together so it may be a little uneven. You can see my city is pretty large in this tutorial. Guards function as both city guards and police. As in C4, I have a functional military but it doesn't look to be quite as an important aspect to this game. Being on an island in the Nile, the army camp requires all its own services like a bakery, hospital, etc. Noticing that my soldiers were continually crossing the river to go to the hospital in town for their pulled muscles (these peasants are really out of shape!) I discovered that the sole priest on the island was too busy to really man the closer hospital there. So I added another priest on the island dedicated only to health care, but he had different ideas about how he wanted to spend his first day on the job: Yes, he is shopping for a monkey. Unfortunately, there's no place on the island to get a monkey, I don't think. He stared wistfully across the river for a few moments, then turned and took his place at the hospital. This is game has been unexpectedly amusing at times like this.