Philocthetes

[quote who="PurrBall" reply="18" id="2487416"]Re: Loss of customization with the ribbon: You can customize the ribbon in Office 2010, just check the Options dialog [/quote] Unless I'm missing something, it sounds like you're confusing the Quick Access clutter on the title bar with the ribbon; it's a handy workaround for a few basic things (you can 9 or ten ALT+A_Number hotkeys that way), but not what I really need. And I guess I should admit I know about and have puttered with t

[evil balky-forum double-post rassa-frassa]

[quote who="red1939" reply="9" id="2486663"]... Basing on the current beta and the developer plans, this game is becoming more and more like a Civilizations clone with a few spells and dragons thrown in. ...[/quote] Gotta admit that this is a creeping worry for me also. Early on, there was some strong talk about how mundane stuff (weapons, city improvements, etc.) would not be as big a part of the game as the magic system. If that's still true, it looks like the magic system will need

[quote who="red1939" reply="9" id="2486663"]... Basing on the current beta and the developer plans, this game is becoming more and more like a Civilizations clone with a few spells and dragons thrown in. ...[/quote] Gotta admit that this is a creeping worry for me also. Early on, there was some strong talk about how mundane stuff (weapons, city improvements, etc.) would not be as big a part of the game as the magic system. If that's still true, it looks like the magic system will need

[Stealth double-posts? This thing appeared a long while after I thought I made just the one post...]

[quote]The problem with the whole 'living-breathing city' argument, and the argument for keeping huts is that in all ways the next tier of housing is superior to the first: No upkeep, higher pop cap, higher prestige. Someone who wants a 'living breathing city' will not be able to reach the next population milestone, or isn't using their city very efficiently and will find the AI is most likely not as sentimental.[/quote] I'll also be surprised (and pleased) if the devs mange to make d

You can sorta jump beween units and towns with the TAB key, but it makes no distinction between towns and units on the map and it seems to get wonky after a game is around 100 turns old and/or you pass some threshhold of too many units & towns. The TAB key isn't mentioned on the Keyboard page at the wiki, maybe because it is 'buggy.'

[quote who="Finneglot" reply="16" id="2413076"]Thank you, schoolmarm Zigzag. Alas, I must learn to become less of a sesquipedalian if I'm to communicate in here. Shame, I am fond of my floundering writing.[/quote] My basic impulse is to take the long way 'round a sentence also, but somehow I ended up actually earning some kibble for my kitties by doing cutwork like zigzag offered above. Finneglot, don't shun your sesquipedalian streak, just learn to make the most of

[quote]I never got into Doonesbury. When I was a kid, I hated it because it wasn't as funny (for me) as Hagar the Horrible, Beetle Bailey, Lockhorns, etc. I've always avoided it for that reason.[/quote] Doonesbury was never for kids. You might like it now, and you can get to an extensive (complete?) archive somewhere on the page for the daily strip . I don't have a sharp idea of Trudeau's personal politics and I don't want one, b

[quote who="Fuzzy Logic" reply="13" id="2486297"]I've never really cared for Word that much. It makes thing difficult when they should be simple. For some reports I do I prefer to work in Excel![/quote] I'm very fond of Excel even though I'm not a hardcore numbers guy. I keep my timesheets in it and am more likely to type a formula in a cell for a quick number than I am to find and start the Windows calculator. But I'm an old right-tool-for-the-job guy, and if a report needs much more

[quote who="ikros" reply="59" id="2486320"]It would be really interesting to have quests that 2 or more players carry out together. ...[/quote] I'd like to see that too, but I've not yet seen a TBS AI that could do a halfway decent job of participating in a military alliance, much less something with the potential complexity of 'you take parts B, C, and F, while I take A, D, and E.' Or were you maybe thinking of something like the player and an AI both contributing units to a

[quote]The introduction, in which the author expresses his thoughts conventionally, is much more interesting than anything else in the book.[/quote] Doh. Wouldn't be the first time an intro had been the best part of a book for me, and I gotta admit I've never thought of Scott Adams as, well, a writer. Gary Trudeau is another matter entirely. If I didn't largely hold prizes and awards in contempt, I'd say he should be the first to receive a Nobel lit prize for an ongoing graphic novel.

Keep in mind that these are random grumbles and not a methodical critique-- Top keyboard grudge in ribbon-land is that the UI no longer helps you learn keyboard paths. Until this change, you could tell any Office app to put underscores on menu commands so you know how to hit them with the keyboard. Some unknown but large chunk of my former speed was not that I remembered exactly how to get to some less-used feature or even how to do a complicated thing regularly without looking at the

[quote]My choice of Martin Luther as an avatar was because a pasty faced somewhat pudgy white guy with absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever suited my personality and has nothing to do with any “desperate” desire to be brainwashed.[/quote] I did a bad job in a good seminar on Luther and Erasmus around '92 or so, and I could swear that my prof (who looked quite like Luther himself) insisted that the man had a jolly streak. He certainly loved his beer and his wife, which c

[quote who="VicenteC" reply="7" id="2486063"]... http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/ Appart from that, I'm loving the 2010 Beta, specially the new OneNote (the Outlook upgrade is nice too, but I just love OneNote).[/quote] Thanks for the tip; that custom tab could be soothing for a bit of my work (I prefer to see the style & font info for wherever my cursor is resting), but it can't help me build the custom menus and toolbars that I still quite miss. <p

I still need to try sovereign death = game over in a build at least at the end of beta 1 or even the start of beta 2 before I can make up my mind about whether I'd even support the option of including the player in any succession mechanics. What you say about working to make the game have a strong story layer is fine by me, but I don't see sovereign succession as a necessary feature for the game to do well in that regard.

There's already a turn counter in the UI if you expand the otherwise-useless thingy in the upper-right corner. I'm talking about tags in the Save/Load list. I'm not at all sure about what psychoak means by "identifying information" for lazy savers, but the current auto-generated world names come to mind.

[quote]I'm not the one that labeled them a different species and decided they were extinct.[/quote] Maybe not, but you are the one playing fast and loose with intellectual history. Saying that "Homo Neanderthalensis is a alive and well" is not at all the same thing as saying you think that current taxonomy has some serious flaws, at least not in the terse and feisty terms you chose to raise the question.

I've been a Word user since 1991, and it has been my central work app since '99 or so. The ribbon has turned out to be a complete hassle, trashing many years of experience that used to mean something on my resume. Is there any chance that 2010 has made some effort to step back from the Office team's aggressive disinterest in the investments made by countless individual users and organizations who learned and use and customize Word in 'the old world?'

[quote who="Valiant_Turtle" reply="9" id="2485590"]... I don't want to be a character in a story, I want to be the author of the story.[/quote] I certainly want the game to make interesting, direct responses to my behavior as a player, but I'd hardly compare that to being an author. How can it be a game if you are writing the entire plot?

[quote who="Valiant_Turtle" reply="6" id="2485471"]... A quest is something that one chooses to do, not something that should be forced upon someone. I think the whole concept of someone "giving" you a quest could stand to be re-evaluated. ...[/quote] In folklore and myths, not all quests are self-directed. Peleus set Jason to hunting the Golden Fleece, for example. It's kind of a traditional monarch thing in many cultures.

[quote]I think if you are able to just upgrade housing to the next level than you will have a city full of mansions... which is absolutely ridiculous in they are trying to create a living breathing world.[/quote] Well, that's a darned good point. I'm not a maximizer, but I've read lots of their talk on the GC2 boards. I don't oppose the idea of abstracting/automating the housing to cut a 'micro burden,' but (so far) I don't mind doing it myself. If we do keep on building housi

[quote who="Denryu" reply="1" id="2485050"]I like it. Not sure I am such a big fan of the cooperative aspect, but i definitely like the idea of a quest being presented to ALL sovereigns simultaneously and essentially a race to accomplish it.[/quote] If nothing else, it seems like the Master Quest might already be a plan for that race-to-win quest type, at least in a game started with only the Master Quest endgame enabled. That "cooperative aspect" you balk at is, to me anyway,

[quote]I'm not quite sure you're entertaining when in flaming homo mode or not, but whatever. When they take polls asking whether people TRUST the theory of evolution in this country, the numbers come out to a round a third.[/quote] That was faux-ho mode, not flaming homo mode; a subtle distinction, I admit. I was also too terse. The numbers I'm curious about would describe the 'spewed misinformation.' Having grad students trawl through publications and tag things according to

[quote]... Gameplay note: Why would you destroy the huts?[/quote] A maximizer would want ever housing tile to hold the max possible population. Someone like me might forget to keep track of available improvement tiles and make it impossible to let a town grow to the next stage because the pop limit is too low and tiles that should be housing have other stuff on them. [quote]I still rather have them scrapping the whole housing idea. It's lots of micromanagement without any real