In two days, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is being released. I didn't get a review copy this time, which is unsurprising. What is more surprising is how much of a shitstorm the game is already causing on social media before it is even released. So I sorted through a lot of material to find out what is the matter, and why opinions on this game are so divided.

The first part of the problem is marketing shenanigans. EA Bioware is apparently trying to influence early review scores by carefully picking the reviewers. Content creators who had been invited to a preview of the game received review copies based on how positive their reaction was to that preview. Those who, like me in 2009, gave a positive but still somewhat critical first impression didn't get a review copy, while those who gave a glowing first impression then received a copy to review. That led to some of the bigger YouTubers in the RPG domain being excluded, while some very minor streamers were included.

The second part of the problem is, you might have guessed it, the culture wars. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is full of features and dialogues that promote the political correct / DEI / woke / progressive / however you want to call it point of view. There is an option to make transgender characters with mastectomy scars, which is probably not the blood and gore you wanted in your dark fantasy RPG, apart from being out of place in the setting. Political correctness not only upset people being on the other side of the culture wars, but also made more neutral reviewers dislike the dialogues and storytelling as bland. One reviewer described it as "every dialogue sounds as if HR was in the room", others as "millennial writing". Dragon Age: The Veilguard is to Dragon Age: Origins what Rings of Power is to Lord of the Rings.

The third, and maybe most contentious point, is whether Dragon Age: The Veilguard is still a Dragon Age game. Dragon Age: Origins had real-time with pause combat, which was still very tactical. Dragon Age: The Veilguard has a pure action RPG combat, that looks like it was lifted straight out of Gods of War. Also Dragon Age: Origins was very much *not* a politically correct game, and forced people to sometimes make really uncomfortable, dark dialogue choices. In The Veilguard you can only play the politically correct good guy, and never run into real moral dilemmas. The most evil thing you can do to a NPC is not doing the side-quest that helps him. There are also only three choices from previous Dragon Age games that you can input at character creation to have some sort of continuity.

Overall, you'll be probably able to guess the age and political leaning of the content creator by watching his Dragon Age: The Veilguard review. With The Veilguard being 15 years after Origins, and 10 years after Inquisition, there are simply a lot of young players out there who don't have a very deep connection to the earlier games. And if somebody likes action combat and prefers being the good guy, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is probably not a bad choice of game. The disappointed voices are those of people who have waited for a decade or more for a reincarnation of their favorite game, and got something different.

Ara: History Untold announced its first major patch for sometimes in November, promising to improve the economic user interface to something that works better when your empire is growing. But when playing Millennia and Ara back-to-back, I have to remark that the resource management and crafting chains in Millennia work a lot better since the very beginning. Yes, there are fewer options, but that means that you aren't constantly micromanaging what your buildings do.

4X games in general have a middle- to late-game problem of the management of larger empires getting tedious. I must say that Millennia is doing a lot better in that respect than Ara. The different ages in Millennia bring some new challenges to later ages, for example rebels. Some of those still can get tedious for large empires, but at least it is something new to manage, and you won't have the same thing to manage if you play again and go into a different age. Unfortunately the choice of ages is the one point where Millennia has a problem that Ara doesn't: At higher difficulty levels, due to the AI not getting smarter but just getting more resources than you, it is usually an AI opponent that gets to a new age first. And thus it becomes very random what new age the AI triggers, leading to a total loss of player agency on age selection.

Where both games, and pretty much all other 4X games, are rather bad is warfare: Higher difficulty levels enable the AI opponents to produce a lot more troops than you do, but they are universally bad at the strategic gameplay needed to send those troops somewhere to achieve something. All of these games seem to rely on the player's imagination, "I see an accumulation of enemy troops here, there AI must be planning to attack me"; that only works if the player then launches a counter-attack, because if the player tries a defensive strategy he'll notice very quickly that the AI attack isn't coordinated at all.

I am less excited for the next DLC announced for Millennia, Atomic Ambitions, as that probably won't affect the earlier part of the game at all. So maybe Ara still has some time to catch up and improve upon its flaws. But right now, Ara is the prettier and worse game, while Millenia is uglier and has the much better gameplay.

Board game releases are a lot more complicated. Especially crowdfunded ones, as for those the peak activity on YouTube is before the crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or Gamefound starts. Publishers produce prototype copies of the game and distribute those to content creators. So if I see somebody playing a board game on YouTube, I might be able to pay for it soon, but I won't be able to play it for usually more than a year, sometimes several years. Crowdfunding campaigns are driven by FOMO, the fear of missing out, and for that reason there is often very little information about how available the game will be in retail. Some games *only* sell via the crowdfunding campaign, and the only retail availability is from shops that get a few of those crowdfunded copies of the game and sell them on at a profit. Other games have a retail release. Often the crowdfunded version of the game is somewhat different than the retail version of the game, for example having more luxurious components.

When I visited the Spiel board game fair, I did again come across a booth that was selling retail copies of a game (Steam Power from Wallace Designs) that I had crowdfunded and not yet received my copy (I won't get it before Q1 2025). That is always a bit disappointing. Especially since in this case I pledged only for the standard / retail version of the game, which is the same that was available for sale there. There were some other booths for games that I had backed, but I didn't see another game already for sale. Thumbs up to Portal Games, who delivered my copy of Thorgal the Board Game just before showing the game at Spiel.

In early July, a major YouTube board game channel made two videos promoting Arcs as the best board game of 2024, kicking off a serious hype train. Three months later, at the Spiel, the hype seemed to already have cooled down somewhat. The backers on Kickstarter had received their copies, and there were retail copies available for sale, of which I was able to get one without even having to stand in a queue. But retail availability is still a while off, with estimates ranging from November to after Christmas. The peak of availability of video content on Arcs was way before most people can even buy the game.

The Spiel is very much a commercial fair. It isn't meant for you to sit down and play a game for long. The tables with games that do exist are mostly for demonstration, and that often is an abbreviated version of the game, to get more people to experience the game, and then to buy it. There are a lot of stands for selling games. And one of the attractions is that sometimes there are games available that aren't quite in retail yet. But this year I only bought two games during the Spiel, and two more of the games shown there in retail after the fair. Buying a game at the Spiel usually involves standing in a queue, and the hotter the game is, the longer the queue. Again this is driven very much by FOMO: BGG publishes a list of new games at the Spiel, players can give thumbs up for games they are interested in, and the most-talked games are quickly sold out. Some companies just sell all they have on the first day, others ration the games over the 4-day duration of the fair to still have something to sell on Sunday. But as I was only there on the first day, I experienced the peak buying frenzy of people who didn't know how long the game they wanted would be available for, and thus queued for sometimes hours to get it.

Personally I have mixed feelings about all that. On the one hand, by the nature of the public board game night I go to, bringing the latest game that nobody has yet makes it easier to find people to play with. Nothing is worse than bringing a game nobody wants to play with you. On the other hand, I don't think I had more fun with Arcs in the two evenings I played it now than I would have had if I had only brought the game 3 months later. The Spiel is huge, and I never manage to see everything in a day, so giving up hours of seeing new games in favor of standing in a queue doesn't appeal to me.

My wife and me disagree about the usefulness of our electric car. She hates the limited range, and our experience with public charging infrastructure really left her disgusted. We simply don't dare to drive beyond half the actual range of the car, so that we are sure we can always get back, and that actual range is only half of the range that if officially quoted for that car. We did trips where we pretended to need to recharge in order to try public charging out, but more often than not that either totally failed, or was excessively expensive. In the end, we just gave up on charging stations.

The reason I am more positive on the electric car is that I live in a privileged situation: I live in a single-family home with a garage, I have a private charging station in that garage, and I have solar panels on the roof which produce more electricity than our household needs. If feels a bit like free electricity, although technically you'd need to take the total cost of installation (for which we paid a rather reasonable €1.40/Wc), and divide if by the lifetime electricity production. Which is difficult, as you don't know the lifetime, nor the exact annual degradation of performance. If I consider only 10 years lifetime, I end up with an electricity price that isn't very different from the current network price; but if I consider 25 years and still 80% performance at that point (which is likely, but not guaranteed), I get the electricity at half the price than from the energy supplying company. I also have the advantage that I don't work anymore, so the car is charging at noon, when the solar panels are producing electricity. And while the limited range is annoying, over 90% of our car use is for short trips like shopping, and the range is totally sufficient for that.

The reason I understand why EV sales are falling is that I understand that few people are in my specific privileged situation. When I still worked in an office every day, I drove far more kilometers per year, and in the middle of the day, when solar panels produce electricity, the car was at the office, not at home. At that time I also still lived in an urban apartment building, and we were told that we couldn't get a private charging station, as the regular electricity lines installed on the road didn't have the capacity to provide everybody in the building charging his car at once. There is currently not a single high-rise building in the world that has EV charging stations for more than 10% of the people living in it, because that would require to completely rebuild the whole urban electricity network. And even at a national level, the electric grid in no country today could support 100% electric vehicles on the road. There are some serious practical limits to EV market penetration, which made it obvious from the start that the growth curve would have some inflection points slowing it down.

The biggest problem however is probably the disparity between the daily mileage that it is practical to drive an electric vehicle, and the daily mileage you'd need to drive to make it economical. As I calculated in a previous post, even considering "free" electricity, I save only €1,000 per year compared to a petrol car if I drive 10,000 km per year. And that is at my current local price of €1.50 per liter, or $6.20 per gallon, a price that would make most Americans choke. As our electric car did cost €10,000 more than a petrol car, it would take 10 years for the savings in energy to pay for the extra cost. And that calculation doesn't work, because after about 5 years you need to buy a new battery if you drive an EV. To make an electric car be economically viable, I would need to drive a lot. But if I drive a lot, then the range limitation and the time it takes to charge the car become really limiting. If you drive 100,000 km per year, you wouldn't want to do that in an electric car.

Electric vehicles are nice for people in an economically privileged position, as long as they care more about their ecological impact than about their finances. But that is a small market, which is now saturated. For the much bigger general car market, electric vehicles today aren't suitable.

A reader made a comment about this on my blog recently, and while you don't know my face or voice because I don't do videos, the parasocial quality of the interaction is similar. You feel you know *something* of me, while I know a lot less about you. I'm approaching 6,500 blog posts on this blog, so of course I revealed some part of me. But there are large areas of my life I don't talk about for various reasons, for example most employers wouldn't appreciate if a content creator would publish company internals on social media. Your feeling of "knowing me" is mostly an illusion.

Would you send a complete stranger 5 bucks a month? Probably not. A part of the business model of internet content creation is based on the parasocial relationship between the content creator and the viewer. As we don't consider the content creator to be a complete stranger, we are more likely to pay for a subscription to his channel, send a donation, or support him on Patreon. But if you consider what a monthly subscription to Netflix costs, and how much content you get for that, the subscription to a single content creator on YouTube or Twitch or Patreon is obviously a rather bad deal.

Still, at some point you probably had the nagging feeling that you "owed" the content creator something. I certainly did pay for some of those subscriptions, although now in retirement I cut down on that expense: I still pay for YouTube Premium, which gives some of my subscription money to content creators in proportion to how much I watch them. And I have Amazon Prime, which comes with one free monthly subscription on Twitch, which I tend to give to some channel I like and that doesn't already have a lot of subscribers. If an angel of karmic justice descends on me and wants to smite me for freeloading on what these content creators provide to me, I'll point out to him that I have been providing free content on the internet for 21 years, with minimal financial returns. My karma should be in the positive. :)

To be very clear, I don't think that you owe me anything, however long you have been reading my blog. Creating content on the internet is always to some extent motivated by the desire to express yourself, to share your thoughts with others. Others already reading my thoughts and being interested in what I think is already a reward. When I started this, the idea that somebody would make a living of creating content for the internet was laughable. I am still not convinced it is a very good idea, as tastes are fickle, internet content creator is the ultimate "gig" job, and it doesn't come with a lot of security or a pension plan. There is also something rather base and mercenary about the content which is created mostly with a financial motive, like the streamer telling you about the "best game ever", only to drop the game a few days later and never streaming it again. And even if I might piss some people off by saying so, philosophically you can draw a straight line from the financially motivated Twitch gaming channel, to the Twitch "hot tub" channel, to a channel on OnlyFans. The content creators do what they need to do to get their monthly income. And only very few of them make it on Twitch, the median number of subscribers on Twitch is between 0 and 1.

Note that I also don't think that I owe you something. I am trying to keep up a more or less steady stream of content, but that depends on my mood. When I talk about games that are currently "hot", that is mostly because I myself am often interested in current games. A good part of this blog is a personal diary in disguise, a journal of the part of my life that I don't mind sharing. I don't know if you ever were in a situation where you stumble across an older game and think "I played that, but I don't really remember it well enough to still know what I thought about it". Well, I know where to look that information up for myself.

The peak interest in my blog was around the time when YouTube just started and Twitch was still called Justin.TV. One could speculate in hindsight whether in a parallel life I could have made the move from gaming blogging to creating gaming streaming content and would have made a lot of money that way. In reality, the thought never crossed my mind, due to already having a well-paying day job I liked well enough at that time. Even now, my retirement is financially comfortable enough for me to not search for another source of income. I think I can live with the fact that nobody recognizes me at the Spiel in Essen and waves "hi" to me.

Besides some regional content on Byzantium, the main content of the Roads to Power DLC is the ability to play as a landless adventurer. You gather fellow mercenaries, travel around the map, and make money and gain favors by doing quests. This mostly uses parts of the CK3 engine that weren't even in the original game, the travel system of Tours & Tournaments. As a result, the landless adventurer gameplay feels very detached from the core game of CK3, as if a completely different game had been grafted on.

While your landless adventurer can gain favors leading to him becoming a count or duke, for example by marriage, and landed characters can become landless, this isn't happening all that often. Basically you play the landless part until you are tired of it, and then switch to the original gameplay. The transition isn't very smooth, and the landless adventurer part is clearly suffering from some limitations of the CK3 base game. Already the time scale isn't a good fit, you probably wouldn't want to play a mercenary group over the 600 years that a CK3 game can take.

I think a completely separate 30 Euro game about playing a landless adventurer in the middle ages would have worked better than a 30 Euro DLC that grafts this gameplay onto CK3. There seems to be very little synergy between the two game modes. And while I see why CK3 fans who got bored of the main game welcomed a DLC that is offering something very different, I wouldn't want games to become collections of sub-games with very different gameplay and little connection between the parts.

Arcs has 4 suits of cards. The 7 aggression cards together have 15 actions, the construction and mobilization suits have 19 actions, and the administration suit has 20 actions. The average number of actions per card is thus 2.6, and the average number of actions in a hand of cards is 15.6. However, to play all of those 15 actions, you would need to be the lead player in every round, or be able to surpass the lead player. If you have to pivot or copy, you only get 1 action per card, or 6 for the whole hand.

If, as the starting player, you lead with a low card, let's say a 2 with 4 action pips on it, the other players are likely to be able to surpass that. However, you still come out ahead: The cards higher than 2 have fewer action pips, so even the players that surpass you only get 2 or 3 actions to your 4. If you lead with a high card, you get fewer actions, but it becomes more likely that other players can't surpass you, and only get 1 action from a copy or pivot play. Declaring an ambition messes up this action advantage of the lead player: As declaring an ambition reduces the value of your lead card to 0, you can be surpassed even with a 1. If you use a 6 with 2 actions to declare the Empath ambition, other players can surpass you with cards having 4 actions and actually get more actions than you do. The higher the card you use to declare your ambition, the more costly in terms of action economy that becomes.

One might be tempted to think that a hand full of high cards is good in Arcs, but high cards have the lowest number of action pips. The best hand is thus actually a mix, where you have high cards with which you can surpass and get initiative, but also low cards that allow you to play a lot of actions. If you have a hand full of low cards, you might get lucky when another player declares an ambition and you can always surpass a 0. But you should also seriously consider seizing the initiative. If you would be reduced to pivot or copy every round and only get 6 actions per chapter, sacrificing a card costs you only 1 action, and then playing a low card gives you 3 or 4 actions.

Getting a lot of actions only helps you if you can actually use them. If you were the starting player of the first chapter and lead with a 1 in construction, getting 4 build or repair actions, you'd find that you can probably only build 1 starport and 2 ships, leaving the last action unusable. This is where the use of resources in the prelude step becomes very important: If in the above situation you had a fuel resource, you could first move a ship into an empty sector and have far more options to build.

A typical problem with a "bad hand" is having too many cards of the same suit. There are diminishing returns when doing the same type of actions several rounds in a row. If you influenced in the previous round, you would often be much better off with a secure action than with more influence. Being aware of such things helps you to identify the cards in your hand that are likely to not bring you much of an advantage. While many players shy away from sacrificing a card to seize initiative, you have to consider how good or bad the card you sacrifice actually is. Sometimes the advantage of becoming the lead player is well worth the sacrifice of a bad card.

Gaining an additional action card is extremely strong in Arcs (see my previous post). At the very least it would allow you to sacrifice a card and seize initiative without suffering the disadvantage of not being able to play in the 6th round. But it can also easily lead to situation where you are the only player left with card(s) in hand, you become the lead player by default, and get all the actions on the cards you play without your opponents getting even one.

In summary, being aware of the action economy is very important in Arcs. Getting more actions than your opponents is generally good. There is true skill in knowing when to sacrifice a card to seize initiative, and when it is better to hold onto all of your cards.

Competitive board games are best when all players have a similar level of knowledge of the game. While all 4 players of my game of Arcs were playing this for the first time, two players had only read the rules. I had studies the rules in more detail, as it was me was explaining them at the table, and had looked at some playthrough videos to see the rules in practice. And the last player was the only one who had a large experience with previous games from the same designer, like Roots. That experience showed, and by the end of the second chapter, he was leading with 16 points, while I just had half that, 8 points. With victory for a 4-player game happening at 27 points, I didn't think I still had a chance. But I underestimated how volatile Arcs is.

I started the third chapter being the only one who had captives on his player board, and managed to declare the Tyrant ambition, meaning this chapter those captives were counting for victory points. But the leading player had already scored Tycoon and Keeper in chapter 2, was still way ahead in the resources to win those, and managed to declare both of those ambitions, so he looked very much as if he would win. But I had a "Union" card from the previous chapter, which allowed me to reclaim a played action card, thus getting one more action that chapter. And then I managed to secure another "Union" card. And the Call to Action Vox card, which allowed me to draw yet another action card. So by the end of the 6th round of chapter 3, everybody else was out of cards, while I still had 3 cards in hand.

That proved to be absolutely devastating. Normally in Arcs, the lead player already has a big advantage in the action economy, while the other players often can get only 1 action that turn, unless they can surpass with a higher card of the same suit. But with 3 extra cards I had 3 turns in which I not only was by default the lead player, I also was the only one getting any actions at all. So I used the 3 cards to attack the leading player and raid him. Arcs allows you to steal another player's resources and cards. I had some luck in completely dismantling his defending ships with a good roll of the dice, and the raid dice roll also came out well for me. So I was able to steal enough resources and cards from him to have the lead for both the Tycoon and Keeper ambitions.

So at the end of chapter 3, I was leading in all three of the declared ambitions. As victory points go up with the chapter, that was already 15 victory points. But I also had 4 cities built, which gave another +2 victory points per won ambition, bringing my score for chapter 3 up to 21 points! With the 8 points I had from the previous two chapters, that got me to 29 points, way ahead of everybody else and above the 27-point threshold for victory. While we had taken 30 minutes to explain the rules, and 2.5 hours to play 3 chapters, that still meant that we finished the game in time before the store closed.

From what I have seen in those YouTube playthroughs, these events of one player making a huge amount of points in a single chapter aren't uncommon. I had never seen anybody do or suggest to do it with my particular strategy to accumulating several extra actions, but that isn't the only way a big score is possible. And while I see how these big swings make for interesting stories, I am not sure whether they are the best game design. I'm not saying I played badly, as I managed to see an opportunity and grab it, but still my win felt somewhat luck-based. I got lucky that so many cards turned up that allowed to get extra actions. And because none of us knew how strong those extra actions were, and everybody was busy with whatever he was planning, I was able to grab those three extra actions. I'm fine with a player succeeding a good move in a game, but I would argue that the ability to make 21 points in a good move out of 27 needed for victory, or 78% of victory in a single chapter, is a bit much. And that isn't even the maximum, I would have made 30 points if I had already built my 5th city.

So this is Arcs in a nutshell. Two chapters spent everybody maneuvering into position, and then an unexpected big win by one player who didn't even look as if he was ahead. Arcs is very much a tactical game, not a strategic one. You might think one player is winning after 2 hours, and then in the last 30 minutes another player swings the game. The game is swingy and unpredictable, and some people will love the game for that. The more strategically minded careful planners might not be so enthusiastic. The people I played with, including me, thought that it was an interesting experience, but none of us were raring to go for a rematch. I assume that if you play Arcs a lot with the same people, it somewhat stabilizes, as players learn to see things coming and preventing others from those big wins. But with one board game night per week with changing players, that is not the reality I live in.

Arcs, one of the hottest games this year on the BGG hotness list, doesn't follow this trend. Just the opposite. In many ways it resembles much older games, like Risk, in that a players progress to victory can become rather obvious, and the other players can band together and stop that leading player by destroying his fleet, raiding his planets, and stealing his cards. Arcs actually has a rule about what happens if a player gets completely wiped off the board. That obviously doesn't sit well with people who think the original Scrabble is too competitive. And thus there are YouTube videos on "why Arcs isn't for you", and BGG reviews calling Arcs "mean".

I much prefer board games that have a good amount of player interaction, whether that is cooperative or competitive. Sitting around the same table, players are naturally more polite to each other, even in competitive situations. The toxicity, fed by anonymity and distance, of certain multiplayer online games isn't present in board games. Being in conflict with each other over a game situation while staying civil around the same table is good, it teaches us a lot about reasonable conflict resolution. There is an evolutionary aspect to games as tools to teach us about real world situations in safety, which is why even animals play.

Conflict and competition is part of the real world. Most of us are lucky enough to not have personally experienced armed conflict and war. But even if you are just working in a perfectly harmonious company culture, you can find yourself in a situation where both you and a colleague applied for the same supervisor position, and one of you is going to "win", while the other "loses". Helicopter parents trying to bring children up without ever letting them come into contact with any risk or any conflict aren't really doing their children a favor. Learning how to deal with risk, learning how to handle conflict is an important part of life. I wouldn't want to eliminate all competitiveness from board games, I think we would be losing something in the process.

I would agree that Arcs isn't a board game for everybody. It is not a casual game. While it doesn't have the most complex rules, it has enormous depth. You can't win the game once and then apply the same strategy in the next game: The combination of unpredictable randomness from cards and dice with even more unpredictable actions from other players strongly impacting you makes it necessary to constantly think on your feet and adjust. And that for 2 to 3 hours, or more if people are playing slowly. Arcs also isn't a game in which a first time player is going to do well against more experienced opponents. But for me there is something special about that sort of game, just like with Dune: Imperium: I love to reach the point after a few games where I feel that now I am playing competently, even if I am not winning.

Now populist parties are generally bad news for democracies. They tend to latch onto protest movements, promising simplistic solutions to complicated problems. But if you believe that the Nazis are back in Europe and about to take control, you fell for a classic political misinformation maneuver: Political enemies tend to exaggerate the position of their opponents, trying to make them seem more extreme than they actually are. Thus Trump calls Kamala Harris a marxist, which is probably an endless source of amusement for actual communists and marxists.

The current success of right wing populist parties is solely due to their anti-migration stance. Giorgia Meloni, the right wing populist prime minister of Italy, has the exact same "stop the boats" at the heart of her political program that the UK conservative party had, which is essentially the same as the "build the wall" policy of Trump Republicans. If you look at the more detailed political programs of all these European right wing populist parties, they are all well to the left of US Republicans and Trump. Like Trump they want to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine with Putin, keep fossil fuels, and keep migrants out of their country; unlike Trump they don't want to lower taxes on the rich or decrease welfare payments. These are populist parties, and decreasing welfare isn't popular at all in Europe.

I think it is clear to everybody that if Trump gets elected in November, it will cause measurable damage to the United States of America and the world. The same thing is true for the European right wing populist parties: They could cause some real harm, for example by massively delaying policies against climate change. That doesn't mean that Europe is likely to soon all wear brown shirts and march in goose step towards World War III. While populist right wing parties certainly give a home to people with neo-Nazi beliefs, none of these parties is actually calling for the reconstruction of gas chambers. Their harshest proposed policies usually revolve around not letting any asylum seekers into their countries, and getting rid of some of those that are already in. Which again is very similar to Trump's proposed mass deportations.

The popularity of these right wing populist parties is based on the fact that the more mainstream political parties don't have good answers to the migration crisis. It is obvious to a large majority of Europeans that a large percentage of people coming into their countries "seeking asylum" aren't actually politically persecuted in their home countries, but are coming out of economic reasons. But as nobody knows how to sort them out, there is only a bad choice between accepting "false negatives" or accepting "false positives". Nobody really has a good solution, but the populist "close the borders" policy to many citizens sounds more reasonable than letting everybody in who asks for asylum. It is predictable that the political pressure will over the next decade globally lead to a diminishment of asylum rights, which is bad news for people actually persecuted. That doesn't mean that the people asking for this are equivalent to the Nazis.

In the local primaries to the US elections, one pro-Palestinian candidate lost against a pro-Israel candidate and promptly evoked a "threat to democracy", despite both candidates being Democrats. There is an inflation of rhetoric everywhere, and the consequence is that words become increasingly meaningless. Even Trump isn't Hitler, and the damage he did to democratic institutions during his presidency was rather limited, and would still be limited if he won again. It would of course be better for everybody if neither Trump nor the European right wing populist parties won. But if the only idea that left and mainstream parties have to achieve that is scare-mongering, they won't succeed. Migration needs better political solutions. Fighting climate change needs better political solutions that don't impoverish low- and medium-income earners. It is the absence of answers from the left and center that makes the right strong.

Our experience last year was that when arriving with a car an hour before the convention opened, it was very hard to still find a parking space anywhere. So this year we came in the afternoon of the day before and stayed at a hotel, which wasn't cheap due to the 200,000 visitors of the convention driving up the prices during that period. That turned out to be a lot more relaxing, and very easy for the parking. I hope that if I book a hotel even earlier for next year, I'll be able to get a better price, and stay two nights. We did the convention this time with only a lunch break, but were exhausted by mid-afternoon and left. If I had a hotel room booked for two nights, I could take more breaks for comfort and spread out my visit over two days. I hope it won't be that full next year, because the huge crowd made it very hard to interact with the exhibitors and get some explanation of games.

Ara: History Untold is not a Civ killer. It is a game with currently a score of 76 on Metacritic, and 68% positive ratings on Steam. Player numbers don't tell us much, because the game is somewhat overpriced on Steam, while having first-day availability on Game Pass: So a lot of people figured out that for an unknown game, playing it for $12 on Game Pass is a better idea than playing it for $60 on Steam. I don't think anybody at Firaxis is having sleepless nights over Ara: History Untold.

Having said that, Ara certainly has some potential. The general idea of combining the crafting and chains of goods from games like Anno 1800 with the civilization building genre is a good one. A lot of people are disappointed *because* Ara is fun to play in the first act, and then loses fun much faster in the mid- to end-game than Civ does. There are clearly two potential futures here for this game: One in which it receives great support, and by a number of patches and DLCs becomes a really good game; and another in which the project is somewhat abandoned and forgotten.

Another part of the general public disappointment is due to modern day influencer marketing and Steam refund periods: Ara looks graphically great in a streamed video of act I, and it takes way more than 2 hours of own play to realize its more serious long-term flaws. It doesn't help that not every streamer that is playing Ara is actually serious about it: I have seen far too many of them saying things like "oh, for my first building, I'll build a farm, to grow my starting city"; which simply doesn't work, as farms in Ara only give +3% to city growth. Putting a maximum of resources in round 1 into your Great Hearth to build a feast, which gives +25 city growth, is significantly more important at the start of the game. In fact, I don't build any building at all in the first region of my starting city early in the game, as these central spots are sorely needed later for dwellings and the palace. Building a scout, followed by a spearman, followed by a settler is a much better strategy. By the time you finished that, you'll have a second region, in which a farm on a wheat/corn/barley resource if you have it is probably the best move. That then enables you to build a granary and produce grain stores, which give another +30 to city growth.

One thing I like about Ara, but which is potentially already too demanding for the average player, is that it uses math quite cleverly: Buildings or resources can give a flat +X bonus, or they can give a percentage +Y% bonus. Over the course of the game, the relative value of these changes: In a city of size 12, the +3% bonus of the farm becomes as large as the +25 flat bonus of the feast, and with larger cities the percentage bonus becomes better, while for small cities the flat bonuses are better.

The same level of math knowledge is needed to understand how the crafting of goods works. Typically to produce a good, let's say fabric, you need a certain number of production points, in this case 500. The weaver building will give you a number of points each round, which depends on the city production value (which grows with city level and various bonuses), as well as on the supplies and experts of the weaver building. Let's say that all together the weaver building produces 50 production points, then it takes 10 turns to make 1 fabric. But the fabric has 3 slots to put in resources for accelerated production. And each slot gives +500 production points! If you fill all three slots, your fabric production goes up from 0.1 per turn to 3.1 per turn, which is a huge difference. Some slots can be filled with either a specific resource, e.g. fur, or replaced by putting in wealth. You can get +500 production on the first slot of fabric production with either 1 fur, 1 llama, or 50 wealth. These resources are used *every round*, so the more slots you fill, the cheaper the resource cost per produced item gets. If you have only fur, you can get 1.1 fabric per turn for 1 fur per turn. If you have fur, wool, and silk, you can get 3.1 fabric per turn for 1 fur, 1 wool, and 1 silk. Overall that means that without the correct input resources, producing a crafted good is slow and expensive, while it gets cheaper and faster when you have the right resources. Understanding how all of that works is the key to playing Ara well. Sorry for the math! It takes a lot of juggling, because for some goods the bonuses from resources are a lot smaller than for others. For example bandages at that same weaver have only 2 slots for accelerated production, and they only give +25 production points each, while 100 points are needed to make a bandage. It is a lot more viable to produce bandages without resources than it is to produce fabrics without resources. And while an expert giving +150% to base production of the building is quite impactful to bandages, it doesn't do very much for your fabric, as it doesn't increase the accelerated production points.

As I mentioned in a previous post, each city has 5 stats, and these stats receive a negative modifier based on city size, e.g. -10 at size 6 and -30 and size 12. But the size 6 city has only 3 slots for amenities, while the size 12 city has 6 slots. The game loop of Ara is growing cities to gather resources, crafting amenities from those resources, and compensating the negative size modifiers with the right amenities to keep everything going. That is fun in act I, and would be fun in acts II and III if Ara had the right UI tools to scale, bundle, and automate certain tasks. That isn't the case right now, so having 10 cities with sizes up to 30 in the end game is just too much of a chore to manage, and even fans of micro-management might give up way before that.

The basic game loop of Ara is significantly different from that of other 4X games, like Civilization or Millenia. If you are trying to play Ara like any other 4X game, you won't be very successful. You need to understand the resources and the crafting, and in many cases that only comes through playing; the game often doesn't tell you what exactly you need and how impactful a resource will be before you actually constructed the building. While I can tell you that if you build a farm on a non-resource space to just grow basic food will produce different amounts of food based on the fertility of the specific region and the city size, the math for that is so obscure that I haven't understood it fully.

If I'll start another game of Ara, I will probably just play until the end of the first act and then declare myself the winner if I am leading in prestige. Setting the difficulty right for this to be interesting isn't obvious. It is possible to set the difficulty for the AI to a different level than for yourself, and that might be necessary: If you apply the same high difficulty to both yourself and the AI, the AI becomes stupidly aggressive and unresponsive to diplomacy, as well as cheating to a frustrating level. Thus I might try a game with a high difficulty for myself to make the economy challenging, but lower difficulty for the AI to make the cheating and bad diplomacy less crippling.