Tobold's Blog

Saturday, March 21, 2026

Bridgerton vs. Crimson Desert

Imagine you are a big fan of the Netflix series Bridgerton. So you decide to take a holiday in London, and visit the Mayfair district around Grosvenor Square, where much of the series plays. Probably that would be quite disappointing. Not only because Bridgerton is fictional, and plays over 200 years ago. But because if you visit Grosvenor Square, you can only look at the expensive houses from outside. You can't go in, and even if you could, there wouldn't be a drama going on like you can experience if you watch Bridgerton.

That is a common feature of any historical tourist spot. I used to live half an hour's drive away from Waterloo, and I can really recommend the museum they have there about the famous battle. But if you are outside the museum, and climb the commemorative Lion's Mound to see the actual battlefield, these look suspiciously like ordinary fields these days, and there is no battle going on. You need to use your own historical knowledge and imagination for that to have any sort of interest.

If you watch Bridgerton, you don't have any freedom to explore. You can only watch the linear story, episode by episode. If you found one side character particularly interesting, but the script doesn't have any further important role for him or her, you don't get the option to see how he / she is faring. If the script skips a week for dramatic purposes, you don't get to see what happened during that time, except for the bits the series chooses to show you. All that is in the dramatic interest of the narrative. Somebody wrote "only the good bits" into the part that is shown to the audience, and thus gets to choose what the good bits are.

This week the open world game Crimson Desert released, and I looked into some of the reviews to find out whether I wanted to play that. That resulted in me not wanting to play it, because of too hard action combat boss fights and too bad controls. But it also resulted in me watching a bunch of people complain that they had expected Bridgerton and got Grosvenor Square. Crimson Desert has a huge and beautiful open world, with many points of interests and opportunities to interact with the environment, up to picking up and cuddling with any cat running around. What it doesn't have is a tight dramatic story that hooks you early in the game and drives you through that world.

I would argue that to some degree the freedom to explore and the tight dramatic story are mutually incompatible. There are many games that try to do both, with more or less success. Games like The Witcher 3 or Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom in my mind found a good balance between freedom and story. But even in those games there are moments where you basically have to decide between one or the other. When you are farming Korok seeds in Zelda to grow your inventory, you have to leave the story aside. There is never any urgency, you can take off a week to just explore, and the princess to save will still be there once you get around to her.

Crimson Desert is definitively leaning towards the freedom side of the balance. And there are people who enjoy that. There are also people who feel a bit lost due to the lack of handholding and story direction. That is neither new nor unique to the medium, I felt the same conflict between freedom and story when I was writing and/or running D&D adventures. Some people liked hex crawl adventures full of freedom, others hated them due to their lack of a strong story and sense of purpose.

I do like exploring, and I do like games like Valheim or Enshrouded. That is why I looked into Crimson Desert in the first place, it looked like something I would like to play. But Crimson Desert is also trying to be Elden Ring, Legend of Zelda, and a bunch of other games at the same time. With the finite number of buttons on a gamepad, wanting the player to be able to do too many things becomes a control problem. And I don't like souls-like boss combat in any version. So I am not going to spend money on this.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Friday, March 20, 2026

War profiteering and the future of oil

This is not financial advice. Although I have a general interest in economics, I don't claim to be particularly good at personal finance. In fact, one could say that me not being good at personal finance led to this post. It is not meant as advice, but as a journal of my thoughts on the matter.

For nearly 3 decades before my retirement I worked for an oil company. Not on the actual oil exploration and production side, but in research of the chemical transformation of oil into petrochemicals. Like many other large companies, my employer wanted me to own shares in the company. Part of that is that companies believe that employees that hold shares are more interested in the share price and well-being of the company; another part is tax reasons, where paying an employee in shares is taxed less than paying him cash under specific circumstances. And so I received some shares for free, and participated in offers where I would get company shares at a 20% discount. Basically free money, so it would have been stupid to refuse that. But not being good at personal finance, I just let the shares accumulate, with the dividends being reinvested. The miracle of compound interest over decades led to the majority of my retirement savings being in that one stock. On the one side, having much of your savings in a single stock is a bad idea. On the other side, old school bankers in the previous century considered oil shares the best investment for widows and orphans, them being relatively safe and paying good dividends.

And then some idiot decided to bomb Iran. That is generally bad for the global economy and share prices, with the exception of oil shares. A large part of the share price of an oil company depends on the proven reserves multiplied by the price of oil. Skyrocketing oil prices mean significant rises in oil share prices. And so I am war profiteering, obviously without having wanted to do that.

I think it is time to sell a large chunk of my oil shares while they are high. Not that I see anything better to invest in: There is considerable financial risk in shares these days, for various reasons from rising energy prices, to a potential AI bubble, to a potential private credit debt crisis. Price to earnings ratios are at record highs, the stock markets had a long bull run, and a correction is overdue. But selling my oil shares would help me diversify my portfolio. And while the transition from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable energy economy is slow, the long term future of oil is declining. I'm not saying that this is the last chance to get out with a nice profit, but it is a chance, and we don't know how many future opportunities like that there will be.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:20 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Thursday, March 19, 2026

Creativity tools as barriers to entry

I have a vivid image in my mind of a group of medieval monks brandishing handwritten bibles protesting in front of Johannes Gutenberg's print shop in Mainz in 1450. I see that image every time I read on some forum about artists complaining about their jobs being taken away by artificial intelligence. The thing is, in hindsight over the past 6 centuries, the invention of the movable-type printing press is considered to be a good thing. It is credited with catalyzing the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.

But of course, any tool that allows faster mass communication of creative ideas also has its dark sides. We all know examples of how the internet led to echo chambers, spread conspiracy theories, or was used to harm others. AI generated images, especially deepfakes, are certainly able to harm others. But maybe we need to zoom out, and look at it from a wider, historical perspective.

I do not think that people in the middle ages did not have interesting lives, or lacked ideas. But we know very little about their lives and ideas, because it would have been prohibitively expensive for them to write these things down. The late middle ages saw parchment from animal skin replaced by the arrival and development of paper. Woodblock printing allowed for making copies of the same document, and the movable-type printing press made the production of pamphlets and books a lot easier and cheaper. That basically removed a barrier to entry, allowing more people to write down their lives or spread their ideas.

A catholic priest in the 15th century didn't like this removal of barriers to entry, and would argue that it allowed for the spread of "heresy". But this "heresy" included humanism, enlightenment, and science. If you remove barriers to entry for mass communication, you simply get *more* ideas spreading. Some of these are good, others are bad. But we are way past the point where we think that organizations like churches or governments should have a monopoly on ideas or information.

Having written 6,736 posts on this blog for over two decades, I certainly do not disdain writing skills. Nor do I think that skills in drawing or painting are bad. But these skills do constitute a barrier to entry for people who might have creative ideas, but not the skills to express them. And it isn't inherently bad to remove these barriers to entry and allow more people to share their ideas. And yes, some of the ideas shared that way will be bad. But there is also the possibility of some ideas being good.

For example, having worked in science and science funding, I have observed over the course of my career that the best presented scientific proposals weren't necessarily the scientifically best proposals. There are scientists that have great ideas, but who aren't great salespeople, and so they never get their proposals funded. While others have generic ideas, but are good at selling them to the people who give the funding. An AI able to write a funding proposal well could be useful, as long as the scientific idea behind is valuable.

In art, there was a time when being able to paint a scene or person realistically was highly prized. The invention of photography made that particular skill less useful. But that in return led to art movements like impressionism, trying to capture subjective sensory experiences and representing personal perception rather than photorealism. I have no doubt that AI generated images will not lead to the death of art. But it will allow people that have no skills in drawing or painting to express the images they have in their mind. I now should have used an AI image generator to create that painting of the monks protesting Gutenberg, but you get the idea.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:51 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Friday, March 13, 2026

Altay: Dawn of Civilization

I play a lot of board games. I also watch a lot of YouTube. In many cases, these two activities fit well together (not at the same time, of course). There are quite a number of board game channels on which board games are reviewed, discussed, or played. With board games being a lot more niche than computer games, many board game companies have concluded that such channels are the most suitable form of advertising for them. But I guess not everybody got the memo. Altay: Dawn of Civilization is the second game I bought from Ares Games, after the excellent Aeterna. And for both games the YouTube content is a lot thinner than one would expect, presumably because Ares Games Marketing isn't paying any influencers to play their games.

Altay: Dawn of Civilization is at heart a deckbuilding game, with a bit of area control mixed in. Like in many other deckbuilders, you start with 10 cards, and draw 5 cards each round. Many of those cards give you resources, which then allow you to buy more cards for your deck. What is different in Altay are cards that allow you to build settlements, and cards that allow your areas with settlements to attack neighboring areas. At the start of the game there are only neutral tokens to attack, but at some point the areas of different players will be next to each other, so they can attack each other. But as you can only do one attack per turn from the same area to the same neighbor, and the winner only gets one settlement from the loser, it isn't easy to actually conquer territory. So the area control part of the game is often not that game deciding. Still, the game board and conquest of areas improves the table presence of Altay in comparison to pure deckbuilders like Dominion.

The downside is one that is rather often the case with area control games: Scaling with player numbers. I played Altay with 4 and with 3 players, and the 4-player game in which we used the whole board was a lot more fun. With 3 players a part of the board is blocked, but that still leaves more areas for every player, and makes area control even less significant. Also, area control games often have problems with a player count of 3, due to possibility of unfun 2 vs. 1 fighting.

Altay: Dawn of Civilization is not a very complex or difficult game, and takes only about 2 hours with 4 players, less with 3. It was fun enough with 4 players, but I have doubts about the games longevity / replayability. I had the impression that already by the second game I had much optimized my strategy, and there aren't too many random elements in the game that would change future games very much. So, yeah, maybe this game isn't talked about much on YouTube because not so many people like it.

In other news, Altay is the last but one board game from my Essen 2025 loot stack. Only March of the Ants to play before I have played all the games I bought at the fair last year.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 12:20 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Looking behind the curtain of EU5 events

I just installed an EU5 mod called Unique Events Tab. It adds another tab to the EU5 user interface, which lets you see possible country-specific events, and the conditions under which they would trigger. The base game of EU5 already has a lot of these unique events, although they are concentrated in the most historically relevant countries: England has 233 unique Dynamic Historical Events, while many small non-European countries have none at all. But more importantly, the bulk of the content of the DLCs for EU5 will come in the form of such unique events, which makes it interesting to understand them.

However, once you understand these events, you'll quickly see a problem: Without the mod, you don't even know these events are there, unless they fulfill the trigger condition and pop up. And that isn't obvious. For example in my current Byzanz run, I now see that there is an event in the case that I conquer Athens and integrate it. However, I chose to vassalize Athens and annex it. So I never triggered the integration condition, and never saw the event.

If you look at the unique events and their triggers, it becomes obvious that the developers assume the player will play a country in a certain way. It is only logical for the Byzantine Empire to want to reconquer all of Greece. However, there is also an event that triggers if the Byzantine Empire owns both Constantinople and Venice, and not ever player of the Byzantine Empire will want to meddle with Italy. It is easy to imagine a run in which the player decides to turn eastwards instead of going the historical way of trying to reconstitute the Roman empire. Any player who plays any country in a more original way will end up triggering fewer unique events for that country.

That makes me wonder how attractive the Europa Universalis V DLCs are going to be. Already at the base, if you don't want to play the Byzantine Empire, you don't need the first DLC, Rise of the Phoenix. But even if you buy it and play it, you might not see a large part of the content. There is at least a risk that buyers of the DLC will be underwhelmed, because too much of the content is invisible to them.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:05 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Monday, March 09, 2026

Pauper's Ladder

Pauper's Ladder is a board game from 2019, but the German version was just released this year, and I bought a copy. Pauper's Ladder is an adventure game, that is to say that you are dealing with a lot of unpredictable random events. You have some control, by deciding where you go, or by manipulating cards. But the basic mechanic is moving somewhere, drawing a card, and then seeing whether that card is good or bad for you. As my personal venture into fantasy board games and roleplaying games started in the 80's with Talisman, I can relate to that game loop.

Board games over the past decades have developed a divide between Eurogames and Amerigames (and that is the polite term, some people use Ameritrash). While not all Eurogames are European and not all Amerigames are American, a majority of games I see in shops here in Europe or encounter at a games fair are Eurogames. Eurogames are mostly about resource management and strategy, player interaction is often only indirect, and very often the victory condition is having the most victory points at the end. If you like to plan several moves ahead, Eurogames are for you. Amerigames are more concerned with the experience than with planning and strategy; they don't mind sudden surprises, as long as that creates fun, and those surprises can be players being able to directly attack each other.

Now for most of my life I have been playing pen & paper roleplaying games, which are very clearly Amerigames. And I continue to enjoy campaign games, like our current campaign of Arydia, which sit somewhere between board games and roleplaying games. So I did enjoy Pauper's Ladder, even if for Euro gamers the randomness might be a bit disconcerting.

I was thinking of the advantages of Amerigames this weekend, as I was playing some older Eurogames with some people in an unfavorable composition for that: Two of the four players knew the two games very well, and had even years ago played one of them at tournament level. Me and another guy played those games for the very first time. Even if winning is not the most important thing about playing games for me, playing a board game at such very different levels and having the feeling of not being in the running at all isn't much fun.

Since I have stopped playing roleplaying games and am visiting public board game nights twice a week on average, I have bought a lot of suitable games for that, and brought a different game every week. Apart from a few games like Dune: Imperium, which for some time were repeatedly played, most of the board games I played were as new to me as to the other players, which evens the playing field. One would need to play the same game with the same people repeatedly to achieve another sort of balance; and that is difficult in the environment I am playing in. Amerigames like Pauper's Ladder have this problem to a much lower degree, as the randomness much diminishes the effect of experience, and people can win by just being lucky. I really want to have some games like that in my collection, also because on some nights I just don't feel like deep thinking.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 10:08 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Friday, March 06, 2026

Winner takes it all advertising

If you were to enter the search term "MMORPG blog" into Google or another search engine, there is at least a chance for you to see a link to my blog on the first few pages. That is of course completely irrelevant, nobody searches for MMORPGs or blogs anymore, my blog isn't a MMORPG anymore, and I don't get any income from people seeing my content. But I still get spam comments hoping to profit from my Google page rank, and I still get mails offering me SEO (search engine optimization) services to improve that page rank.

This is all based on the fact that most search engines for most of the time of the existence of search engines gave out results in the form of long lists of possible results. Of course the top results got the most clicks, but being on the bottom of the first page or somewhere on page two was still a lot better than not being listed at all. For people who derived income from people visiting their website, paying for search engine optimization or paying Google directly to be high on a search result page made sense.

Today was the first time I saw the term AEO (answer engine optimization). Because search on the internet is changing. Even on Google, the list of links is now pushed further below, with the top of the page being more and more often totally dominated by an answer given by artificial intelligence. If you "search" by directly putting a prompt into a chatbot like ChatGPT, you don't get a list of links at all, only the AI answer. If I ask Google AI what the best smartphone is, it answers "In 2026, the Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max and Google Pixel 10 Pro XL are widely considered the best smartphones overall for their top-tier performance, cameras, and software experiences.". This answer is obviously rather valuable for both Apple and Google, as many people with this question won't search much further than this. Being given a definitive sounding answer suits most people. But if you think about it, we don't know whether that definitive answer is true, how it was produced, and how it was possibly manipulated. Maybe another AI, not made by Google, would recommend a Samsung phone over a Google phone.

This is not just bad news for people offering SEO services, which are becoming increasingly irrelevant. It also changes the interest of being on page two of the search results. If the AI answer pushes the other links further down, or only the AI answer is displayed at all with no link list at all, then you need to be either in that AI answer, or you don't get any clicks at all. There is no such thing anymore as a good but not top Google page rank, you are either at the top or not there at all. Winner takes it all. Like for Super Bowl ads, the advertising cost for being displayed at the top rises astronomically, while the second tier advertising business loses customers.

Funnily enough, if I ask Google AI "What is the best MMORPG blog?" the answer is "The top-rated MMORPG blogs and news sites are MMORPG.com, Massively Overpowered, and MMOBomb.com, offering consistent news, reviews, and community discussions. Other highly regarded, specialized, or opinion-driven sites include MMOs.com, Tobold's Blog, and MMO Culture.". That result is probably a combination of the AI operating on outdated information, there not being much new information on the outdated topic, and nobody paying to push his MMORPG blog to the top of the queue. It is also very possible that different people asking the same question to different AIs will get different answers. For me that doesn't really make a difference. But not being in the first answer to a question to an AI chatbot could potentially make a huge difference to anybody trying to make a living with internet content.

The internet is currently full of content that isn't the best or top in its category, but still gets clicked on enough to create a revenue stream that allows the content creator to continue. The more people will rely on AI answers instead of scrolling through lists of search results, the less viable that second tier becomes. You will either be a rockstar among content creators, or not be visible at all. And unless, like me, somebody is creating content without a monetary incentive, those content creators will disappear.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:38 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Tuesday, March 03, 2026

Byzantine Empire in EU5

I am back to playing some more Europa Universalis V. I took a break because the developers had taken a break, for Christmas holidays and to prepare a large patch. Patch 1.1.0 is now out for the release version, and there is a beta server with patch 1.1.8. It solves the problem of the AI being overly aggressive, but otherwise the patches are an endless story of game systems being changed to solve one problem, only for the changes to cause another problem elsewhere. Still, I'm not overly sensitive to that, and so I am playing on the beta servers.

While a single game of EU5 over 5 centuries of game time already takes up to around 100 hours, I am now 240 hours into the game, and had to consider replayability. What is it, that makes one game of EU5 different from another? The answer is mostly location. For example, I already played a game as Holland, in which I conquered Utrecht early in the game, and later formed the Netherlands. If I would now play a game as Utrecht, conquer Holland early in the game, and later form the Netherlands, that game wouldn't be much different than what I already played.

But besides location, there are also countries that have particular starting conditions or special rules. So I decided to play one of those, the Byzantine Empire. In EU4, the Byzantine Empire is already very small, and usually gets quickly overrun by the Ottomans. In EU5, the Byzantine Empire is still stronger, and larger than the Ottomans. That gives a player the opportunity to preempt history, attack the Ottomans early, and reverse the decline of the Byzantine Empire.

That isn't easy, because the Byzantine Empire in EU5 starts with strong negative modifiers in the form of estate privileges, which result in nobody but the peasants paying taxes. And they don't pay very much, so the financial situation is dire. Also the initial ruler has a very low life expectancy, and his heir is still an infant. This is definitely not a country that I would recommend to a new player. However, removing estate privileges and strengthening crown power is already a regular part of gameplay for about any country in EU5. And so are country finances.

I will not go into the details, but let's say that my gameplay of the first decades of the Byzantine Empire involved a lot of brinkmanship (e.g. razing all my forts to save money) and borderline exploitation of game mechanics. But I basically brought the Ottomans down to a single province, and are militarily secure against divided Turkish countries. While the Byzantine Empire starts with a lot of non-integrated provinces, the lands in Western Anatolia are actually Greek in culture, and the Byzantine Empire has lots of cores there. So it is easier to conquer these and get control there, than to increase your control in Greece.

Once the Byzantine Empire gets all its estates to pay taxes and increases control over its existing and conquered territory, it has a rather strong position. There are a lot of expensive resources in the area, like gold, gems, or silk. And as the name suggests, Byzantium is already an empire, the highest possible country rank, which gives various benefits like for example more cabinet members. Once the finances were in order, I was able to afford the new feature of patch 1.1.0, a local governor. That is a very expensive to maintain building which provides a local source of 80% proximity, like a second capital. I built it in Thessaloniki, and that much improved my control in the Greek part of the country. Constantinople also starts with some advanced buildings, some actually from later ages, like a dock. And there are several hospitals in the country, which helps a lot with the plague. So the outlook for my Byzantine Empire is now rather good.

There is one other reason that I am playing Byzantium now: The first major DLC for EU5, now postponed into the next quarter, is Fate of the Phoenix, a DLC that adds specific content for the Byzantine Empire. In EU4, DLCs often came with changes to game mechanics, which resulted in the annoying situation that you had to buy a specific DLC in order to get access to a specific game mechanic, like for example army drilling. The promise for EU5 is that all changes to game mechanics will come in free patches, and buying the DLCs will only add content, usually country- or region-specific. It is not very clear how that will work, and how much value a player gets out of such a DLC. As I am very curious about this, I decided to play the Byzantine Empire now, before the DLC, to then be better able to judge the improvements the DLC brings.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:12 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

Avocado toast instead of houses

I am a German living in Belgium. 72% of Belgians own the house they live in. Only 48% of Germans do. That has a lot of significant economic consequences. Despite the fact the Germany has a higher GDP per person, and lower taxes than Belgium, the median household net worth per adult in Belgium is $250k, compared to only $67k in Germany. Wealth is far more evenly distributed in Belgium. All over the world, houses mostly belong to average people, not banks or billionaires, and are thus an essential part of the middle class dream.

Buying a house in 2026 is harder than buying a house in 1976. There is a common narrative on the internet that this is due to some sort of generational conspiracy, where the older generations like the Boomers succeeded in an evil plot to keep the younger generations like Millennials or Gen Z poor. That is complete rubbish. The internet favors simplistic, sensationalist, and wrong narratives over complicated and less interesting truths. The counter-narrative of younger generations having no houses due to spending all their money on avocado toast isn't much better.

The complicated truth here is that patterns of consumption and asset ownership have very much changed over the last 50 years. I sometimes wish that the young people filled with generation envy and complaining the loudest about older generations could be put into a time machine and forced to spend some time in 1976. I doubt they would like the experience very much. No mobile phones, no streaming, no internet, no social media, VHS was just invented, few people had one, and there were no video rental shops yet. Households spent a much larger part of their income on groceries, but had a lot less variety. Any type of consumer goods was comparatively much more expensive. Holiday air travel was expensive and a lot less common.

And then 50 years of increased industrialization and globalisation happened. As a result, the relative cost of consumer goods fell. The relative cost of assets rose. The availability of various services exploded, but that came with a cost. Average screen time rose from 4.5 hours in 1976 to over 7 hours in 2026, but while in 1976 the main cost was buying a TV, today we have far more and far cheaper screens in our houses, but pay a lot more for subscriptions.

At 9% mortgage interest rate, houses weren't all that much more affordable in 1976 than in 2026, and as people had a lot less stuff, they were about 40% smaller. But they did require less down payment. And the value of a house grew faster than inflation in the past 5 decades, so it was a great investment. Still, one shouldn't neglect that most people who bought a house in the 70's had a lot less money left for consumption, and that money bought them comparatively less comfort. A mortgage is a way to force yourself to save more money and consume less, which obviously results in better retirement savings and a more comfortable situation in old age. The personal saving rate of Americans was 12% in 1976, and is under 4% now.

The world changed in the last 50 years, and people changed with it. The 2026 median household lifestyle with its much bigger choice of cheaper consumer goods and services would seem like luxury and science fiction to a person from 1976. But people simply adjusted their expectations to what lifestyle is normal. If we express wealth as the pile of stuff we own and the services we consume, we are a lot richer in 2026 than the people of the same age in 1976 were. But the fundamentals of people only earning money in the middle section of their lives, and their saving rate during that part of their life having a big impact on their retirement finances hasn't changed at all.

In the US, a record number of high earners report living paycheck to paycheck. But that is due to all the expenses that they consider to be "necessary" today, some of which didn't even exist before. Less consumption and higher savings rates are still possible today, even if it might involve resisting stronger temptation. Whether you buy a house or some other investment portfolio with the saved money, your future self will be grateful. It is easy to blame everything on "the economy" or "older generations", but a lot harder to make good lifestyle choices for the long term.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:32 PM Permanent Link (6) comments

Saturday, February 21, 2026

Civilization 7 failed the test of time

Civilization 7 was released just over a year ago. Although Firaxis claimed that they had great sales on consoles, the success of Civ 7 with its core audience on PC wasn't great. Player numbers peaked at only half the level of Civ 6, and a few months later even Civ 5 had more daily users than 7. A number of updates and DLCs didn't change much there. Some of the core features that distinguished Civ 7 from Civ 6, like the game having three eras, with some kind of reset between them, and players having to switch to a new civilization in a new era, were not very popular. So now Firaxis announced for "Spring 2026" the Test of Time update, which basically backpedals on these core features: You will now be able to play a civilization through all ages, and the whole reset between ages, and victory conditions for each age will be massively toned down. Civ 7 after the next update will resemble Civ 6 a lot more than before.

Now whether a game is officially in early access or not, we have become used to games changing a lot during at least their first few years. And of course there are always people who love the new content being added, the bugs being fixed, and the balance being improved; while others always kind of like some unbalanced features, and are complaining about them being removed. But I would argue that these changes to Civilization VII are something different. This isn't just added content and balance improvement. It is an admission of failure, that a core concept for the game was unpopular, and an attempt to change that core concept without completely breaking the game.

From the previews it appears as if these changes will massively change how Civilization 7 is played. Most players at least somewhat oriented their gameplay to the era victory conditions and legacy paths. By moving the goalposts, Firaxis is fundamentally changing the way that most players will play this game, even if large parts of Civ 7 will still look like before. Civilization 7 is dead, long live Civilization 7.5!

- posted by Tobold @ 10:44 AM Permanent Link (7) comments

Friday, February 20, 2026

Following the money - Insider trading

Earlier this month, an unknown person made $17,000 on the prediction market Polymarket by getting 17 out of 20 bets right regarding the Super Bowl half-time show. The circumstances strongly suggest that this person had some insider information. Which isn't really surprising. Even if event organizers want to keep the details of the half-time show a surprise, there are a number of people involved organizing such an event, and the information is probably guarded less well than state secrets or sensitive financial information. If you know something that few other people know, you can make money with insider trading.

Which brings me to the core of my post, where I would like to give kudos to the UK police. Not just for bagging the first royal in 400 years, but for asking the right question that was previously ignored: How did Jeffrey Epstein profit from trafficking underage girls to presumably a lot of important people? As far as we know, he didn't directly blackmail somebody like the former Prince Andrew as in "give me money, or I'll release compromising photos and videos of you with underage girls". Instead there seems to have been a much subtler interaction going on, in which Andrew gave Epstein insider information that he had due to his role as UK Special Representative for International Trade and Investment. It isn't hard to imagine how such information could be valuable to Epstein, who was a financier.

Since Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion in 1931, police knows that following the money trail is often a lot easier than proving the underlying crimes. Some of the released photos of Andrew in the Epstein files or before are suggestive, but there was apparently no hard evidence on which to convict him on any sex crimes, which are notoriously difficult to prove. Proving that Andrew had access to confidential information and gave that to Epstein will be a lot easier. And, somewhat ironically, the maximum UK prison sentence for "misconduct in public office" is higher than that for having sex with underage girls.

To me it seems very likely that a lot of the Americans who were invited to Jeffrey Epstein's island did also give him information that enabled him to do insider trading. But the Department of Justice apparently didn't pursue that line of inquiry up to now, possibly due to political pressure. The American guests of Jeffrey Epstein up to now only were punished by cancel culture, not by any legal proceedings. The UK looks morally superior here, being able to arrest the brother of the king.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:23 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Working with cheap idiots

There is another board game drama, because the COO of a large board game company believes that in the future board games will be designed by AI. He said on Linkedin about AI: "Three years ago it was essentially nothing but a curiosity. Now it's useful but in limited cases. In a year or two it will be as useful as any new hire. A year or two after that it will be as useful as an experienced employee. For a few dollars a day in cost."

I don't care about the drama and calls to boycott the company. But I find it interesting what top managers think about AI. And while I am in no way an expert, I am pretty certain that the above quote reveals a number of very important misunderstandings about the use of AI to replace employees.

First of all, there is the question how useful AI is and will be as an employee. A research institute on AI tried to test that, by creating a Remote Labor Index benchmark. It takes real world examples of jobs that have been posted on freelance platforms like Fiverr. It then compares how various LLM AI models perform in those jobs, compared to humans. In the paper the AI succeeds in only 2.5% of the time to do as well as a human freelancer, while in a later update with the latest LLM models it still doesn't get better than 3.75%, failing to complete over 96% of projects at a level that would be accepted as commissioned work in a realistic freelancing environment.

Will there be further progress in these LLM AI models? Most certainly! But there is already a lot of indicators saying that the progress is slowing down. If a future generation of LLM model with the help of even more data centers and computing power then manages to do 10% of tasks as good as a human freelancer, that is still not going to be good enough for companies to really replace employees by AI. And that is just for the type of work that is already identified as being very possible to do remotely, just with a computer. The "robo plumber" that comes to your house, identifies the problem with your faucet, and fixes it is still very much science fiction, and will be for at least decades to come.

The other big issue with the statement about the future of AI employees is the "few dollars a day" part. The current cost for users to use LLM models is not in any way even covering the cost to run them. And the cost to run them is increasing fast. AI is still very much in the honeymoon phase of the enshittification business process, where it is sold below cost to attract and bind users. Once the "winning" AI models have been identified and established a monopoly or oligopoly, the companies will substantially increase prices to get their trillion dollar investment back.

Will AI change the economy? Absolutely it will! But we aren't heading for a future where all of us are unemployed. We are heading for a future where most work that requires any manual part will be still done by humans, because even if an AI controlled robot can do it, that won't be cost efficient. And the type of office work that doesn't require a robot will be done by AI supervised by human handlers. While a LLM AI is not actually "intelligent", there are some tasks that it clearly can do faster and cheaper than a human, especially in the generation of text and images. But it has been shown that hallucinations are a fundamental part of the technology, and won't be fixed by future versions. So for any type of work output that somebody else then has to rely on, a human needs to verify the AI work, which often takes longer than the AI needed to produce it.

And now we come to the part nobody talks about: So-called bullshit jobs. In any large company, a significant percentage of the employees is doing work that isn't actually essential or useful to the companies bottom line. You don't want AI designing a bridge and rely on that bridge not crashing. You might want to use AI to make Powerpoint slides for internal company use, or to write long boring documents for some compliance paperwork task. The less actually useful your current job is now, the more likely you are to be replaced by AI in the future. And even then you might be promoted to AI handler, with an increased output of Powerpoint slides and paperwork that isn't essential. The future of AI is us working with cheap idiots that nobody trusts to do the real work, because for the real work the cost of verification is higher than letting the work be done by a human in the first place.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:02 AM Permanent Link (7) comments

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