The problem with the concept is that it is extremely macroscopic. If you were a shareholder of Kodak, or an employee at Kodak with 20 years of experience in making film products, you got the full blast of the "destruction" part of the concept. Somewhere else a completely different set of people that invested in and developed digital photography reaped the benefits of the "creative" part of the concept. You might consider that as a business case, where the company Kodak failed to go with the time. But the reality of things is that neither existing experience in developing chemical film, nor existing machinery to produce it, are of any use when making digital cameras. There are examples of companies that managed to adjust to innovation, but even there people with the "old" expertise got fired and replaced by people working on the new technology.

Expertise, and especially the level of expertise needed to make something really good, is often highly specific. You probably all heard stories of video game companies that had great expertise in making excellent single player games; then management decided to make live service games instead, and it turned out that the same people who made great single player games now made pretty mediocre live service multiplayer games and the game studio closed down and fired all the devs.

In a previous post on D&D I mentioned how I had hoped that Sigil, the official D&D virtual tabletop software, would revive the D&D brand and enable me to find people online to play with easily. On paper, that idea wasn't so bad. But it is also easy to understand that programming such a software product needs very different expertise than making a printed D&D book. Hasbro / WotC quite obviously failed to secure the expertise at a high enough level, and thus wasted 30 million dollars to make a mediocre and barely functional product nobody wanted. Creative destruction to make a better D&D *could* have worked, especially if they had added the right sort of tools to turn played games into Twitch streams and YouTube videos. But Hasbro had neither the technical skills to pull that off themselves, nor the management skills to secure a mutually beneficial collaboration with another company that does have that sort of expertise. Sadly, in the history of the companies owning D&D, the mutually beneficial collaboration with Larian Studios was an exception, and didn't last. There are far more examples of TSR/WotC/Hasbro trying to screw the outside contributors to the success of D&D, instead of understanding how essential these people were. It is now uncertain whether there will be a lot of innovation in how we play multiplayer roleplaying games in the coming years, and whether that will involve the D&D brand at all.

The most expensive game I bought was an older one, Zombicide Black Plague. Zombicide is considered a bit of a joke in the board game crowdfunding community, as the company CMON has for years since 2012 launched a "new" Zombicide game several times per year, about 16 core games and an endless stream of expansions. From a classic zombie theme, to fantasy zombies, cowboy zombies, superhero zombies, to science fiction zombies, every imaginable theme has a Zombicide version. Each game comes with a lot of plastic miniatures, but the variation and innovation in gameplay between the different versions is limited. Why did I buy it? Well, simply, I did previously not own any Zombicide game. And while the suggested retail price of Zombicide Black Plague is $109.99, and you can usually find Zombicide games on Amazon for around $90, at the fair I only paid €50. And Black Plague has a fantasy theme, which would be the Zombicide I am most interested in.

The stand I bought this had only a few games, each in large numbers and at a high discount to the suggested retail price. Basically a board game surplus store. Which brings me to the biggest game that I *didn't* buy: Descent: Legends of the Dark. Suggested retail price $174.95, available at the surplus stand for just €70. When the game came out, I was interested, but considered it to be too expensive. So for less than half price, I was considering it again. But as I wrote in my previous post, I have more campaign games than I can reasonably hope to play, and Descent would have been another campaign game. I also didn't like that Descent: Legends of the Dark uses a lot of 3D cardboard terrain, which isn't terribly stable. Looks nice on the table, but takes more time to set up, and isn't always practical if you end up sitting on the wrong side and a higher element blocks your view. So ultimately I decided that I don't need that game, even at this low price.

A similar story was the other game I considered buying: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Normal retail price €70, available at the fair (another stand) for €49, which is quite a good price for such a recent game. Now I have played SETI already twice and really liked the game. However, even the second game with people who had already played the game once still took 4 hours. Which means that SETI isn't a viable option for my weekly board game night, where I need to bring a game, set it up, explain it, play it, and put it back into the box in 3 to 3.5 hours. Now I have some groups with which I play board games privately at home, and don't have that time constraint. At which point another problem kicked in: Some of the groups I play with are German speaking, another group is French speaking. I can usually play English language games with both groups. There are also games which have only symbols, not text, on their cards and game material, with only the rulebook being language specific. But the copy of SETI was a German one, and there is a lot of German text on the cards, so I wouldn't be able to play it with my French group. So in spite of me liking the game, I didn't buy it.

What I did buy was a game where I had previously fallen into the language trap: Castle Combo. I have a previous game, Faraway, from the same company, and that game didn't have any text on the cards. As it is a French company, it was easier to get Faraway from France, and I have successfully played it with German speaking groups. So I made the mistake of assuming their next game, Castle Combo, would be the same, and bought the more easily available French version last year. It turned out that there was French text on the cards, so I never played the game at my German weekly board game night. So I picked up a German version for €20 at the fair in Dortmund.

Another game I bought specifically for the board game night was Tower Up. This is a relatively short and easy city building game that came out recently. The reason I was interested was that it seems to have a solid amount of player interaction, as every time you build, you also interact with the adjacent towers on the map, even if those aren't yours. I found that in recent years there has been a trend towards games I call "multiplayer solo" games, in which everybody works on his own game engine, with little interaction with other players, other than trying to score higher than them at the end. So I always look for games that have a good amount of interaction between players, because for me that interaction is where the interest of playing a board game around an actual table is.

Slightly more complicated is another purchase: Great Western Trail: El Paso. Or as I call it, Small Western Trail. Even the publisher describes it as "the perfect game for game nights when there is not enough time for its big brothers". The original Great Western Trail takes an estimated 15 minutes to set up, 45 minutes to explain, and then another 3 hours to play with 4 first-time players. The El Paso version is easier, thus quicker to set up and explain, and should play in half the time. Thus a much better fit with my board game night time requirements.

The concept of making an existing successful game smaller brings me to the last purchase, which I bought mostly because it seems so unbelievable how far that concept can be pushed: Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs. I have the original Gloomhaven, a huge box that weighs 10.5 kg. Buttons & Bugs comes in a very small box, weighing just under 0.3 kg. It also cost under €20, while at another stand the newer Frosthaven complete box was sold for €280. Yes, Buttons & Bugs is only a single solo adventure, compared to the large number of scenarios in original Gloomhaven and Frosthaven. But for that price I was willing to see how similar a tiny version of the game could be to the original, or whether miniaturization to this degree was just silly.

Overall, the Spiel Doch! in Dortmund was a better shopping experience than the Spiel in Essen, simply because it was less crowded. My plan for Essen this year is to book a hotel more in the inner city, and take public transport to the fair. Instead of going for just one day, I want to stretch it out to two days, but less intensive each day. That way I also hope to profit from less crowded times, e.g. at the end of the day, rather than participating in the rush to get in. But it is kind of a last try. The Essen fair has become so successful that it is suffocating under its own success. Even just walking from A to B without looking at stands is a slow shuffle in a crowd, and that isn't much fun. On the other hand, I am not sure whether 2 hours drive to Dortmund for a fair that I can see everything in 2 hours is worth it. Big fair, small fair, both have advantages and disadvantages.

Today is also the day that UPS will deliver a board game to me that I backed in crowdfunding. I just don't know which one. Surprise! Basically making a crowdfunded board game is an exercise in coordinating a bunch of different sub-contractors, with the last in line being the shipping company. The end customer usually doesn't know which backed project uses which shipping company, and the shipping notification doesn't always specify the content of the parcel. So now I got a shipping notification that I'll receive a parcel of 6.5 kg (so I am pretty sure it is a board game), coming from Awaken Realms in Poland. But as Awaken Realms is the owner of Gamefound, and Gamefound is both its own crowdfunding platform, and is being used as pledge manager by games on Kickstarter, I still don't know which game this will be. My best guess is Dragon Eclipse, a game I backed in September 2023, and which was promised for September 2024.

One reason that I am less enthusiastic about backing crowdfunded board games is that the delays sometimes mean that by the time the game arrives, I'm not all that interested anymore. For example I love campaign games, but the last two campaign games I finished each took about 1 year to complete. So I realized that I bought more of this type of game than I can reasonably hope to play through, even with me currently having two different groups to play with. Well, two reliable groups; I have a third group running to play another campaign game, but we only played once, and now have problems finding another date.

Tomorrow I'll visit a board game fair in Dortmund. It is an order of magnitude smaller than the Spiel fair in Essen in October every year, but that is probably both an advantage and a disadvantage. Essen last October felt too crowded to actually try a game out. I think I'll have better opportunities to try out games at the smaller event. And it would be nice to try out a game, and then immediately be able to buy it. I still see the advantages of crowdfunding board games, especially if I want the deluxified edition, or games that are too niche to have retail appeal. But I'll probably pick up a game or two tomorrow, which is a whole lot less complicated and involves less surprises than crowdfunding.

Having said that, I am also in favor of democracies regularly changing governments, swinging from left to right and back, with each government providing some counterweight to the other. If you leave one government in power for too long, things always degenerate. Democracy is served by letting the other side try to do better. Democracy is also served by that other side failing to do better. There are some parties in Europe that are in permanent opposition, and I find it far too easy for them to criticize the people who govern, while never taking on that responsibility for themselves.

Effective opposition to me is basically a running commentary on a) what the government is doing wrong, and b) why the policies of your side would lead to a better result. Unfortunately, effective opposition is rare these days. Some opposition parties just refuse to do anything at all, just waiting for the next election. Other opposition exaggerates in the other direction: Constant outrage and hyperbole at anything the government does, conveniently leaving out the part how to do better. The worst is opposition by political violence.

I do not subscribe to the idea that the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th were freedom fighters, while the people throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla dealerships are domestic terrorists. But neither do I subscribe to the reverse position. I would even say that it is dangerous to try to either justify one with the other, or to try to relativize one form of political violence by pointing at another and saying "they are worse". The burning Tesla cars generally do not belong to Elon Musk, and a lot of people bought a Tesla or opened a Tesla dealership long before Elon went crazy. I totally support boycotting Tesla, and generally smile when I hear about Tesla's drops in sales in Europe, and corresponding drop in share price. Publishing a database of all Tesla owners and encouraging activists to seek these private citizens out and light their cars on fire to me is not valid political protest, and morally wrong, because it hurts innocent people far more than it hurts the purported target. Political violence to me is also the exact opposite of effective opposition, as it creates sympathy for the victims instead of underlining what they did wrong.

It seems to me as if the Trump administration is doing a great job of sabotaging itself. Effective opposition would be running a split screen of the story of how the government is using non-classified public social media platforms to discuss war plans side by side with Republicans shouting to "lock her up" at Hillary Clinton. Showing Republican hypocrisy talks louder than Democrats now expressing outrage.

On other subjects, I do believe that even for an American it is hard to understand the exact ultimate consequences of some of the decisions of government. I don't think it is a good political platform to claim that every single federal government employee is necessary and doing a great job, as that runs counter to the experiences of the citizens (and not just in America, but pretty much everywhere else). To foreigners, some of the discussion is simply incomprehensible: For example the government wants to cut 80,000 jobs in the Department of Veterans Affairs; such a department doesn't even exist in many other countries, and non-Americans might well scratch their heads when they hear that this is the largest part of the government, and that the US has more employees in the VA Department than it has active serving soldiers. It took me some research that this is because the VA Department is basically running a completely parallel national health service for 3% of the population, which tells you a lot of what even the US government thinks about the health service for the other 97%. To me that appears to be a bigger problem, one that can't be solved either by adding or subtracting any number of employees to the department.

I also personally don't believe that tariffs are going to revive the US manufacturing sector. Even if working as intended, tariffs at best make a US company competitive again by raising the price of the goods of foreign competitors. Whether they buy foreign or US, the customer will always end up paying more for the same goods, and ultimately end up with less goods for his money. While it will take time to see how all this plays out, it will take considerably less time than 4 years. Again, effective opposition for Democrats might be to just show old Republican footage. Ronald Reagan's "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" question comes to mind here. And sometimes effective opposition means realizing that the other side has a winning subject, and stealing it; I would believe that Democrats would be better served by coming up with their own plans on how to make government more efficient or how to create jobs in the US economy, than just blindly promising to reverse all changes.

In short, I believe that Trump is clever enough to correctly identify what the day to day problems of average citizens are. But his solutions to those problems are just populist hogwash, or based on flawed ideology. It doesn't seem an insurmountable obstacle to come up with better plans for the Democrats, or to point out the various failings. But voters clearly were also unhappy with the situation before, so going back isn't an option either.

And then Hasbro / WotC promised a bright new future for D&D. They were going to make another edition of D&D, *not* called 6th edition, and they were going to create the mother of all virtual tabletop programs for that, called Sigil. Instead of having a tabletop software that moved tokens over flat maps, Sigil would be fully 3D, run with the Unreal engine, and provide a spectacular game with 3D miniatures in 3D dungeons and landscapes. So at some point I was thinking that I'll wait for that, and then when a lot of new people would be attracted to D&D by that software, I could find new groups to play with.

Sigil launched this month. The launch was so successful that Hasbro fired 90% of the development team two weeks later and basically abandoned the project, just keeping it on life support as an addon for D&D Beyond. It wasn't just that the software wasn't running very well. It also turned out that Hasbro hadn't had a clue what their customers wanted, and how they played Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is a game of infinite creativity, and every table has its own house rules or homebrew creative additions. But the goal of Hasbro for Sigil was to maximize monetization, which meant that everything cool should be created by Hasbro and then sold to the players for extra money. There is no room for creativity from third parties or players in such a monetization scheme, you can't allow a DM to create something really cool, because you can't charge him for that. As one of the vice presidents of Hasbro announced: "After several months of alpha testing, we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a large, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized. As such, we cannot maintain a large development effort and most of the Sigil team will be separated from the company this week."

The inconveniently named "Dungeons & Dragons—5th Edition, 2024 version" didn't tempt me either. Not just that I don't have a group to play with; but I spent a huge pile of money on the 5th edition, 2014 version, and don't want to buy the whole bunch again, for just some minor changes. Hasbro tried in various ways to make the new edition necessary, for example on their D&D Beyond platform, by creating artificial incompatibilities between the 2014 and 2024 editions. That only led to them losing more customers, forcing them to backpedal. Personally I think that they should have made more changes and done a 6th edition, as their approach of simultaneously keeping the successful 5th edition *and* making people buy all the books again clearly didn't work.

If you look into the history of Dungeons & Dragons from a corporate point of view, you'll find 50 years rich in corporate mismanagement. D&D is a product that was successful *despite* the various companies making it and the various owners, not because of them. 5th edition was particularly successful due to the creativity of third parties, like Critical Role, or Larian Studios with their Baldur's Gate 3. And Hasbro managed to treat all of these creative people so badly, that none of them want to continue working with them. The fundamental truth is that the D&D intellectual property isn't necessary to achieve most of the fun of role-playing, and that excessive IP monetization only kills the product. Right now, the future of D&D doesn't look very bright. And that makes it difficult for people like me to find other new people to play with. It's a negative network effect.

As a result, I don't think there will be many more posts on this blog with the Dungeons & Dragons label. Sorry if you enjoyed those. But I can only write about what I live, and D&D just isn't part of my life anymore. Except for maybe having a look at patch 8 of Baldur's Gate 3, when it comes out.

The antiquity age is doing best here. If you asked me to pursue a specific legacy path or combination of legacy paths, I would know how to adapt my strategy to do so. The legacy paths are also not contradicting each other: Expanding by settling or conquest up to and beyond the settlement limit will help with pretty much all legacy paths. The military path will simply count your settlements, with added points for conquered ones. The economic path counts resources used, and that needs several settlements as well. Science needs installed codices, which needs several settlements with science buildings. Only culture, counting your wonders, could reasonably be done with a single city, but spreading them obviously helps too.

The exploration age legacy paths are a bit less balanced. And a bit less fun. The religion "combat" system is annoying and tedious. It is also the first "rush" victory / legacy condition, where doing it early, even by neglecting other aspects of the game, is a winning strategy. The military path is somewhat similar to the previous age, only that it only counts settlements in the new world. The economic victory isn't great, because it involves much random luck: You need to build settlements that have specific treasure resources, and ship those treasure resources back home. But many areas of the new world don't actually have any of those treasure resources, or they do have the resources, but too far from the coast to allow for a treasure fleet. You need those treasure resources early, as they only harvest every X turns, and then still need a good time to get the treasure fleet home. In an at least historically accurate way, sometimes your best strategy is to conquer the coastal settlements of the new world civilizations, as they have most of the treasure resources. The scientific legacy path is by far the hardest: You need to create 5 tiles with an overall yield of 40 or more. That basically needs planning starting from the antiquity age. To get such high yields, you need several specialists on a tile with several adjacency bonuses. Having been clever about placing your wonders during antiquity sure helps here. But because raising the specialist limit needs a lot of science, this goal is often the last you'll succeed in.

The balance between the four paths is currently worst in the modern age. Before the patch, getting the artifacts for the culture path could be rushed far too easily. Now this is a good bit slower, so it is about as slow as reaching either the scientific space race victory, or the economic railroad magnate victory. The military victory of the modern age is basically unachievable, because the AI simply refuses to play the game. By the time you and the AI are already nearing the space race victory, many of the AI opponents will not even have yet chosen an ideology. Thus getting the 3 points for conquering a settlement of a different ideology is extremely hard. You could achieve victory by just getting the 1 point per settlement without ideology, or 2 points when at least you have an ideology. But unless you have a crazy military dominance, conquering cities becomes a very slow affair in the modern age. If you try that, and either go after other victory conditions in parallel, or have at least one AI that you don't attack and that can pursue another victory in peace, the game will always end with one of those other victories. Getting a military victory would be kind of a specific challenge mode.

Overall only the legacy paths in antiquity are fun, because they align with what you want to do anyway. In the other ages, pursuing some victory paths means rushing some activity that you actually wouldn't want to do otherwise, or playing in a very specific way. The rewards for legacy points aren't very well balanced either. And if you ignore the legacy paths, the game punishes your with a horribly bad meta progression at the end of a long game. I am pretty sure that all this will be still patched and rebalanced repeatedly, as it just isn't very good right now.

What we have in 2025 is hindsight. Over 700 million people caught Corona, and over 7 million of them died. That is horrible. But it still means that in every country more people *didn't* catch Corona than caught it, and of those who caught it, 99% survived. Compared to for example the Spanish Flu, Corona was milder. Corona was a lottery, and unlike most lotteries, your chances of winning were much better than your chances of losing. In other words, for a huge majority of people the measures that countries took to combat the pandemic were massively more impactful than the virus itself. And it is those measures that still cause the most anger and fallout today.

I totally won the Corona lottery. I never got ill. And before Corona, my job involved a lot of stressful business travel. I haven't set foot into an airplane since. I was working stressful 50-hour weeks before Corona, which the lockdowns transformed into a much more relaxed home office work with the same pay, and the realization that a lot of the stuff we thought necessitated a business travel could in fact be done via Zoom / Teams just as well. I went from there into early retirement, which made the pandemic a near perfect transition period between my previous career and life as a pensioner. I was lucky. And a big part of the reason for me being lucky is that I was and am in a financially better position than the average person.

While the quality of the home you live in is generally important, it becomes much more so when there is a lockdown. If you divide the size of your home by the number of persons living in it, richer people typically have a lot more space per person than poorer people. If you are locked into that home and can't leave, and aren't allowed outside activities, that space per person makes a huge difference. People like me, with higher income, an office job, and the means to buy enough computers / tablets / webcams to shift our lives online were more likely to have a "good" pandemic. People with more manual jobs, less stable employment, not enough electronic devices and rooms in the home to allow home office / video schooling for the whole family were more likely to have suffered during the pandemic.

Politicians and health officials during the pandemic didn't have the hindsight we have now. In hindsight, we now know that they erred on the side of caution. Sweden, a country widely ridiculed during the pandemic for taking a much more relaxed attitude to it, in fact didn't fare worse than countries with much stricter measures. Especially school closures are in hindsight thought to have caused more harm to the education and well-being of children than it prevented in infections. On the other hand, it is hard to blame politicians for not gambling with the lives of their people. They had to make decisions under a lack of data and information; them having been often overly cautious and preferring a restriction of liberties to a higher death toll is understandable, not criminal. There were people, including politicians, that profited from the pandemic with criminal energy, e.g. with dodgy deals on face masks, and those should most definitely be prosecuted and jailed. But even with our current hindsight it would be difficult to design a "perfect" lockdown strategy, officials got things wrong in both directions, too lenient and too strict, at different times. I don't think it would be just to blame somebody for getting it wrong, when he tried his best.

The things that make me still angry about looking back at the Corona period are the hypocritical parts, where we as a society seemed to have realized something, only to then not act upon it. I feel ashamed whenever I see some Corona period photos with public praise for "essential workers". We realized that some people are more important than others to keep our society running in a time of crisis, and then decided that a round of applause instead of a pay rise would be sufficient to reward them. That is both extremely unjust to a group of people who suffered very much during the pandemic, and is making us less resilient for the next crisis. Somebody essential should be paid more, which would result in a stronger essential infrastructure.

Over 13 billion doses of Corona vaccine have been administered worldwide. With a data set this large, we are now absolutely certain that the vaccine had a very acceptable level of side effects, and that for the overwhelming majority of people being vaccinated was better than not being vaccinated. But I do believe that we, as a society, treated people who were sceptical of vaccines unfairly harsh. People were treated as weirdos and conspiracy theorists, and while some of them certainly were exactly that, others just had some doubts about the official narrative, and some of those doubts weren't actually that misplaced. The people who didn't get with the program were often discriminated against, rather than honest efforts being made to convince them that the program was actually the right thing.

Between officials not wanting to be reminded when they got things wrongs while trying their best, other people wanting somebody to be punished for their suffering during the pandemic, and a majority just wanting to forget, it is unlikely that we will ever get a good and fair official review of that time. Which is a shame, because I do think we could do a better job to discuss and document the lessons learned, in order to do better next time. Overall, I do think that governments got a lot of things right, and we need to discuss this with a view forward on those lessons learned, rather than backward with a view on vengeance. But I'm afraid we won't get much of that.

If you open a US newspaper tomorrow, and search for news about Germany, there might be a rather small article, and that only if your newspaper has pretty good international coverage. That articles will be about the German parliament voting on a constitutional change, lifting the "debt brake" introduced just 15 years earlier, in favor of more spending on defense and infrastructure. Boring stuff that nobody outside Germany is interested in. Or is it?

Trump recently said that the European Union had been specifically created to screw over the United States. Which is not only extremely self-centered, but also extremely false. While the creation of the European Union was a complex process, if you wanted to put it into a short statement, it would be more correct to say that the EU was created to contain Germany's economic power and handle it in a way that doesn't result in another world war. Since German unification in 1871, German economic power had twice risen very strongly, that economic power had twice been channeled in infrastructure and military spending, and that military spending had been the basis for two world wars. Keeping the German economy down after the first world war hadn't worked at all, and it was thought that it would be a better approach to work together with the Germans and channel their economic power into other projects. Although NATO is older than the EU, over time it became part of the construct, as even the US preferred Europe and Germany to be part of a military block under US leadership, rather than a totally separate power block.

How much debt should a country have as percentage of their GDP? Economists disagree on that question, and it is likely that richer countries can afford more debt. The US has a debt of 122% of GDP, the EU as a whole 87%, Japan 255%. Germany, shocked by the financial crisis of 2008, decided in 2009 to put a "debt break" into their constitution, stopping German governments from taking on too much debt. That resulted in two things: Germany today has rather low debt, 62%, or half the percentage of GDP that the US has, and under-investment. Thus, as a result of the recent German elections, tomorrow's vote that will add exceptions to that constitutional debt brake rule, with 500 billion Euros for infrastructure, and "whatever it takes" for defense.

While Germany is a much smaller country than the USA or China, it is only on place three of overall GDP behind those two. If Germany decides to raise its debt from about 60% to about 80% of GDP, that is a rather huge pile of money. Thus my unease as a historically minded person: Germany putting a huge pile of money into the Autobahn and tanks, what could possibly go wrong? It worked so well 90 years ago!

The political system being better today than it was last century, there is probably very little chance of Germany starting world war III. The EU as a project to integrate Germany was a smashing success. But this could still be a historical moment: The moment the EU decides to not rely on the USA in matters of defense, feeling it can't rely on their former allies anymore. If you have a perception of Germany or Europe being weak, militarily speaking, that is partially correct, but it is a temporary condition, and voluntary. The EU wanted to be part of the western block, and rely on NATO, rather than being their own military powerhouse. But it isn't as if the population (449 million) or GDP ($16.6 trillion) wouldn't allow them to. They even have nukes. Given their performance against Ukraine, I wouldn't bet on Russia being able to wage a successful war against the European Union. Not today, and certainly not tomorrow, after Europe goes on a rearmament spree.

The main problem with military spending is that nobody ever threw away a tank. You probably read some astounding number of how much military aid the Ukraine received. What rich countries usually don't say is that that is expressed in the value of the military hardware and ammunition when originally bought. "Military aid" is a code word for getting rid of your old military hardware and ammo, and replacing it by new stuff. And the new stuff is going to be given as "military aid" to somebody again later, if it isn't used by the country that bought it. Germany and Europe investing heavily in military hardware means that most probably in some time, somewhere, somebody will find himself at the receiving end of that purchase.

At the very least, tomorrow could be the start date of the end of US global military dominance. When Trump is constantly complaining that the the US is spending so much more on NATO than the other partners, he simply doesn't understand what exactly the US is buying here. It is far from obvious that America would be better off if Europe had a military their size. Again, keep in mind the difference in time scales between politics and history: Today this is a political story of America unilaterally offending all its allies. Germany's vote tomorrow is a first sign that the allies won't just let this slide, and at the very least know that if the US won't defend them, they'll have to do it themselves. How that will evolve over decades to come is anybody's guess. My guess is that more weapons is seldom good news.

The first part of this review isn't actually about the game, it is about corporate greed. I have been in games long enough to remember a time where games were mostly being made by people passionate about games, trying to maximize value for the player. The overexpansion of the games industry during the pandemic has led to there not being many passionate development studios left, if any. Civilization VII adds Firaxis to the studios that have gone over to the dark side. Corporate greed shows up in 3 major points: Abandoning the PC as a standard platform for the Civilization series in order to chase console sales, aggressive monetization, and lack of quality control. Thus a month after release, Civ 7 has "mixed" Steam reviews, with less than half of them positive. This isn't a few review trolls, but the opinions of 27,500 players, which is now more than the game's Steam concurrent user peaks on a weekday. Firaxis certainly tried to maximize shareholder value instead of maximizing value of the players, but even without knowing console sales I have my doubt that this was a business success. I think it is more likely that you'll have a financial success if you concentrate on making a great game, while concentrating on making money is rarely a winner.

Between the redesign for console controller and the bugs, the user interface of Civ 7 is now just plain bad. The user interfaces of the two big 4X history games of last year, Millennia and Ara: History Untold, have their peculiarities, and there were certainly complaints. Nobody would have guessed that Civilization VII manages to do worse here. The series that usually *sets* industry standards is now not even conforming to the more basic ones of them. All of the mods I am currently running are just there to fill in the blanks, give me the information that the game itself refuses to tell me. I started my review with corporate greed, because if the bugs weren't there, and if the UI wasn't so bad, people would have been less shocked when Firaxis asked them to shell over another 30 bucks for the first DLC just 4 weeks after advance access release. Creating monetizable content instead of fixing rather obvious shortcomings is just a very bad look, regardless of whether you believe that content had been deliberately removed to be sold back to you, or whether it had been created in those 4 weeks.

Having said all that, I like Civilization VII more than I liked the predecessor. I have played all the games in the series when they were released, including outliers like Colonization or Alpha Centauri. Civ 6 to me felt tired, as if all the graphical improvements, the bells and whistles, were finally unable to make me forget that this was a game that simply wasn't fun to play to the end. Civ 7 is still not fun to play to the end, but the era resets *do* help, and it is visible how a better balancing of legacy paths and victory conditions could actually turn this into a game I would want to play until the end. And Civ 7 is more satisfying to stop playing at the end of an era, rather than stopping to play Civ 6 at some vague point where the fun has run out. I play antiquity twice as often as I play the explorations age, and that twice as often as modernity. But the fundamental feature of era resets is very, very welcome, and for example the scouting at the start of the exploration age is nearly as much fun as at the start of the overall game.

200 hours of Civilization VII played means I am well past my usual 1 dollar per hour quality yardstick, and that although I upgraded to the $130 founder's edition. I am having fun with Civilization VII. I am cursing about the shitty interface *while* having fun, but I am having fun. Paying $130 is me succumbing to the realization that I won't get a complete Civilization experience for just $70. We will see about the DLCs of next year, but this year's DLCs I consider to be the necessary stuff, the stuff that was in the game and then got cut out to be resold later. Civilization VII isn't going to be complete until they added the 4th age, and traces of that atomic age are already in the game files. And maybe that fixes the age of modernity, where the current victory conditions feel somewhat artificial, probably because in the final game they will just be regular legacy paths, not victory conditions.

Civilization VII is not a finished game, but it is a game with a good bone structure. Having played a lot, I tried out a variety of different things. The experience tends to be similar: There is a designed way to play this game, and if you deviate from it, things tend to go wrong. Civilization VII is not yet a robust game. This is why I am thinking of giving it some more time: The long-term replayability is suffering when you try an unusual strategy and either that is an absolutely unexpected success that instantly wins the game, or some unexpected consequence totally ruins the game. Also, "I tried something fun, and then they nerfed it", isn't a great player experience either, it reminds me too much of my MMORPG days. Civ 7 is fixable, and as Firaxis only had two major brands, Civ and XCOM, and they abandoned XCOM, so they can't afford not to fix this one, eventually. At the point where it is, I consider Civ 7 better than Ara, but worse than Millennia today. But Millennia's ugliness problem can't be so easily fixed, and Firaxis has deeper pockets, so there is a good chance that next year, Civ 7 will be the best game.

I understand that for many people this will not be enough. Not everybody wants to pay $130+ and wait a year to get all the parts together that finally will make a good Civilization VII. If you paid $70 and expected a good game now, you only got a flawed version instead, and are understandably angry. There is fun to be had in the current version of Civ 7, but only if you are willing to cope with some shit that you shouldn't have to cope with. So this is certainly not a general recommendation from me. My general recommendation would be to check back in next year.

The AI isn't great with exploration. While I prepare a maximum of army commanders, settlers, and scouts to cross the ocean as soon as cartography is researched, the AI usually just explores with ships first, and doesn't do much else until they got shipbuilding. By that time, my aggressive move into religion has given me a huge boost to science, so the AI is way behind in shipbuilding. And I have already most of the new continent mapped, and treasure resources secured either by settling or by conquest, before the AI even sets foot there.

The modern age is even easier. Even after the patch, the culture victory is still relatively easy, although now the economic victory is sometimes faster. The game tends to be over before even all AI has chosen an ideology, which makes a military victory not really feasible. And the cultural or economic victory are so fast, that I never get around to a science victory, although I am leading in science as well.

In short, the challenge of Civilization VII is currently ending in the antiquity age, because the AI is so bad at the other ages. So I was wondering whether the AI was doing anything at all. So I played a game deliberately badly: I played an extremely isolationist Carthage with a strange special rule: None of my units every left the area of the city, never got more than the 3 spaces away from the city center. That meant no scouts, no merchants, no contacts with city states, no conversion of other cities with missionaries. Just relatively fast moves, because most of the map was covered in fog of war until the very end. The only really interesting thing was that if you are weak like that, all AI players are going to declare war on you with no reason in modern age, probably to try and gather ideology victory points. But defense is very strong in Civilization VII, so with a bunch of guns behind city walls I was able to beat back all AI players at once, until they gave up and made peace. Finally some AI actually won.

What that single settlement game showed me, was that the main problem with not expanding is that you need additional towns for gold, and additional cities for more science and culture. You do have enough production to build every building you research, but progress in technology and civics is slow. You can easily defend against any aggression, but that is mostly because the AI is so horribly bad at warfare.

For my next game, I plan to do the antiquity normally, and then play the age of exploration without religion. Or rather, without missionaries, as you can't really avoid researching piety. That is obviously sub-optimal, but that way I don't crush the AI with a runaway success in religion in that age, and that makes the game maybe a bit more balanced. Unlike Millennia, there doesn't appear to be any negative consequences if you let the AI convert your cities. And the whack-a-mole later gameplay of missionaries is boring and annoying anyway.

To me it appears as if one of the fundamental balance problems of Civilization VII is that features like religion or archeology give such huge rewards for rushing them. As the AI isn't good at throwing all their resources at a single issue, that massively favors the player. After a couple of games, the player knows which game elements he should rush to, and then winning becomes trivial.

In the 15th century some scholars argued against the printing press leading to a degradation of knowledge. It is easy to see their point, after observing the internet as a logical conclusion to the development of letting everybody publish whatever they want. And there are signs that the advent of large language model AI isn't going to help, as AI can not only hallucinate, but also unearth that one Reddit post about eating rocks, rather than giving the consensus view that eating rock is bad for your stomach. Fact-checking on social media is in decline, mostly for cost reasons, but in part also because there were at least some examples of "fact-checking" being used as a method of censorship against opinions that were more clearly unpopular than false.

The reasonable and educated, and thus all of my readers, deal with misinformation in media and on the internet with media literacy skill. We learned to detect biases, and to identify sources that are more likely than others to tell the truth. We know that just because "it is written on the internet", it doesn't mean it is true. And that "do your own research" is basically telling people that because they can find any weird theories by doing a search on Google, those theories must be right. There simply isn't any available internet tool where you could search for something like "was the coronavirus produced in a laboratory?" and you'd get a percentage number of the probability of that theory being true or false, or some other sort of indicator of how far out or not that idea is.

But given that misinformation on the internet is now many decades old, I find it surprising how few people seem to have this sort of media literacy skills. Shouldn't this be something taught in primary school, right after being taught how to read? We might need a bit more time to all realize that photos aren't proof of anything anymore, but shouldn't we all know by now not to trust the written word on the internet? Why would anybody believe something he read on the internet anymore than he would believe something he heard some bloke say in the pub?

While there is discussion of a future feature that lets you "reroll" your start with the same selected leader, civilization, and settings, right now you need to go a slightly more complicated way to do that: Under the "Confirm" tab of the "New Game", after selecting your leader and civilization, you need to go to "Advanced Options". There you find your current Game Random Seed and Map Random Seed. What I do to search for a good starting position is set both of these seeds to something easy, like 1. Then I use the "Save Config" button, save that configuration, and then "Launch Game".

You can either play a few turns to see how your starting positions is, or alternatively you can enable the debug console and use the "Reveal All" button under "Debug" and "Map". If you are happy with your starting position, just reload the autosave from the start of the turn. If the position is bad, you quit to main menu, go to "New Game" again, but this time just go directly to "Confirm", "Advanced Options" and "Load Config". There you can change the map seed (which determines basic geography) and game seed (which determines AI opponents, but that can change your starting position). I then usually save the configuration again to keep track of it, and then launch the game again. Repeat until you have a good starting position. You might consider that cheating, but believe me, playing Carthage with a bad starting geography will be no fun at all.