See, I have no attachment whatsoever to the setting. Miniatures, besides being horrifically expensive, also require greater social skills than I really have. I was never going to be a Warhammer fan as it existed, so these video game adaptations are the only in for me.

I’m finding Civ VI to be better than Civ V, overall. The military AI is still kinda wobbly, but it’s solved most of the problems around the series’ non-military victory options.

I’m not a big fan of the Empire—they have a super shitty position that leads to them getting their asses whipped regularly—and the Dwarves are...whatever. They’re typical fantasy dwarves. The Wood Elves and Norsca are my favorite factions from the first game, and you can tell that Creative Assembly really figured out…

Oh, and the reason the Skaven are so difficult—besides the general frailty of their non-monstrous units—is their unique food mechanic. Units cost food in upkeep, but Skaven have no means of producing food via buildings (OK, there are some buildings that do this from unique resources, but they can only be built in…

I’m shifting into one of my periodic strategy game moods, so I’ll likely be playing Civilization VI and maybe Total Warhammer 2. It’s been awhile since I fired up Civ, and it seems like they’ve tweaked things since last I played. I’m rolling the Americans and immediately entered a Dark Age, despite doing pretty well,…

There is a lot of DLC for Total Warhammer (and the entire first game and its own DLC are effectively a nested DLC pack unto themselves), but you get a lot of game for your buck, and all of the factions are different and interesting in their own ways. When Total Warhammer 3 comes out, completing the trilogy, owners of…

Without getting into spoilers, the book is far less concerned with the exploitation of any particular culture and more concerned with the long-lasting, planet-wide ramifications of the Industrial Revolution.

The Lizardmen are also very beginner friendly, and they have dinosaurs.

It’s a pretentious sentiment he’s expressing. He “doesn’t understand” the concept of pride? Bull. Shit.

If you insist on starting with the Skaven, play through their tutorial enough to understand the basic mechanics—especially Food—and then restart with Lord Skrolk.

I get why they did it—it’s very true to the conception of the race—but it’s not a good approach to tutorials.

They’re actually a lot of fun, but they have a very different playstyle from any other faction in the game—including Total Warhammer 1. Bizarrely, their tutorial Legendary Lord, Queek, has the more difficult starting position, which further makes them a tough faction to come to grips with. Once you’ve learned the…

Is there a specific issue you are having? Broadly speaking, I would pick either Tyrion or Mazdamundi and follow the tutorial, which is much-improved over Total Warhammer 1. Under no circumstances should you choose the Skaven for your first playthrough.

“Am I ‘proud’ of the game? I don’t know what that means. There’s something very egotistical about being proud of something. ‘Proud’ sort of implies that you believe that it reinforces your intrinsic value as a person.”

The problem was that climate change just doesn’t work. For all the many sins of the Victorians, they absolutely didn’t know what the industrial revolution was going to lead to, and a literal murder-monster is not a sympathetic face for the issue.

I feel like Chik-fil-A’s generally extremely fast service—with fully staffed kitchens and counters in every one I’ve ever been in—gets overlooked in discussing its success. You can usually get through a long Chik-fil-A line in less time than you’d wait for your food at a barely-occupied KFC.

Yes, their bite is moderately narcotic and induces sleep.

Those are compys (procompsagnathus), and they are much more prominent in the original Jurassic Park novel, where they are, in many ways, the iconic dinosaur of the story: creepy scavengers/predators who are unafraid of humans and attack children, kill old people, and eat babies’ faces.

No love for the dinosaur hunt in The Lost World? Or the raptors in the tall grass? That movie doesn’t really work, overall, but those scenes work like gangbusters (and unlike the admittedly better trailer sequence, have a lot more dinosaurs involved).

I don’t know, the whole “psychic ability” element was set up very early. I think Simmons had a misguided point to make about climate change and didn’t think through the implications of using an unambiguously supernatural and dangerous monster as a symbol of the issue.