I've tried FreeOrion. It's . . . interesting, but ultimately, at least so far in its development, I don't like it.
So, the pros: Interesting tech tree, some interesting ideas about how empire economics and pop growth work. Pretty cool ship designs and tech trees surrounding them. Arguably a pro is the very open source approach to the UI, that has all these sub-windows that you can arrange and size how you want, if only you understood what all of them are for.

Neutral: There are a lot of space monsters, which in the early game can put a serious crimp in exploration or even kill your empire if you get unlucky. But they're sort of interesting to deal with and let you test your latest combat ships without actually going to war with real alien empires.

The cons: Incredibly minimalist look, with essentially no art whatsoever. User interface bare and often difficult to understand. Notifications of what's going on almost feel like error messages in a command line interface. Nonexistent diplomacy. Interesting and unusual concepts and technological capabilities with unobvious strategic implications are usually not matched with even half-decent explanations of how they actually work. Wonky; weird things appear not to work, increasingly as you head towards later in the game. Sometimes it's because of some obscure rule that is not explained anywhere, like you can't take that planet because its stealth is so good that even though you're seeing it on the map and just defeated its orbital defences, in some hypothetical way you're not supposed to know it's there so you can't land troops or settlers, but nothing in the user interface really tells you that, it just won't let you. Sometimes it's just because shit isn't working, and so some tactical action you kind of need to take, you just can't because it decided not to work. And, late in the game (although I'm sure there's a setting you can do to turn this off . . . somewhere), often some kind of overpowered crisis aliens just kill you and there's nothing much you can do about it.

I've never finished a game. But it can be kind of fun through to the mid game or so if you get lucky.

I, too, am interested in these indies @such mentions.

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Well, sure, but ultimately the question remains: Where did they get the capacity to be seen as able to pay back that kind of loan?

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I've been holding off on GalCiv 4 myself. I didn't like GalCiv 3 nearly as much as I expected to--it's exactly my kind of game but there was something weirdly boring about it. The tech tree was mostly boring, the weapons made too much sense . . . nothing you could do felt cool, nothing you could research felt like it made a qualitative shift in how your empire worked. Which you might expect would be in the service of game balance, but the game was actually unbalanced in a weirdly boring way, like "If your race has this one ability that lets you make use of these ancient thingies you find while you explore, you rule. Otherwise, you are mediocre." But even that unbalanced thing gave you massive but pretty generic bonuses, so it was boring too. As 4X space games in the MOO genre go, it did not hold my interest. I go back and play MOO2 again sometimes, and I go play another game of Stellaris every so often, but it never occurs to me to play another game of GalCiv 3.

And when I go to the Steam GalCiv 4 page, I mean, some people like it, but overall what people say doesn't look that promising. So I kind of feel like Stardock make games that I would normally expect to like but somehow probably won't.

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The Romance of The Three Kingdoms novel

Surely there are dozens, hundreds, probably thousands of Romance of the Three Kingdoms novels.
I suppose we're talking spinoff novel based on the game Romance of the Three Kingdoms?

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It's probably a good idea, I can see why they're doing it, but the "Popular Searches" function still instinctively annoys me. Look, here's an easier way to conform! Jump on the bandwagon and join the herd today!

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These days I'm starting to wonder if Death Road to Canada won't turn out to be kind of prophetic . . .

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I have nothing against stories where there is no clear-cut villain. But the things is that Miyazaki will sometimes set things up with a clear villain to provide spooky atmosphere and then decide he just doesn't want what goes with the setup he just did. Howl's Moving Castle is a perfect example of this--the Witch starts out both very frightening with her weird creepy shadow-ooze minions and stuff, and a pretty horrible person--completely self-centred, clearly willing to kill on a whim, and shallowly materialistic. Then they sort of defeat her but then take her in and after a brief interregnum of being almost a vegetable, suddenly she's a kindly, wise old lady. I somehow don't mind, I love Howl's Moving Castle, but it makes no sense in daytime logic.

There's a lesser version of this in Spirited Away, where Yubaba, whose whole gig is using magic to enslave people and actually takes the main character's name away, sort of, gradually comes to seem like just a grumpy old employer who the main character embarrasses by calling her "granny" at the end. But it's not like she actually reforms, it's more of a shift of how you see her. And, maybe she's getting a bit softer from the influence of the MC. Maybe. At any rate, it pretty much works in the story--it's not like there had been any expectation that Chihiro was going to somehow defeat Yubaba.

This kind of antagonist personality shift I think happens in a few movies because Miyazaki seems to like creepy scary setups but does not so much like the violent conflict resolution that those creepy scary setups would logically point towards. It lets him have his cake and eat it too, and the imagery and sense of wonder are so strong, and the uplifting not-violent endings are typically so inspiring, that he can get away with it. But it doesn't mean that inconsistency isn't there, he just generally makes me not care very much.

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Reminds me of Merchant of the Skies. Even the Majestic Carrot probably wouldn't be out of place here.

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Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Clever concept, but I too wondered if their reach exceeded their grasp.

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There are key benefits if Linux goes mainstream. Hardware (and the software attached to hardware, so basically complete control over specialized complicated hardware), anti-cheat, and software. Only the last of those is very mixed as blessings go: On the up side, all the software that we're missing, like Adobe stuff, will run on Linux. On the down side, software like Adobe stuff will run on Linux, and be just as annoying and subscriptiony and all as they are on Windows . . .

I don't think it will make a huge difference to the desktop experience otherwise.

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