@Caldathras While it's very true that fascists are insinuating themselves into the whole Anglosphere (and far beyond), I think it's an overstatement to say they're a bigger problem in countries where they have not actually seized power. While the US system of "checks and balances" is not yet clinically dead, it is showing few signs of successfully checking or balancing, and the recent budget bill included a massive appropriation to hire so many people into the Gestapo ICE that it will have more personnel than the FBI.

As to Collective Shout . . . I've watched as activist groups demanded things for plenty of decades. The general rule is, they never get the things they demand unless (1) It was going to happen anyway, or (2) There is an upsurge in protest so massive that it is shutting down society, or occasionally (3) Nobody cares about the demand so what the heck. And that last one is rare; the default is "give them nothing, don't encourage them". Some Australian weirdly reactionary feminist group I'd never heard of is not in itself going to force a big transnational company to do anything. A couple days ago I speculated that it was all lawyer stuff happening at mid levels, but I think I was wrong--this has been too widespread for that. I think they must have decided that there is strong popular/political backing for this kind of thing, and/or there's some high-ups who are into it.

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I'm starting to feel like somewhere in the mid-layers of one of these outfits, there's some lawyer who received a complaint, looked over some terms and conditions, and decided to issue a cease and desist just to be cautious, or talk to the mid-level lawyers in one of the other organizations and get them to issue it, and none of the PR flacks at any of these places, or the upper level executives for that matter, have a clue what the hell is going on.
Sprawling organizations with too much unaccountable power.

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My personal solution: Mednafen.

Sounds like an antidepressant medication. Which would work, kind of: "The problem still exists, but I don't care any more!"

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Yeah, my first thought was "Wait a minute. So this is a new capability that lets me drive myself crazy by making it look like my games are sorted wrong!"

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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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