I thought that vinny would review this, or at least someone from NY since they're the only ones that put out videos about JC3.
It could be that some kind of preview press tour was happening in NYC (since a handful of other gaming press outlets have offices in NYC as well), which is why GB East would get the preview coverage of it. Ultimately a review copy/code gets sent, and they assign the review to whoever wants it.
Also, a Vinny review is always a long shot, because it has been years since he posted one to the site, and even when he did review stuff, I think it was mostly due to GB being overworked and understaffed during the fall review season.
@mikelemmer: I should mention it was the first game I played with the Shadows add-on, and I'm not clear on whether the AI changes were part of a general patch, or specifically only apply to the Shadows expansion. I played another game only like a week ago as a different faction and nobody was nearly as keen to just close borders constantly.
Coming from Civ, it's kind of crazy that borders are open all the time by default, but I guess that carries with it the risk that you can freely be attacked in the default cold war unless you're on home territory.
Has anyone got an idea what causes the AI to react to you in various ways?
I played my first game as the Drakken a day or two ago. Unlike any of my other playthroughs as other factions, the AI all pretty quickly closed their borders to me as soon as they amassed the influence to do so. Some were near, some were far, some outstripped my military, some were weaker than me, but they pretty much all did it. I barely remember anybody closing borders in previous games, except when maybe I was obviously traipsing about their territory with a sizable army, exploring ruins, and the AI got nervous.
The only thing I can think of is that the Drakken trait immediately tells you where each empire is located at the start of the game, which sort of means you know where their capital is (but you don't have vision of it), so maybe they were all just nervous that I had "discovered" the location of the capital and might invade it any second, even though I was dozens and dozens of turns away from that being remotely possible?
Then eventually I just made alliances with everybody.
Diplomacy victory is weird, because once you get a bunch of buildings that produce influence, then A) you get to the point that you can easily max out your empire plan, and B) it doesn't even cost that much influence to create alliances with everybody and that's all you can really do to get to diplomatic victory faster, and C) there is literally no way on the tech tree to accelerate your progress to diplomatic victory except for one tech in the final era that doubles your diplomacy point gain. I kinda didn't understand how all of that really worked until halfway through my Drakken game, because for some reason I thought diplomatic victory was based on influence gained sort of like how economic victory is based on Dust gained, but I was super wrong about that.
All 3 of you thought the Lupin reference was an anime thing. It's a reference to Arsene Lupin, a famous fictional thief from some French 19th century stories.
The anime Lupin III (or read as Lupin The Third) is inspired by Arsene Lupin. As much as the dev team is French and probably aware of the original Aresene Lupin character, it is far more likely that the California-based writer of the game's dialogue was going for the anime reference. I mean, it's an old-ass anime that is kind of a stretch for 18-year-old kids to reference in 2013, but it's more likely they'd reference the anime than reference a 19th century French detective story.
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