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Quoting: Liam DaweI'm not going to quote everything they say, but I do suggest instead of instantly thinking like that, you read the blog post for the part you're interested in. They give clear reasoning to explain what was done.

Their explanation does make sense, yes.
For others who were also a bit confused by this:

In the civilizations displayed in the game, women did not usually hold citizenship, which was a prized social status. The "female citizen" was a misnomer. It was also incorrect to display all men as soldiers, and most women as servants. Instead, we want to describe the armies of 0 A.D. as followed by a group of minions of lower social status, able to support the soldiers in the army camp, but not on the battlefield. Those are the new Civilians. Citizens, on the other hand, were soldiers, able to wage war as well as working, which we have always been accurately describing in the game with the citizen-soldier concept. The ambiguity of the term "citizen" is removed: this word now only describes citizen soldiers.

So basically now it is:
Citizen -> soldier+eco unit, male (or mostly? Guess it depends on the civ, haven't played enough to remember)
Civilian -> economy unit, male & female (probably random at production time)

When it used to be:
Citizen Soldier -> soldier+eco unit
(Female) Citizen -> eco unit

More clarity is definitely welcome.

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Quoting: g000hWell, Chrome Books (Google) and Mobile Phones (Google and Apple) are not far off being headless terminals. The public uses them for consuming content, most of their functionality relies on cloud services (e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, iCloud, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc).

Not sure I agree here. My Android smartphone, for me, is effectively a minicomputer. I do not use it for any of the "functionality" you've listed here. No streaming. No games. No social media. I use it for visiting forums, online research, offline calendar & task management, recording notes, offline office functionality, etc. This is not all that different than my daily driver laptop. On top of that, I also take photographs and send and receive phone calls. These devices are what you make of them.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPMeanwhile, I'm still waiting for some proper kind of campaign or Soulstorm-styled conquest campaigns.

This. I'm waiting for a proper single-player campaign too.

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I'm not going to quote everything they say, but I do suggest instead of instantly thinking like that, you read the blog post for the part you're interested in. They give clear reasoning to explain what was done.

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Gendered Civilians.

Are they just fishing for some faux outrage with this one?

Civilians in 0AD have been available in male and female for ages, usually even fulfilling different roles in the economy as well.
Weird.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for some proper kind of campaign or Soulstorm-styled conquest campaigns.

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Quoting: Mountain Man$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

Even that isn't enough. Businesses like that have no right to exist. They should have seized the entire thing and shut them down.

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Quoting: ScottCarammellstill waiting for that legitimate use case the technology is sure to get. I mean this is supposed to be the next motor vehicle or whatever, right? there's gotta be something huge right around the corner. not like this was all a giant, unbelievable waste of time, money, life and resources for absolutely nothing of value. that's impossible. the people on wall street said otherwise. they're supposed to be smart, right?

https://asm.org/articles/2025/august/ai-next-frontier-antibiotic-discovery

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still waiting for that legitimate use case the technology is sure to get. I mean this is supposed to be the next motor vehicle or whatever, right? there's gotta be something huge right around the corner. not like this was all a giant, unbelievable waste of time, money, life and resources for absolutely nothing of value. that's impossible. the people on wall street said otherwise. they're supposed to be smart, right?

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Of note with this case is that Valve had already bought a licence for the patents. Then they got sued. So there was a case where they said, "actually, we already paid for this." Then they got sued again, so they took the gloves off.

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Quoting: Mountain Man$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

As far as I understood (which is very limited), this is just this step and this actually sets Valve up further action. So I'd expect much more in the future.

Not the smartest move to try and screw over a company that actually has the resources to fight back.

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that really is a great bundle. There's about 1000 hrs of awesome content there.

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$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

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Nothing in life is guaranteed, that's pretty trite, but with Mewgenics there were clear signs the second the media picked it up for the preview cycle. It's not even that it was praised, it's about the type of praise it received, and how it was framed. It wasn't brought up as a quaint indie game by oddball creator first, it wasn't as subjected (if at all) to your typical template-driven news/preview slop. It came across as though people who played it prior to release viscerally liked it and needed to tell you about how much fun they had. At least from what I was seeing it was as much a done deal as humanly possible.

Perhaps I have a career in industry predictions, I dunno ;)

Compare to something like the late Cyberpunk 2077 previews which were all extremely politely lukewarm, but also somehow framed to maintain the ridiculous level of praise from much earlier in that marketing cycle. You could've mapped pretty much the entirety of the design, system and content issues of that game right then, from the universally positive previews, without even looking at the game. Not with certainty, obviously, but the signs were all there.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: syylkThanks for the enlightening answers!

(Yup, didn't think of TV gaming. 😁)

I don't know how usual that is, but I got the problem on the output side:
My company notebook, bought last year, doesn't have DP, only HDMI and USB-C.

Yeah, that's pretty much the norm with (business) laptops. Your docking station likely has DP outputs though.

It does, so yes, I'm not actually using HDMI. (Is it for beamers?!?)

Projectors and TV screens in conference rooms, in my experience.

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What's more interesting for me here is that the patent lawyers themselves (Meyler Legal PLLC and the lawyer himself Samuel Meyler) got held responsible for filing without due diligence. This I think is the first time a PLLC has consequences for patent trolling, up to now PLLC's have been in the shadows when it comes to patent trolling.

Hopefully this will mean that lawyers will be more resistant to being complicit in patent trolling. That could change the whole landscape.

Also, wow, that verdict document is properly damning.

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Quoting: vic-bayIf you see ai slop long enough, you will learn to identify it immediately. Yes, it is still a time waster, but it is nowhere as bad as it looks at the first look. Creating slop commits and pull requests takes way longer than reading it for half minute and smashing ban button.

That might be true, but Godot currently has nearly 5000 PRs awaiting review, and 50K closed PRs overall. I think that when you're dealing with those kind of numbers, it still adds up to a near-insurmountable problem.

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HUGE W

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Quoting: suchOdd thing to say. To me it's very obvious that a reasonably deep turn-based roguelike with some whimsy and personality, AND cats is more popular than the thematic downer that is The Binding of Isaac or the tough as nails meat grinder of a precision platformer.

I guess it's possible to spend years dedicating your life to something unaware of what it is that you're actually doing?

The point is - nothing in game development is guaranteed. We've seen lots of games fail that many thought would be a clear success.

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Quoting: vic-bayWhy HDMI cartel doesn't want HDMI on Linux? So more people won't use HDMI? Do they hate money, or did Microslop bribe them?

It's always about control. Even in this scale. Not so much about "money" (though that concept is a control mechanism itself too). What matters is power and natural resources, not some monopoly "money" (worthless in itself) or numbers on screens..

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Funny thing is that this is apparently not really that much of a change. Most of the functionality is already in Unity and it just requires tying a few things together. Which makes this statement primarily one for shareholders in an (apparently successful) attempt to raise the stock price.

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If you see ai slop long enough, you will learn to identify it immediately. Yes, it is still a time waster, but it is nowhere as bad as it looks at the first look. Creating slop commits and pull requests takes way longer than reading it for half minute and smashing ban button.

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Why HDMI cartel doesn't want HDMI on Linux? So more people won't use HDMI? Do they hate money, or did Microslop bribe them?

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Quoting: hardpenguinThis is getting ridiculous

This is Dark Souls of ridiculous situations.

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Polish power. Let's go gents!

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: syylkThanks for the enlightening answers!

(Yup, didn't think of TV gaming. 😁)

I don't know how usual that is, but I got the problem on the output side:
My company notebook, bought last year, doesn't have DP, only HDMI and USB-C.

Yeah, that's pretty much the norm with (business) laptops. Your docking station likely has DP outputs though.

It does, so yes, I'm not actually using HDMI. (Is it for beamers?!?)

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Quoting: pbinb4 they start selling headless terminals that have to be connected to the cloud, where all our files would reside (at a hefty monthly fee, of course)

Well, Chrome Books (Google) and Mobile Phones (Google and Apple) are not far off being headless terminals. The public uses them for consuming content, most of their functionality relies on cloud services (e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, iCloud, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc).

People are already being manipulated into not having fully functional computers any more.

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On a good side of things: all those news finally convinced me to buy a Steam Deck while it's still available.

:).

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: syylkThanks for the enlightening answers!

(Yup, didn't think of TV gaming. 😁)

I don't know how usual that is, but I got the problem on the output side:
My company notebook, bought last year, doesn't have DP, only HDMI and USB-C.

Yeah, that's pretty much the norm with (business) laptops. Your docking station likely has DP outputs though.

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I'm starting to see this same issue with Minigalaxy. Someone made a massive AI made PR and after going through it 3 times to review it, they figured out they were unable to fix it and closed it.

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Quoting: syylkThanks for the enlightening answers!

(Yup, didn't think of TV gaming. 😁)

I don't know how usual that is, but I got the problem on the output side:
My company notebook, bought last year, doesn't have DP, only HDMI and USB-C.

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