OK, I don't rant very well. My blood rarely boils over something that isn't largely pointless to the wider population.
But he may well be a Trotskyist who takes a dodgy photo, and I may well be a reactionary recidivist, who also takes a dodgy photo, but I found his diatribe strangely warming to the cockles of my heart. Whatever the hell they are.
So if Scotland does secede, Royal Bank of Scotland will
relocate its HQ to London, so that it's still protected by the Bank of England. Or something.
But wouldn't the whole name become a misnomer? It couldn't be a Royal and Scotland (unless Scotland remained in the commonwealth under Betty, but what's the point of gaining independence if you can't also tell the monarchy to go fuck themselves?)
Seems odd that if RBS goes bust the BoE will pick up the tab, not the Scots, but hey-ho.
I didn't think for the world that jobs would move en masse, that makes not sense at all. But I'd imagine that at least a few would have to move to establish a London HQ.
Nooooo!!!! Dump the bloated old maggot and her whole maggot fambly!
Just watched the big big big big big big debate. Galloway has fucking lost it. Greens came over very well (particularly the 'fairer is more important than richer' point).
I had to resort to Google to figure out who you meant by Galloway.
The Greens may end up as a credible opposition party up here - they've got a lot of support thanks to everyone refusing to touch the Lib Dems with anything shorter than a very long bargepole.
Interesting times ahead (hopefully)!
haha, good work!
I think No are probably going to scrape a win here, but I hope that the closeness of it and the large engagement of people means some improvements come along with it.
What is that game, and why are you showing it to me when I go back to uni on Monday? :@
What is that game, and why are you showing it to me when I go back to uni on Monday? :@
Hah. It's a far worse time vampire than Civ could ever dream of. Days just disappear. I have to ration myself heavily.
*/FWIW/* I think/hope it'll be a narrow Yes. I think the No campaign have pissed enough people off with their negative approach in the last few weeks to swing what was pretty much in the bag for them.
But it really depends on which side actually gets out and votes and I'm hoping that the Yeses feel more strongly than the Nos. Enough to outweigh the usual thing where people vote more conservatively than they poll.
It's exciting (dance)
Playing as Scotland is hard at the best of times. You've got to go through England to really get anywhere and England are always going to have at least a 3-5x bigger army than you and their navy simply can't be beaten.
As Scotland you really have to make sensible allies and take advantage of English weaknesses. And, during my game, pretty much everything went wrong. Firstly Leinster allied with me and together we annexed the independent Irish provinces. This went well and was a good situation for both of us - we could work together to repel the dirty English.
Inexplicably though, when the wars ended Leinster (who controlled the southern half of Ireland) dissolved our alliance. Which is pretty bad, you don't want an unpredictable nation with a land border when you're far more concerned with a bigger neighbour. So I had to fabricate a claim and annex them which was frustrating but fine, I got more land, raising the size of the army I could support a bit.
Ok, so, as Scotland, as I say, you rely on powerful overseas allies and English weakness. Those allies are usually France and the Scandinavian countries, those are the ones that make sense. And English weakness means poaching territories off them while they're engaged in stupid wars with France and/or Spain or, even better, if the War of the Roses happens (conditions have to be right for it to occur) just marching in and taking a nice big chunk of England while they're fighting with themselves.
Colonialism isn't really viable as Scotland (though I'd really like to play an all-out colonial Scotland one day).
I'd allied with France but they won the 100 years war and took back all English territory in France ridiculously early and were embroiled in useless (for me) wars with Holy Roman Empire member states making them pretty worthless as a military ally. They just weren't interested enough in helping me invade England and were too constantly war weary from fighting with the HRE.
So I took as much of North Sea trade as I could without pissing off the Scandinavians or leaving myself exposed and looked to Norway and Sweden - they are usually very good allies for Scotland as the relationship tends to work extremely well for both sides.
Unfortunately both Norway and Sweden had somehow got into a personal union with Denmark (with Denmark as the senior partner) so all diplomatic interactions had to go through the Danes whom, at the start of the game, I had chosen as my rivals in order to get a stronger position in North Sea trade. The whole of Scandinavia was useless to me.
Denmark eventually got both Norway and Sweden when their monarchs died and became a new political entity, which I quickly allied with, but they're so fucking huge now that they're not really interested in looking west, they've got Lithuania and Muscovy to worry about.
So I'm sitting here as Scotland building up my economy and tech, supporting any English rebels that pop up and hoping that the War of the Roses kicks off sometime soon.
That sounds like a game I might enjoy.
It is kinda amazing. Every time I play I come up with new ideas as to how I want to play it next (like my current one is playing as a Chinese faction and seeing if it's possibly to colonise America via the Pacific before the Europeans get there. Also I want to have a successful game as a Native American tribe, which is hard). I've got a huge backlog of ideas for games I want to do.
It has a bit of a learning curve but I've talked friends through the UI and they're up and running in 5-10 minutes, it's really about learning which buttons do what, there's little to no real micromanagement despite the complexity of the simulation.
It's a hell of a timesink though.
I'd avoid setting up a colony in Panama.
Also: shut up shut up shut up shut up.
