Conquest

So, first of all, I realize these pictures don't fit nicely into their column, but you can't see what I'm going to talk about when they are smaller.  So, first of all, in case you don't know, these are screen shots of the conquest game we have on our computer.  We play it while we wait for the internet to work (not so much now that we have internet that usually works, but a lot at our last apartment).

Let me tell you about the game leading up to this first picture.  I was playing.  I am the green one.  I was not doing well, so I decided to surrender and just let the computers duke it out until the game was over.  I forgot about the game and left the computer.  Hours later Ryan was on the computer and asked me something about this conquest game.  I told him I had surrendered and came to see who one.  3,793 turns and only one person was out.  Um....that's a little ridiculous.

We decided it must have been a fluke.  So, we setup another game and surrendered before we even played anything.  We were determined to see who would win the game.  This game went on and on and on...for days.  When we would turn the computer on, we would open the conquest game and let it keep playing.  We did this for way too long.  It was looking for a while that it would end before 50,000 turns and each day I would email Ryan conquest updates at work (I guess when we're onto something, we're just onto it).  Eventually I said that if it got to 100,000 turns that we were giving up.  Now, I'm not a quitter (I don't think), but right around 80,000 turns, I decided that this was a really boring game and I didn't want to wait it out to 100,000 since the computer never did anything.  It was after all this that we realized the setting was on very stupid, meaning all the computer players were intellectually very stupid.  Well, that explains it!  Which just brings me to another question....How was I losing against very stupid players?  We changed the setting to very clever and did the same thing.  The game was over in 25 turns.

So, there you go.  Now you don't have to try this because we did for you.  ;)