The Old Hack

Easiest way, I think, would be to idle ahead of the silly things at a speed of five or six knots. Slow down if they looked like giving up, gently adding throttle if they came too close. Then wait for bad weather. Once the bad weather is there, sink them at your leisure while they are fighting to stay afloat.

To be fair, Yzjdriel did talk about modern bows with favourable wind. Greeks in triremes would not necessarily have access to these nor to modern materials and bow construction techniques. An older English longbow would have an extreme range of some five to six hundred yards and these were the marvels of their time. In the early 19th Century, a Turkish visitor to England armed with a recurved bow managed to shoot some nine hundred yards. If you were talking shortbows from earlier dates, you would be lucky to make some three to four hundred yards. And again, we are talking skilled archers here. Ten years of practice is not quite amateur level; Yzjdriel should not sell himself short. Mind you, the one thing Greeks couldn't be said to be short of was physical strength. With decent bows they could probably achieve fairly scary ranges. But another factor to count in: back then, really good bows were expensive and took time to make. Many made do with slings or throwing spears. The legendary longbow of Odysseus was a nobleman's weapon and not something a common shipboard trooper would be armed with.

That gives a whole new meaning to "Supersize me."

Then it will have to wait till summer till the grills come out. That's the only grill days we have.

So, incoming frijinks!

That actually sounds reasonable to me. Mind you, the resolution of those stone carved hieroglyphs was a lot more detailed than anything CompuServe had to offer. That could have contributed to their slower download speed. Also, you have to take network speed into account. They used the Nile as their backbone and all the grain barges and crocodiles caused a lot of slowdowns, not to mention lost packets.

There is a long standing tradition for that. Tell me, precisely what message was it that those mathematicians of yours buried in the hundreds of yards long series of steles in the Khufu Pyramid?

No, no. Clearly the lines were off side.

Why not? My wife had a hospital simulator computer game where the hospital was named the Legacy Memorial. We could have an Arena Stadium.

Holy cow! The Butterball Turkey Hotline is actually the secret communications network of the DGB! ...don't look at me like that. I am training for the Conclusion Jumping Olympics.

ROFL! The Panzer IV was one of the first tanks to be modified with 'schürzen' (armoured 'skirts') that were designed to cause antitank rockets or explosive rounds to go off prematurely, before they made contact with the actual armour of the tank. I love it!

Duh! Yes, B-25s. What was I thinking? >.<

Denmark has the opposite problem. Our PM almost had one this autumn but in the end he couldn't get it up.

I dunno, it may have possibilities. Maybe put miniature B-17 drones on them so the wearers could go Doolittle on catcallers and other scumbags like that?

Okay, I admit that 'Battleship Top' has 'tank top' beat hollow. Now I wonder about the possibilities in a Baby Flat Top shirt.

Actually I think that if you refitted an actual tank engine to haul a train, it would do a pretty good job. And if you kept the turret and the main armament, it would be at least a little bit intimidating for potential train robbers.

It has 2 move a turn at basic level. 3 if you have completed Magellan's Expedition. 4 if you have invented Nuclear Power. (Don't ask me how this works. When you reach Nuclear Power, all your ships get 1 extra move. I do not know how you install a nuclear power plant on a trireme, I just know it gets the extra move.) In Civilisation 2, Range is a moot point because it assumes the strategic level, which is to say that each unit actually represents several of the vessel in question and that when you move to attack, you are engaged in combat. Certain weapons have First Strike, which is to say they are allowed to strike and do damage before the enemy can strike back. The equivalent of a PT would be able to carry up to 3 Cruise Missiles. These have First Strike and each will be guaranteed to eliminate one Trireme unit before it would even get to attack. A PT unit would be Modern and would therefore have either 30 or 40 HP. A Trireme is Ancient and would only have 10. Even when engaged in combat, a Trireme with its minimal attack power would only be able to do 1 point of damage if it hit, which would be a tall assumption. The PT unit, on the other hand, would do from 12 to 18 damage with each hit and would hit nearly every time, eliminating one trireme per hit. Given enough Triremes and time, the PT unit would still sink in the end. But it would be a tall assumption. It would presuppose a PT unit willing to hold still while it was surrounded by Triremes (stacking them would be a really bad idea as this would allow the PT to spread its damage over multiple Triremes, potentially sinking a dozen or more of them per hit). And in the end, they could win only by wearing it down. The RL equivalent would be that it continued to fight until it had run out of fuel and ammunition, which just doesn't strike me as the ideal naval combat tactic. ETA: This was a rather heavily modded version of Civ 2 and I am reconstructing this from memory. Any deviations from vanilla Civ 2 are entirely on my head and I apologise in advance if I have made egregious mistakes in that direction. Thank you.

Whenever I see 'tank top', I keep thinking of tank turrets. It makes me envision girls and women wearing the turret of an Abrams tank complete with cannon. I guess it could reduce catcalling if the catcaller had to live in fear of getting hit with APERS ammunition once the victim got tired of him.

Even so, I am glad to hear it has cleared up for now. I don't know, maybe you are allergic to Election Days :/

That sounds depressingly like I am supposed to act like an adult. Could I take a rain check, please?

Nonsense. Name even one other Pharaoh who used a laser pointer.

Yeah. I hope you recover from it soon.

Oh what lovely havoc would ensue. Mind you, their weaponised 'Dew already successfully turned poor Jinx into the Hulk, so they are probably headed in that direction.

On a sidenote, your avatar just made me realise that Doc and Roger have yet to invent a shrinking ray. About jinks level: maybe EGS needs a jinks warning level. Sort of like that national alert level with the weird colours, divided into Low, Low to Medium, Mid, Mid to High, and Hijinks.

Not until you pointed it out. Maybe he is contemplating trying to convince the grandparents of the advantages of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations?