I see Neutrals advantages as better, with more trade, morale, upgraded tiles, cheaper instant buys.
Its a matter of if you like war, or peace, I think. Some people prefer evil because of the weapons and production.
But many laws go agaist evil, their trade is worth less, their diplomacy is naturaly lower,
and are less respected by other races, and don't get morale or loyalty bonuses because the people prefer good or Neutral.
Then Again I usually win through tech victory, or influence, so Neutral advantages serve that well.

Would you care to elaborate on that? I thought the loss of +100% econ bonus in TA made the MCC much less of a no-brainer. The artificial slave centre and no mercy invasio centre a really nice, but the +1-% approval bonus for neutral is also huge IMO. I think that MCC change would make Neutral more useful in TA.

Of course, there are 2 no-brainers for Evil, IMO - Drengin and Korath. They get Psionic Beam so fast that they can simply wipe the floor with their enemies early-mid game

Good points on all sides : >
I wish I hade TA : ( then I could check out what your saying.
Also I prefer tech victory, and when Neutral, I sometimes get thousands from trade.
One time I was getting 800bc/week (plus or minus a few) from taxes,
and getting 1500bc/week (plus or minus a few) from trade.
But its all in game style as you said, you prefer war in your games.

I understand that.  I have times where I play computer games a lot and times where I don't play at all.  Right now, I have a lot of free time, but that can always change, just depends on what's going on.

Oh man a 7300GT, that's pretty rough.  I'm sure you're much happier with your new machine.  I have a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a GeForce GTX 250 video card.  Not the fastest in the world, but it handles every game I've thrown at it.

That's a huge jump going from a 7300 to the 250.  You non-upgraded right up through the 8000 and 9000 series.  That would be a world of difference.  My wife only plays a couple basic board games on the computer and I put a GeForce 9600 on hers.

I updgraded my monitor a year or so ago to 1680x1050.  I'm pretty happy with that.  I was thinking of going with a HD monitor (1920x1080), but I think I like the 8/5 aspect better.  If I were to upgrade right now, I'd go with a 1920x1200 I think.  For me, HD monitors seem overly wide and not tall enough to use on a computer.

On heavily graphic games like the FPSers you mentioned, I found I rarely need to go over 4x AA.  I've played around with AA a lot because it is by far the most demanding setting.  Some games I've found can run without any noticable difference between 4x and 2x and I'll run 2x on those.   It also depends on how much you even notice ragged edges.  It's not something I notice much and only games with a lot of sharp angles and straight sides need much of it for me.  For example, Far Cry had very non linear graphics so I found I only needed 2x AA with that.  Need for Speed II Underground was very angular and straight sided, I ran 8x AA on that one.

As far as resolution, for single monitor operations like we're doing, there's no need to go for more than typical memory offerings.  It isn't until you get into the dual monitors at high resolutions where you need the cards with real big memory.  I think some poeple confuse memory amount with performance, it's a capacity thing, not a performance thing.  For us single monitor users, memory speed is much more important than memory amount.

In any case, the cards we've got will happily plow through the vast majority of games out there at decent graphics settings.  I honestly think going any higher up the product line would be a waste of money, especially at the resolutions we're running.  It sounds like that's an important consideration for you as well, so it sounds like you made exactly the right pick.  I'm very happy with my card.

I have 512MB, seems to be enough for all the games I've played.  I think some games can use most of that for the resolutions we're running if they have heavy texture usage in the graphics.  I think what happens when a video card runs out of local memory is it taps into system memory.  That results in slower rendering performance because local video memory is much faster.  I'm not positive about that, but I believe it's the case.

Some games load the card more than others.  Heavily graphic games like Crysis will get it real hot.  You can turn on vertical sync which will make the card run cooler since it waits for the vertical refresh to render the frames.  Personally, I always run Vsync enabled becuase it keeps the images from tearing.  That happens when the card refreshes the frame when the scan is part way down the screen.  There's really no reason I know of to run with Vsync off.  The human eye can't tell the difference once the framerate goes above 40 or so per second anyway.  It makes the card run cooler too.

Well, I used to be a good badminton, tennis and table tennis player and used to sometimes play cricket at night, so maybe it is a side effect. On the other hand, I could have a vision problem - I have been meaning to get my eyes tested for some time now.

A problem could be that my LCD monitor is a bit on the older side and so has a lot of ghosting problem. What I don't like about the whole LCD thing is that the display system related software is still designed for the CRT - when are we going to move beyond that?

We have had a nice discussion, Craig.

I to break this up but, I intended this topic be about which and why people play a side, not about your computers sports and monitors.