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Civilization VI made major revisions to the Trade system, totally changed how Roads are made, and created an entirely new mechanism around Civics. You need to adapt your play style to these new systems, as we explain.

Playing Civilization VI, Part 3

Trade and Roads

The next major system to be upgraded is the Trade system. And this is an important system to master since it is the major way of obtaining gold in the game. If you neglect Trade, you will be in continual financial difficulty, but use it wisely and you can have all gold you need, and then some. I’ve had games where I am bringing in as much as 900 gold per turn! And with a healthy treasury you can buy buildings and military units as needed, plus have all the gold needed for maintenance and upkeep. The other reason to master this system is that in Civ VI workers (now called Builders) do not build roads. Instead, roads are created by your Trade units when they travel between cities. This is a major change in the game dynamic.

Sometimes you need to send a trade unit to a city purely for the road it creates. Within your Empire you might send a Trade unit between two of your cities just to get the road. And you can send one to the city of another Civ to build the road, and then use the road for your military to invade! One thing to watch out for is that when you are looking at setting up a Trade Route, the game interface shows you the path your trader will take, and if you watch closely you might be able to send a trader to a foreign city but have it go through one of your own cities. So you can get a road connecting two of your own cities as part of a Trade Route that goes to a foreign city and brings in Gold. The one exception to the rule on roads from Trade is that later in the game when you discover Steam Power you can use Military Engineers to build Railroads. This does not use a charge from the Military Engineer, but does use one Iron and one Coal, which adds to your CO2 emissions. You would not want to overbuild Railroads, but if you are aiming for a Domination victory you will want to get the new units you build to front quickly, and there is no better way to do that than a good Railroad system.

But the primary reason to build Trade units to set up Trade Routes to bring in Gold (primarily), and perhaps other resources as well. You begin when you discover the Civic ForeignTrade, which gives you the capability of having exactly 1 Trade Route. You can gain the capacity for additional routes in several ways. You can build a Harbor and Lighthouse, and that will give you 1 more. Or you can build a Commercial Hub and Market, which also gives you 1 more. However, you cannot build both in any one city and get 2 extra trade routes. But since you can get one more route in each city where you do this, one way to get more trade routes is to get more cities, an approach known as “building wide”. There are also Wonders and Great Merchants that can give you additional capacity.

Once you have the capacity you have to build the Trader and send it. Unlike in previous games where your Trade routes were totally virtualized, in Civ VI the Trader is a unit that travels between the cities, and it can be attacked by enemies or by Barbarians. If this happens your route is pillaged and you have to start over by building another unit. But if nothing goes wrong you will eventually get a Trading Post in each city when the route is complete. This matters because Trade Routes are limited by distance. They can go up to 15 tiles for a Land route, or 30 tiles for a Sea route. But a Trading Post increases the range by another 15 or 30 tiles, and if you can go from Trading Post to Trading Post you can go clear across the map. However, this is not usually the most important consideration. Trade Routes are also important for gaining a Culture victory since they add to the tourism you get from your trading partner. Trade Routes also last for a fixed time according to a complex formula I won’t try to replicate, but suffice it to say you will get a chance to use your Trader again as long it has not been killed. So you can use it to build a road, then some turns later use it to get Gold from a City-state, for instance.

Civics

I mentioned Civics in the previous section. In Civ VI this is a whole new system that is parallel to the Science/Technology tree. It is a tree of Civic advancements, and you really need to advance along this tree to keep up. And just like the Technology tree requires you to earn Science to make progress, the Civics tree requires you to earn Culture. You can do this in a variety of ways. First is through buildings, beginning with the Monument, which is available to you immediately without any Research. Many players like to build a couple of units first, then a Monument so they can start building up the Culture. Then Theater Squares give you a place to put your Amphitheaters,, Museums, and so on. Anyone who wants to get a Culture victory will be building a lot of Theater Squares and the buildings for them. You can also get Culture from Trade Routes, from Wonders, from some tiles, and so on.

You need to advance along the Civics tree just as you do on the Science tree. So you have two quasi-research tracks going on, and you can use the same selection methods. You can simply pick individual Techs and Civics from the options the game gives you, or you can open the tree, find a goal you want to achieve and click it. The game will then select that and all of the prerequisites, and take them in order. And a number of things that used to be on the Research tree in earlier versions have moved to the Civics tree in this version. For example, Trade has always been a technology you would research, but in this game Foreign Trade is now a Civic. So I just think of it as researching Techs and researching Civics.

At the bottom of the Civics Tree is a progress bar that shows where you and other players you know have progressed in terms of Eras. If several players are in the same Era, you will see a number for the number of players in this Era, but if only one is in this Era you will see the portrait of the player. Since it is only based on Eras it is not very detailed, but it is information. To access the Civics Tree use the button on the Top Left.

Policy Cards

The new Civics system in Civ 6 gives you a lot more flexibility than the Civics system in Civ 5, and this is accomplished through the system of Policy Cards. As you progress through the Civics tree you will be given slots into which you can insert Policy Cards that affect your Empire in different ways, and some Civics will give you additional Policy Cards. In addition, the slots you have available are subject to your Government choice. There are 5 categories and they are color-coded in the Policy screen. They are

Military – Red color

Economic – Yellow color

Diplomatic – Green color

Wildcard – Purple color

Dark Age – Black color

The flexibility comes from the fact that you can remove and replace cards as your circumstances change. And as you move through the Civics tree you will gain more cards. You should expect that as the game goes on you will have more cards available to you than you can use at any time because of limited slots. Cards have to go in the appropriate slots, so if you have a slot for a Military policy you have to put a Military Policy Card in that slot. The exception is with Wildcard slots. Wildcard Policy Cards have to go into Wildcard slots, but the slots can also accept other cards as well.

When you start the game you will be in the default Government type of Chiefdom, and that will give you one Military slot and one Economic slot. A good example of a Military Policy Card you might to use at this point is Discipline, which gives you +5 combat strength when fighting Barbarians. In the early game you will be fighting a lot of Barbarians so this will come in handy. But as the game goes on and you progress into further Eras you don’t encounter so many Barbarians so you would want to switch this card out for something more useful in your given circumstance. A good Economic card in the early game makes producing Settlers easier. Since producing Settlers and founding cities is something you mostly do in the early game, this is useful. But once you have set the cities down you will need to develop them, and that requires Builder units. So this could be good time to switch out the Settlers card for one that makes it easier to produce Builders. You can make a free swap whenever you research a new Civic, or whenever you change Eras, otherwise you would have to pay for the privilege. So again a healthy Treasury is a big help.

As you progress through the Civics tree you will get access to more Government types, and this also affects the slots you get. Tier 1 governments get 4 slots, tier 2 get 6, tier 3 get 8, and tier 4 get 10. But the kinds of slots can vary when you change governments. As we saw before, Chiefdom has 1 Military and 1 Economic slot. But if you move up to Classical Republic, a tier 1 government, you get 2 Economic slot, 1 Diplomatic, and 1 Wild Card. But you don’t have a Military slot available. So when you change to this government (if you choose to, there are two other tier 1 government types available), whatever Military card you had previously selected goes away until such time as you get another Military slot.

You can also gain slots from certain Wonders. And certain Empires come with an extra slot, so you can pick one of them and get one more slot from the start.

Links

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/trade-routes-guide.25529/

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civic_(Civ6)

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Policy_card_(Civ6)

https://www.palain.com/gaming/civilization-vi/playing-civilization-vi-part-3/

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Part 1: https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr4661/index.html






HP ProBook 4540s:




Specs: https://support.hp.com/au-en/product/product-specs/hp-probook-4540s-notebook-pc/


Tonymacx86 forum post on the 1920x1080 screen upgrade for the
ProBook 4540s: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/4540s-lcd-screen-1080p-replacement.88212/


Panelook.com link to the LG156WF1 screen variants: https://www.panelook.com/modelsearch.php?keyword=LP156WF1&search_id=1839426


HP ProBook 4540s teardown and screen upgrade video by JSnake
Repair: https://youtu.be/3ceZ1m7JFYw?t=1252


wangpeng® New LCD Flex Video Cable for Hp Probook 4540s 4570s
4730s P/n:50.4ry03.001: https://a.co/d/08HvC5wR


BRIGHTFOCAL New Screen Replacement for LP156WF1(TL)(A1) FHD
1920x1080 LCD LED Display Panel: https://a.co/d/03hEU6pG


16 GB upgrade woes:


Workaround for performance degradation with 16 GB RAM: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/Performance-degrades-in-Probook-4540s-after-memory-upgrade/td-p/2268503


Linux workaround: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=412041





























































Evoo EVC141-12BK:




Specs: https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr4031/index.html


RIP







Lenovo ThinkPad T495:




Specs: https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad_T495?tab=spec


My T495:


AMD Ryzen™ 5 PRO 3500U Processor


16 GB DDR4-2666 soldered + 16 GB DDR4 SO-DIMM (pulled from
the dead Evoo)


AMD Vega 8 Graphics


480 GB M.2 2280 SSD with Windows 11 Pro


This was replaced with the SSD from the dead Evoo that
has OpenBSD.








Future Project:


M.2 2242 SSD on the WWAN port, or an adapter for the 480 GB
SSD with Windows.

























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--------------------







01 Introduction



This is the seventh episode in an 8 part series.







02



In the previous episode we took a brief look at PLC networking, together with a detailed look at one network protocol, Modbus.







03



In this episode we will look at where personal computers fit into the factory floor.



This includes



* Personal computers in industry, including specialized hardware,



* SCADA systems,



* HMI systems,



* Test and measurement systems,







--------------------







04 Personal Computers in Industry







In a previous episode we how the first microprocessor based computer sold on the commercial market was the MICRAL from France, based on the Intel 8008.



It was sold as a cost effective replacement for minicomputers used in industry.



It preceded what are generally considered to be the first Personal Computers.



So you can see that industry was not slow in adopting general purpose computers in roles for which they were suitable.







05



However, personal computers suffered from a number of problems which made their use on the factory floor difficult.



They did not withstand heat, vibration, dirt, or oil very well.



Power supplies, hard drives, keyboards, and monitors were particularly problematic points of failure



If enclosed in a sealed cabinet, they put out a lot of heat of their own which must somehow be gotten rid of and the cabinet itself was difficult to fit into the available manufacturing floor space.







06



None the less they offered certain advantages over PLCs in a few very specific applications.



Their hard drives could save data recorded from production.



Their monitors allowed the creation of large, complex user interfaces.



The previous two advantages combined with their powerful CPUs, large memory, and highly flexible programming allowed the creation of highly specialized production test systems.











07 VME and STD Bus



There were however several multi vendor standard computer designs intended for embedded applications.



A well known one is VME Bus.



This uses cards which plug into a backplane in a rack.



The backplane was not part of a "motherboard".



Rather, the CPU was just another board that plugged into the backplane.



If you are familiar with S-100 bus systems, the concept was similar, but designed to be more rugged.



However, these were very expensive and so saw little use in industrial applications.







08



More common was STD Bus.



Again, these were boards which plugged into a common backplane bus in an open rack.



The individual boards were much smaller than S100 or VME boards.



The system was designed for lower cost and more compact installation than VME bus.







09



While VME and STD Bus systems offered standard hardware, they came without the user friendly software that defined a PLC.



The user would write software that either ran without any supporting operating system at all, or at most a very limited operating system that would allow the program to be loaded and run.







10



They were intended for manufacturers who were producing many units of manufacturing equipment that they would offer to customers as complete turn key off the shelf products.



They were not of much use to machine builders who were building one off entirely bespoke machines that would be supported by the customer's own maintenance personnel after delivery.







--------------------







11 Passive Backplane PCs and "Industrialized" PCs



In an attempt to provide a sort of compromise between commodity desktop PCs and things like VME or STD Bus systems, some manufacturers came out with "industrialized" PCs that provided computers that were more suited to the factory environment while still being compatible with PC operating systems and software.







12



These took two forms. One was to simply put a standard desktop PC motherboard into a more solid case with better cooling.



These cases often had shock mounting for the hard drives, positive pressure air cooling with changeable filters on the inlets, and even redundant power supplies in some instances.







13



The cases were built to match rack mount server dimensions, and typically rack mounting hardware kits were available for them as well if you didn't intend to put them on a shelf.



Keyboard and mouse connections were often at the front, although that became less relevant when USB replaced dedicated mouse and keyboard connectors.







14



The other form is what are termed "passive backplane" systems.



Instead of a conventional PC motherboard, there is a board which contains a number of slots conforming to standard PC expansion bus standards, such as ISA, PCI, and PCIe.



These could have anywhere from 6 to as many as 20 slots.







15



The functionality of a full motherboard was integrated into a board which plugged into the backplane.



This held the CPU, RAM, disk interfaces, networking, and other chips required to provide the equivalent to a standard PC motherboard.



Some boards had both PCI and ISA connections, allowing the use of both types of bus, provided the passive backplane supported this.







16



Putting what amounted to the motherboard on a plug in board allowed for the equivalent of a motherboard change by simply opening the top of the case, uplugging the old CPU board, and plugging in a new one.







17



The main advantage that passive backplane systems provided however was that they allowed for a large number of slots to accomodate special boards for measurement and control of test or other equipment.



These specialized boards were often the real heart of the system and the PC is there to support them.







18



The main advantage of industrialized PCs in general were



their large, roomy cases making them easy to work in and replace components such as power supplies,



the good filtering systems,



the shock mounting for hard drives,



and the hard drives often being mounted in removable carriers that allowed them to be simply pulled out and replaced through the front of the case.







19



With these systems often being used for things like production test systems where a production line could be down if the computer is not working, high reliability and speed of repair is very important.







20



There are a number of vendors of these systems, with Advantech being one of the best known.











21 Other Standards



There are a variety of other designs for adapting PC hardware standards to the industrial environment, but I won't go into them here as that would be outside the focus of this series.







--------------------











22 Single Board Computers



There were also numerous small vendors selling what were called Single Board Computers, or SBC for short.



These were small programmable boards, often using a Z80 or 8032 series CPU.



Many of them came with a Basic interpreter built into the ROM.



Again, these were mainly used by specialist vendors who needed some sort of very limited hardware to do one specific task in a standard turnkey product.



The Raspberry Pi seems to have taken over much of that market these days.



Without the software that defines a PLC however, they occupied a different niche in the automation market and were not a real competitor to PLCs.











--------------------







23 Software Systems and Applications







Having outlined the hardware environment, I will now turn to what sort of software was used on these computers.











24 Spreadsheet Horrors



First I will start with tales of software that will chill your bones.



One particularly horrifying use of PCs in connection with PLCs was to use spreadsheets as a database or user interface.



In the early days this was done with Lotus 123 and later on Microsoft Excel.



With the right communications boards, drivers, and other components, you could link cells in a spreadsheet to the PLC data table.



People used, and still use, spreadsheets as a development environment and database to create PC software.







25



Knowing how to program a PLC did not necessarily equip you to write a complete stand alone program in languages such as C, Basic, or other common PC programming languages.



For these people, being able to create applications with spreadsheet macros or VBA was much simpler.







One of the major problems with these monstrosities is that later on, nobody, often not even the author, could figure out how they worked or what they did or what to do when they stopped working.







I will leave off on this topic before I give anyone nightmares.







--------------------







26 SCADA



You may have heard of this term before.



It stands for "System Control And Data Acquisition".



A SCADA system is a customized program that runs on a PC that has a complex GUI, some sort of database, and some sort of scripting or other configuration to make it do what is wanted in that application.







27



These are most commonly found in process industries such as chemicals, food processing, water utilities, and other places like that.



They are much less commonly found in assembly manufacturing.







28



A SCADA system is generally built using a special IDE that has a drag and drop GUI builder, database, and various other related things.



The IDE is very closely tailored to developing SCADA applications.







29



Communications with the PLC is generally done via drivers following a standard known as "OPC".



OPC originally stood for "OLE for Process Control".



"OLE" stands for "Object Linking and Embedding", and was a Microsoft inter-process communications method.



OPC was later re-branded to "Open Platform Communications".







30



What OPC does is allow PLC vendors with proprietary communications protocols write Windows communications drivers which allow other vendors with proprietary SCADA development systems to use them.







31



I won't go into any more detail on this, but historically, it was usual for the only way for a third party to write software that could talk to most PLCs was through an OPC server.



Open protocols such as Modbus TCP were in fact very rare.



This in turn explains to a large degree the very strong position of Microsoft Windows in manufacturing.







32 SCADA Security



If you have read articles on security problems in industrial control systems, these are almost invariably problems with SCADA systems.



As these are normally just Windows applications running on a Windows operating system and typically using a Microsoft SQL Server database, SCADA systems are open to all the usual Windows security problems.







33



There is really nothing special about this, except that for most companies that have such a system, it is often critically important to their business.



On the other hand, as a factory floor system maintenance of it is subject to all the usual penny pinching and postponement of upgrade or replacement until a crisis occurs that characterizes most other factory floor operations.







To put it simply, SCADA security is just normal IT security and is best understood in that context.







--------------------







34 HMI Systems







HMI stands for "Human Machine Interface".



In the context of PLCs, it basically refers to a way to give a display, and either a keyboard or touchscreen to a PLC so that an operator can interact with it.







35



These can be anything from a small LCD screen and keyboard to a large PC based system running a custom GUI program.



These differ from SCADA systems in that they focus on display and entering of data and generally lack control or data logging functions.







36



The HMI will display the status of the machine, display fault and diagnostic messages, show QC related information, and various other related things.



The operator can also use it to change modes, control the machine manually, enter set points and recipes, etc.







37



Typically special HMI GUI builder software is used to create these programs, which may be traditional GUIs or be web based.



At one time ActiveX was very widely used for this until browser support for it was killed off.







At the back end of the HMI will be a communications driver to connect to the PLC where a block of PLC memory will be used to hold numeric data which is read from or written to the PLC by the HMI.







38



Smaller HMIs were run on custom designed hardware, but PCs were used for larger ones.



These PCs however would often be built into the back of the display to give a compact and easy to mount system.







--------------------







39 Test and Measurement Systems







Many manufacturing processes require some sort of quality assurance or other tests to be integrated into the production system.



Very simple tests can be conducted by a PLC and the parts accepted or rejected based on measurements or other checks.







40



However, some tests require sophisticated algorithms to be applied, or require large samples of data, or otherwise are not suitable for being done by PLCs.



A further consideration may be the necessity to record the data permanently for future reference, such as making decisions on product recalls.







41



Test and measurement systems often include computers, either to conduct the actual test, or to just record the readings.







42



Readings on sophisticated tests may require thousands of samples to be taken at high speed at precise intervals and then have advanced algorithms applied to them.



Data acquisition hardware may involve boards that plug into a PC's bus inside the case, or it may be housed in an external rack and the data transferred to the PC by USB, Ethernet, or other communications link.







43



I won't go into any real detail here except to mention a few important product names that you may hear in this field.



One of the biggest companies in this field is National Instruments, who make both hardware and software.







44



They have two software products that are very well known in this field.



These are LabView and LabWindows.







45



LabView came out in 1986, roughly 40 years ago.



It provided a GUI based graphical development system which allows connections of "virtual instruments" in a drag and drop manner.



It first came out on the Macintosh, later being ported to Windows and Linux.







46



In 1987, National Instruments came out with LabWindows, which provided a GUI builder, analysis libraries, and interface libraries to connect to their data acquisition instrumentation hardware.



Despite the name, LabWindows ran on MSDOS, not Microsoft Windows.



Applications were written in C or Basic.



Several years later, in what amounted to a major re-write, LabWindows was ported to Microsoft Windows, where it was renamed LabWindows/CVI.







47



LabView was better suited to hacking a lab test system together quickly, particularly for people who may not be familiar with programming in a conventional programming language.







48



LabWindows on the other hand was better suited to production test systems where it was important to be able to tailor the behaviour of the program more precisely in order to optimize test and production rates.







49



In the present day, Python is very well suited to writing production test software and should probably be the first item on any list for evaluation for such a project.







--------------------







50 Episode Conclusions







In this episode we looked at the following.



* Personal computers in industry,



* SCADA systems,



* HMI systems,



* Test and measurement systems







51



In the next episode we will look at the following.







* Soft logic systems,



* The IEC-61131 standard,



* A free and open source PLC



* What a hypothetical free and open source soft logic system suited to industrial use may look like.







52



This has been the seventh episode in an 8 part series.







--------------------





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file extensions sometimes are other files with a different name, lets talk about them!







recorded with tenacity 1.3.5

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This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host.

I have been using Audacity for long, as I'm an audiolover for a long too. When Audacity 3.x popped up saying
Audacity 4 is here
, I went for it. To get decepted.







It is beautiful, really something you can call a NEW version, but it's incomplete. The old, loved and necessary features are not all ported to the new interface, and shortcuts are a mess to (not) work. Not a big thing, if they simply said so in
their website
, or named it beta, or release candidate, for a few more months, until the implementation of 1 or 2 bug fixes and 2 or 3 features of old being still present.







Don't buy my opinion for it, or
opinions
on the Audacity
forum
; try yourself if you're an Audacity user! (Are you already using the new one?)







Hope you get a good show.















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Short music clip used, free license: Jazzy Abstract Beat_Chops, by Coma-Media, on
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