The Shrine

The video claims the guy went to the Internet and looked up how to pick locks and learned how to do it in like 5 minutes blindfolded on every lock with video to prove it. I mean, I'm sure the techniques are correct, but if the guy is this awesome he's obviously in the wrong profession. This seems to be basically equivalent of a TAS video and not label it as TAS. Either the guy spent hours trying to pick a lock and just show you the finishing part, or that he already knows how to pick locks and lied about being an amateur.

Then again, I remember a long time ago there was a guy doing Civ 5 video where he miraculously started with an Iron 6 deposit in his home city and only a very handful of viewers are keen enough on game mechanics to call out how improbable it is (large iron deposits are almost never in your home city by design to force you to expand). I've played a lot of Civ 5 games and I'm not even sure if I've ever seen such a start, and I suspect you have to change the map setting in some way since the standard resource template isn't enough, and not even sure if abundant is enough as I think only Legendary Start would do it (that's one where you'd never have to look for resources, I think).

Is the guy benefitting from showing off this trick? If so, I'd say he's probably a performance artist or a grifter.

And yeah, sounds like he modded his game somehow. Some people like playing a hard difficulty level, but then set it up so they have a stronger than usual start. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, unless it's for some bragging rights let's play video. I usually prefer playing Civ games on the highest or second highest difficulty, but it's not because I like to see if I can overcome the challenge, it's more to do with liking how the AI behaves.

In Civ, playing on anything less than King or Emperor (depending on the game), I find the AI falls behind enough in tech and such that there's usually only 1 or 2 opponents that are remotely threatening to the existence of your civilization, and everyone else at most might damage the production on one of your outer cities. But when playing on the higher difficulties, usually most of the civilizations do a lot better, and as a player - I feel forced into working with others and maintaining shakey diplomacy that feels like a cost to me, in order to maintain the balance of power. Its a more fun game for me.

I usually don't mod, but I have modded before for the good start, or at least started like 18-20 times to get an ideal start. What's not fun to me is starting a game, struggling for 2-3 hours, then getting slaughtered because I didn't have the right resources.

But while on the topic of strategy games (sorry to veer off topic):

But honestly, it's been a while since I've played Civ. I've fell more into the Grand Strategy genre fandom - originally I was a big fan of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. KOEI seemed to go more into actiony type games, more so than even Creative Assembly, and so Paradox Interactive has become my favourite Grand Strategy Dev, and IMO they've taken the genre to a whole new level - I wish Creative Assembly and KOEI would take note.

The video looks like it's just fishing for views for advertising. He's not trying to sell you lock picking strategies for sure. The stuff he goes over is pretty simple, like you or I can pretend we're an expert on the same thing from watching spy movies. E.g. take a metal wire to open the traditional lock, listen for the clicks on a combination lock or subtle changes in pressure since the correct number will end up moving a gear or something. The video had like a million views and it looks like this guy has plenty of videos with high views. It even had a clickbait title something like 'all locks are useless! Watch me pick them blindfolded!' or something along these lines. I mean one of the part he shows himself blindfolded setting a random number on a lock, and then picked it like 5 minutes later. He can literally just view his own video to see what he set the combination to pick the same lock since he recorded the whole process. I assume since he was doing it blindfolded it's not the case that these feats are outright fake but clearly if you can pick a lock blindfolded that isn't something you learn from just reading about it on the Internet unless you're like a professional sports equivalent in terms of talent at lockpicking. He's either already skilled in lockpicking or he simply never bothered to show you the hours he wasted before he figured out how to pick the said lock. I mean if we record ourselves for 100 hours trying to pick a combination lock, it's got to succeed eventually by just exhausting all the possibilities and if we keep only the clip where we're successful, we can obviously look like a lock picking guru too follow by some bogus reasoning of why we figured this out.

The Civ 5 video was on Deity and the guy was playing as the Romans and he never expanded and just teched his way up to Legions/Ballistae and since there happens to be an iron 6 in his starting city of course he can built them right away instead of being stuck and probably left for dead. I know that guy must have memorized the exact build order to beat stuff on Deity since there's a very specific way you have to play to overcome the AI's immense starting advantage and you can eventually beat them via combat since once your promotions rack up you can pretty much kill an arbitrarily large number of AI units as long as they're not like more than 2 tech eras ahead of you, but he still needed the improbably lucky outcome of having an iron 6 in your starting city for this strategy to work. Obviously he's either spent 1000 hours recording a video hoping one of the time he has an iron 6 or more likely the map was modded in some way so that he can get an iron 6 in his starting city, since it's too risky to expand on AI on Deity as you don't really have much time between you can see iron to research iron working to build up a meaningful city defense to acquire that iron in the first place. I'm pretty sure these guy does these allegedly random real videos of Deity where he plays weak races with a bad strategy and wins an overwhelmingly large number of them. Even factoring having build order memorized I find that to be highly improbable. Deity isn't that hard, but it's not something you can possibly beat just messing around trying cute stuff. Watching someone beat Deity would make a very boring video, which is definitely not the case of this guy's videos.

For some reason I could never get into the Paradox line of strategy games. They feel more like RPGish games with a strategy overtone, which is perfectly fine but not my cup of tea.