Obsolete

    Although I'm complaining about Civilization IV again, this is mostly a writing exercise. Describing a question of word usage turns out to be trickier than I would have thought, or at least it is inside my head.
    In Civilization IV, certain technological advances make some buildings, resources and wonders of the world "obsolete." I've been playing various versions of Civilization since the beginning. I'm pretty sure that in the past, obsolete meant obsolete: that these things were absolutely useless. What obsolete means this time, though, is that you can no longer build them or get access to them. So if you're building an obelisk, say, and you attain the technology that makes it obsolete, you get a message that you can no longer build the obelisk. If you have one already, though, it continues working fine.
    Again, I grasp that nobody likely to read this is likely to play the game, and vice versa. But it's a fairly major thing. The word "obsolete" just doesn't mean what they're using it to mean, and it makes a huge difference how you play the game when you find out what they do in fact mean. You have to build all that stuff before you can no longer do so. Before, I wasn't bothering to build a lot of really excellent stuff because it would just be obsolete soon. So I really, really wish they would have just said "can no longer be built" after some given technological advance. English is important.