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Tim Cain is back at Obsidian!

The only issue I've ever run into with LTSC was with the old versions e.g. LTSC 2019 being feature-outdated for a couple of newer games, which is what necessitated me upgrading to LTSC 2021. But they would just straight up not run - otherwise, no problems I can think of, it's pretty much just Windows 10 but a little lighter and a little less annoying. However, I have not ever used Edge and I have not played Anno 117, so I cannot comment on those. You could try temporarily disabling UAC entirely (i.e. everything is run as admin all the time always) to see if it resolves the Anno 117 saving issue. Admin permissions can be a little flaky with Windows: in theory, an application you start as admin should also open other stuff as admin (e.g. in the event of running secondary executables), but somehow it doesn't always necessarily work out that way. Someone also posted having a similar issue with the game, and it actually ended up being the fault of Windows Defender:

it's legal(ish) and has been sop for years. is US fed law as well as UNCLOS and specific international agreements which give (enough) legal justification for drug inspections o' vessels on the high seas such that complaints o' lack o' jurisdiction has failed as a defense o' drug traffickers in both US and international courts time and again. also, ... The administration's lethal approach marks a huge shift from the traditional maritime interdictions the U.S. has long done. Those operations involve the U.S. Coast Guard intercepting a drug boat at sea, boarding the vessel, seizing the narcotics, arresting the crew and bringing them back to the U.S. to face prosecution. The U.S. Coast Guard works off information gathered from U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community sources. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has a hand in detection, monitoring and coordination. "We used to call it a self-licking ice cream cone," said one former FBI official who worked transnational crime and maritime interdictions. "You stop a boat, you get the bad guys, you use the leverage of prosecuting them to turn them into cooperators." Investigators would use those cooperators to intercept more drug boats, arrest more low-level traffickers, leverage some of them into cooperators to get more intelligence. This way, over time, the former FBI official said, investigators have been able to work their way up to cartel leadership. Even when the people detained on a boat didn't have information that helped in a prosecution, they often had tidbits that helped illuminate the cartel network, which American officials then use for intelligence purposes. "Forgetting the philosophy of whether killing people is right or wrong, when you kill them you can't talk to them. When you grab them, you can," one former senior DOJ official said. The information that leads to an interdiction comes from human sources as well as what's known as signals intelligence, or electronic surveillance. Current and former officials said in interviews that that information is generally accurate and reliable. It allows the Coast Guard, for example, to put a cutter at a precise location of a drug boat in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, which is roughly the size of the continental United States. The current and former officials said the intelligence isn't always 100% accurate. Sometimes the vessel the Coast Guard intercepts is a resupply boat carrying food and fuel for the traffickers, not the actual drugs. Still, the intelligence that allows the Coast Guard to be in the right place is often built upon a piece of information provided by a human source, which then allows the U.S. government to put its vast electronic spying powers to good use. These officials said blowing up boats instead of interdicting them will have a compound effect over time on the quality of intelligence. With the lethal strikes, the U.S. is no longer gathering phones and other electronics off of crew arrested on the high seas, nor is the U.S. questioning the low-level drug runners about who and what they know about the broader trafficking network. "You need something to tell you where to look," the former DOJ official said. "If you're killing all these people, you just dried up the human intelligence." ... again, the coast guard has been stopping, searching and questioning those on the suspected drug boats for many years, typical with the cooperation o' south american, caribbean and european nations, 'cause particular in the case o' venezuelan drugs (cocaine) the drugs is more likely bound to end up in caribbean and euro nations than the US. often the drug boats is destroyed by the coast guard, but only after the people and drugs is removed from the vessels. in spite o' the fact the boats is being stopped often many thousands o' miles remote from the US, the drug interdictions has ordinary been the task o' the coast guard, although the overall efficacy o' the operations has been... suspect. ... As the intelligence dwindles, the U.S. government's understanding of the cartels, their money laundering networks, supply chains and business strategies will start to go dark. In the past, the OCDETF-led interdiction model intercepted around 4% to 6% of known maritime cocaine shipments annually on non-commercial vessels. In fiscal year 2023, for example, the rate was 3.71%, according to a Department of Homeland Security watchdog report from February. This fall, the Trump administration shuttered OCDETF, and transferred its cases to new Homeland Security Task Forces jointly run by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations. For those who spent years working on combating drug cartels, there's deep skepticism that the Trump administration's new policy of military strikes will be prevent more drugs from reaching America. "All this strategy is doing is killing people and the same amount of drugs is getting into the U.S.," the former senior DOJ official said. "You didn't save anybody or increase the number of people you're saving in the U.S. It's extraordinarily shortsighted and I don't think it gets you the goal you want." ... the recent shift in policy and practice appears on its face to be performative. at least if there were some kinda compelling argument or evidence that blowing up drug boats headed for trinidad and tobago is saving american lives, you could see a rationale for engaging in lethal interdictions, but that ain't the case. recall, the US sent people to cecot w/o due process. explanation for cecot efforts were that tren de aragua is not just a terrorist organization, but is an active para-military group active involved in the downfall o' the US. if trump had been successful, he coulda' sent anybody he disliked to cecot or someplace similar, 'cause sans due process, explanations and justifications is replaced with faith in the administration. the boat strikes is an effort to do something similar to cecot and is arguable worse 'cause as bad as cecot is, summary executions means there is no way to correct mistakes. trump doesn't provide proof before the maritime murders take place and the justification for the killings is that narco terrorists is involved in what amounts to military actions directed at the US. the double-tap clap trap is a kinda red herring 'cause it ignores the complete lack o' legitimacy o' the boat strikes. am bothered by the focus on the double-tap accusations because doing so means you are already pretending as if the people being murdered on suspected drug boats is analogous to enemy sailors who is fighting a war with the US, a claim which is transparent false and... stoopid. if rando fisherman working for drug cartels in venezuela may be subject to summary executions 'cause drugs are bad and americans die because of drugs, then try and imagine who else and where else trump could do murder w/o needing proof o' any kinda crime. the only thing slowing down the administration's authoritarian efforts is their utter incompetence... a fact which is not near as reassuring as we would hope. HA! Good Fun!

Im on PC, XBOX Ultimate. My Game Also is crashing within a couple minutes of the start and is unplayable. I have not left the base area to see if that works. Game ran fine before update. I can play using Cloud Play, I completely reinstalled game, same result. I am using nVidia RTX 3070 Laptop GPU. Is there a way to revert the update so its playable until fix?

Most annoying thing with Nalpazca is arcane dampener... You get lose all your buffs AND get drug crush. Imo its not worth it. If you have good healing support in party go with Helwalker.

Horses in particular took 3 hours. Otherwise, I was on AL last week (still have a few days to spend until 2026) and Black Geyser was of reasonable length (~35h for the first playthrough, 8h? for the second) to play. I also WFH 3 days per week and it is glorious as it cuts down ~130 minutes of commute per day. I would not try to play anything Ubisoft-like and currently just listening to the other gamer in the household playing Rogue Trader. I like Owlcat, but the turn-based combat and their density of encounters fill me with dread. So, might try in a year.

Nvidia dropped driver support for the 9xx and 10xx series with the latest branch of drivers.

How in hell do you guys finish playing games so quickly?! Do you just not go to work, don't eat, don't sleep, just play, play ,play?! It takes me many months to get through modest sized game.

The less militant alternative to these types of ship attacks would be to force the ship to halt, then board, search for drugs, and question the crew for more information. That way there's at least physical evidence, although it's unclear whether that action is legal either. But at least it isn't murderous. Imagine the uproar if North Korea was engaged on these types of ship attacks on the open ocean. What would happen if every country with a navy started following the Trump doctrine? This has to stop.

"New weapon type" Any chance for Blunderbuss? Other question. Any DLC planned? I would pay AAA retail price for a Cipher DLC.

I have finished Horses. The only reason for the Steam ban I could see is that Valve really dislikes non-gratifying sexual violence (1 scene). Otherwise, it is a short walking simulator. The controls are unrebindable, the game saves every ~5 minutes, the scenes can be replayed after completing the game. It does not say anything new nor is particularly enjoyable to play (seems to be linear), so, unless one wants to support the developers, it is safe to skip. I have also played Atlas Fallen and so far it feels good. It also does not use UE5 (may it be sunsetted soon), so the performance is stable. The most memorable moment so far is the battle against a mini-boss and most of it I was able to spend mid-air ascending higher and higher along with the boss and it was not a scripted scene. In terms of story, it articulates more persuasively "theocracies and authoritarianism are bad" than Horses. A slightly longer review for Horses:

At this point I'm pretty sure this version of windows has some additional security I can't figure out that is blocking apps from changing files. Running the app as an admin resolves it for most, but for an example edge and Anno 117 don't work (can't update edge, can't save games for Anno) even when I run them as admin. The strange thing here is that I'm pretty sure this started happening recently and was not the case when I initially installed this version of windows (Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC). @Bartimaeus did you run in to this by any chance?

I was expecting a lot more LOL corny sounds. There is a bit of that (mostly the dialogue bits) but the sound effects are pretty fun and nifty. Every time the engine duh-duh-doo-doo-doodoooo-wherrrr types went off I both laughed and admired. They broke it up into four short parts, this is the first one.

Just a bit more info. Firstly I've tried most of the easy fixes, restarting the game, verifying the game files, reloading both manual and auto saves from throughout my current play through ect. Second is that this issue only emerged after level 4, before level 4 I was able to put all of my skill points into guns.

I have had a pretty odd issue with spending my skill points. This is my second play-through and I am unable to spend both of my skills points on a single skill. I do not have any traits or flaws that effect where I can spend skill points except for dumb, but the skills I can't put points into aren't the ones I've locked. Every time I put 1 skill point into my guns skill which is my highest, the game acts like I just maxxed out my guns skills, with the stripped red background and all that. Has anyone else experienced anything similar? I wasn't able to find any preexisting forum posts or reddit posts complaining about this issue. For a bit more information my guns skill is specialized, but observation is also specialized and I can put both of my points into observation no problem.

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

Xbox series X Grounded2 crashes every time I go to my base. I can play anywhere on the map but anytime I return to my base area, the game will crash and go back to the start screen. Any help would be great.

Hello, I am very conflicted on weather to go base monk or nelpazca monk because of not being able to respec subclass and am worried about being annoyed mid to late game by constant drug needing. How intrusive is it and is the subclass worth it? I am playing on potd/veteran depending on if I want to lower it.

Good lord vertical ziplines is such a good idea for this game.

Overall this game feels way clunkier and less intuitive to play that the original grounded. I think the biggest thing is not auto resuming sprint after stopping or melee. The sprint mechanics of Grounded 1 were some of the best mechanics in any game ever, please go back to that. Also, the omni tool should be an actual tool that can be equipped. When trying to chop down grass, weeds, or bust rocks, any bit of inaccuracy throws it off. Hitting things in grounded 1 with the appropriate tool was much smoother than this new system. An equippable omni-tool would solve this perfectly.

Same problem here. Very frustrating. Happened last night and wasn't able to save any progress since I have autosave off and then pressed Y XD

Finally a sequel to the best Total War game: I try to not get too excited. To be frank, most of the time I spent in Medieval II was with mods (mostly Stainless Steel), and no other Total War experience managed to scratch an itch that heavily modded Rome and Medieval II could. I was hyped for Shogun2, but never managed to get into it, and none of later TW caught my attention - I tried Warhammer for a bit, but felt rather simplistic (I mean to give it another go now when I have a PC that could enjoy the looks better). Anyway, classic Total Wars got GOG release. Picked up Medieval2 and might give it another go at some point. We will see if nostalgia googles hold up. edit. Oh, and Empire. I have a weak spot for it. Such a messy game, but also somewhat inspiring. I loved the setting, and innovation and I just wish it would be a more polished release.

Feels great in these Gothic-likes to finally become powerful and then revisit places on the map to clean house. But the most enjoyable is really to be able to pick up whatever you want without having to worry about getting encumbered.

Had to be careful to avoid spoilers, had some really nice screenshots from cutscenes, but alas, major spoilers in them. Starting the game off slowly... The environments are gorgeous Still does not do the location justice GOTY Cats, cats everywhere! The game sure has got the vibe down I'm sure she's angry for a reason Think I wandered into a Tomb Raider game Eeeeep Yeah...so I do happen to be colourblind Looks like I'm slightly more powerful than a single goose, go me!

Trump’s attack on DEI may hurt college men, particularly White men Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data shows. Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal antidiscrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses. But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. HA! Good Fun!