Leaderboard

@Darkpriest Looks like everyone here missed one of the most interesting news in last few days. Looks like another Russian neighbour had enough of Putin's threats, and the verbal sparring in St. Peterburgh's economic forum has an interesting follow up. Kazakhstan president has approached EU with an offer to solve the current energy crisis. https://caspiannews.com/news-detail/kazakhstan-voices-readiness-to-help-ease-global-energy-crisis-2022-7-5-14/

Ono

Well I guess, if you squint real hard, Turkey is compromising the future security of the EU by blocking new members. Ah who am I kidding, after viewing the Russian performance of their personnel and equipment they are clearly a 2nd-3rd tier military and the EU would smack them up good. Theyre lucky they have nukes. China is the only legitimate threat to the US and Im not 100% convinced they arent a paper tiger too.

Rude. Kazakhstan is a pretty nice looking place. And they don't just live in mud huts either.

Was is it not Staling who was ally to Hitler? Didn't Russia attacked Poland first? I might have missed something in school...

New Victorian Era Robot Waifu trailer:

No not at all, we cant even rocket anymore: Reentry Vehicle Test For America's New ICBM Failed Just After Launch (thedrive.com) I have interest in all countries advanced weapons systems but shooting at air is easy and Id just like to see unvarnished performance tests between these systems and targets that have the capabilities to defend themselves.

It will be interesting if they manage to incorporate the satirical nature of the original Robocop. At first it looked like a pretty bland shoot 'em up, but the CEO stuff was spot on. Considering Spec Ops: The Line is the only shooter I've bothered with in the last couple decades, I'm slightly intrigued if they can make it more than a murder simulator. Cheesy satire at its finest.

Turkey's Newfound Cache of Rare Earths Could Supply the World's EVs and More (thedrive.com) Looks like somebody needs an invading. Rare Earths are the new black oil.

Well, I would say, that the statement of the Russian economy doing good is a little bit more than overstatement. I have found a twitter account from some guy from German Institute for International and Security Affairs, who has some words on the situation. You remember the doom and gloom how the high cost of oil would destroy the west? Here is the prediction from Citigroup. (we are almost at the level of pre-war prices and it is going just downward.) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-05/citi-warns-oil-may-collapse-to-65-by-the-year-end-on-recession-l57ro9of The funny thing is, that Russia is already selling their Ural oil for these prices, and is trending downwards further... And guess what happens to the country who is completely dependant on their fossil fuel exports? Well, just look at Venezuela, and you can see, where the Russian economy is slowly heading... It is little bit different with Gas export, but you can clearly see, how much they are losing in every other industry and export. So if the west hold tight and does everything to solve their Gas issue, Putin's Russia will be in pretty deep troubles... IMHO even such big tariffs can not substitute the losses in everything else in the longterm. And here is the effect of the invasion on Russia's heavy industry... And here is his analysis on the Russian economy as a whole published on June 30. If you decide to read it, just do not stop reading after the first paragraph, the most interesting stuff follows .

I am a gamer that loves to create and build. Grounded has a great building system but it could be even more awesome with some new building pieces I wish we had. -We have horizontal half walls, what about vertical half walls? For any wall type and even for the current horizontal half walls, making them quarter walls. Sometimes I don't want to entirely close off a space but still have some sort of devider. -And sometimes I feel a bit limited with the stairs, or don't feel like having greens stairs in my builds that don't use any grass. Stem stairs and half stairs would be pretty neat to have too. -Let's talk about the stem half wall and let's be honest, it's a great railing but as a wall.. it doesn't blend into the full stem walls for let's say, when you make a tower of specific height. -How cool would it be if we could provide more detail and structure to our bases with horizontal beams, this is mostly an aesthetic request. -Next up, roofs. My castle outpost towers of 1 square look a bit silly with the dome pieces, but other than the flat roof piece, nothing really works for it. So I'd love to see the dome piece but squared. Also the peaked pieces, there's no triangle wall pieces that fill in the gaps that that roof piece has, just a little finishing touch. And my last purely aesthetic request: being able to paint structures like the working bench and the production buildings To whoever reads this, feel free to drop your idea's on this post!

Yes, but what I think was meant to address it was..

This looks kinda awful. At the rate they're making these Middle Earth games I can't wait to play as Tom Bombadilo in a harem visual novel in 2030. "I remember the first acorn," is probably his go-to pickup line.

Well, okay, perhaps Venezuela has other factors at play, but then we can also point to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Nigeria, etc. as examples of petrostates that are decidedly *not* paradices.

Sanctions are the 'go-to' option for Western liberal democracies who's leaders want to be able to tell their voters they're "doing something" in the face of some despot's nasty actions even while not having to choose the option of war/military action to counter said despot. There are warehouses full of data showing that sanctions rarely ever have the desired effect (apartheid South Africa being the one notable exception). But they are loved by democratic leaders as an ideal "middle option" between war and doing nothing. At some point very soon both Western political elites as well as Western publics are going to learn that they cannot continue to have their cake (comfortable, worry-free, problems-free indolent lives in an advanced society) and eat it (standing for their cherished liberal principles and values) too. At some point very soon there is going to be a very hard reckoning that sometimes you have to be ready and willing to fight a war and suffer its sacrifices.

Surprise – Again! NASA Spacecraft Reveals Asteroid Bennu Is Not What It Seemed

Excellent point. If oil and gas sales were all it took to have a great economy, Venezuela would be a paradise.

you'd think after Napoleon and Hitler the west would finally learn to leave Russia alone

EDIT: Ninja'd! @Sarex In my experience, most Japanese are strongly pacifist. And the assassin had to use a home made double barrel zip gun!

Wild that happened in Japan.

Kazakhstan? What.....I thought that was a made up country for the movie Borat ? It looks like its real ? Mamie is this a real link

you men the vids, where they are hitting some random trees?

there is a curious alchemy necessary to pull off such lies so routine. first you need create an us v. them culture, which is easier to achieve when people is suffering or afraid, but you would think it would be more difficult to create such divisions during peacetime and w/o major economic/social upheaval. additional and almost paradoxically you need convince people that everything they hear from previous trusted media sources is suspect, while at the same time you need foster an almost slavish devotion to a few select media outlets and voices which will deliver your alternative facts messaging. boris needed more polarization and he didn't have the necessary propaganda apparatus to reinvent his falsehoods as misunderstood integrity. "it's not lying if you don't admit that you lied!" with an us v. them electorate plus fox news and radio voices such as rush limbaugh and steve bannon telling the faithful (us) that the real liars is the libs and their media lackeys, never admitting you lied is a viable tactic and a powerful one. almost any lie will be embraced just so long as is contextualized as us v. them. that said, am admitted petty enough to admit a kinda schadenfreude for brit political woes. sure, US politics o' the last few years has been the equivalent o' the hell toilet from trainspotting, but brexit and boris proves there ain't anything unique stoopid or improbable 'bout our current troubles. HA! Good Fun!

But it's not lying if you don't admit that you lied!

Is that because their economy was already crap before? Can't really ruin what's already ruined.

Did final interview, if this place extends me an offer they are devoid of ambition

Yeah, I'm slowly getting through it in co-op, indeed very slowly because one or two sessions a week of 2-3 hours each doesn't get you far. But the design of the campaign feels very perfunctory, I daresay similar to how NWN1's was. And I can't help but feel it's getting worse as the game goes on, my last main story quest feeling like I'm just being guided from room to room and being told to fight whoever is in it. Even any notion of setup has been discarded, the last two questlines I remember simply teleported the party into a small room, the inevitable fight against the villain of the week plus a few random mooks starts after a couple throwaway lines of dialogue, quest ends, onto the next quest. In that context even the dungeon crawling part no longer holds, it's feeling closer to a few amateurishly cobbled together set pieces now. All sense of place has been lost. This may be because I'm fairly close to the end, probably. I think we've got maybe 5 of the 7 gems?

We know exactly what you mean, the corruption and influence from SJW and wokeness is irrefutable

What better way to celebrate America's independence than by drinking Mexican cerveza out of a German stein?

I concur with the people that said deadfire didn't really sell to the degree Obsidian expected because many people who bought pillars of eternity 1 didn't really like or even play pillars of eternity 1. its really that simple. The original pillars came out around the time of a nostalgia wave from people like me who were 90s teens who played too much Baldur's Gate and wanted a grand adventure real time with pause game like those, however when pillars actually came out they found they didn't like this gameplay conceit so much anymore. it was clunky, immersion ruining, awkward, a relic, and so on. turn based is just clearly superior, they said. A shift in taste that is kind of amazing if you gamed at all in the late 90s while diablo and RTS ruled the universe and being able to real time multitask just showed how much more intellectually superior you were but i digress. i have always preferred turn based and currently do a lot of gloomhaven so i'm perfectly aware that turn based can be more thoughtful and fun but criticizing a game pitched and produced to be a successor to infinity engine games for being real time with pause is kind of like complaining that a wes anderson movie would have been better off if it was grim & gritty. I think a lot of people bought pillars 1 because of critical reviews and high ratings. I know some who never really played it purchased it because of baldur's gate nostalgia and when they fired up the new game they were like ah, yeah, i'm so over this. A lot of people just simply didn't understand the way the game was made because they didn't ever play Baldur's Gate and had no nostalgia for it. they simply just don't want to read too much and think that its 'bad writing' (phrases like wall-of-text or text vomit), they don't want to explore much on their own (complaints of 'pointless' wilderness maps), need quest markers to find things, and so on. Contemporary gamers need games to have simple stories with unambiguous universal morals, quippy dialogue, action packed and full of avatar customization drops and cheevos for them to stay invested. As we all get older and many of us have careers and families to spend time on, under 30s are going to be the main people who buy games and will make your game successful by turning it into an ubiquitous meme, especially games that aren't multi-million dollar, football game ad packaging, casual-oriented pick up and play for 30 mins and put them down again AAA cross-platform titles. So if you're shooting for big sales numbers this is the demographic you have to appeal to. if you're making arty indie games for old people who like to read with modest sales goals, like weather factory does, you'll have more "success" since that's all based on perception anyway. This reaction was compounded when deadfire came out because the flavor of the month at that time was divinity original sin 2: a straightforward godmode story in which you were practically encouraged to be batman villain evil with quippy dialogue full of jokes and Easter eggs and to top it all off glorious turn based combat. Go browse the negative reviews of Deadfire on steam from the year or two after it was released and you'll see almost every single one of them cross-promotes D:OS2. I think its interesting nobody has really mentioned DOS2 in this thread. I mean its easy to forget its not like people still talk about it, and Larian seems to be stuck in some kind of early access grift loop with the wholly unnecessary Baldur's Gate 3. At the time it seemed like the consensus verdict from the people who were searching for the objective, definitive reason why the game missed sales expectations was that pillars was a throwback to Baldur's Gate and not built like D:OS2. Perhaps this is true, but that's not a flaw with the game, that was the entire pitch for funding development, which I've already said. The grousing about RtWP in particular became so inescapable here on the obsidian boards that the pillars team literally added a turn based mode at the end of the support cycle in an attempt to appease them. and frankly, this is a recurring issue. I don't necessarily think this is why it didn't meet sales expectations but I want to dig into this, at the risk of being blathersome. i think pillars series shows the pitfalls of sourcing the community for direct involvement in game design. after the first game was released people complained about the pacing and how boring and dreary the setting was so in deadfire they changed it to make it less "edgy" & more open world, like the Baldur's Gates were. And people complained about that instead, that it wasn't as deep and dark as the first game. And those aren't the only changes made from "community feedback" eg complaining from randos: the backer NPCs were stupid and boring (facts), there's too many spells to choose from, can't multiclass, its not 100% voice acted (ugh), there's too many 'walls of text' (double ugh; its called a paragraph) etc and yet when deadfire came out: what happened to the backer npcs, there's not enough spells, multiclassing is not that good, the dialogue is simplified and the story isn't as compelling, the voice acting is uneven, etc. the lesson? never make a game based on kickstarter promises and fanbase feedback and wishlisting or you'll be forced to try to please that which is unpleasable. and maybe i'm wrong but thats probably why tyranny performed relatively better, it wasn't saddled with kickstarter promises and backer wishlisting and nostalgia for playing baldur's gate games or pie-in-the-sky sales goals tbh, it was just able to do and be its own thing. it seems like no matter how many changes you make to reflect feedback the negative feedback will flow in against whatever choice you make. its a law of the internet: people who are happy with things don't comment and people who have an axe to grind do. furthermore i think the sales rumors and perceptions (this game didn't really sell badly, it didn't totally bomb either, its not lawbreakers) tended to have a negative feedback loop for people buying into the game. People, especially mainline gamers, don't like buying unpopular things, they want to play the game that is trending on twitter, stuff they can either play with friends or talk about with friends. That seems to be the main motivation to buy any game in this stage of the social network economy. Not only is there the rampaging Fortnite gorilla, but recall stuff like the brief fleeting infatuation with fall guys leading into the endless punishment of among us. this game didn't trend on twitter. no amount of marketing can make up for the fact that streamers aren't streaming and posters aren't posting. Honestly, would this game even be fun to watch on a stream? I have a hard time imagining it would be, compared to something like GTA, Fortnite or Elden Ring. At the time, people on here seemed to believe that the perception of low sales meant definitively that it was a bad game and searched out the objective design reasons why it failed which is extremely faulty reasoning. Stuff that isn't broadly popular is not objectively bad, in fact a lot of times the stuff that is broadly popular has attained that popularity at the expense of depth and uniqueness. This game makes a very direct reference to Deep Space Nine by naming the ship the Defiant. Little history lesson from an old person who was there, that show got ragged on by everybody for being boring and not actually star trek because they weren't exploring. yet over time, thanks probably to streaming facilitating binging serials, DS9 has grown to be regarded as one of the best things under the Star Trek brand and one of the earliest examples of the emerging "prestige television" serial. i said at the time deadfire is peter gabriel genesis: full of great steve hackett riffs, bizarre but heady lyrics, big ambitious ideas it sometimes realizes, totally messy and all over the place, it reaches for things that it can't quite grasp but i like that approach and find it more interesting and laudable than phil collins genesis. thats me tho Its a good game, its not a great game and it seems to have made money so I'm not sure why anyone should worry about its popularity. Many things greater than this game aren't broadly popular either. And like DS9 or the Velvet Underground maybe it will become more appreciated with age.

gamefaqs is busted so failing a guide update i'll put some of my findings here. Basically, I think it's safe to say that one-handed style is avoided by a bunch of players. I've called it a borderline trap build based on how much of a drop in DPS it is compared to dual-wielding or even 2h (which also is a drop from dual-wielding but makes up for it with extra PEN and/or reach). Basically it only existed in my mind as a setup that desperately wants crits on PotD (where even the much higher number of attacks from 2w might not make up for the fact that you have 0% chance to crit, if you rely on those crits), but there's not really that many builds that care *that* much about crits. But one place where single-weapon style starts competing well with dual-weapon style is on characters that are already very fast. Yes, Action Speed is Linear Returns. But if you have multiple dimensions that feed into damage and a fixed amount you can put into those dimension, you maximize your outcome by balancing those dimensions (the area of a square is larger than the area of a rectangle, if their perimeters are equal). So for very fast characters, you start doing better if you make each of those weapon attacks ''better'' instead of making yourself even faster by dual-wielding. Keep in mind you have to be very fast or effectively very fast for the trade-off to make sense - you just get so much action speed for "free" by dual-wielding. It takes a lot for the single-weapon case to be noticable versus the consistent returns on increasing action speed. You need high dexterity (20+), with action bonuses ('''Deleterious Alacrity of Motion''', '''Frenzy''', '''Swift Strikes''', ''Cat Flurry', or consumables), with minimal armor encumbrance (at most comparable to light armor, even better if it's a piece of light armor with a recovery time bonus, cloth, or light armor with a pet or passive that reduces armor recovery penalty). On top of that, it helps to be a swashbuckler with a -50% recovery time bonus, or a monk that gets a bunch of free attacks from '''Swift Flurry''', or some other class that can abnormally boost your effective attack rate--even the barbarian's barbaric retaliation would help. At that point, the fact that you aren't getting as many attacks as a dual-wielder is made up for the fact that your attacks are doing more damage overall and critting more often. Aside from this, even with "conventionally" fast characters, single-weapon style is great for when you're expected to underpenetrate the enemy. In such a situation, even a more normal single-weapon user can overperform a dual-wielder who has to flip on a weapon modal that grants +2 PEN for +50% recovery time penalty. This is all because of the fact that crits get a 1.5x multiplier to your PEN, so getting more crits from both +12 accuracy and a hit->crit rate is a huge win over time, even if on any given individual hit it seems like the +2 PEN on a dual-wielder with a weapon modal would do better than a single-weapon attacker without a weapon modal. For a martial character with spare weapon slots (like a Blackjacket or someone equipped with Fleshmender) it might even be more worth investing a point into single-weapon style and reserving one weapon slot for single-weapon-wielding, even if that's not your main focus, for precisely these PEN-related reasons. This PEN effect also has the implication that if you like using weapons like daggers, flails, and hatchets, which don't have a +2 PEN modal, you may want to consider a partial single-weapon style setup over pure dual-wielding setup for precisely the underpenetration cases. (This is much more of an issue on Veteran/PotD than on lower difficulties) I ended up making single-weapon style work pretty decently on a SC barbarian wearing basically cloth (actually, the changeling's mantel with the -10% recovery time bonus and Nalvi) and who would get a Quick buff from a chanter. Aside from the calculations, it definitely "felt" ok, too, and it was a huge difference between cloth/fast light armor and even medium armor - with normal medium armor it still "felt" bad compared to dual-wielding. (Though in the end, spamming Driving Roar is what really ended up mattering )

Aha, I see the issue. Yuriy, what you're missing is the phrase "encounter or evade?" written in the bottom right hand corner of the screen when the Sinspawn first appears. If you use the caltrops then, then you'll only evade the monster. You have to encounter the monster, then use caltrops to defeat it -- which means that, for the Sinspawn, you need to make that dang wisdom 6 check.

You missed something. Caltrops will only defeat a monster whose highest difficulty to defeat is 9 or below; if the monster's check is 14 or below, caltrops will only evade the monster. Wrathful Sinspawn have a difficulty of 9. However, before you act, you have to make a wisdom 6 check or the difficulty of your checks is harder by 1 for the rest of the turn. I'm guessing you failed that check (or a similar check earlier in the turn), causing your Sinspawn's difficulty to get bumped to 10, preventing caltrops from defeating the monster.

It's official, Abe is dead.

In-laws in Russia are definitely feeling the pain. One of my wife's cousins wants to flee the country because of poor economic prospects, not wanting to raise his kids in such a hateful environment, and being afraid of being locked up for not being on board with the war.

James Caan