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Henry Kissinger

Some people wanted some feedback on the Colony Ship RPG so here it is a decent (15 hours maybe? Not sure how much I put into the indev version) way through. TLDR: basically no change from my reaction to the indev version. It's far more polished than AoD and generally looks nice and crisp. UI is fine and there are some QoL improvements too. The skills are well thought out and pretty balanced with maybe one(ish) exception and that may be classic pebkam rather than a game issue. Combat is hard but there is an easy difficulty for people who aren't masochistic think RPGs are for running around feeling awesome. I, of course, am hard as nails and tough as teak so am playing on underdog. Character development is almost entirely by skill use. You get a feat on level up, and can add implants and the like for stat boosts. Could, maybe, do with some extra tools to improve skills? Maybe. That's related to one of the complaints below. There's definitely a best way to do things (ie do all skill level 2 checks, then since you now have level 3 skill do all skill level 3 checks etc) but it's far better than AoD's saving up of LPs(?) so you can add them appropriately to pass the skill checks you want. Slightly longer positives: Jack of all trades/ generalists are a lot more feasible since you have a party (up to 4). I actually haven't found any more than 3 recruitables (or maybe you don't get offers if your party is full, doing it spoiler free so not checking) but they cover the general archetypes pretty well. The world/ ship feels good, and the game has a pretty compelling atmosphere. The backstory/ factions aren't going to win prizes but are pretty believable and consistent and the dialogue is good, with a decent amount of appropriate skills/ stats being referenced. As prior, the combat is hard, but I've only found two fights I couldn't do- and that's with a stealth and chat specialist among the 4. Just don't be afraid of using grenades etc and know when to use them (and energy weapons, where the ammo is scarce). And you can avoid combat. only major gripe is stealth. It doesn't work that well with a TB system unfortunately, and... well it kind of forces you into having an out and out specialist rather than an assassin archetype. ie you need stealth, stealing and lockpick on one character minimum, and in some case computing (so far). While you can get training in computers to boost it for someone who doesn't have it tagged some hack tools or similar might be useful. OTOH, don't think any of stealth missions have been compulsory but, can't avoid the fact that someone with all stealth feats and high skill (and a stealth gadget) still finds some missions to be impossible. As above, I may be missing something and I'd spec Faythe differently in retrospect. Dunno, from what I've seen if you want maximalist stealth you'd have to build your character on a prescribed path. Minor gripes: all the combat takes place super close together, there's no 'strategic depth'. Probably too many interrupts too, occasionally they get comical where an enemy seems to get off more shots in interrupts that they can in their main combat round. Gear/ itemisation is fairly generic. Could at times do with a more detailed quest log? Some of the maps are confusing in that it's difficult to tell where you can/ can't go, and some of the blocking is clumsy. Ironically, it's kind of like how in Mass Effect you'd suddenly start encountering waist high barriers whenever a combat encounter was coming only here it's narrowed doors and similar. Not much really, and very little of real substance. Obviously it's a game for a certain type towards the grognard end of the gaming spectrum but it's a pretty unequivocal recommendation from me, so far.

Whats the Kissinger - Bourdain beef? Hahaha, I kill me.

In hindsight, this isn't really a day to celebrate, because that dude should have died a long time ago. This is way too late.

Henry Kissinger is finally where he belongs. What a day.

Anthony Bourdain may finally rest in peace. Burn in hell Hank.

Tom Lehrer - 'When Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize, satire died'

Probably that they should have bombed Serbia harder. "Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries – and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor – must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected US relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major western European powers?” The US won the cold war, and that means that the “burden of proof” is on critics to show how different policies “would have produced better results”. The Rules Based Order laid out neatly, I guess.

Idk, where does he stand on the Yugoslav civil war? Joking aside don't know much about Kissinger, apart from his attitude regarding the wars in Yugoslavia. Saying that he doesn't seem much worse than the people who came before or after him in the US political scene.

But hey, he was on our side, so he can't be all bad. Right?

Iirc, the only movie King ever directed was Maximum Overdrive.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/11/30/henry-kissinger-anthony-bourdain-cambodia/ TL;DR: You can't travel the world like Bourdain did and avoid seeing the work of Henry Kissinger, which has a death toll in the millions.

Penetration vs. armor is one of the most important mechanics in combat. You are right that everything that either raises your PEN and/or lowers enemies' armor ist quite useful. Very useful I'd say. Cipher's "Driving Echoes" is a very valuable penetration buff, one shouldn't sleep on it - even if the Cipher himself cannot profit from it. I would just make a beeline for it. It's loot from an isolated island and the local "quest" has no ties to anything else. And the fight to get it isn't that difficult (esp. if you keep the fight to the one enemy that carries the pistol which is easy to do). Then come back later to finish the "quest". It's rel. easy to get the pistol early that way. But of course it's kind of spoiling the exploration aspect of the first playtrough to look up where you can get it and all that. I think a Soulblade is almost always better as a multiclass character (if not deliberately build to suck). The main feature of the Soulblade (Soul Annihilation) profits so much from a lot of other classes' abilities - and not so much from the Power Levels 8 & 9 of the Cipher single class. I think good candidates for SC Cipher are Beguiler and also Psion. Both are not really about melee combat (Beguiler could be, but since a Beguiler can generate much more focus with casting Deception spells than usng a melee weapon most of times one tends to deviate from melee combat quickly in my experience). Some very good and also fun to play melee ciphers are (to me): Soulblade/Trickster, Soulblade/Shattered Pillar (Community Patch version) and Soulblade/Bloodmage. I guess Soulblade/Barbarian could be nice due to the combination of Blood Thirst with Soul Annihilation. I heard that Soulblade/Stalker is also good. I could maybe see a melee SC Cipher with Whispers of the Endless Paths as main weapon, given that Shared Nightmare would enlarge the cone of the weapon a lot. But I don't know if that's worth it tbh.

i'll let others w/ more experience w/ soul blade comment on it, but cheap shred is good, and there is some insane cheese you can do with the soul blade's ability, if that's your thing. chanter/troubadour is always aces. i would personally suggest you lean more towards int and con than might in such a build. might is less important for a tank, and getting longer linger/larger chant and more survivability would be helpful if you're going to be on the front line. if you're not into summons, i suggest giving tekahu a whirl as a pure, single-classed chanter. i've geared him up like a tank, with heavy armor, a high-quality small shield and a hatchet to start (until better defensive gear and chants), and also make sure to pick up chants like ancestor's memory for heal or her courage thick as her shield and especially silver knight (for bonus deflection and engagement). chanters start off a little squishy before you lay on all the defensive chants, but overall it worked out very well as a secondary tank, and tekehu's unique invocations can be very good (chain lightning is great when it unlocks, so is tornado, and tekehu has unparalleled chanter cheese capabilities with avenging storm + sasha's singing scimitar). you lose summons but it sounds like you don't want those as much. (edit: another consideration is that tekehu gets so many invocations for free that you can spend your ability points on tons of passives that aid survivability or general utility. in fact with tekehu i typically don't really pick up any invocations explicitly except for maybe the resurrection or the tier 9 class resource restoration one.) not that important IMO. not worth dumping it, but also not worth investing heavily into. i think konstanten is underpowered as a companion because he puts so many of his stat points into constitution. a properly built party with careful enemy management can skate by even with a front-line with minimal constitution investment (my aforementioned fighter only has 12, investing mostly in might, my other frontline in this run is ydwin who has 10). i also always pick up tough for virtually every character (incl ones i've dropped their con below 10), and IMO that's a way better bang for your buck than investing in con with your precious stat points. res you have to be a little careful. it can be very insignificant but it can also be very good. for a tank i would consider strongly finding a way to get to 19 or 20 that still leaves you happy w/out too much compromise on the other stats. but you have to back that up with a shield as well as weapon+shield style. you get increasing returns from resolve/deflection and it'll all pay off. (but it can feel rough on esp PotD early game some enemies just have such stupid accuracy that it doesn't always feel like a good trade-off, but it eventually works out). an underrated side benefit is the reduced harmful effect duration from res (a new aspect compared to poe1). another reason you get increasing returns here. at 20 res, debuff durations are down -30% which, thanks to complicated inversion math in deadfire, can be much more powerful than you think, able to cancel out up to +43%'s worth of duration boosts from the enemy (mostly intellect). and it keeps getting better the more resolve you add on. basically a high-resolve tank can shrug off attacks and debuffs really easily. in my current run i have a merc that only has 6 resolve, and compared to my higher-resolve fighter it can be a massive difference in debuff duration sometimes. not as different as in poe1, but there are still differences: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/classes-single-classing-focus. the most notable one is fighter, who gets a +5 deflection bonus, which makes them already pretty tank-appropriate, and any fighter multiclass will get only part of that deflection bonus (i forget if it rounds up or down). on the other side barbarians get -5 pretty punishing combination with frenzy

Thanks for all your helpful replies. Also @thelee for your helpful guide. I read a few sections from it that came up when googling stuff even before you mentioned it. Should be stickied or something in my opinion. I just tried using a one-handed style, a pistol with the modal active and it awesome. I am shooting almost twice as fast as Eder is swinging his saber. Given that the enemy is not pierce resistant. I probably will give Eder mace proficiency for the modal to help with that. Or have Pallegina cast that level 1 chanter ability that reduces armor. With how penetration and armor rating works it seems to be quite a useful spell. I just hope that I will get the gun @Boeroer mentioned not too late into the game. What do you think about a Soul Blade as single class Cipher, should that focussing on a melee approach is more appealing to me? I also thought about going with with a Chanter/Troubadour single class just to have another character being able to tank or use summons to protect the backline a bit. Just relying on Eder for that feels uncomfortable. What do you think about a SC Troubadour with the attributes MIG 14, CON 10, DEX 10, PER 14, INT 16, RES 14? Using a medium shield when tanking and perhaps an Estoc against weaker enemies. I really like the idea of combining the Estoc modal with the -2AR spell chanters to handle heavily armoed enemies. And I could also summon mobs as distraction/cannon fodder, although I'd prefer to focus on damaging spells and buffs. What I forgot to ask about: How important is CON? In PoE1 I played a paladin with 10 CON and because my high defenses it worked fine. I rarely took damage so fast that I could not just heal it. For an off-tank/support chanter, do you think that 10 CON and 14 RES would be fine? Do different classes have different health and defense base stats or is it all the same for everybody, apart from class specific skills that aid survivability? Thank's again you all

There is one single weapon setup for a Cipher that I like - and that is single pistol + modal (rushed reload). This combination has only -3 ACC (and increased crit conversion with the one-handed style talent) but an incredible increase in shooting speed which is faster than dual wielding pistols would be (even with the two weapon style talent) . It stacks well with Time Parasite later on, too. On top of that you always have the option to switch off the modal and instantly gain 15 accuracy should you struggle to hit your enemies. I personally really like to use Eccea's Arcane Blaster as my primary pistol then. Its the best pistol imo because of the combination of raw and elemental damage (with its special modal) which takes away all concerns regarding pierce immune or -resistant foes. Once Shared Nightmare is available I like to use Fire in the Hole with Chain Shot as an alternative weapon because its AoE size scales with focus then - combined with high INT you can reach absurd AoE size for the mortar blast which gives a lot of focus if there are enough enemies around. Shared Nightmare also works with Kitchen Stove's "Thunderous Report" which should provide instant ascension after use if you can manage to hit enough enemies with the cone. Of course then it's not a melee ascendant anymore... Single handed melee weapons that could work with a cipher (and not be totally subpar) include all weapons that can proc a damaging effect on hit or on crit: usually those effects count as weapon damage and will generate focus. Something like Sungrazer's enchantments (fiery meteor strike on crit-kill) or Grave Calling's Chilling Grave (a Chillfog that generates focus when it hits enemies). With one-handed apporach and style you can make sure to crit more which would help to proc those effects more often which in turn generate more focus. This isn't super reliable - but it helps generating focus nonetheless. Another option can be to use Xoti's Sickle and scale the Religion skill as much as possible. The sickle will gain up to +60% damage bonus (like a fully leveled SC Rogue's Sneak Attack) after killing a few enemies - and it doesn't matter how you kill those enemies (for example with Cipher spells). But the damage bonus only applies to the sickle itself, so single-wielding it isn't a bad idea (or use it with a shield). That way you can start combat with something strong in order to ascend asap (see mortar shot or thunderous report), then switch to sickle and kill lots of enemies with cipher spells while ascended - and then clear up the rest with the buffed-up sickle which will have great dps from the kills. Yet another option is to use the Magistrate's Cudgel for obvious reasons. It's good with crits (see enchantment route for cipher) and you'll get more crits with single weapon + one handed style. Still... my first recommendation for single weapon + cipher would be pistol.

Fine -- it just might have been better for you to have said this in the first place instead of talking about a party "we" would be having, regardless of how you intended the "we" to be defined.

Lies of P, just got the Rise of P ending. If you like Soulslikes and are not someone who needs exploration with any sort of depth or great rewards, this is definitely one to try out. The game is fairly linear, i.e. at best you have a secondary path with some loot or two along the way, which is a clear break from the usual From Software style. There are plenty of arcane stats and mechanics, although nowhere near as bad as they were in Dark Souls. Combat wise it is a hybrid between Sekiro and Bloodborne, but different enough to be its own thing. The game is a lot more rewarding - and probably easier - to play if you remove preconceptions from earlier Soulslikes. Perfect guarding (the term for parry in Lies of P) attacks can stagger enemies, but dodging has a definite place in the combat system too. Dodging a slow, sweeping attack that would knock you back even with a perfect guard gets you close to the enemie and lets you attack them, for instance. The weapon system is fun, being able to freely switch between movesets and special attacks by combining different handles with different weapon blades, but in one of the more arcane design choices combining handles with blades that were not meant for their combat style results in doing less damage than usual, and this is only inidicated by an easily missable and small double down-arrow on the weapon assembly screen. Guess it makes sense, putting a giant wrench head blunt weapon on a dagger handle is possible and gives you fast attacks, but it will not be optimal for damage. Might still be a good combination though. One of the patches along the way changed the behaviour of the combined weapon parts, so more options became viable, apparently. Never played before 1.3, so no first hand experience. A lot of things are straight up taken from the Souls series, like special boss weapons and boss souls ergo that you can trade in for special items. Anyway, as I never played it before the patches, I cannot comment on the difficulty of the game too much. I did not get stuck anywhere, and even the final three bosses, arguably the hardest in of the game, took only a handful of tries to defeat. They're all definitely easier if you're used to Sekiro-style parrying though, so maybe keep that in mind if you want to check it out. Oh, lest I forget, unlike the Souls series, this one has actual storytelling, which is always a great plus in my book. The Belle Epoque steampunk setting is also pretty neat.

I'm agree for the squishy aspect of SC cipher, at less until you get some reliable stuff or party-assist abilities. So, quaterstaff as two handed weapon (modal +25 deflection at melee, long range) or dagger as one handed (modal +25 deflection at melee, +other weapon slot ) can be more efficient than a shield vs melee attacks. The cipher' subclasses are really well designed imo to concord with differents playstyles, and at melee the SoulBlade subclass take care of the Concentration problem when you constantly alternate between melee attack and spellcast : You gain Concentration on melee weapon kill (and max focus). Weapon's abilities like the per rest spells attached to the Amira's Wing rod or the Thunderous Report on the Kitchen Stove blunderbusse, generate focus and can be basically considered as an interruptor button to be ascended. Once, switching to another weapon slot more relevant for the situation (shield, dagger, whatever else) is nice since when ascended, spamming spells for free is more interresting than attacking with weapons.

Being happy that the Forrest Gump of war crimes is dead is in fact a very liberal feeling.

There are a decent number of 'as good as (or better)' adaptions. The Boys, I Claudius, Game of Thrones (up to S4), House of Cards (UK), The Wire/ Homicide: LotS, Generation Kill. That's only shows I'd rate as very good/ excellent though*. There is of course a far longer list of adaptions that were either awful, or worse than the original. If the stipulation was no or ignored input from the original author as well almost all of those would be excluded, which is not coincidental. Could probably add some historical stuff too like Spartacus* and the like for being ultimately based on history books, but that may be a stretch. *or in The Boys'/ Spartacus' case, very enjoyable.

Feels like "better" will largely depend on which you happened to experience and enjoy first, though that's not universally true (for example, I strongly prefer the book version of Peter Pan even though I watched Disney's adaptation a number of times in the couple of decades preceding me reading the book). A few of my favorite movies are adapted from books, but I watched the movies before reading the books and so I'm biased when I say I very much prefer the movie adaptations (e.g. Perfect Blue and The Lord of the Rings films - the latter of which I have the distinction of reading all of in spite of the fact that I quite dislike Tolkien's prose for those books).

Evidently I only have one gear:

one-handed style is very niche in deadfire compared to poe1. and that niche is not focus generation, you are tanking your focus generation unfortunately (for more info on the niche, i wrote it up in one of the sidebars here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/weapon-styles). two weapon style is overall best for dps/focus, two-handed style is also good and has other advantages (quarterstaff and pike give you reach like in poe1 so you have good dps/focus while being relatively safe like a ranged attacker if you have a good tank to body block). with party support a club will work best. also, the cipher doesn't need to use a club, you can have someone more melee-capable use a club to keep enemy will low. ciphers will actualy suffer with club because of the -25% damage penalty from the modal. eventually you get a high-level passive that you can take that gives you bonus to accuracy vs will which will help. edit: same thing goes with morningstar modal. put it on a front-line tank, hit an enemy with it, and suddenly you have a juicy target for a cipher disintegrate. IMO the tier 1 beam spell is always good although the targeting can be a bit challenging. ascendant is not really meant for front-loading powers, since you have to build it up. there are other ways to super charge focus generation for an ascendant (there's a unique blunderbuss that can be enchanted with a once/encounter massive push back attack that will top you off with focus almost assuredly). aside from psion, the other ciphers will do overall better with front-loading attacks, and the beguiler can generate tons of focus real fast with the right powers. i think those are decent stats. unfortunately a cipher on hard/potd is just going to be squishy for a melee-er, you don't have survivability-boosting abilities/passives compared to martials and heavy armor is really taxing on your ability to use powers; so additional con/res may help a bit but won't help the big picture that much. eventually by mid/mid-late game with more powers, the ability to pick up Tough, and the slowdown of the AR vs PEN arms race on hard/potd will make things easier. in the meantime, rely on your party to support you. firearms are great. their #1 feature is that while reloading, you can do switch to doin anything else, like quaffing a potion, using a power, etc. one-handed pistol with modal is also a super way to do firearms w/ basically minimal reload time (the math works out heavily in your favor doing one-hand pistol with modal that it doesn't with any other weapon). crossbows/arbalests are similar, but they especially come with utility for interruptions, which is more important than any damage they can do. there are also some frankly stupidly good unique firearms. there's a pistol that can do raw damage and be enchanted to do even more damage on top. there are two blunderbusses that instead of firing 4 bullets, fire one bullet that explodes (also decent for focus generation). there's an arquebus that lets you fire twice before reloading--basically eliminating the slow reload tax. that's kinda what i do. i give each character a main skill to focus on, maybe two tops. the diminishing returns on party assist are pretty nasty. more important for watcher to focus because there are lots of checks that are watcher-only, but that's the general idea. the main argument for not giving everyone these skills is that IME keeping your characters stocked with enough potions and scrolls is expensive. eventually by late game you'll be overflowing with high-powered scrolls (through forgotten sanctum dlc) but good potions will always be hard to keep up. I max out at two characters investing in those skills at a time. similar with explosives, though explosives are honstly easier to keep stocked up (most explosives recipes give you more than one bomb/craft, and even really basic ones are good). in terms of potions being usable by all, the best benefit from alchemy to me is making even lesser health potions extremely useful. combat is slower than in poe1 so drug durations won't get too high relative to fights, but high alchemy is needed if you want to do more than one fight (+ some exploration) with the effects of a drug. edit: also if you are interested in poisons maxing out alchemy is basically mandatory for them to be usable at all on hard/potd. on potd you also need additional help from items and miscellaneous general buffs (like a source of aware to get graze->hit or independent accuracy bonuses not tied to perception). athletics is also good for a lot of characters. it falls off quickly, but even with the fall off it's very useful heal. i have a fighter mainchar right now that is maxxing athletics (for an item that gives you -% recovery based on athletics), and at level 12 i can heal ~200 health with athletics (at fast speed with no recovery). for mercenaries i might need i tend to pick up laborer as a background since that's +2 athletics off the bat, and that's basically a free, no-recovery potion every encounter. if you hover over your character, there's a tooltip to the top left of hte screen by default. There should be a number next to a "Concentration" label near the top of that tooltip that will have a number if you have more than one layer of concentration. Plus I think there's "Concentration" next to whatever effect is granting it in the list of active effects. edit: there's also a visual indicaiton in the above-your-head combat short tooltips - the circle that shows your current action will be glowing if you have any concentration. very important for at-a-glance info on whether that enemy caster is interruptible.

My legs and accompanying joints are bad. Not worn out*, just bad. They smoke with cigarettes and wear dark pleather jackets and pantaloons, and are generally ill-tempered. I do work out but my cardio is limited to walking so I can't run away from my problems, I either close my eyes and pretend they don't exist or walk away at a glacial pace. I beat the new DLC for WOTR the other day and am now playing through the main campaign again. I also just hit level 150 with my High Elf Mariner in LOTRO. *this is a lie, this guy lies.

A figurehewd, which was campaigning for Ukrainian genocide with her “academic research”. And as always, FSB had the case solved in two days, while they are still “searching” for the murderers of Nemcov. Yeah… as convincing as all the arguments about flatness of the Earth Well, you both got a point with the anti-corruption, but together with her, number of GRU officers have been poisoned as well. So this makes it much less probable theory. I think, the attack on president was expected by anyone, and everyone takes it as it is: A valid target of warfare. The same would be considered if they attacked Budanov directly. On the other hand, Poisoning the wife of most powerfull UA officer, is on par of trying to kill Putin’s or Shoigu’s children. What do you think would happen, if UA attempted something like that?

Putin decided to escalate to conflict to immeasurable levels, by allowing his lapdogs to poison wife of Ukrainian Head of Intelligence Budanov…

Last Train Home has been released on GOG as well today: https://www.gog.com/en/news/release_last_train_home Czech made game, about Czecho-Slovak Legion trying to return home after WWI during the Soviet Revolution. Now even you can enjoy the Russkiy Mir first hand, without fear of being sent to Gulag! Best to be enjoyed with a cup of tea and open window, to fully absorb the atmosphere of the setting.

King Arthur: Knights Tale Roman Legion Dlc trailer

HA! Good Fun!

These days I guess I would lean conservative if I had to be put on the highly reductive left/right spectrum but I share the hesitation to be jubilant about someone dying. That said, the someone in question had a hand in regime changes that led to some truly stomach-turning atrocities. Pol Pot often gets overlooked due to some of the 20th century's other great monsters being so famous, people like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Josef Mengele, Shiro Ishii, Idi Amin, and Margaret Thatcher. Pol Pot was just as evil as any of them and Kissinger helped him come to power. I will spit on his grave if I ever pass it.