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If their god wants them to have a new yacht/mansion/jet then who am I to question that? Supply side Jesus saves and takes 10% right off the top

I've been working my charms on Wilhelmina and, judging by how she's blushing, it certainly seems to be paying off: She's perhaps the only character you can romance in the game, the only one I know of for sure. You can befriend just about anybody and get them to really like you and they will act differently toward you, greet you differently, instead of a neutral generic greeting they may say something like "Hey, great seeing you again, I hope you're doing well." It's not a huge deal but I love that kind of reactivity in games. They'll even sometimes give you gifts and if they're shopkeepers they'll give you a discount. You can also go to the brothel and hook up with one of the ladies or gentlemen of the night there and get a really short sexy time cutscene. It will cost you 20K gold, though, so that better be some incredible sex for that kind of money. With Wilhelmina you can have a full-fledged romance, though. There's an entire quest chain for it. I don't know what the quest chain involves I only read up on it as far as knowing when to start the quest chain because there is a narrow window of "time" (in between a couple of specific main story missions) in the game when you can initiate the romance, so once I got that information I stopped reading to avoid spoilers. I haven't quite reached that point yet because I've been doing a lot of side content, but I'm close and in the meantime I worked my charms on her to get her affinity up to maximum. The blushing is this game's indicator of maximum affinity. At the end of the quest chain is presumably some hot steamy sex, eat your heart out @BruceVC

sorry Hulrun, I'm chaotic now xD

Well, this is anecdotal, but from my experience almost everyone, who supports nationalist parties in our country does not believe that Russia commits atrocities, and on the other hand, they believe that Israel commits them. So the answer to @BruceVC question from the Slovakian PoV is simple. It is mix of Russophilia and antisemitism which is dear to these people. These people always believe what they want to believe, and even if they provide then 100% factual proof about the opposite, they immediately deny it

Hello friends, In case you have not seen the new feature for the community, it's below. I hope this thread will be used to discuss community member's blogs and explore ideas for the new adventure for our community!

A combination of economic lobbyism and European Union law. Only a handful of religious minorities (including our 4% protestant population) had Good Friday as a public holiday in Austria, meaning that roughly five percent of the population had an extra public holiday, i.e. basically one day of paid vacation more than everyone else, as long as they are members of their congregation. Which the European Court of Justice found to be a discriminatory practice, and it is hard to argue with that finding. Faced with the decision to either take away Good Friday as a public holiday for religious minorities or granting it as a public holiday for all residents, the choice was easy: economic lobby groups said that the economy would collapse if everyone had one more paid day of leave, and thus it was taken away. Needless to say that we had a right wing government at the time, headed by the People's Party with their supposed Catholtic roots. One would think that good Catholics would be amenable to add such an important day of Christian belief to the roster of public holidays, but, well, when the party donors do not want to deal with a work time reduction of 0.0038% (I calculated this based on the average work time of Austrian employees, based on official statistics for 2023), then they do not want to deal with it. There's a certain irony in some of the same lobby groups insisting on a 3.75% decrease in overall work time just four years later during negotiations for our collective agreements. To make working full time more attractive.

The tithe is tax deductible, but only up to 400€ per year. As for the "benefits", well, you can have a proper Christian burial, receive the sacraments, have a church wedding and participate in communion. That is for non-orthodox Christians Churches, and I have no experience with congregations of other faiths. All for the tiny price of 1% of your yearly base income before income tax (your yearly gross income after all prior deductions, i.e. social social security, tax free income and payments specifically exempted from income tax, like our variants of a 401k). You have to calculate your tithe yourself, but if you don't, then the church will collect an estimate based on sex, age and education. Whether or not it is benefitial to let the church estimate your tithe depends on how much you earn above or below average. I have let the church estimate my tithe for years now, as they were generally way off the mark (to my benefit, obviously). How very Christian of me, huh? That is the same, you can just visit any mass, funerals or baptisms, you are just not allowed to participate in communion. Theoretically, that is, it is not like anyone actually checks your congregation membership when you partake. Data protection is just an excuse. Your parents sign you up via baptism, and at age fourteen you are supposed to confirm your membership through ritual, which I suppose is the same for the US offshoot of the Catholic Church, although I have to admit that I have not put in the effort to check. When you do, the moment you start earning an income that is not from any apprenticeship, the church will send you a letter, demanding money. The data your congregation has on you is simply your birthday, sex and place of residence. How much this is just a silly hurdle designed to prevent people from readily leaving congregations they joined is seen in the inverse: if I were to sign up for another congregation, that can be done directly with them. Joining? Easy. Leaving? Oh no, please go to your district administration and tell them that you want to leave and they will inform your congregation for you. Just to make sure nothing goes wrong. There is full separation between church and state here (in theory, at least), but the first couple of elected governments after World War 2 were lead by the People's Party (or, as it was called at the time, the Christian party) and had deeply Catholic roots, and thus decided to reinstate Austro-Hungarian Empire laws passed in 1868, but conveniently keeping the church tax law from Nazi Germany.

I completed the Wilhelmina romance quest in DD2, it's called Every Rose Has It's Thorn. It wasn't what I expected... I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't that. It was a fun quest chain and I got a sexy time scene at the end, albeit a short one. I'm not going to post any pictures of it, though.

As @melkathi said, this is Transiruby. It's a nice metroidvania, although a simple and easy one. And no, it's not available on GOG. The bike form was an interesting idea, but they should've made large horizontal areas to truly make use of it.

I completed Hogwarts after 80 hours, it gets a solid 71/100 on highly popular " BruceVC game system " I have mentioned all things I liked about it so I wont repeat it The main negative is the combat doesnt require much strategy and the repetition of the same 5-6 enemy types for the whole game You can only have 4 spells active at one time and even though you can change this in the HUD for most battles you dont need to so combat does tend to become repetitive But that negative doesnt detract from the overall positive experience

I can second Outward being an amazing immersive game. I was hooked on that world for months.

If it is anything like DDDA, you can actually "romance" anyone. Though, as you said, random NPCs have less story content than the main ones. Curious if the issue with the duchess (forgot her name) and the lack of dialogue options was solved. Unironically, the best beloved from the gameplay standpoint was From the story perspective, there were several options with some quest lines, including the best friend, the travelling merchants, the knights, and the witch. --- Stray Blade The companion drags the MC's body to the checkpoints for revival. I have not noticed any negative consequences for dying - only unfinished groups of enemies recover, which is very convenient for upgrading weapons. The "Enemies Cleared" message means that the foes will remain dead.

Farthest Frontier is still on my list because I like Crate Ent. I trust them to make a good/decent game. That said, from the getgo I wasn't sure if they were making a city management game I'd personally be into. I think you can essentially get a sandbox mode out of it turning dangers and combat off, but still. Not sure at all, even when it comes out of early access. I can't remember if you've played the old Impressions city builders or not? There's at least less of the population happiness management - I mean it's there but it's more of a generalist thing and not difficult to pacify or almost largely ignore (at least in freeplay). Or at least, I didn't find it so. But then I do find some aspects of the "management" part of efficiency "fun" as long as it's not overboard. I liked Banished and I'm glad it rather revived the genre, but I'm tired of the whole "city building survival" concept. I don't care about earthquakes or floods or invading armies or skill trees or research paths. Just give me the buildings and a map and let me figure out what I think is best/most fun. To me that was the whole point of such games - sandbox, not to provide a gamey gameplay RTS challenge with the city building. I also like city builders to be smaller scale myself. Stuff like City Skylines I have no interest in. EDIT: the few building simulators I've seen that are much simulator vs. management are either too mechanics geek tech-y/complicated or too simple (almost to mobile game simple). So yeah...maybe for different reasons but I find if difficult to find modern ones that I like beyond an initial run too. Although some of that may be because I find them all largely too easy to "master" by now. They've spent more time trying to insert more gamey gameplay or difficulty/time roadblocks and zero time on how to make the process of designing a city/layout more fun/interesting. eg, more terrain or resource challenges perhaps. Everything that conceptually worked in the ones from 20+ years ago still basically work in the new ones.

It took me a while to finish Rebel Transmute. The game is good, but at some point it started to be really annoying, with bosses far from save points and some game mechanics that were a little too hard to reproduce. Eventually, I simply decided to enable infinite healing on the accessibility options and rush to the end to see how the story ended. It was nothing that interesting, just a waste of time. Transiruby. A simple and straightforward game, but compared to Rebel Transmute this was great. Too easy, but at least it kept my interest all along and never bothered me. The graphics are quite simple but I liked it a lot.

The Gentlemen Guy Richie's show on Netflix. Not as good as most of his movies, but still entertaining and full of surprises. I watched four episodes so far and I'm looking forward to the next four.

I think they already got better: Eventually you will be able to feed it a 5 year old child's painting and get a high definition image.

That's exactly how I also feel about DD2 and, to a lesser degree, DD. DD2 is the party-based adventure/RPG I have been waiting for my entire life, I dreamed of stuff like this when I was younger. Climbing onto a dragon and hanging on for dear life as it takes off into the air is thrilling as ****. Having my warrior pawn hurl me high into the air above a cyclops and then I hit my downward thrust skill, come down with great force stabbing into the cyclops' neck/upper back, and then, hitting the grab button at just the right time to grab a hold of the cyclops' hide to stay on top of them and then continue to stab the cyclops with my spear is so awesome, especially since none of that was a setpiece or a scripted event, I did that dynamically. Or tackling a smaller (man-sized) enemy and pinning them to the ground and watching my thief pawn come over and stab the enemy in the face while I hold them down, that's ****ing teamwork right there. And then, as icing on the cake, after the battle we high five or fist bump. It's the greatest feeling. DD is a more janky version of that; the fantastic ideas are all there but the implementation is rough. Still, if you can get past the rough edges, DD is a good game.

@Hawke64 Agreed on the IP owner. Definitely a good reason to avoid anything related to the IP. Fable... I played one of those games. It may have been 2. I finished it, but I played it the same way I played Skyrim - set up homes and adopt as many orphans as I could. Like Skyrim, I found the game had nothing else to offer.

Ah! If I knew at some point that you can give orders to your pawns at some point, than I completely forgot about it after the tutorial. Might give it a go, next time. I must admit, I am liking DD more and more. Started encountering more large monsters, and while rather gimmicky they are fun. The game has issues, but it sells the idea of party adventuring like few other games. In a way it feels like playing classic RPG, and I like it. I even grew to like UI. It was a nightmare to start with, but once I got used to it, it became fairly efficient to use. Unlike, let’s say Baldur’s Gate3, in which the more time I spent the more issues an inefficiencies I found in the UI. speaking of BG3, I wonder if Dragon’s Dogma was one of Larian’s inspiration. Grabbing&throwing enemies, exploding barrels, mayhem and fire everywhere, pawns hurting themselves while autofollwing you, gimmicky boss fights. It seems curiously similar.

Certainly piqued my interest as well. I'll see how the impressions end up. And it is scheduled to release on GOG as well. https://www.gog.com/en/game/new_arc_line

Finished book 6. This one was a bit of a slog. They tried to do a similar narrative to God Emperor, but the issue was that none of the characters where that interesting. What it does do well is set up any future plot.

So I play on Xbox and had a pet gnat with whom I stored some valuable items on. The gnat has disappeared. I tried loading earlier auto saves and found nothing. They aren’t even in the pet house anymore. They can’t die because I have invincible pets enabled. I tried scanning for gnat fuzz and raw gnat and proceeded to check every red square on the map to see if they had the lil fire ant helm and nothing. The only other thing I read was a pet leaving when unhappy. If that’s the case what happens to my items? Can I recover them? I had some trinkets you can only get once. If they’re lost forever I can’t bring myself to start over.

I just sent my declaration of my intent to leave my congregation to the responsible district administration. It is a silly bureaucratic hurdle the churches demanded which requires certain documents to "prove" that you are indeed a part of the congretation you want to leave. The official justification is data protection, because leaving your congretation requires the disclosure of personal information to said congregation. And we would not want to disclose any personal information to the wrong congregation, would we? Yes, that justification is about as silly as it sounds. You cannot just leave your congretation by talking to them directly for no other reason than to introduce extra bureaucratic hoops to jump through in order to deter as many people as possible from leaving a certain Church with a proclivity for child abuse. At the end of the day, this is about money, as both major Christian Churches in Austria and Germany can (legally) collect money from their congregation members, colloquially known as church tax, it is a required tithe that goes back to laws made by the good shepard, The Führer (no, really, the church tax really goes back to laws passed by the Nazis). With the government removing Good Friday for us Protestants as public holiday a while back and the Church now wanting a membership fee in excess of what is tax deductible, it no longer makes sense to be a part of the Protestant Church.

pity those who actually like hp the whole thing always seem pretty dull at least those fan are not as unfortunate as paradox fan

Was this ever answered? I have the same issue but have not seen my pet since. It seems that right when I placed the inventory items in, ran back to base, then the pet disappeared and was no longer linked to the pet house. I checked the house link and made sure the pet was happy before I placed the items in the pet’s inventory and now it’s either roaming around (has a helmet on) or is just gone gone… how do I find him or how do I retrieve the inventory?