Humanoid

True, the 7200rpm drive is faster, but a couple of factors tend to sway me: 1) The speed difference is not proportional to the difference in rotational speed, in practice the difference will be significantly smaller. Personally I believe a quieter, more reliable drive (Seagate have had issues lately) with a better warranty tips the balance in favour of the slightly slower drive. 2) SSD storage is becoming quite cheap, with a 1TB SSD occasionally even falling under 200EUR. Personally I've been able to fit all my games onto less than my 1TB of SSD space, and indeed ended up taking out all my spindle drives altogether. Even if you don't go as far as that, I believe it's more forward-looking to think of the traditional HDD as a media drive mostly. It's also for this reason that "premium" spindle drives like the WD Black series are no longer worth the money (and noise). In the end though, not a big deal really - it's mostly because I note you have a pretty generous budget so it's an ideal case to go heavy on the SSD route.

It's usually recommended to play the content in order, i.e. finish main game, then Hearts of Stone, then Blood and Wine. The minimum level recommended for the expansions is low-to-mid 30s so they're just about doable at your current level, but they will cause you to overlevel. Hearts of Stone takes place on the existing map, it just adds new locations to the previously unused north-east part. Storywise it doesn't break anything if you finish it before the main game. Blood and Wine takes place on an entirely new map, far away from the rest of the game. Storywise it'd be a bit silly and nonsensical to do it before finishing all other content.

Heard a lot of Finns just buy their PCs from Germany so here's a sample PCPartpicker build. Note I had to swap out the PSU but only because the EVGA G2 isn't available in Germany. As a general principle, I'd say throw any extra cash you want to spend at buying more SSD space, because you won't really get much out of it by spending any more on the other parts. You have an m.2 slot on the motherboard so you can get an m.2 SSD if you want. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor (€339.58 @ Mindfactory) CPU Cooler: Scythe Kotetsu 79.0 CFM CPU Cooler (€34.27 @ Amazon Deutschland) Motherboard: Asus Z170 PRO GAMING ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (€147.79 @ Mindfactory) Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€165.85 @ Mindfactory) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive (€106.79 @ Mindfactory) Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070 8GB G1 Gaming Video Card (€482.49 @ Mindfactory) Case: Fractal Design Define R5 Blackout Edition ATX Mid Tower Case (€105.05 @ Mindfactory) Power Supply: SeaSonic 650W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (€98.89 @ Amazon Deutschland) Total: €1480.71 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-03 05:00 CEST+0200

The shop you're linking to seems down at the moment so these are just more general recommendations: 1) I reckon we're finally at the point where the extra threads in an i7 are worthwhile in a gaming machine. For about another 100EUR I reckon go ahead and get the i7-6700. 2) Intel K-series CPUs no longer come with a cooler, so you'll need to buy one. The CoolerMaster 212 series is commonly considered the cheapest "good" option, though my personal pick would be a Scythe Kotetsu (or the larger Ninja 4, which might be inconveniently large). 3) A 650W PSU is fine. The only reason you'd need larger is if you plan to SLI *and* do heavy overclocking. 4) Some games love fast RAM these days and the price difference isn't much so you may as well go for DDR4-3000/3200.

Um, it's out of spec, but hardly "illegal". It's happened before, though to lesser degrees, with both companies in the past. Nothing bad happened, no one went to court, no one was fined, and to my knowledge no hardware broke because of it. And that's just for out of the box products, overclockers regularly run their cards such that they consume power way beyond what their connectors are technically rated for. Heavily overclocked high-end cards that consume 400W of power while nominally rated for 300W, no problem in practice. Also if those >200W reports are true then I suspect they're one-off faults with individual cards, the widespread issue is that they're drawing ~160-170W while technically the PCI-E slot and the 6-pin power connector are only rated to 75W each. Being officially rated to something has no real correlation to what the connector is actually able to deliver. I've read before that it's perfectly viable to draw 200W through a 6-pin connector, only above that you might start running into the risk of heat damage/melting. So let's assume a worst case of 170W power draw, and it's taking 75W from the 6-pin connector, i.e. the excess over-spec power is all being drawn through the slot. That's 95W, so 20W over spec worst case. In reality it might just be drawing 80W from each. Sure, it's a little naughty and looks a bit unprofessional, but in the grand scheme of things inconsequential. The 750Ti and 950 are known to draw 5-10W over spec at times too.

I can't read German, but computerbase.de supposedly did a test where they manually reduced voltage to the card. Temperatures dropped, power use dropped by 30W ....and performance went UP because it was no longer hitting the thermal/power ceiling. Like a horse, Polaris out of the box is being whipped too hard and performance instead drops as a consequence. AMD, why do you do this to yourselves?

Cheapest here is $369AUD. Minus 10% tax and then converting to USD, that's just under $250. Considering the RRP of $239USD, that's actually very good, if only because the Aussie dollar is steadily dropping value. On the other hand, I got my 290X which is roughly equivalent for $405AUD a year ago so the value proposition has mostly been wiped out by the currency movement and the clearance status of the 2xx series back then. The best time to buy a new video card recently was in late 2014 when 290s were being cleared out for pretty close to $200USD. Essentially what the RX 480 has done is just revert us back to that state in terms of price-performance, nearly two years on. Looking at it like that, you could be forgiven for being disappointed at the new card, but then also bear in mind that the intervening time has been one of the worst ever times to buy a new card from a value perspective, so it's good to see a product get us out of that rut. Can't help but think that the RX 470 will be the pick of the Polaris litter though, the chip seems to respond very well to downclocking slightly. P.S. There seems to be a lot of variance in the silicon lottery this time around, but fps gains seem almost directly proportional to clock speeds. Depending on the average clocks achieved by the custom boards (assuming they don't go wildly over the power limit by doing so), it's possible for the chip to jump a tier and reach Fury levels of performance.

Unlike Tyranny, I suppose there's an additional challenge in their other games in that they'd need to decouple their multiplayer backend from Steam. For that reason I'd say it's unlikely, unless they just rip out multiplayer from the GOG version altogether, which may not be perceived in a particularly positive light.

It's not terribly exciting, yeah, which makes for a pretty simple summary: a) If you have a 290/390/970/980 series card now, then go away, there's nothing to see here. b) If you don't already have one of those cards, then essentially the cost of your upgrade to that tier has been reduced by about one-quarter to one-third. Some more observations: 1) The reference cooler sucks. As always, wait for custom models. 2) Power consumption is disappointing. It's not a problem as such, cards have drawn over PCI-E spec before with no issue, but for a company who used to publish very conservative TDPs, they've now joined nVidia in using it as a marketing tool to look good on paper. 3) Performance is as expected, nothing less but also nothing more. 4) Overclocking headroom is nearly non-existent but it scales well with what little there is. This suggests a fair bit of room for improvement with the custom models. 5) It's observable that it does perform better with newer titles, so while performance today is barely over the 970/390, it really should creep up over the coming months (and years) to end up closer to the next tier I suspect. 6) It's freakishly good at running Hitman for some reason, pretty much matching a 980Ti. If the one and only game you play is Hitman I guess that's good news?

On the other hand - and this applies to all RPGs and not just PoE - unless I'm playing a goody-two-shoes, I can't justify letting companion characters join me. I prefer to do my evil work in private.

The Steam version of Civ4 is tricky to get working with mods, including the near-essential BUGmod. I tried and gave up, reinstalled from disc instead. No disadvantage these days because the final patch removed the disc-check DRM.

Especially since you can buy the complete edition for less. It was also one of the BTA games in the Humble Firaxis Bundle back in January.

I tried a PoE solo run as a thief back in the day and failed miserably, only being able to kill the bear from the first wilderness zone through dumb luck, and getting slaughtered in the temple under the first town. Wonder if it's viable now with the addition of the story mode.

Doesn't it mean a reduced VAT take now though? Obviously they've never charged me VAT, but now they won't get any cut from sales to EU countries?

Time to load up my Amazon UK shopping cart, yay! I barely followed any of this news, but from a practical perspective, all this means is about a 10% (and climbing) discount on anything I import from the UK.

I just took the default appearances every time I generated a character for the pool, pretty much. Functionally it ended up the same as using a custom namelist in the first game. All this was before the extra customisation DLC was released though, so everyone was pretty vanilla.

If you want EW/LW to draw randomly from a name list, you can use this handy generator here, all it does is spit out a text file with the correct formatting. I've tried manually fiddling with the namelist in XCOM 2 but it was a hassle and doesn't distinguish between soldiers and other types of character, including civilians. Character pool is the right way to go about things there, but there's a setting in an ini file you can change to force the game to *only* grab soldiers from the pool, instead of drawing a mix. EDIT: Just to illustrate how big a winning Long War roster can be, this is my barracks in the final month of my LW victory. October in the second year, which would be the twentieth month of playing. I had a pretty clean run of it, with only two deaths (plus one blueshirt) so this is probably a bit bigger than the average roster though.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the game was good in spite of the open world design, but it sure isn't good *because* of the open world either. Maybe at higher difficulties the problems come more into focus, but playing at default difficulty I find the common complaints to have no real bearing on my experience with the game. Things like gear being level locked, having to hunt down schematics/materials for the best gear, etc - all that I was able to ignore on default difficulty, and I certainly didn't feel I was suffering by wearing the same pants for 15+ levels, not putting runes into anything, never using any alchemy things except healing potions, etc. At no point did I go exploring for the hell of it either.

If they were left behind but not dead, they actually come back later as VIPs to rescue in certain missions (instead of rescuing a generic scientist or engineer for example). Ultimately though, the winning strategy in XCOM 2 is just explosives. All of the explosives. They have been nerfed somewhat since I played my one and only XCOM 2 campaign admittedly, but still can't beat that 100% reliability. It still baffles me how they possibly thought it was a good change to change the range bonuses so that point blank rookie shots only gain 20% accuracy for a poor 85% hit chance, as opposed to the 100% chance in the first game. The risk/reward planning out actual gunfire pales in comparison to the "solve" button that is explosives (and later, psionics). I don't think XCOM 2 is a terrible game, but it's telling that I have in excess of 500 hours playing the various flavours of the previous game (at least 300 of those hours in a single Long War campaign, granted), where I've only played the single 40-hour campaign of the sequel. I bought the Deluxe Edition, and so have access to all the released DLC, but still I have no desire to go back to the game anytime soon. As to what I've been playing, finally polished off the base campaign in The Witcher 3. The wrap-up was satisfactory, though the boss fights were somewhat too gimmicky for my tastes, especially the first two of them, who abuse their teleport abilities in a manner that can be described as nothing else but tedious. Shame about there being no post-ending world update, so it's a little weird being dropped back into the world with the status quo continuing to hold. Wouldn't matter much under normal circumstances, but I've got new content to tackle, speaking of which.... And so Hearts of Stone begins. To be honest, I wasn't too impressed at the first hour or so, the nature of which felt pretty railroady - not in a terrible way, but moreso than usual. I'll admit it's charmed me since then though, an impression no doubt helped by how little the new content depends on combat to pad it out. Other RPGs condition the player to expect DLC to contain new monsters to kill, more dungeons to clear, more things to craft. I don't care for any of that, and from what I've seen so far, this expansion, even if fully stripped of those checkboxes, would still fulfil its promise with genuine content. With no open world filler to contend with, this is the core that lies within the game that makes me love it. ...but to be honest, all it needed to include to get me was Shani.

Ended up completing DoTT remastered in one sitting while waiting for the downloads to complete. Didn't get stuck for longer than a couple minutes at a time, probably the only adventure game for which I can make that claim.

So GOG Galaxy managed to butcher my Witcher 3 installation, and as a result I have to redownload both expansions because Galaxy apparently doesn't keep the installers. No play today, just when I was planning to finish the main story, absolutely stupid. GOG is great and all with everything else, but stick with manual downloads and archive your installers - lesson to me to not use beta software for important things I suppose.

Yeah, few months ago I played a bit on my laptop, with the mobile Haswell IGP. Not only did it experience FPS drops at minimum settings, it also had a tendency to crash to desktop in open areas (but not, for instance, at the fleet).

Clearly he's just impersonating an Oblivion NPC.

The most important strategy to learn in XCOM is the overwatch crawl. It's a bit boring, unfortunately, but is pretty much the key to success at higher difficulties. In essence, the idea is that only the first soldier to move every turn is allowed to reveal any fog-of-war, and may only do so on their blue move. If there's no contact, then move up the rest of your soldiers in a conga line, right behind the first soldier, no cover required, and put everyone on overwatch. If there is contact, then your point man can use their orange move to find good cover *behind* where they are, ideally breaking line-of-sight altogether. The rest of the squad can then move up and attack (if the point-man is exposed to fire) or stay back and lay an overwatch trap. Breaking LoS completely is usually a good idea in general because the AI has a tendency to become a drooling imbecile anytime none of their active units can see any of their units, and they will often take up suicidal positions while they search for you. Another thing that you can use in your favour is the fact that the enemy count is soft-capped in both Easy and Normal difficulties. No matter how many aliens are active, only five of them will engage you at any given time, the extras will just run away out of sight until some of the ones engaging you die. It's also worth looking up the rest of the specifics of each difficulty level here, particularly the section showing how many aliens to expect on each given map type. For Exalt missions, ideally you will have an Assault as the operative. They're so much better at the job than everyone else that they should have the job exclusively. Run and Gun works for activating the relays, so you can often chain together multiple turns where Exalt cannot fire at you, excluding explosives. Exalt Heavies have the rocket launchers and Exalt Operatives have grenades so prioritise killing them in that order. For the Extraction missions, the enemy reinforcements are triggered when you stand next to a relay with your operative. Use this to your advantage by *not* activating the relay immediately: assuming you're not in immediate danger of being shot, just stand there and overwatch, then activate the relay after the reinforcements arrive. For Data Recovery missions, you have a lot more relays and often the most effective strategy is to stand a couple of Close Combat Specialist assaults in the capture zone and watch as the enemy idiotically bum-rushes you, because the AI has a fetish for occupying that zone if none of their units are in it, and will prioritise doing so above all else.

I think Skyrim worked for me because all it did was dump the player character into the world, no strings attached: no silly backstory, no contrived motive, no one-note voice acting. You were free to play whatever character you liked. Fallout 4 completely failed because it effectively had a fixed protagonist. i couldn't shake the feeling the whole time I was playing it (for a total of 10-15 hours) that I was playing Bethesda's character, not mine. Fallout 4 might have been a good game if it abandoned all that pretense, and had simply gone "you're a visitor to Boston, have at it".