Tigranes

Well you could be talking about anything, in that sense. There are two official expansion packs (as in, retail products) from Bioware that each have additional prestige classes, and lots of new stuff. No new races though. If either of them is not what you are looking for, then you might mean either the CEP (go look it up at NWVault) or some other mod; if the former then there are plenty of instructions and links at the vault, though I've never used it myself so I won't risk misdirection by giving too much detail.

.... Bit more detail in what you're looking for? Actual expansion? Hak pak?

So in other words, we should never believe any absolute claim about your own behaviour. Really, Hades, I thought you'd tell us something new after all this time. IMO Raven has a point since the only real addition of note in the patch was the cloaks, but all those patches and the little fixes/changes do add up, I think.

There's not much new stuff, it's really a campaign where you must conquer a set number of provinces as Alexander in a set number of turns; so you really have to blitzkrieg and conquer, conquer, conquer, doing just enough to stop revolts behind you. So it's a nice play but not really a full expansion. I'd think it would be fun for a couple of plays, especially with the re-enactment plus, but as RTW as a game engine and concept is completely incapable of handling an Alexander-like conquest (with a lot more chokepoint / terrain-based battles, subjugation of large areas through diplomacy or destruction of sovereignty, a real handling of revolt forces, etc)...

The cloaks are really, really good. I've reinstalled NWN after a long break with the express purpose of playing Kingmaker (in the process of) and Daggerford (not yet), so I hadn't really tried the community cloaks before. Kudos to Bioware.

Colrom has the idea. I know that adult-organised little leagues and so on give children a great opportunity to have a great envirnment and lots of other people to play sports with - and it's great if you live in some apartment block where the nearest park is 50 miles away or you don't have enough friends that want to play sports. But if you do have the option, IMO it's better for the children to play on their own initiative. It can fall apart, they may not play properly, they might fight or get hurt, but it's the way to go and it's the way I played. As part of the tweens group I honestly think that many people in this generation's idea of 'taking initiative' in anything is looking up what program they can join, or what professional they can ask help for.

I anticipate ~Sept 30 Gold, though that's just a feeling. Well I have no problem with the feature being in, but having bugs, a month to go till gold. I would have a problem if they deemed it low priority enough to ignore, but I assume that they consider this a big issue. Hope.

Wait, wait. Didn't Sawyer say their latest build has fixed the animations?

Hades wins the world once again with his immaculate logic.

That's odd, my people breed like rabbits day in and day out. O.o This is regardless of military production?

And that's the whole point, really. Republican rotation battle system can't be simulated to any real degree of realism in vanilla RTW and only slightly better in mods, as Principes are exactly the same as Hastatii, but 'better' in every way by a bit. You know, ports are great for trade, but I find myself never building farms. Money isn't that big of a problem, population is never a problem, and really I hate it when cities get too big; it's a must to have a +24000pop max-developped city every region in your empire to pump out good units and have a centre of fortified defence, but they bring extensive management / happiness problems, and as someone who likes to see Green faces everywhere too many big cities are unwelcome. Oh, and the funny thing is the lower you put the taxes to make people happy, the higher the population grows, and no matter what you do squalor and crowdedness later bites you in the butt.

Hey, hey, hey, hey guys! You can have jumping and height for RPG combat / strategy purposes on a 2D game! One could easily have taken BG, set all flying creatures to immune melee damage (some mods do this), etc. I fail to see where jumping would be useful unless the world is built to have 'jump points' a la FFX, or the game is built towards a first person, TES/Gothic/Arx Fatalis type combat. If you want 4 people to jump somewhere it can't be very precise, it's gotta have jump points, and they are perfectly possible in a 2D world and gimmicky if done too much.

The problem with RTW Sieges, IMO, is that navigation in streets, on walls, up/down towers and in gates are so damn cumbersome. If I put a unit up in a tower, or on the ground, I have to be prepared to let them stay up/down there for the entire battle, or risk losing them for 5 minutes while they trickle down/up the tower. Streets are horrible as well, although how you can't kill two fleeing peasants when the street is full of legionaries, I can't fathom. Another mindboggling fight is the bridge fight. It's always fun launching onager blasts into the bridge itself, and watching dead bodies fall off... then when they reach your end of the bridge they start running back, making others fall off in turn. This, I think, was vanilla RTW: I got REALLY sick of 10,000 Roman legionaries attacking me in the civil war, so... What I love with family members is to 'groom' them. My RPG roots means I love constructing a mental narrative of the empire (with my good memory I end up remembering every ruler in my 200-year campaign and their deeds, anyway O_o), so if a 'gifted' youngster is born into the family I can have him defeat some easy rebels (do get unit xp and good traits), spend some time in the city with the best academy, and do retinue swaps. I always make sure that youngsters visit their older and dying relations and get the good retinues off them before they drop dead - before long I have a "King's Collection" of retinue, and then I can sometimes achieve Alexander-like Kings who ascend to the throne when they're 20, have 5-6 stars/scrolls/laurels and go on to dominate. :D It's been a long time since I've played, however; I got into MTW just before RTW came out, so I had 1-2 years where I played a *lot*. I believe there was one game where I actually conquered every province as the Seleucids on RTR. The map that goes down to India. O_o

The problem is that if you don't keep up with the news on video cards, it's always difficult to find out what's good for you. I mean, you'd think the difference between X700, X800 and X900 (for example) would be exactly the same, but nooo. Also, if you start skipping across nvidia and ATi it gets worse. I have right now all recommended specs, but ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 256mb (AGP); of course I could just upgrade to X800 or GeForce 6800, but they don't pay me to upgrade to play their game. Is upgrading to a card worse than X800 / GF6800 worth it? If so, what are good options and which ones are "blips" in the production progression?

I got really really sick of BI, actually. I end up trying to make sure NO faction gets destroyed, because Hordes are extremely easy to kill but there are so many of them, and they run about at random meaning you have to be the one chasing them down. That, and I hate fighting horse archers that run arond the map for 10 minutes. Another horrible thing is that every single barbarian faction, or at least their hordes, are nearly exactly the same. The game devolves into fight Horde A, then Horde A, then Horde A. Wait until you see the Seleucid Kataphractoi mowing everything down. That is one of the true joys.

Hypaspistai were grossly overpowered at one stage, but even if they are not anymore they would be a fearsome opponent. Traditionally, if you have legionaries powerful enough to pin them down you can make multiple charges into their rear with heavy cavalry; lighter cavalry, or heavier ones getting bogged in results in huge casualties, especially for your super-expensive horsies. As for mercenaries, Cretan Archers are a perennial favourite, of course, but it's also nice to hire some light cavalry or horse archers, as well as some 'barbarian' infantry for gruntwork and doing high-casualty work. The only real way to avoid casualties with elephants is to assign two javelin / horse archer units per elephant unit, making them turn one way then the other and spraying in the rear. It usually takes a lot of space and refuses interference from other units, however, so I often find it's better to lure the elephants away from the mainf ray with a single javelin/peltast unit and suck up the casualties. Nothing's worse than fleeing / rampant elephants running away through your battle-line. With adoption: RTW engine balances out birthrates so you have roughly 1 general per city. When you get big, you will naturally not have as many - and you will begin to get a lot of adoption proposals. Personally, for the sake of historical narrative I like keeping a very small family with very few adoptions, placing family members in central cities and occasionally rotating them (sticking a family member as governor in one city for 30 years can often result in unsavoury corruption)

Blank: Perhaps in an debate-centric perspective it is valid to question the other person's motives in asking why he brought the baby-killing issue up; but when focusing on thinking about your particular belief system (which, to be fair, is completely your business), the said comment does not nullify its possible significance. The way I read your comments is thus - that presupposing God is just and fair, his actions regarding these children must have been just and fair; and for reasons we cannot comprehend, God has, as always, done well. I am not being sarcastic (I am Christian, I'm not having a go), by the way. After all, a key part of faith is to adopt God's standards to one's own life, not to judge God by one's previous standards. Of course, questions arise. Theoretically, to accept and believe a God that we know has done acts such as order Abraham (I think) to sacrifice his own son (though he stopped them at the end), is to say that if God would command me/you to do such a thing, then I/you would be prepared to do so. Can you say that if God had commanded you to lay to the sword a member of your family, and you were absolutely convinced this message was true, would you? In all likelihood, this is a completely hypothetical argument and the issue would never surface - but this perhaps is the reason I am hesitant to take any part of the Bible as literary and not symbolic; that its stories should be adopted as direct parallels and not general guidelines for morality would drive me into a few awkward situations indeed. Contextual justification is always possible; just as Paul's comments about women can be contextualised and therefore eliminated from a general Christian code of conduct, so could potentially God's order for Abraham to sacrifice his child, etc, etc. The fact is that contextual justification can, like statistics, be used for anything. It is a risk we run whenever we depart from God's exact (translated) words and use our own logical reasoning to interpret the words - but then, we have long since even remotely followed many of the Bible's orders literally (mainly what we now consider to be contextual, contemporary laws for those specific people and churches). Yeah, it's a tangle and I always drive myself into a corner here. But point being; to, for example, accept the presupposition of God's justice in his baby-killing is to say one is prepared to do the same when commanded by God. It is much easier to promise and relinquish one's own life than that of others.

Hades, that's like saying western democracy is a flawed system because it's been known to produce corrupt leaders. Also, it has its precedence in ancient Athens when young men would parade around town naked as a coming of age event and old men would leer at their beauteous body.

BGs didn't often have "technical" bugs, in terms of crashes, instability or whatnot, except for the famous "green water" and their incapability to run properly on later machines and later drivers, which you can't really blame them for. However, BG2 especially, due to its largeness, had "coding" bugs - e.g. a guy who's supposed to appear doesn't, or a particular spell rolls a D8 die instead of D6 die, and so forth. But even most of those weren't particularly significant.

You can be a mage, fighter, or thief, all from being trained by people in Sigil.

Hopefully Atari will realise that in terms of post-production support NWN2 is more akin to a MMO, and that it was pivotal to the success of NWN1. Sounds optimistic when it comes to Atari, but we shall see. They were, after all, involved in NWN1.

Note that my RTW/RTR/etc knowledge is, depending on the fact, 3-6 months old: The exact causes of the Marian Reforms and ways to edit it have never been revealed; even in the vanilla sometimes theres a bit of a wait after you get your Imperial Palace. I believe RTR6 or thereabouts often had Marian reforms come around the turn of the century (~200), give or take fifty years. It is highly uncommon, but possible, to have Marian reforms that actually come around 100BC. As for vanilla, it's already been confirmed here - your continuing successes eventually: -> put the people on your side (you get a message prompting you to rebel; if you refuse, you might have a chance again a few years later) -> the senate declares war on you -> the senate makes unreasonable demands, the most serious of which is the suicide of your leader. Know that bowing to their demands would not actually appease them, since a few years later they'll demand that the new leader chop himself off the block too.

mmm, fidgets. makes me happy. kirottu, the permeation of hades into the wider world may have severe implications.

Agreed, which is the reason for my continued use of "NWN2 video" not "NWN2" in terminology. I simply note that it hasn't been eliminated so far, and in the possible event that this is not rectified before release, it would be a hit at visual realism and polish. It's not more elaborate/longer animations. It's: 1/ The space, or 'skip', between one animation and another, notably action animation and wait animation, is noticeable. 2/ The 'wait' animation does not have enough movement in it, both because of the flat posture of the figure and because of a... well, lack of movement at all. The personal space point was made at nwn1, not nwn2. I clarify all this not to be anally retentive, but just since I was possibly not as clear as I could be before. It's not as easy to describe things like this in words alone. Atreides: in this respect NWN1's 'wait' animations were less static - would you count that as 'filler' as well? In that case, I wonder at the design decision. It's reasonable to say "the fighter will only swing his sword when he actually attacks, so it is not confusing"; but to say "the fighter will stand still and shuffle just a tiny bit when not attacking, so it is not confusing" is odd. Anyhow. attribute-based animation is a great idea, and certainly a better answer than 'special move' design some games go for.

Actually, meta, you inflated my criticism to disproportionate degrees with no incentive for such from me. Back in page 1 (or something) I simply pointed out that this is a continuing eyesore in my opinion - something that didn't break NWN and won't break NWN2, and I never claimed that, did I? But to say a criticism is pointless because it is not a game-breaking one would be illogical, so we can get past that fallacy. Indeed? In concept, yes. Even making the gaps between the stop of one animation and the start of one, and a more 'active' wait animation would suffice. What I mean by that is, in-between each swing of the sword or whatever (which may be up to 5 seconds), the NWN2 figures in the video seem quite flat-footed, and don't have any of the lightness / 'jumpiness' that real fighters would have. It is as if they swing the sword, then with a miniscule skip of animation turn back to standing with legs slightly abreast. So it's not the basic mechanics that would have to change, simply the polish and fluidness of them. I believe NWN1's characters had this problem too, but they were a bit more mobile than the video's NWN2 figures - in their case the point to nag was the fact that they seem to 'glide' in an arc around a circular, invisible 'personal space' the enemy figure occupied.