Zoraptor

If you have a conscript/ low skill army then you need a simple and easy to maintain weapon, hence as soon as automatic became important something like the AK was inevitable. If Kalashnikov hadn't done it someone else would have. The German's WW2 assault rifle type weapons had already pointed the way.

Yep, may as well criticise the inventor of the machete, or go back to those heartless bastards in China who invented gunpowder in the first place. All Kalashnikov did was make a very popular and reliable version of something that had been around for centuries; if they weren't using AKs they'd be using some other gun. Or sticks and stones, we're very good at improvising violence with whatever we have to hand.

The name is brilliant. "Kingdom Come: Deliverance- it'll make you squeal like a pig"! Best tagline since John Romero was at iD.

Don't know if anyone has a decent source for profitability of colonies, it seems to be one of the more difficult things to find decent analyses of. The colonies were nearly all loss makers post WW2- except those with extraordinary resources like oil- due to the US insisting on the disbanding of the preferential trade system but prior to that the only one I know of that made a definitive loss was India of all places. And that changed when they hit on the great idea of selling opium to China, and switched to being very profitable. Main thing is that colonies being drains is not borne out by the evidence- Britain and France were very wealthy throughout the colonial period up until at least WW1 and arguably WW2. Spain, despite having been bankrupt (ironically due to their colonies being too profitable) at one point and practically moribund for two centuries still had a huge empire/ colonies at the start of the 19th century, as did little old Portugal.

We have no way of knowing how well or not countries would have done without colonialism. It would depend on what (if anything) replaced it. But as I said, if colonialism were better balanced in terms of returns I'd swallow my moral objections, so I'm not absolutely opposed to the process, just its implementation and results. I would say with certainty that if there had been more emphasis on developing the colonies for the benefit of the people who lived in them as well as the coloniser they'd be in a better situation, else there's really not enough information to speculate.

The thing that seems weird to me is that they're suing on behalf of shareholders the entity in which the shareholders have shares. So if they win the shareholders... get paid their own money, in effect, plus devalue their own shares?

It's a bit more complicated than that, because good governance is very much in the eye of the beholder- Belgium may well have considered the Congo to be well governed as it made a good profit for them; the inhabitants not so much. Fundamentally though, good governance ought to be governing for the benefit of the governed and not some outside group, and that generally did not happen. If it had colonialism would have been more palatable.

Cardiff had Britain's entire copper smelting industry situated there, for example. There was nothing similar in the colonies, if anything they were used to supply Britain with cut price raw materials rather than using those raw materials to build up their own economies. Singapore and Hong Kong are special cases in that they're both cities rather than classic countries. They have the big advantage of having been developed as ports and as points of entry to British controlled areas- indeed, the whole conquest/ lease of Hong Kong was as an access point for opium to China. That necessitates a lot of infrastructure and administration that simply was not necessary and hence not done elsewhere. As for right of conquest, historically it was fine and accepted as such- at least if you could make it stick and get other great powers to accept it. Nowadays it isn't. It's largely an irrelevant distinction though, I don't object to colonisation because it was 'illegal', because it wasn't though post UN it at least in theory is (Israel and China being examples of where it's still being done) now. My objection is that the colonised did not benefit enough from being colonised, ie that the White Man's Burden got rather tiring and left sitting- or dropped suddenly- at the side of the road when it became inconvenient. My objection is partly a matter of principle, but mostly a matter of practicality. I'd happily swallow the principle if the end results were good, but far too frequently the end results weren't.

You'll be pretty safe, I'd have thought. The other ratings boards got it same time as the Aussie one and passed it as ok, iirc. We, on the other hand, frequently get lumped in with our puritanical trans tasman brethren and end up with no reward nookie in TWitcher2, no strippers in Duke3d and a host of other stuff historic and recent. Once Australia finally accepts the clear logic of accepting our standing offer to join us as the West Island it'll be fixed.

The main things that differentiate it are time- 12th century vs 19th century- and proximity. For the vast majority of that time Wales has been treated as an integral part of England/ Britain and has had essentially indistinguishable social and economic institutions. The same certainly cannot be said for Swaziland- it did not get much development, wasn't treated as integral, did not have the same institutions- and pretty much the only colonies where it can be said are those which had colonisers in either the majority or a very sizeable minority- Canada/ A/ NZ/ RSA- and even in those cases the colonised were generally less well off still.

Hmm. I guess the points I was trying to make were twofold, firstly that most of the post colonial countries are fundamentally compromised by their design, and that in order to have them be (immediately) successful post colonial countries is a process requiring decades of preparation rather than months or years. So whatever preparations made, no matter how well intentioned, were effectively the ambulance at bottom of cliff rather than railing at top. With respect to Nigeria (and India etc) I will happily accept that Britain did not deliberately sabotage the independence process and in latter cases probably did the best they could, but on a fundamental level the problems they had were results of colonial policies from their inception and that the only way to avoid them was to decide- early- that the colonies would be independent at some stage and to have at least some focus on getting good (native) governance and infrastructure in place from early on. That way you have people ready for a power transition who adhere to the tenets of good governance, unfortunately that was not the focus.

1) It is neocolonialism. You may not like the label but it is a real term with a real definition, and it does involve going in to non developed nations and replacing their governments with ones that are friendly towards yours, and which follow your economic models etc. Yes, it will be dressed up differently from that but it's always been dressed up as such because it's easier to sell to both Victorian and current audiences if it's in humanitarian and charitable clothes as well. 2) I'm perfectly capable of doing it, and indeed have done. I find the evidence unconvincing, and largely consisting of "Stalin was mean, therefore it must have been deliberate!" when in truth Stalin was mean, so much of the time (a) nobody had the courage to tell him anything bad (b) many appointments were made for ideological purity/ loyalty rather than ability reasons © other organisations have done similar things through a similar mixture of callousness, incompetence and greed (East India Company and British Raj included) without it being a deliberate policy (d) if it was aimed specifically at Ukrainians he wasn't aiming anywhere near as well as he could, vis Chechens, Cossacks and other minorities he targeted accurately. It's also in part because I have a very negative reaction to some of the statistical methods used to generate the higher figures- often done on a purely ideological basis in order to get Stalin's kill score high enough to surpass Hitler- such as including birth rate decrease as well.

If they did then the question would be "why didn't you kickstart this instead of PoE?" and "won't this take focus away from/ be too similar to PoE?" from a lot of people. They'd already get some people who will not back again due to not having a completed product from the first ks, and they already have the most popular fantasy subset covered. If they were to do a Skyrim type open world thingy in fantasy chances are it would be set in the PoE world anyway.

The big problem there was that the principles that governed good colonial administration and good independent administration were not in concert. For a good colonial administration you want a minimum of trouble for the administrators, and maximal returns on the 'investment' of having the colony- and at least in theory for an independent administration you want a balance of good economic principles and good social development/ cohesion. Unfortunately colonial administration often meant things like deliberately weakening tribes that were 'too strong' by putting half their land in one area and half in another/ promoting weaker tribes as administrators in preference and similar, things which are potentially disastrous when independence comes along because you have resentment and, for want of a better term, national identities that are split between nominal countries. At its heart the problem is that colonialism was always- fundamentally- about benefiting the coloniser rather than the colonised, no matter what justifications were said about it at the time. If you want a good, smooth and seamless transition to home rule it needs to have a good framework of things like education and infrastructure, well run, and native run, industries which are not just obsessed with target profits but also with how those profits are made (eg no corruption tolerated just because they make enough money for the crown), and good 'state' fundamentals like a judiciary and police force set up over decades not months or years plus- as far as possible- sensible boundaries and policies to include and harmonise the people in the new country. Sadly, while those things did happen in some areas (dominions, mainly for the Brits, though they were also usually where colonists outnumbered natives) they didn't happen everywhere.

Contradiction, no. After all, to a certain extent it's exactly what I'm doing. Irony though, yes, if you're going to say that doing so is stupid when you did exactly that twelve hours ago. 1) You kind of do. From the other thread (or earlier this one, asterisked if I can keep it straight) you were talking about post colonialism stopping the UK from interventions and replacing people's governments- which is exactly how much of the British Empire was built and even administered, eg all the Raj statelets that persisted until 1948 and the White Man's Burden bringing of enlightened administration to the Zulus etc. If you're going into countries and replacing their governments, inevitably with 'ideologically pure' ones, then you are being a neo colonialist even if you don't think of it in those terms. Especially with the inevitable double standards that will come in to play where you have to save country X from oppression, but country Y which is already friendly is AOK to do the same things. That's just the Raj principality program with the serials files off and more nominal independence. 2) Evidence required for it being deliberate policy, and not the sort of evidence that has Stalin killing more people than Hitler by counting all the Russians Hitler killed in Stalin's column. Sure Stalin was a monumental asterisk, but if he wanted people dead he was more than capable of getting and frequently did get a metaphorical Mosin Nagant for a lethal lead injection. It wasn't specifically aimed at Ukrainians or anyone else, plenty of Russians and others died too during the same processes, the primary cause was continuing to export food even when in shortage which British India also did on several occasions during famines- as well as the small manner of being the biggest international drug pusher of all time! Of all time!! and producing opium while the population starved.

Hmmm. Do I feel a r00fles coming? Mind you,there really isn't any objective measure to judge degree of evilness other than body count. I'm sure all the Indians who starved kept it in perspective and were comforted that they died in service to good old fashioned capitalism rather than dirty unclean communism, but a more cynical mind might speculate that it wasn't much comfort at all.

At least in some cases there were accusations very similar to those made against Stalin for Holodomor, eg continuing to export foodstuffs while areas starved, which was why I brought it up- and other accusations such as favouring cash crops for export (opium, mostly 19th century) over foodstuffs and over taxing farmers. Exactly how true or fair those accusations are (as Kroney said, nobody can control the weather, which was a common factor) is open to debate, but then you can have plenty of debate on Holodomor too in those regards.

I presume Fantasy isn't there because P(o)E is itself fantasy and it would be a bit odd to kickstart another fantasy game given that, unless it were a sequel- and that was ruled out as a KS, iirc.

Meh, oby just needs to go look at the Mandate kickstarter, Glorious Russian Imperium in Spaaaaaaaace! Have to admit I'm finding the coverage of Ukraine hilarious. Imagine if Putin turned up at an Occupy Wall Street protest to support them, the world's supply of hearing aids would be exhausted from deafness due to the squealing and outraeg!!! at the effrontery of it. Let alone all the reports implying it's a broad popular movement when it's a regional movement from groupings that lost the last election. Split the country in half, it's an artificial one anyway. East and south to Russia, west can become Grand Duchy of Never Actually Going to Get Into Europe And If You Think You Are You're Morons, You're Too Poor And Have Too Many People. Oh, and Uncle Joe actually killed fewer people in Holodomor than Britain did in its Indian famines /lof

And accessories do share blame- it's itself a crime to be an accessory to a criminal act if you knew or had a reasonable suspicion of it. Given human nature it is inevitable that some people will see withdrawal of police as an invitation to riot or settle scores, while others will be driven by withdrawal of services of the breakdown of law into doing things they usually wouldn't and previously hadn't. So you can blame the individuals, and you can blame the system/ it's withdrawal, the only question being where exactly the balance of blame lies. But one entity I don't think you can fairly blame is the people as a whole. No country whether India or the UK consists entirely of Gandhis, if it did you wouldn't need police etc in the first place.

I put that down to my influence. I say that RPGWatch is too bland and has too little conflict and next day they have a competition designed for trolling- plus the prize is steam only so they're trolling me as well. Well done, 'Watch, well done. Next competition: "What is the definition of an RPG?". Make it so! Thought the Age of Decadence sales figures were quite interesting. Not often you get detailed figures, especially from steam.

My bad for speed-reading the thread. Clark didn't like Alexander, his (British) boss and was a tool. I am glad Wals agrees. I was more amused that he'd come up twice and in similar circumstances than anything. He's not really the most well known of generals- perhaps the most fitting punishment. And so far as I am aware the NZ Division thought very highly of Monty which is enough for me.

Presumably they're different and better because they are cheaper. Don't think you need to look further than that.

Going by the riots you had fairly recently, quite a lot, quite quickly. The real question there though is how much blame you assign to the people actually committing the violence vs the people who have withdrawn all the services.

Wals already mentioned Clark. Obviously gets a certain reaction from Brits much like Monty- despite being perhaps the most gifted general of all time- gets from Americans.