Deraldin

Gorth, Nepenthe and TrueNeutral were all on 2 deaths! Death count was on page 15 (post 292) and True Neutral's second death was on part 15 (post 326). I knew I should have reposted that death counter before this got started. >_>

The reason you don't remember the Nabassu is because it's not supposed to be there. Tale summoned it by accident with a wild surge.

So close... I mean nice job Tale! >_>

Hey! You forgot me!

The horse is a romanceable companion? O.o

I'm in! I should really update my copy of SCS2. The last time I downloaded it was back in v8.

I tried working through a one city challenge in Civ 5 last night, but I think I've decided to give up on that one. Ramesses started the game with marble so he managed to swipe just about every wonder in the game with the exception of Colossus and ironically enough the Pyramids. I had managed to beat back 4 wars on the part of Ramesses and was doing just fine with the last one, but when I get the notification that Ramesses hit the Modern Era when I had yet to hit Industrial my "state of the art" army didn't feel quite so modern. I was still behind most of the others in the tech race as well, but not quite to the extent I was with Ramesses. I could probably have kept up with a number of the others, but Ramesses was going to steam roll me sooner or later. Time to roll up another start I guess.

Yes, yes! Calax get's his turn to play the party meatshield, er, cleric. I mean cleric. Damn spiders...

I didn't have a single military unit, except my starting warrior which was off exploring, before China declared war on me in the early game. I had enough gold to purchase a composite bowman in my border city which combined with the city itself was able to hold off an army of 10 times that size while I built up a couple swordsmen that eventually crashed into the enemy army. The only reason I survived the early game was because I exploited the dumb AI. If I had been fighting a human they would have just gone around that city and taken my undefended capital. Or they may have gone for the city, but done so in a more effective manner the involved actually using their superior numbers to overload my defences. The continent was a doughnut shape. I was in the 9 o'clock position, China was at 11, Alexander at 1, Rome at 3, Hiawatha at 4, Netherlands at 5 and Byzantium at 7. The doughnut hole was to the west of center so it wasn't as crowded in the east as it sounds. China was the first to fall as she was by far the most belligerent of the leaders, getting pissed at me while she still had plenty of room to expand to the east instead of south into me. Byzantium was quite nice to me until I decided that her land was easier pickings than trying to squeeze an army through the 1 hex gap in the norther mountain range that led to Alexander. Netherlands and Rome were nice, but I never came close to them before they were conquered by Hiawatha and Alexander respectively. Alexander was fairly standoffish, but we had a decent understanding. Namely Hiawatha was such a big jerk face to both of us that we would much rather pick on him than each other. Hiawatha and Alexander were constantly going to war. I propped up Alexander for a little while before I took on Hiawatha myself and stomped him while he was distracted. China was taken over using Longswordsmen. Byzantium was taken with Tercio. Hiawatha had a few early losses to Infantry before I ran into problems with his cities taking a lot more punishment than I could dish out and still be able to push forward. I teched up to Bombers and massed them for anti city duties. They were joined by a handful of Artillery and eventually Rocket Artillery for most of his cities. By the time I finished up with Hiawatha I had just recently upgraded to Stealth Bombers as well. My military had had a technological edge for most of the game from the Longswordsman forward. Hiawatha did manage to keep up with my siege units briefly, deploying Artillery shortly after I did, though he was still using Riflemen compared to my Infantry at that point. If I had remembered that military victory was just capturing the enemy capitals I could have done that much sooner than the space victory would have been. I was still thinking of the old conquest victory type, not domination.

I finished off that game of Civ5 tonight. I ended up going for the space victory because after taking over most of the continent it was getting kind of boring and the space ship was the fastest way to win.

I think the point was, if just telling XCOM to not update automatically will stop it installing the hotfix, then why not do that instead of going into offline mode and making it impossible to play your demo. Wouldn't that have solved the problem?

I'm in the process of wrapping up my Civ 5 game as Spain. Haiwatha has been taken care of leaving just myself and Alexander on my home continent and Napoleon in sole possession of the second continent. I have about 75% of my continent which puts me either in the lead or very close to it in total land area. I have a handful of Rocket Artillery that was supporting the main body of my army of Mechanized Infantry as they steamrolled Hiawatha. This is combined with a large air force that covered the advance of my troops from the west and a carrier group that snuck around from the east to take out the enemy navy. At this point, victory is a foregone conclusion. Even with the huge number of cities I have, I could probably win a cultural victory if I bothered to wait around long enough. I have 3 and 2 half policy trees unlocked right now. I also have an SS ****pit sitting on the launch pad, an army that outnumbers and is technologically superior to both remaining civs and the ability to build the United Nations. Just a matter of choosing which way I want to go.

So it's cutting out monsters because I'm going solo and then further cutting encounters because I'm low level? That's even worse. :/

Yes, but they finetuned it a bit too much in the other direction. Again, been 10 years since I last played BG1, but getting attacked by a single xvart seems a bit... easy. A single xvart? What's the point? *thunk* Oh look, the mage managed to kill it with his sling before it got close enough to attack. :/

I have it. Got really bored with it. I blame the narrative. this for me too, i was REALLY excited for the game, but frankly, its boring. I'm about 75% through it but i don't feel the urge to finish it. This is about where I'm sitting right now. I've finished up all the collection stuff and I'm sitting about 85% through the story, but I have touched it in weeks. I'll get around to it eventually, but I don't really have much desire to do so right now. Probably by Christmas as I've found myself at least remembering that I haven't finished it lately. It's not bad, but it's slow. Half the game is reintroducing you to concepts that you've probably already seen. They need to cut that out from the next game. Oh yeah, and I go around to starting up Civ5 again now that I have Gods and Kings. Playing as Spain on Prince with Continents. Going well so far. It's about 1600 and I own maybe 25% of the continent. I'm running into happiness problems with my conquests sadly.

Haven't we known that BG1 and BG2 spawning systems are different since Tutu and BGT? It's been so long since I've played vanilla BG1. When you're talking about reduced monster numbers, is that reduced from BG1 or from Tutu/BGT? That swarm of 20 gibberlings right after Elminster on the coast road was always a little rough when playing Tutu.

Finished up my new game plus run of Mark of the Ninja last night and grabbed the last couple achievements. This time I managed to complete the game without killing anyone that isn't required to die by the plot and got all the scrolls. There are a couple pretty tricky ones to get without killing or setting off alarms. Lots of fun. Highly recommended!

Boots of Speed does make it more than tolerable, generally...but that doesn't really help unless you're playing solo, because you'll have to wait for everyone else to catch up to the character with the Boots of Speed regardless. Always made Boots of Speed worthless in my estimation. Especially considering it doesn't add the full haste effect, (the bonus attack per round), but just increases movement speed. Eh, the main draw of the Boots of Speed in BG1 for me was the ability to kite enemies all over a map. Toss them on a ranger or someone specializing in bows and they become extremely deadly against anything other than those damn bandits. Also helps out if they get hit with a confusion effect. Zooming around the map randomly so the enemy can't take advantage. :D EDIT: I like the rest video. Death isn't bad. I miss the kobolds in Nashkel though.

I've been playing Endless Space again as my group has gotten back into multiplayer again. We started up an 8 player game (3 human, 5 AI) on the hardest difficulty just to see how long we would last. Turns out that we managed to get extremely lucky with the random AI race selection and wound up with all the peaceful races so while they are steamrolling us score wise, they aren't doing so militarily yet. Went to look up the actually difficulty setting effects after quitting for the night. Holy cheating AI those are some huge bonuses! +50 happiness, 0.75x to all research costs, something like 0.2x rush building costs and more. Just insane. If we combined our three person team we would be second in score, but still massively outgunned fleet wise by the front runners.

Maybe you were just more aggressive at pushing forward in the latter portion? I'm pretty sure the spawning doesn't change later in the game, but as long as you keep making forward progress it's much less noticeable than it is if you sit back and try to pick people off. The forward progress combined with the lessened number of enemies (less respawning of enemies) might make it seem like you're having more of an effect as well. EDIT: and humanoid is here too! D:

I actually haven't played this yet. I don't know where my KOTOR 2 discs are, but I did pick it up off Steam for dirt cheap a few days ago. Does anyone know if it will work with the Steam version? Should work just fine from what I've seen. EDIT: Ninja'd by Humanoid.

That's the one.

I'm still on the fence to be honest. I think I'm going to wait a while for fixes for and reviews of BGEE before I make my decision. If you're not going to get around to playing it for another month anyway, this is probably the wise choice to make.

Eh, I didn't care for the tank missions in the second game and I lost track of the number of times I died on the D-day mission storming the beach. I really liked the Russian campaign playing in the ruins of Stalingrad though.

I'm working on a new game+ run of Mark of the Ninja right now. First time through I wasn't very discriminating with my kills, but I didn't go out of my way to kill people either. Just whatever was easiest for each specific enemy. This time I'm using the stealth costume and going for no (unforced) kills. Having a lot of fun with it so far. Using a controller because I injured my fingers. It's working pretty well overall, but the lack of precision with item targeting compared to the mouse is a bit of a bummer.