Keyrock

Personally, I found that light did have an effect on stealth in LL, at least with human enemies. In the areas that it took me several tries to get past I found that the times that I didn't bother turning off the lights I was spotted much quicker and forced into a firefight, whereas the times I made the effort and extinguished light sources I had a much easier time remaining unseen and killing off baddies like a shadow in the night. I never bothered doing much stealth against monsters outside of scripted sections. The one exception was gargoyles, I generally tried my best to avoid getting spotted for as long as I could, but gargoyles appear almost exclusively in well lit areas (read: outside) anyway, so there's not much I could have done about light against them.

My Split Caiman Vanguard coming in to dock at my newly purchased ore mine Ore mines are a great choice for building your first station. The biggest hurdle is finding an ore rich asteroid in an area where you won't be facing heavy competition from existing ore mines. If you can manage that, an ore mine is a pretty good starter station as it only requires one resource to operate (energy cells) and the product it manufactures (ore, obviously) is the second most used resource in other production stations (energy cells are first, by a long shot), meaning you are likely to have steady demand for your product. Also, ore mines are fairly cheap and generally don't require high reputation to purchase, relatively speaking. An ore mine doesn't have nearly the potential for profit that some of the high tech factories and multi-factory complexes do, but I'm a long ways off from affording such things at this stage of the game, not to mention not meeting reputation requirements. The bottom line is that once I get my secondary transport over to the station (I had it trading a good number of sectors away), I can set it up to automatically make resource buying runs and product selling runs while I go do my thing elsewhere and I'll have an automated source of steady income in addition to what I earn making trade runs manually on my own. Alternatively I could just leave the station be on its own and other traders would come and go to my station and buy and sell with it as with any other station (they will do this also anyway), but having one of my owned transport do trading runs for the station generally brings in both greater profit and less (preferably no) downtime due to empty resource reserves or full product storage. It's a slow drip of steady income at first, but it adds up and will allow me to buy more transports and build more stations which will in turn accelerate my profits and eventually allow me to build some specialized, high tech manufacturing stations with the potential for far greater profit.

I stealthed way more in Last Light than I did in 2033, but I pretty much never used throwing knives and barely ever used a silenced pistol. I prefer the OG method of outmaneuvering them and sticking a knife in their throat up close and personal. Way more satisfying that way. As for areas being brighter in Last Light, you know that you can turn off circuit breakers and blow out flames, right? Also, I agree with Woldan, I thought the level design in Last Light was really great. So many levels with many different paths and approaches you can take to get through them. As for me, I'm on the verge of building my first station in X3: Albion Prelude. I have enough cash on hand to buy an ore mine and enough extra to supply it and have some on hand for my own trading, but I need some more because I need to hire a TL (station transport) to bring my ore mine to where it will get set up. A few more trade runs then it's time to scout out a mineral rich asteroid in a sector that isn't already saturated with mines (easier said than done). Alternatively, I can build a scruffin farm instead. Hmm...

Thanks Shady, good lookin' out.

Well yeah, no place is completely immune from earthquakes. Heck, we've gotten a couple in Connecticut in the almost 30 years I've lived here, but we're talking small tremors that, as you wrote, you might not even know about if you weren't told about them.

I got back from my trip to Charlotte today. That trip served 2 purposes: 1) Vacation 2) Determining whether it's an area I could see myself living in. To answer the question posed by item #2: Yes, definitely. I'm stuck in Connecticut until at least March (lease), but after that I have every intention of getting the **** out of this God forsaken state. With that in mind, I have plenty of time to make up my mind and start looking for work and a place to live before my lease is up, but the Charlotte area is the top contender at the moment. It ticks pretty much all the boxes for me: Lower cost of living. Lower taxes. Mild, short winter. Friendly, polite people. Far enough from the coast to have no fear of hurricanes, but close enough that I can drive to go to the beach for a weekend. Close enough to the mountains to drive there for a weekend but not close enough to get a legit winter. Not in tornado alley. Not in earthquake country. Plenty of attractions. Gorgeous downtown area. Yeah, I could see myself living in Cackalacky. With any luck, I will be this time next year.

Young grasshoper, one must not always stand and fight... okay, you do have to kill it once.

The snow level.

This is a pretty fun soap opera :D As for the publisher issue, I have no doubt that every single one of them wants to turn as much profit as possible (that's the ultimate goal of every business) and to keep their customers happy. The difference is in how much emphasis each publisher puts on profit margin vs customer satisfaction.

I'd like to think that is true, but how many times has Ubisoft ****ed their customers or released a pile of bugs, yet people still buy the crap out of every AssCreed reskin they put out every 6 months. I imagine there is a threshold of crap where even the mainstream will abandon a publisher, but it seems they'll get to pile the mountain of crap up pretty high, and laugh all the way to the bank the whole time, before we reach that threshold.

My Split Jaguar Vanguard While not the fastest ship in the game, it is not that far off. This ship is great for exploring because you can go through sectors in no time at all and you pretty much never have to fight unless you chose to, on account of there being only a tiny number of ships in the entire game that can catch a you. Heck, this ship can outrun some missiles.

Again, to me it seems like logical character progression. In 2033 he's being cryptic and "hands off" because he wants Artyom to find out the truth and to come to the correct decision on his own because of some kind of philosophical young padawan must find things out for himself bull****. When Artyom doesn't come to the correct decision on his own and nukes the Dark Ones instead, Khan decides he needs to be more direct and hands on because, well, look where being hands off got him and the dark ones. His change in character seems very appropriate to me. Yes, his demeanor is different, but it seems natural to me given the events of 2033. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

To me it seemed appropriate, given the bad ending is canon. In 2033 he's more cryptic about things, but obviously he's telling you "don't kill the dark ones" ("the dark ones are not the enemy" was literally the first thing that popped into my head when I fist met Khan in 2033), so in LL he decides to be more direct in what he's saying since dumbass Artyom was too thick headed to catch on before. Seems like logical character progression to me. /shrugs

Khan may never directly say "don't harm the dark ones" in 2033, but, come on, it's pretty f'n clear that's what he means. Also, I personally never felt like he was in direct opposition to the Rangers in LL.

ShadySands never posts again outside of WoT to maintain his 1337 status.

Did it? I never actually learned how Last Light ends: the absolutely pants-on-head-ridiculous love plot line was enough to put me off of that game for forever. The complete revamp of Khan's character from an old, wise sage type character (with possible hints of not being totally correct?), to a crack-smoking hippie type character didn't sit well with me, either: throw that in with the LSD tunnel or river or whatever it was as well as Anna, and you've got yourself a nigh insufferable game. Well, at least the final gameplay sequence is a lot better. You get to go through a pretty badass firefight instead of tripping balls sequence. As for the love plot, yeah that was ham-fisted to say the least, I basically just ignored it to the best of my ability. Personally, I thought Khan's character was pretty consistent between the two games. Also, Last Light has actual proper villains.

You mean the tripping balls sequence at the end? Yeah, that was... something. Did you get the bad ending or the good ending ? Regardless of which ending you get in 2033, the bad ending is canon in Last Light. Thankfully, Last Light has a more satisfying less WTF ending, plus it's just overall a better game to boot.

^ Yeah, it's definitely a slow game, which actually fits my play style perfectly, as I like to take my sweet ass time playing games in general. It takes forever to get to the point where you've amassed enough wealth and influence to build a massive fleet, but rolling into a sector with several capital ships, a wing of corvettes, and several dozen fighters, and having a massive fleet battle is so insanely satisfying.

That is epic. I bet it's awesome while playing with a controller and lounging back in a chair a little ways away from the desk, but how is it when you're sitting at the desk typing and stuff? For me, I wouldn't want a monitor larger than maybe 27 or 28", unless I had a wide enough desk that the monitor was 3 or 4 feet from my face when sitting at the desk.

I had forgotten that the Split are almost as xenophobic as the Paranid, so buying a transport from them was impossible initially (they wouldn't even let me dock with the ship yard). Luckily, raising my rep with them to an acceptable level was rather quick and easy, and I made some good profit in the process. Now I'm the proud owner of a Split Caiman transport Unfortunately, I don't have enough rep with the Split (or anyone else for that matter) to buy 25 MJ shields, and I haven't found a spot nearby that sells 5 MJ shields yet, meaning I'm stuck with this dinky 1 MJ shield that came with the ship, which might as well be no shield. With that in mind, I need to continue being very careful where I trade. On the bright side, the Caiman is almost as fast as some heavy fighters, so my chances of reaching safe haven if set upon by pirates are decent.

Gawker is grotesque chimera of lies and contradictions, trying to understand its "message" is sheer folly. /gives self a pat on the back for using "chimera" in a sentence

Out of curiosity, is Reddit a big deal? Serious question, I never go there purposely and whenever I happen by it the formatting of the front page dissuades me from delving deeper, hence I don't really know what the place is about.

No. If I was getting arrested the attractiveness and gender of my arresting officer would be of no consequence. My mind would be far too occupied with thoughts of "****, I'm going to jail" and "how do I get out of this one?" to be having sexual fantasies about the person who put the cuffs on me. I mean, if this were a porn movie, I'd offer her some kielbasa and good times would follow. Sadly, real life doesn't work like a porn movie (bummer) and offering her some kielbasa would make a bad situation significantly worse.

So I started building my empire in X3: Albion Prelude, and by "building" at this point I mean just earning whatever money I can doing short trading runs to upgrade my transport so that I can haul more stuff faster which I can turn into more money which I can turn into a second transport and eventually my first station. Eventually I'll buy combat vessels too, but that's much later on, I'm not aiming to fight anybody right now, I always play these types of games as merchant first and foremost. I did the Humble Merchant start, which is the easiest starting point, at least if you're looking to trade. With the Humble Merchant start you get an Argon Mercury (transport) and an Argon Discoverer (scout) and some meager chump change to begin with. Like all Argon ships, the Mercury is a capable vessel, average across the board. Argon ships are never a terrible choice, regardless of the role you're looking to fill, but they don't excel at anything either, hence why I pretty much never buy Argon ships. Still, it's a decent enough ship to start with. The discoverer I haven't touched yet, I just had autopilot park it at the nearest station while I do my trading runs. The Discoverer will come into play soon enough, but I'm not quite there yet. I have my Mercury decently upgraded at this point, but it still has a ways to go. Once I fully upgraded the engines (which is fairly cheap) it became a balancing act of purchasing as many cargo extensions as I could afford while also maintaining enough cash in my account to fill said cargo hold with goods. The transport starts off with no weapons and a weak ass 5 MJ shield. I'll eventually get the ship as shielded as I can (3 X 25 MJ shields, I think), but right now cargo space is more important, plus finding a station that sells 25 MJ shields is easier said than done (that's where the Discoverer will come in). For now, because of the pathetic shielding I have, I need to stick to safe, well patrolled sectors. A 5 MJ shield will protect me from minor collisions, but if I get attacked by pirates I'm toast, that shield will go down right quick. I'm never going to bother putting any weapons on this transport,or any other, for that matter, I kinda don't see the point. You don't fight with a transport, if you see pirates a comin' you turn tail and run as fast as you can to the nearest station or (non-pirate) military vessels you can find, get on your comm, and ask for protection. Either that, or you fly with an armed escort (advisable if you carry expensive cargo and tend to fly in dangerous sectors). You can arm a transport with weapons somewhat comparable to a light fighter (especially if we're talking about a Split, Paranid, Terran, or OTAS transport), but transports aren't exactly the most nimble ships ever made. Any fighter will have no problem flying circles around you and blasting holes in your hull while making it extremely hard for you to get any hits on them. Once I finish maxing out my cargo hold, I'll hire a pilot to take over my Mercury and do trading runs in a safe area while I hop into my Discoverer and go exploring. I don't remember if the Discoverer comes with any weapons to start, but if it doesn't I won't bother getting any. While you can fight in a scout, I'm not looking to do that. If I see danger coming I can simply outrun it; only another scout is catching a scout. Step 1 will be to find a facility that sells 25 MJ shields for my Mercury. When I find that I'll order my Mercury to fly over to that sector, get fitted with the shields, then back to trading with it (I can then be a bit less careful with what sectors to trade in to boot). Then I'll take my Discoverer and head on over to Split territory to buy another transport. When choosing a transport there are a couple different theories you can subscribe to. If you follow the Boron and Teldai train of though, you get a slow transport with tons of cargo space. If you follow the Split and Paranid train of thought, you get a transport with less cargo space but that is much faster. I subscribe to the Split and Paranid transport theory. Sure, I have less cargo room so I can't haul as much stuff per trip, but I can make the trip much faster, also I can beat the competition to stations to get the best price, also also having a faster transport gives me a better chance to get to safety before pirates get to me. Of course, you can get a OTAS transport and get the best of all worlds (they have the best ships in the game pretty much across the board), but I won't be reaching any OTAS sectors any time soon unless I want to take some real big risks. While Paranid ship designs, in my view, are far more pleasing to the eye, Split transports are much cheaper and a bit faster to boot. Plus Paranid are tough to deal with at first, I'm not even sure they'd let me buy their most basic transport with my current reputation, while I'm almost certain the Split will sell me on of their basic Caiman transports. I'll be dealing with the Paranid later to get military vessels, I like their combination of firepower, speed, and shielding. Outside of OTAS, I think Paranid make the best war vessels. Once I get my Split Caiman then I trade until I can afford to build my first station, likely an ore mine. After that, more transports and more stations until I get enough steady income pouring in to begin building a fleet of fighters. Then I start hunting pirates and other aggressive factions to raise my rep high enough to get larger and more powerful war vessels. Once I get a frigate it's on like a pot of neck bones and then I go into conquer mode.

That's really sad. I knew he had been having health issues recently, I guess they got the best of him.