majestic

Casting AoE spells during an encounter is really difficult which is why I've loaded my higher tier spell book with various versions of Chain Lightning. It's also a nice throwback to the good old IE games in terms of descriptions not matching what's going on. Oh so many spells saying they affect only enemies in their area of effect but, uhm, woops, sorry, did you need your party for something else than roleplaying a carpet? I keep a few AoE damage spells on my main to use on groups that I can safely attack before an encounter starts. Coupled with being able to sneak attack due to Surprise Spells large groups of enemies evaporate into a bloody mist before they can lift a finger. Although... this is barely any faster than hacking the group apart by letting your party auto-attack while being buffed with Haste. Another part of the issue is worthwhile enemies being virtually immune to spells anyway - and if they aren't then they're usually at least protected against Magic Missiles. My Arcane Trickster sometimes looks in envy to Jubilost. Oh look, a terrifying Ferocious Devourer. Scorching Ray! Resisted. Magic Missile! Immune to Magic Missiles. Oook. Uhm, Hellfire Ray! Resisted. Okay let's sneak attack with the dagger. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Meanwhile Jubilost is like "Bitch, please!", pulls out his Holy Bombs and goes like hit, 45 damage. Hit, 45 damage. Hit, 60 damage. Combat finished. And to add insult to the injury you can throw 20+ bombs. Sigh.

Wait, did you accidentially start The Sims?

Yeah those magister rank up is definitely bugged, that you can fix. The other two I've only seen happening after I gave myself an extra year for kindgom management by resetting the time. I learned the hard way to not do that so far back as to have another Bald Hilltop event that already happened fire again - major stat drain and you can't do anything about it. Anyway, if it's not related to save game editing at least you'll have a month or two of game time for the devs to fix that. This was the buggiest release I've ever played but at least they try hard to fix the issues.

Do you mean kingdom stat upgrade events? Because those can be bugged and the event card that says [Advisortype] is asking for an audience will stick around forever. The easiest way to fix that is to manually edit your save and increase the kingdom stat, bypassing the project that never fired and... sort of live with the card that won't go away.

Hilarious, isn't it? Two of three councillors are gated behind easily missed or ignored decisions, one made at the very beginning of the game and the other one when you have to do something completely out of character for most players. So, basically, if you have no alternatives and didn't allow the other possible councillor to remain in your lands (if you did you can still pick her up ) you need to wait to get that NPC back.

GOG allows you to archive the installers - that's as good as having them on discs. Whether or not they'll run on future platforms is something entirely else of course. If you want to build a decent gaming PC don't forget three components that are all too often ignored, to the detriment of the player. Pick a good keyboard, a mouse you can use without your hands falling off and a good, comfortable chair. It's one of these hilarious arguments from console peasants that they can sit on a comfortable couch while playing. Well, duh, people pay a couple grand for a good couch to sit on and then put a $50 IKEA chair in front of their computer and wonder why it's less comfortable. Same goes for Sonic's incessant "gamepads and touch controls are more comfortable than keyboards!" trolling posts here.

Pastafarians are allowed to wear a strainer on their ID photos. Sure the police stated the decisiion to allow the sieve wasn't based on religious grounds but picture IDs only allow headgear for religious reasons, so go figure. They just didn't want this to be brought to court. The Pastafarians in Austria have been trying to become a registered religious community for a while now and are denied even though they fulfill all the criteria.

The court confirmed an Austrian ruling, that was "just" an appeal. While I would agree that these laws shouldn't exist in the first place if they do they need to apply to all religions equally, that's one of these pesky EU anti-discrimination rules you agree to when joining. Most of them were made with some form of Christianity in mind. Malcador dug up a similar ruling about an Anti-Christian film. There have been attempts to change or deprecate the law in question by both libertarian and left wing parties, but guess what, the christian center-right would rather keep their protection from blasphemy and risk it covering teh mooslims. *shrug*

I like it how I can set my companions to handle problems but then spend the entire 14 days they need to do so traversing the mountains looking for spider caves, barbarian hordes and dungeons full of undead with them in the party. Apparently everyone else has acess to long distance communication and travel except the king. Eh, and maybe Nok-Nok since he's not allowed to handle anything. Edit: Just had a problem pop up that requires the attention of one of my advisors for 45 days. GG Owlcat, consider me trolled.

Oh dear. That moment when satire becomes reality:

I backed the new season on Kickstarter for a good deal of money and am now not legally allowed to watch it. And the corprorate fatcats wonder why piracy runs rampant.

Condolences from me too Malc. On Monday my boss handed me a todo before disappearing for the week. With our supporter also gone all I managed to do was taking a look at it. So, gotta rush it tomorrow, yay. At least our support guy will be back and I don't have to spend the entire day hearing whiny complaints on the phone about how whatever they were trying to do always worked and it suddenly stopped working even though nobody touched that module in the past two years.

That might actually end up being a purchase for me. I still have the original box here somewhere.

To quote the Borg queen: You imply disparity where none exists.

We also have a normal overtime regulations like everyone else, with a 50% markup for regular weekday overtime and a 100% markup for Sunday/holiday work and even higher ones for people working (graveyard) shifts, dangerous or dirty work. Most pople have regular work contracts and get paid overtime. I just don't, and funny as that may sound, by choice. That I can sit here at 09:10 in the morning and type up this post before I leave for work is a big part of it.

Well, actually EU law just regulates how much overtime you're allowed to do, not how you're compensated for it. I don't get paid for overtime. I do get a lump sum bonus payment for all overtime rendered (monthly) and am allowed to use overtime as equal comp time. There are also some exceptions in my work contract. I do get paid overtime for weekends and holidays assuming the overtime is necessary, e.g. crunchtime to meet deadlinesThis, however, exceptions put in place the company as incentives, not mandatory by law.

I decided to have a bit of fun with the kingdom management (as far as that's possible) by putting advisors in charge that aren't exactly aligned with my kingdom's, uhm, alignment. So while that's Neutral Good I've Tsanna as High Priest, Jaethal and Minister and Bartolomew as Grand Diplomat. It's hilarious, Jaethal's first idea was to torture everyone that might have been involved in a possible conspiracy.

The time limits on the main quests are more of an annoyance than a real problem. The fact that kingdom projects take an eternity is though. Due to the way it is set up you can barely get two 14 days stat or region upgrades done per month and you have to split your main quest downtime on kingdom management as well as companion and artisan quests. Which means in reality you'll be doing one upgrade project per month, at best. And you can do these only at the beginning of the month, because if you cross months while doing the upgrading you will automatically fail all events that come up in that 14 days timespan. Because no matter WHEN they spawn, they fail on the first of the next month. And the game does enjoy throwing you a curveball on the last day. These 14 day projects are actually by far and large govern your advisors ability to handle events. So if you don't do them enough you'll end up with unwinnable events. That's not even touching the projects where you send your advisors away for 90 days. That means three months without that advisor, heaven forbid if problems come up that can only be solved by someone who's away. The more advisors you can use the less problematic this gets because for most issues you later have at least 2 advisors to go but it's an issue in the beginning of the game. The final issue is the speed at which you travel the world map. It's slow. Really slow. And it slows down in woods and even worse in the mountains, or if you carry too much loot around. Granted, that last one you have a handle on yourself. The others make sense. But with an extra day or three to spare in between upgrade projects it puts a damper on the game when your companion quest is four days back and forth. At top speed. Sigh. That said my Bokken is alive and well. Old bugger gave me some new potions the moment I loaded my game. Not bad for an old geezer who died twice so far.

That bothered me a bit in the beginning but I eventually stopped caring by the time he quit the ticket booth. It helps when he's doing something else than sitting, staring and cashing in parking tickets. Edit: Oh! Oh! Spoiler warning for Better Call Saul, Mike eventually does business with Jimmy and the Mexican drug cartel. What a shocker.

I wonder if that retroactively fixes poor Bokken. He died for me. And even if he still lives, will he finish his project? Hrm.

Finished the fourth season of Better Call Saul. it doesn't happen all too often that a spin-off of a well written, well directed and excellently produced show as Breaking Bad was ends up being well directed, well written and excellently produced. But here's the crux - as much as I enjoy seeing Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks on the screen, just as much do I not give a rat's ass for the show itself. It gives me answers to questions I've never asked myself while watching Breaking Bad and it has the added prequel problem that it is primarly about characters that either have full plot armor or are entirely original, which is all of a problem on its own. That would be all right if the show wasn't trying get me invested in storylines that almost all have forgone conclusions. It's like having seen the knockout round of a sports tournament and then watching the group stage afterwards. It's made even worse by the show having these flashbacks to points further in the past and the flash forwards to after Breaking Bad - both of which are much more interesting than the near-past shenanigans of Gustavo, Mike, Jimmy and Hector. Well, rant over. It's not the show's fault, but I really only like prequels if they manage to add something interesting to questions left by the original, and those are kind of rare. Cube Zero is a decent example. The conclusion has the same issue - why bother explaining how Rodney McKay ended up in the cube (and he's not even played by the David Hewlett in Cube Zero, boo!) but the rest of the film is interesting enough.

Yeah we had that theory at some point over in the gaming forum.

Considering that everything the game saves is stored inside the savegames as JSON files and it's really easy editing them I'm very tempted to... toy around with the kingdom management. Mostly by setting running event timers to 1 day. It's not it helps with the actual game... much. It still leaves these annoying do diddle squat for 14 days parts. Meh.

60 to 90 days long projects are also really awesome. Sending your treasurer or high priest away for three months is like staring down Dirty Harry's gun while he says WELL DO YA, PUNK? Except the game's gun has unlimited ammo.