majestic

The second month of Chapter 2 had a lot of problems happening and my advisors were already busy (not even projects or opportunities) when on Arodus 31st the game decided to spawn two new problems with the deadline being Rova 1st. Well now that I know it can happen I can deal with it. It was just a bit annoying.

I don't like that problems can come up at the last day of the month, leaving you with one day to address them. You can accidentially spend the time resting and fail and have your barony stats messed up. Sure I can work around that. Don't rest on the last day of the month and make sure you don't take time skip projects that push you over to the next month. It's just not really good form when you can't control how long your rest is going to be. You spent 16 hours hunting, enjoy your new crappy barony stats.

The thread itself has proven your point already. If we're being honest, it's gotten pretty bland now, since the drama died down. Then again, perhaps it was the drama that was entertaining souls and not the news after all? Or maybe, just maybe there aren't any interesting gaming news right now. I mean it's kinda proving the point with barely anyone replying to your trailer marathon. I have to admit I almost fell for the Wing Commander trolling a page back.

The Spam Adventures continue! Today I got a fun little mail saying that if I don't pay 600$ to a certain Bitcoin wallet they'll release a video of me watching porn. Then followed a long, convoluted explanation about how they managed to do that and that I now have 48 hours to comply. They also know that I read the mail because they included a tracking image. The sender was faked to be my own mail address and they actually managed to find an old password of mine that I used to sign up somewhere (damned if I know where though). They claimed that this was my mail password (it isn't) and that's how they managed to send me the mail using my own address as sender. The video of me watching porn was captured with my webcam. This was probably intended for laptop users where that at least would be possible. I don't have a webcam. I had one back in '98 that had a resolution of 352x288 and captured video with 12 frames per second. Good old times. Oh and the mail of course didn't include any tracking images, and even if it did my mail client is set to not automatically download external resources for exactly that reason... Regardless, it was as good a reason as any to go over my accounts and enable two factor authentification where possible and change passwords.

Especially when it comes to Raptors.

Enemy tooltips like in Pillars of Eternity would be nice where you just hover over them and see what resistances and armor class they have. It's stuff you can find out from the combat log anyway but it would go a long way to help realize what's going on. Also WTB a sell vendor trash button. The inventory filters are nice but why's the vendor trash lumped together with crafting materials? That's sort of... annoying.

Checked my spam mail folder and found a Twitter confirmation mail. Figured it would be the usual spam but no, actually someone or some bot registered a Twitter account with my secondary mail adress (it's the one I use to sign up for less... say, trustworthy, sites). The account wasn't confirmed meaning nobody else or at least not the guys who registerted the account had access to my mails. I deactivated the account, changed my mail password and checked https://haveibeenpwned.com/. That probably wasn't necessary but hey, better safe than sorry.

Magus seems to be a really bad base class if you want to add Prestige levels - or mutli class in general.

It's the first season since the first one that I didn't binge watch. It's defintely good but failed to capture me like the three seasons before. I couldn't say why, it's not any one thing.

I'm being extremely stressed out by the time limit of the first act. I know it's generous and probably more than enough but it's there, and that suffices. I still have 77 days left but that doesn't seem so much considering I managed to finish one side quest so far and... my party seriously needs more level ups.

Have you ever tried Malazan Book of the Fallen?

The fleet splitting and the command limit came with 2.0 (I still played that ), but at that point you just split your corvette ball into smaller corvette balls. In the end you designed one missile corvette with the best torpedo launcher you had, maxed out evasion and slapped whatever utilities you wanted on. You'd target the nearest enemy fleet and the corvettes would rush up, launch their single torpedo on the way and you'd - in a slo-mo crawl - would watch the enemy fleet disappear. Most of the time 90% of your corvettes were still there. The enemy fleet was not. Worked against everything a single player game could throw at you because even if the AI brought point defense the sheer number of torpedoes was overwhelming. Paradox apparently "fixed" the issue by nerf-batting torpedo and missile hitpoints in 2.1.1. End game crises and FE/AE fleets have much more shields and armor than hull points, so that's the reason to go disruptor spam now that torpedoes no longer work. From what I could see the idea behind having battleships in 2.1.1 is to have a corvette ball engange the enemy and use a fleet of battleships and titans to engage the enemy fleet once the corvettes tanked the initial alpha strike. It's a nice idea would the game work the way it should, but as you noticed it's barely possible to keep your large ships out of the furball. I'm not even sure the entire system is fixable in a meaningful way. It's like the ridiculous situation in Master of Orion 3 where point defense missiles where the best offensive and defensive weapon you could slap on your ships. They'd launch automatically, intercept enemy missiles and fighters and then go overwhelm enemy point defense screens with their sheer numbers, and the setup is so cheap you can spam the ships right from the start...

I only tried the battle on normal difficulty so far but you can do a couple of things that really help out: Heh. Hard or insane? If you picked a Wizard and had an unlucky dice roll for hit points the guys could one-shot you while you're in the middle of casting magic missile... on any difficulty. That's how my first ever BG character - a necromancer - fared. Game over after Larloch's Minor Drain failed to kill Shank.

I played the tutorial three times with different characters to see what I would like and sometimes my characters with higher persuasion failed easier skill checks while those with lower charisma and less persuasion succeeded. Then it dawned on me. Roll D20, add skill modifier(s) and compare against DC.

Read a bit about the changes in 2.1. It is what it is. Powering through end game fleets shields and armor is not impossible, just really costly. Pre 2.1 single player Stellaris had the advantage of simply being able to use what was your main fleet anyway. Now you need to switch - or not bother with anything but disruptor corvettes and arc/lightning emitter battleships even through the normal game. It probably won't make much of a difference.

Let's be fair, they're not tricking themselves that much. The game looks like The Banner Saga, sounds like The Banner Saga and it certainly plays like The Banner Saga. The combat is more fun and gaining experience isn't as annoying. Of course it tells a different story in a different way and branches about much more than TBS. That seperates it obviously, but you still could move any assets between the two games without anyone batting an eyelash. edit: I enjoyed Ash from Gods, don't misunderstand me, but they're like non-identical twins. Seperate yet very similar.

I'm just so puzzled by this sentence. I mean, it comes across as forced, rather than a game recommendation. Anyways, added to my wishlist, so thanks for the heads up. When the game first came up (it also had a Kickstarter) there was this minor internet drama about how Ash of Gods looks just like The Banner Saga. Understandably so, considering the artstyle and the setup of the turn based combat looks like taken directly from a Stoic side project. People even believed they might be backing a Banner Saga addon. The rest is #justsonicthings, really.

“Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, And each will wrestle for the mastery there.” -- Faust On the one hand I love this - it's a great trailer and given Lucas' inspirations for Star Wars it's a perfect fit. As a Star Wars fan I'm loving it. On the other hand the character's artstyle rubs me the wrong way. It's just off. The contrast is made worse by everything else being spot on - animation, scenes, cinematography, editing. So this is both totally awesome and weird to a point where it confuses me. Strange feeling.

Wasn't that the originator of the Crazy/Hot scale in pop culture? Maybe, I really don't know. It looks like typical sitcom material so it makes sense to come from or being popularized by one, but I don't know that many sitcoms.

That kinda reminds me of an HIMYM episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HO717nZD-4

No, that's not a meme, it's an RPG launcher. Specifically an RPG-7 by the looks of it.

Literally!

I have no idea how saving was before so I can't really answer that. There are one-off save game stones in between, but they only let you save once before going inactive - or use them up to get experience. It could be that they added these in later and that the only reusable stones were actually in Skara Brae Below before the complaints. So just like the old games where saving was only possible in the guild. Meh.

Were you talking about the original Bard's Tale? Because that game has no skill points at all, you just get random stat increases as level up - par for the course for RPGs of the time.

In the first Bard's Tale an arch mage is a caster who mastered all four spellcasting classes. When you go to the review board your casters can change classes. You should do that whenever you hit character level 13 with your current spellcasting class and learned level 7 (the highest level) spells because there is no going back. Then you go the review board, learn everything and go to change class and have your magician and your conjurer turn into a sorceror. You'll be reset to level 1 but keep your current spell and hitpoints as well as all the spells you've learned up until then. Also please note that changing classes resets your experience to zero so if you're close to getting level 14 you might want to get that level up before switching classes. That also means you shouldn't worry about spell points too much. Your casters are going to level up much more than everyone else. By the time you're done with the next dungeon they'll be fielding 200+ points each.