majestic

It's a problem of scaling. Take your paladin there, for instance. If you slap one of the heaviest armors on him that you can find, you'll get +15 or something AC. Sounds nice, yes? If you take the character you made, add a level of Scaled Fist Monk [CHA to AC, when not wearing armor] and Oracle with Nature's Whispers [CHA bonus works as DEX bonus] and remove the armor, you're now at +10. Essentially, you're starting the game with an Adamantine Full Plate, and the Paladin abilities provide a really nice saving throw bonus. You're wearing your charisma as armor, basically. Your AC is 10 + 2 * CHA-Bonus, and if you spend all your points in charisma and add a +6 item you're looking at 30 CHA (or 32, with a Kindred Half-Elf) without any buffs or other abilities, giving you +20/22 AC, and your smites a +10/+11 to hit against pretty much every enemy in the game that warrants it. There's no armor speed penality on your character, no armor penalty for skill checks and it leaves you open to add other sources of "armor" - like Bracers of Protection or the best option there probably is, the Archmage Armor mythical ability that adds your mythic level (goes up to 10 over the course of the game) to Mage Armor, which adds +14 over the long run and although you're not spending a whole lot of time at Mythic 10, but you're getting to +7 or +8 AC out of that ability rather quickly. Any character can procc Archmage Armor as long as they're the source of Mage Armor, so potions work for everyone. On the other hand, you can just have Lann turn into a Divine Hunter and have a leopard pet, that starts out with 31 AC and can last you for a while. Arguably the entire game on Core if you buff the pet well enough, and here's a tip: treat your pets as well as your characters, they'll be really helpful. But, actually, that's not even what I meant, although it is a part of it. Core was not designed to be played like this: You don't need to go all the way and break the game in every way possible like you would if you wanted to do a full unfair run - like the CHA/AC scaling which you could do simply because it's easy and convenient and you have the charisma for it anyway - but you should have a more than decent idea what you can and cannot do in the game. Play around until you get a feeling for what you want to do. Drop back to normal when the going gets too tough. Enjoy the game. Nobody's going to laugh at you for not playing on Core. Paladins get two different mount choices: horses, and black horses, but that is not bad, horses are good because you can still ride them when enlarged, provided you and your mount are enlarged by the same size factor. PARANTHESES ARE DEATH.

There's something wrong with her design? There's an episode down a ways where a guy starts talking to her and she goes "I'm not as cheap as I look!" and that had in me in tears. I'm not sure that was intended as comedy, but I laughed. Hard.

The charisma is fine - maxing charisma is pretty much a must on a paladin (for Smite / Mark of Justice). Heavy Armor might be a bit lacking as defensive mechanism later in the game on Core. Are you planning on getting a horse?

Maxwell Fraser/Maxi Jazz. Guess he'll finally get that sleep. Man, feels weird when people from one's childhood start dying.

The joy of old games with no internal game loop speed limit. DOSBOX works, but not always perfectly. I thought SM1 was fine, SM2 is really annoying and a lot less enjoyable overall, but that's perhaps biased. It took me a while to get Secret Missions 2, I only had the base game and Secret Missions 1 for the longest of times, and when I finally got my hands on SM2, I was disappointed. SM1 manages to make you feel like you're on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. For a game that old, the atmosphere is top notch.

Good, uh, luck on Core.

Build buildings that increase your recruitement pool. Don't have more than one army and general until way later in the game, use a sorcerer general and ranged units are better than anything else. When you get the upgrade options, pick marksmen. Recruit marksmen. Win.

Oh, come on. No Medal of Valor? Due to the game's hilarious medal system it's possible to walk away with a Medal of Valor and 18 other medals while still ending up on the losing path of the campaign. The weird counting of the tally system makes it so that losing your wingmen in certain missions is actually required to get them. One on the winning path, two on the losing path work like that, but it's basically a design oversight as those missions were not meant to award medals as their required points total is impossible to reach unless very specific conditions are met that give more points than they should.

From what I've heard, that mission is intentionally almost impossible to complete properly so players understand that there's a mission tree with different cut-scenes in Wing Commander. It is possible to complete, but it was intentionally hard, or at least so Chris Roberts claimed at some point. Just eject to get the medal for surviving. Well, and have Halcyon complain at your face that ejecting saves the pilot, but not the expensive fighter craft. I think I've played the original Wing Commander two dozen times, of not more, and I never really saw all of the missions. There's 13 systems, but any given run has a maximum of eight, and a minimum of six. Failing Kurasawa 2 gives you one extra system to go to.

There are two expansions, Secret Missions 1 and 2. The first one is better, and arguably Wing Commander at its finest, although overall the second one is probably more polished. As much as games from the era can be considered polished nowadays. Heh, okay. Not really used to people using the full names for the games. You're lucky if your wingmen don't crash into you or just die from their own stupidty in the first games. When I played the first game, I did not have a joystick, so I just played with keyboard, which was really awkward. The trick with both asteroid and minefields is just to just hit the afterburner and rush through them. More often than not you get through without taking damage. Mine fields are less problematic because all of the ships can take a hit, and you're not getting hit more than once most of the time. Asteroids can just insta gib you, but it's still faster and less frustrating to just try to afterburn through than playing 'properly' - especially on a keyboard.

「for good measure」

[these] <all> {work}

Fun an quick way to get the forum to display the "Request Blocked" error: At any point in your post, begin a new line, and put some text in parantheses, like so: "(THIS WILL CAUSE THE FORUM TO ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL)" Just without the quotes. -> @SChin -> tagging you in again. Some other combinations may cause this too, but this is a really simple way, at least on the latest Firefox. Edit: Does the same on Edge, so it is not a browser problem.

Which one? All of them? One particular? Some?

Yeah, 7900 XT prices have been plummeting here in Central Yurop too. 1000€ now, which is a little less than MSRP when factoring in VAT. With the prices what they are, at the moment, the 7900 XT is actually in a pretty good spot. They're cheaper than the slower RTX 3080 Tis and higher cards and are currently a good chunk cheaper than the RTX 4080ies (which are also cheaper than any available 3080 Ti / 3090 / 3090 Ti and sold under MSRP). Kinda funny, in Central Europe, both of the greedy upsell cards are currently decent value, if one for some reason really HAS to upgrade right NOW and can't wait. Prices fluctuate pretty heavily though. Still no good reason to buy any of the cards over a 3060 Ti or a 3070 Ti unless you want that 4k performance boost, or play high res VR (although in that case, it's probably the 4090 or the highway and money isn't a factor anyway). Edit: considering one can get the EVGA 3070 Ti or regular 3080ies for 700€ or less, the upgrade to a 7900 XT looks relatively bad still. It's faster, but at that price point only at a really bad ratio.

Works fine on iOS 15.7, at least, as evidenced by reactions and quote above. Have nothing newer to check.

Tweedledee and tweedledum…

Well, luckily, there is a really easy fix for the problem with Safari: Stop using that piece of trash.

Yeah, looking at market prices at the moment, it's kind of funny. In spite of having better MSRPs than nVidia at the same or similar performance in their respective performance class*, all AMD cards are ludicrously overpriced in retail to the point where they look like they're just supposed to get the RTX 4080 out of stock. Mileage might be a lot better in the English speaking world our outside of Europe, but if one really wants a card of this generation right now and is in the Eurozone, then there's no way the 7900 series can be recommended. *Sans the obvious 'AMD can't launch any new architecture without driver troubles and/or hardware kinks' as evidenced by some benchmarks being all over the place, there are some things that are a bit disconcerting. RDNA 3's specs to real world performance, for instance. The 7900 XTX has what, 60% more memory bandwidth and almost thrice the computing power of an 6950 XT, and in real world application it's 20% faster (outside of a few outliers that are probably due to software and driver issues)**? The 7900 XTX 'flagship' doesn't even have the maximum possible infinity cache, because... well, who knows. It becomes really ludicrous one you look at power draw charts, the stock configuration of the 7900 XTX draws 20% more power than the stock RTX 4080, and that's at a 300 m² combined graphics chiplet die size (GCD) compared to the 4080's 397 mm² traditional die. **Sure, specs don't scale linearily, but... uh... not a good look, regardless.

So, this is my current #1 top recommendation on Netflix: I'm putting this to a vote. Should I watch whatever this is? How can I possibly say no to a thumbnail like that?

Recently, two of my colleagues talked about their kids believing in Santa (or our local custom, anyway, which is different but similar in terms of results) up until the age of nine or ten, and one said he wasn't certain when his daugther turned eleven, he thinks both sides just pretended for the joy of it, because it's just great to watch the kids at Christmas. Made me wonder if I ruined my parent's enjoyment of Christmas by figuring it out at five. Sure, they still had my brother, and he stubbornly refused to accept the truth for a longer while after that, but it was probably not the same. Well, tangent over. Happy holidays and whatnot.

Turn it off. Can be done through right-clicking the ability.

Thanks, but @Azdeus deserves credit too. I just found a way to reliably reproduce the issue based on a hint from his working posts and some of his comments.

Sometimes I should just finish watching before posting. This Violet Evergarden recap is even worse than I thought, it just drops the entire finale of the series. Why? The entire resolution of Voilet's character arc is gone. The contrast of her coming to terms with all the losses suffered versus the rebels who just cannot let go. Instead there's flashbacks to her accomplishments that make no sense because those parts were cut out, and the recap ends with her writing the letters for Anne Magnolia (or rather, for her mother, for Anne). Oh, right, it also completely mangles her introspective episodes by removing all flashbacks. Now, well, the series had a point after episode nine where it could have ended with a little modification here and there, and that could have been a way to end this recap nonsense, but nope. Sigh.

Well, they already did all of that. Drawling lots, full replays, deciding games by alternating corner kicks, the works. Curious why none of that stuck around for modern football.