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Imoen herself suggests this is because the Bhaal essence is simply more concentrated in charname than in her. This is later confirmed by Yaga-Shura in ToB—unsurprisingly, charname has more Bhaal essence than anyone!!1 Regardless, WotC have determined that, to mark their release of 5th ed., the guy who fought Melissan for the right to ascend to godhood and won is just a level 4 fighter. Take that, BG fans!

Only that's not at all what's being suggested in this thread. I'm curious, why do people insist on putting stock on what official and mainstream sources say, by default, without any sort of critical review or personal fact checking, when said sources have been known to stretch the truth, misrepresent, make mistakes and outright lie in the past. I suspect this is related to the theorised innate psychological vulnerability of people to authority figures, but there has to be more to it than that. The argument is not "believe every conspiracy theory because otherwise you are sheep", and turning it into that is very much strawmanning. The argument is, "when there is conflicting evidence and expert opinions, why do you choose to believe one version over the other?" Heh, the link I posted a few pages ago questioned even whether this is an actual choice at all, and this is reinforced by the cognitive dissonance videos Valsuelm posted. Arguably, there is no difference between the conspiracy crackpot that takes every word that comes out of Alex Jones' mouth as gospel, and the honest-to-god upstanding citizen that believes it's his duty to trust every press release by an alphabet agency—both have renounced their ability to form their own opinions, relying on others to provide prefabricated ones instead. So why the selective derision?

Oh, wow. I somehow missed this gem. So it's "nothing personal", but you go out of your way to single someone out and belittle him in your usual holier-than-thou, fake ass amicable and thoroughly revolting condescending tone? LOL You think running a state is like playing a game? If they attack, well I'll just reload and prepare my border. Russia is preparing it's borders for any eventuality, it could be an attack force but more likely it's a defensive force. The government in Kiev is not, what you would call a beacon of stability and a lot of random **** could still happen. You would agree that common logic dictates that you shore up the borders with the country you are in conflict with. My money's actually on Putin giving the go-ahead under the guise of protecting ethnic Russians at certain point after **** hits the fan in Donetsk and elsewhere, depending on how some things play out. The gov't in Kiev may be stooges and shills but they aren't about to attack Russia anytime soon.

Because you are conflating peacetime and wartime economies. They are nothing alike. You can spend billions of oil dollars on advanced foreign weapons systems, and that only guarantees that you will have the prettiest military parades around. You can purchase some of the hardware, but you cannot buy a pool of experienced training officers, field experience, an integrated military and economic doctrine, effective inter-service coordination, etc. So a huge GDP is going to matter very little if all you do is buy expensive toys abroad and play the stock markets. I'm also not accepting the leap you are making so lightly that it's "easy" to build a nuke → it's easy to build a credible strategic nuclear force, because it isn't. Delivery systems are as important as the warheads themselves, but ballistic missiles are only one part of the equation. Extensive testing is also required unless you are going with licensed designs—but nobody does that unless they are part of a major military alliance, which makes the point moot. Designing, building, storing and maintaining the readiness of different types of nuclear arms is not "easy" or cheap by any stretch of the imagination, requiring a whole industry dedicated to production and the fulfillfment very specific training needs. The list of countries you list is simply not realistic; some of them such as Japan and Germany are legally bound to forsake nuclear weapons (Germany by the Two Plus Four Agreement, Japan by their post-war Constitution). Ukraine never developed nuclear weapons on their own, and seeing how they lack the ability to train submariners anymore, the suggestion that they can become a nuclear power is... interesting. South Korea is probably the only one in your list with the know-how and industrial potential to do it, but they have no reason to as that would escalate tensions with NK and they are on the long list of freeloaders off the American defense umbrella anyway. But by far the most insane of suggestions is Taiwan—an admission or proof that the ROC is close to completing a nuclear program would inevitably lead to war in the South China Sea, something that none of the major players in the area really want. Of course, this is also without getting into domestic dissent problems that may arise from pursuing nuclear ambitions. In the words of Bruce Lee, "knowing is not enough, we must apply". Having the potential is one thing, tapping it is another entirely. So, to sum up, becoming a major nuclear player requires not only a significant economic effort, but also a degree of international political independence unattainable by anyone... outside of great powers. This sacrifice of international influence is fine and dandy so long as one is a member of a major military alliance where one or more of the members are already nuclear-armed, and for as long as their interests and goals are aligned with those of the nuclear members. But this effectively means those countries are relegated from leading to following in critical matters, which is precisely the mark of a second rate power. No, in 1964, the Soviet Union was a superpower, prepared to go toe-to-toe in a nuclear slugging match with the only other superpower to an uncertain outcome. This was with an economy that was already nominally several times smaller than that of the bloc they opposed. Gajillions of dollars on paper meant little back then, as they mean little today, when trying to gauge the importance of countries relative to one another. And this is also without accounting for the problem of increasing financialization of Western economies. You say that economic reasons GDP shows that Russia is no longer to be considered a great power—I say this approach paints an incomplete picture, provided concrete examples of this, and am explaining why making judgments based on that picture is foolhardy. I'm also not too convinced of the usefulness of trying to determine whether one country or another presently meets an arbitrary set of criteria to be included in one arbitrary category or another, especially when those categories are inherited from the study of history, a discipline that is based on retrospect and whose goal is not at all to make assessments of the present or predictions for the future. I'm fairly certain that to Eastern Europe, the power of Russia is pretty great at the moment, and this perspective is probably shared by many in Western Europe too. So for the purposes of this discussion, does it really matter if a hundred years from now, historians will place 2014 Russia right up there with 1914 Britain, 1556 Spain, or 360 Sassanid Empire or not?

Yep, that would probably be a good set of criteria for assessment of "great powers"—before 1945. Today, anyone with enough nukes to turn the planet into one huge glass parking lot and the means to deliver them, has more influence than anyone who doesn't. That alone puts Russia in the big leagues, because any use of conventional force carries the risk of escalation. The whole diplomacy game changes when war is absolutely out of the question. A purely economic perspective (and one limited to GDP, at that) is going to paint a decevingly weak picture of Russia, which is why I cannot subscribe to Rostere's purely economic assessment. For reference, GDP in 1964 for the European members of NATO minus Luxembourg and Iceland (Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, UK, Turkey) was $2.389 tn, while for the USSR it was $1.010 tn (edit: adjusted for inflation, 1990 int'l dollars). This is at the time of peak Soviet influence in world affairs, and I'm not even factoring in the US or the rest of western Europe. Try and convince someone in 1964 that the USSR wasn't a great power. Hell, try and convince anyone that they weren't a superpower. Granted, it's not the eight-fold difference you have now, but then neither are there Combined Arms Armies deployed to overrun Germany in seven days anymore, which were as much a pillar of Soviet influence as their strategic arsenal and their raw economic output. The case of pre-war Germany is also interesting, because GDP figures cannot reflect the critical shortages of raw materials that ultimately doomed their war effort from an economic standpoint—and it still took the combined might of the Allies and Soviets to defeat them with a nominal economic power that was just ~70% of the combined GDP of France and the UK in 1938. The bottom line is, when push comes to shove, GDP isn't going to be a good method to compare the relative weights of countries, by itself.

A cheap sociopath. As the old adage goes, "you get what you pay for".

I think this is the key. It's not that Babchenko's post is inaccurate, it's that inflammatory tirades can, and have been written by journalists/activists/political contrarians for just about any country. If anyone produced any of Michael Moore's rants, they'd be grateful that posts here cannot be downvoted to oblivion (yet). For the more academically inclined, one can always cite Noam Chomsky, which is certain to trigger a deafening *YAWN* from our audience. Yet this guy automagically gets our full support because he hurls much vitriol at those we have been taught to hate, regardless of the quality of his analysis, the veracity of his claims, or the degree to which subjectivity taints his views. Ah, but it seems the two minutes of hate just ended. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

That's pretty cool. Especially the Anonymous one. What the hell is that, anyway? A RPG of sorts? Thanks, I wish we would get input from people living there more often. So you believe the disturbances in south east Ukraine are being blown out of proportion by the media? In addition, what exactly do you mean by "responsibilities inherent to the budget deficit", though? I'm really interested because it's something that's deeply ingrained in the austerity discourse, but in my experience, it amounts to "cut down on welfare, because". Can you shed some light on the fiscal situation of Ukraine and the measures announced by Kiev? What is the really unjustifiable public spending that absolutely must go to <insert meaningless economic jargon> the economy? Not being able to read Russian or Ukrainian, it's difficult to see the whole picture.

That's the problem with the appropriation of symbols. The Star of David is undisputably a symbol of Jewish identity, but also of Zionism... yet they are not one and the same. Should the policy of zero tolerance for racism be extended to political ideas too? Should mods err on the side of caution whenever anything that could be construed anti-semitism pops up? A case could be made either way. I agree though, he knows what he's doing.

The vehicle, or rather, the remains thereof, posted by Woldan looks closer to this: It's an armored ("Frag 5 armor") HMMWV—not quite as "mine resistant" as the actual MaxxPro MRAP you posted. Impossible to know for sure what it was before the blast, though. In the picture there seem to be fragments flying around, too, which is weird considering how beaten up it is already.

Donetsk activists proclaim region's independence from Ukraine This will end well.

Burce aren't you going to ask for a source, or some link so you can prove it's not a lie. I thought you had a big speech about how you were all about truth now. http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/valkomna-till-ryssland-kara-krimbor/ There is original article in Swedish newspaper and original writer is Arkadij Babtjenko, here is link to Russian wikipedia about him. He has published books about his experiences in Chechen Wars and works as journalist and war correspondent for Novaya Gazeta Nice post, sorry Sarex and 2133 guess you will just have to accept this one Unlike yourself, I'm not in the business of accepting or rejecting anything based solely on how much lube it needs to fit in with my preconceptions.

Burce aren't you going to ask for a source, or some link so you can prove it's not a lie. I thought you had a big speech about how you were all about truth now. Nah. It's just the latest example of the intellectual circle jerk that some people engage in, here. Something somebody doubly translated from somewhere on the internet, without links, without references, without anything is perfectly fine, but the opinions and experiences of forum members that are either Russian or have lived in Russia are ignored, hand waved as propaganda, or dismissed as "not knowing what they are talking about" or having vested interests. Don't despair, though—it's a well known phenomenon. Reminded me of something I read some time ago, in fact. Nothing new here, move along.

I'm nine years old and what is this?

Stratagems is probably my #1 must have mod—the insta-hasted Amnian troopers shenanigans is one of the results. But even so, it does little to spice up repetitive, generic encounters because of their simple, homogeneous design; a pack of wraiths and shadow fiends is still filler content despite the restored P&P abilities they get, I just need to enrage Korgan before engaging them to prevent level drain, and keep everyone else out of their sight. Caster fights are much more interesting though, and definitely increase the difficulty of certain encounters, bringing them up to what one would expect from, say, a 18th level Conjurer. But those are encounters that were already plot-related and interesting in their own right, not the generic mob packs I was rather referring to.

Then I have bad news for you. Scared yet?

The key differences are that a) the referendum in Crimea was unconstitutional as per the (admittedly depreciated) law of Ukraine and b) the result was a given. Indeed, the very act of organizing the referendum was grounded on the certainty of the outcome—as is usually the case when the people are asked direct questions about governance. "Worse", though, I don't know about that. I guess that depends on who wins the Presidential election in Afghanistan, and even then, you'd have to specify worse for whom. Not sure it can get much worse than Karzai, though there's always the possibility of a new government being willing to accomodate the Taliban. I think that would certainly be worse by any standards.

I agree with this. I think my problem with rogues is that devs always try to make them as effective in combat as fighters, rather than giving them fun rogue stuff to do outside of combat. The Quest For Glory series has had the best class implementation in games IMO. That's just because RPGs consist of 99 % combat. I can't even remember the last time rogues had an actual impact on the game apart from a few cosmetic locks and traps. Baldur's gate 1-2, where the cosmetic traps were a bigger deal? And even so. The last time I tried to replay BG2, I was genuinely surprised by how abundant filler combat is. Interesting fights like the one with Mencar Pebblecrusher and his band at Mithrest Inn are far and few between, but the game is chock full of "2d4+1 dungeon-thematic mobs" encounters. Oh, and I was also playing evil, so I had a squad of hasted troopers and mages dropped on my head every time I walked outside. Fun times. Suffice to say I got bored in the end and couldn't finish the playthrough.

That doesn't mean what you think it means.

Item descriptions aren't always amended by mods. Go by what the dev says, or download DLTCEP and check by yourself—wouldn't be the first time a mod doesn't work as intended. I don't have BG2 installed atm, so I can't check myself... edit: "I don't have BG2 installed" is also my blasphemous opinion for the day.

I've found that unsolicited advice is a surefire way to get people to become defensive and close you out. It's easy to fix the problems of other people... because you're not the one doing the actual fixing.

I like this idea, but unfortunately it's handled terribly in the games that have tried—by encouraging save scumming and metagaming, mostly. You rarely ever get in-game hints that you are going to be in over your head and that it would be wise to turn around... it's just a quick death followed by a sense of "wha?" → reload.

Just a quick clarification: Comintern as such was disbanded by Uncle Joe in 1943. By the 70's there was no international forum or umbrella organization for commies to rally to—it was either straight up pro-Soviet, or pro-Chinese.

You do know that Naftogaz is state owned, right? State owned enterprises aren't set up to make a profit, they are chartered and organized to provide services or goods that are deemed essential, strategic, or otherwise pertaining to the general interest. That's why they are state owned; they aren't necessarily profitable and therefore one cannot rely on capitalists to fill that niche with the assurances and stability required in critical roles. It is also risky to relinquish control of certain sectors of the economy to private, international actors, whose interests and motives are, at best, opaque. That you think the IMF is making the right suggestions in this is, frankly, mindboggling. This is not the first IMF credit Ukraine receives, it's actually the third, following one in 1998 and another in 2010. Each time, the bailouts required the application of austerity measures that have done nothing but choke an already battered economy. But this is not an isolated case, it is a result that consistently repeated. The IMF is a messenger all right, but the message is the old market fundamentalism doctrine of the Washington Consensus—it is a supranational instrument designed to wrestle control of economies that have been previously destabilized and weakened by other means or factors, from the representatives of the people. The strategy of taking over nations by saddling their economies with debt is not new; it's been around since the Roman Empire. And it's not that a rise in Russian gas prices is irrelevant, it's that no longer being treated as a preferential customer is the logical consequence of flipping the bird at one's provider. Remember, Russia is still fundamentally reacting to what the provisional government in Kiev is doing. The unelected, putschist government in Kiev, that is. Can't risk waiting until after the May election to sell the country for a pittance, can we?

Yes, because IMF-sponsored "fiscal prudence" has worked wonders elsewhere, right? Who cares if people can't pay for gas? After all, it's "bad business" to subsidize necesity goods, huh? But hey, let's spin the story to make it about Russia. And while we're at it, let's also forget that the single thing that started the ball rolling was Yanukovych's refusal to accept the same terms of the deal that his unelected successors have made. Can't let silly things like democracy get in the way of economic domination, now can we.