213374U

Therefore, my point stands. Art direction predates polycount and thus polycount by itself has ZERO influence on whether a game's art direction is good or bad, stupid.

As a general statement, this is simply false. Art direction predates polycount. AoD's engine looks plain ugly, though.

I've been following some of the dev reports, and one of the things I found most interesting was the new front/reserves combat system in provinces. How is it? And, did they do something about northern and central Russia being essentially four huge provinces? What about central China?

Problem is, in vanilla ARMA, CHC is pretty much neglected by the devs as far as events go. A CHC game I played with MOD34 (or was it 33?) was one of the most I enjoyed. Getting events like Long March, formation of popular armies, etc... really changes things. HOI2 was very accessible to strategy n00bs... but I only found this out after I discovered an AAR that explained every single thing in great detail. Think Fall Wei

I think it's horrible. It's the closest we have come to functional mind control. We are constantly bombarded with opinions that tell us who our heroes have to be, what we are to think, what we have to fear, what's the road to happiness, who are the good guys and the bad guys... etc. Throw in video games (or any other form of mental anesthesia), and we might as well dump our brains in the trash can. And it takes a conscious, sustained and focused effort on the individual's part to fight this.

Couldn't be a pirate even if I wanted to...

Uh, he's actually talking about a MODDED version of BG. Vanilla was a piece of cake.

Sorry, preorder only!

Quit squirming. You asked for examples that were elected by the people and had had their powers expanded by democratic institutions. Both fit the bill. Mussolini had a ~2/3 majority in the 1924 election AFTER the Acerbo Law was passed by the Italian Parliament. Vote rigging and coercion can only do so much if you don't have a vast popular support. So much for democratic convictions, eh? Hitler did earn his seats in the Reichstag, like it or not. And with von Papen as his vice chancellor and von Hindenburg as President, his power was FAR from absolute. It was in fact von Papen's overconfidence and von Hindenburg's apathy and inability that allowed things like the Reichstag fire decree to be enacted. It's a clear example of a powermonger manipulating the people and gaming the system. Um, not quite. If you had actually read, you would know that all it took for citizens to earn the right to vote was for them to complete their basic military service. It wasn't dependant on heritage, wealth or influence, so it's only an oligarchy in your mind. Twice you have dodged the question of why political rights should be freely given as opposed to earned somehow. What have YOU done for the good of your country to be entitled to ANYTHING? Wrong. Outsiders in any given society in antiquity were treated as inferior beings. There was no argument behind it other than "they are barbarians". Pretty much the same as it's with your racism, only there's more words and pseudoscience to disguise it, a reminiscence of the Enlightenment, perhaps. I'm still waiting for you to elaborate on that connection between "scientific" racism and capitalism, though. You know that's the title of the guy that made the Spanish Empire, right?

Actually, you can lose the AI or, at least, throw them off the track of the stealthing character. But once they go mad, they WILL track the rest of your group, across the map if need be, even if they don't KNOW there are other people apart from the sneaking/invisible character. Yeah, it's easy to piss him off. Getting the good ending involves playing super nice with him and only confronting him directly once, which is... difficult to justify from a RP perspective. Problem is, if you refuse to go along with his mad schemes and failed to convince him, the final battle becomes so much more difficult (Ascension+Irenicus+SCSII=world of hurt). It's still one of my favorite mods anyway. BTW, you need to save both the kid and her father, in Amkethran.

I mostly listen to the radio when at the gym... but it doesn't matter. I saw a video of some dude squatting 250kg with Rihanna playing on the background. Anyway, do you know of Millencolin?

This is the internets. Nobody is to be taken seriously.

Nice. I really need to learn to get rid of the jaggies.

Yes, of course, anything that doesn't portray this contemporary Hero of The People under favourable light is nothing but propaganda manufactured by the oil industry-controlled media. Sloppy dodge, even for you. "Quite aware", huh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerbo_Law They say ignorance is bliss. In your case, it's ****ing ecstasy. Explain further.Wait. Don't tell me you're one of those cranks that actually believe that The Party invented democracy (along with the wheel and penicillin)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_dem...n_and_exclusion That's a pretty flimsy connection you're making there between "capitalism" and racism, considering that the practice of conquering territories and enslaving the locals was thousands of years old in the 1500's already. They didn't really need to convince the populace of anything, since the power of the Holy ****ing Roman Emperor was pretty much absolute. But nice try.

Actually, that's not necessarily a bad thing. With several small parties what you get is an unfair distribution of power if there isn't a clear majority and the two "big" parties can't seem to reach an agreement - one party will enlist the support of the small ones to do something, but the small parties are sure going to want something in return. If you are willing to accept the notion that "the majority is right", it makes no sense to have small parties that can decide whether something goes or not.

<-nub

TL;DR Just kidding. I agree with you about building a character independently of gear. But I do it out of RP reasons. I don't like metagaming and stuff like building a character based on foreknowledge of rewards and items just isn't fun for me. The only exception I remember I have made in recent times to this is choosing falchion for my weapon master because of a certain particular weapon in MotB. But then again, a lot of the design decisions in that campaign were, to me, pretty stupid anyway... (Devastating Critical?!) and falchion is a good choice for a crit-focused build at any rate.

What's with the gap between the hairline and stubble, though.

Of course he is. And eventually, the alternative may well be illegal, too. There's a name for that, btw. Plenty of examples throughout History. It would do you some good to put Engels' manifesto down for a moment and read that instead. How about you explain why the people have to be trusted to select their own leaders just because they "are the People!"? Democracy and universal suffrage aren't necessarily one and the same.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world...90731-e3i5.html For the People!

They won't - they have no feelings to impair their reason and no egos to protect.

It does sound interesting. I'll probably get it, if only to kill some time until HOI3 comes out. Thanks guys.

I have a bad feeling about this. JA pretty much perfected the lightsaber combat with the dual sabers and saber staff. If they built upon that and made an AAA game today, it would be awesome. The JKII/JA style of saber combat would work pretty well with a controller too, it's sad that they went with crappy quicktime events for TFU. Myth. JO/JA fencing was CRAP. Fun for a while perhaps, but crap. It boiled down to circling your opponent from a safe distance, bunny hopping and rolling while waving your saber stupidly, hoping he'd miscalculate and step inside your striking distance and get killed. Oh, yeah. Don't forget kick spam. Full Force servers were even worse, with combat being decided by who could better execute the dreaded pull-throw-kick combo. It was the very first online dancing game. And that's with the single saber styles. Dual/lighstaff style was even more limited in moves and options and more unbalanced. The best/most fun SW lightsaber combat game I've played was the EP 3 game. The game itself was rather unremarkable, but the VS mode and its Tekken-like approach to duels was much, much better than JK's - with the addition of Force powers being balanced well enough to work without completely disrupting regular swordplay. I haven't played TFU, so I can't compare.

http://gizmodo.com/367698/technosexual-one...e-of-robot-love *vomits* This should have been the central story of the thread. Who cares about running robots. A guy humping his USB hub is win.