kanisatha

The stats affecting conditions is one thing that is best turned off in the difficulty settings. They're just an annoyance that has nothing to do with making things challenging.

Stealth-based designs don't allow for those graceful aeronautical shapes of the past. The F-15 is my all-time favorite fighter jet, but I have to admit that the original Su-27 in clean mode is the most beautiful fighter jet ever built.

I agree that the US has lost all credibility in the world these days. But I also 100% believe that the world will come to deeply regret this situation very soon. People often say "history repeats itself." I have always intellectually rejected this notion. But nowadays increasingly I find myself wondering if indeed there is something to the notion of history repeating itself. The world today feels very eerily similar to the early 1930s.

Sorry. I think they're trying to cover the range of different types of games here. The WotC guy even suggested they were open to strategy games based on D&D. And I think the classic iso RPG type is supposed to be covered by BG3. Personally, though I also prefer party-based isometric cRPGs, a game like what Hidden Path may be working on could be great if they're doing something similar to the Witcher games: third-person open world game where you're playing a specific character (like Geralt). I would LOVE to be able to play Elminster or Storm Silverhand or Erevis Cale, or my all-time favorite Forgotten Realms character: Khelben "The Blackstaff" Arunsen!!

My favorites were "Rivers of Babylon," "Brown Girl in the Ring," and "Malaikka" (sp?). Never did care for Rasputin myself. I just liked the songs that have a lot of Caribbean steel drums because I love that sound.

Well, my expectation is that war with China is inevitable one way or the other. The question is which country gains with the passage of time. Some analysts believe that China has peaked, and so the balance of power will become more favorable to us the longer we can delay that fight. I disagree, and believe we are better off fighting them sooner rather than later. There is also the issue of ever-increasing strategic coordination among China, Russia, and Iran these days. I think the Chinese would very much like to wait until the three revisionist allies can carry out a coordinated assault on the US international order: China invading Taiwan, Russia invading Ukraine, and Iran moving to take control of Iraq through its proxies. But Putin seems to be messing up China's plans by being overly aggressive and impatient right now vis-a-vis his plan to take Ukraine. I think Putin feels that at his age his time may be running out to go into Russia's history books as Vladimir the Great.

Actually no, if you read the evaluations that were done. The -25 was billed as a M3.2 jet, but the manufacturing was so bad that any more than a few seconds at those speeds and the airframe literally tore apart at the seams. Also, its Tumansky engines only had about 200 hours of flight time, again because of very poor manufacturing. The design of the aircraft was pretty decent, but Soviet manufacturing was atrocious.

Hehe. Her. But with a male co-/backup vocalist.

Hehe, yeah any group that was internationally big in the 70s or 80s is in my collection. A lot of Cliff Richard, and among US groups definitely John Denver, and also Leo Sayer, Simon & Garfunkel, and so many more. Maybe we should start a 70s and 80s international rock/pop music thread. As for life in the US, I definitely cannot complain as I have had a very successful career and am financially in great shape. And especially since many of the kids I went to school with are sadly no more, killed in the war years in one way or the other. That could just as easily have been my fate. But I have wondered if I would want to come and live here if I were a young kid today. The answer is definitely not the resounding 'yes' from my youth. I know this will upset some people here, but the US I arrived at in '86 was so much a better place than the US I'm living in right now. Materially, things are much better today of course. But morally, spiritually, and especially socially, not so much imho.

Back in the Cold War the huge disparity in the military expenditures of NATO v. the Warsaw Pact clearly also showed up in the disparity in technology quality between the two sides. This was especially true after Belenko's defection with his MiG-25 in '79(?), where before we were so awed by Soviet fighter jets but after we got to examine the -25 we learned that it was pretty much crap. But looking at where the Chinese are now, the same pattern does not hold. Despite spending a lot less on defense than us, they have largely caught up with us in many areas of military tech and are ahead of us now in some areas. They are now able to field a navy that is bigger than ours. This is why it has been such a shock to US military analysts and especially members of Congress. We all were told for many years that U.S. spending far outstripped Chinese spending (including in story after story in the newsmedia as justification for defense cutbacks), which then meant we were way ahead of them in capability (it was logically assumed -- though not by me). Then, just like that over the past year or so, the Joint Chiefs are testifying before Congress that the Chinese have caught up with us and even surpassed us. But how can that be?!! We've been outspending them by vast sums of money!!! This is the best ever example of official budget numbers not being reliable indicators of military capability. The Chinese are clearly able to do a LOT more with their defense dollars than we are.

I have every one of their ten albums plus all the singles. All on CD, as is my entire music collection of about 270 CDs. Growing up in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and early '80s, the sole English language radio channel in the country played a lot of great Western rock and pop music, but overwhelmingly European than American because as a former British colony everything was much more Anglo-centric. So ABBA got played a LOT (along with another very popular group called Boney M, a Jamaican group but from Germany), and I spent many hours in the afternoons after getting home from school listening to ABBA on the radio while dreaming of someday living in the West.

No, the only things we know so far are that it is third-person, open world, and AAA. And another D&D game is being made by OtherSide Entertainment. Zero info on that one. WotC boss has said they have about seven D&D video games in the works, with an expected one or two releases per year from '21 through '25. This year was Dark Alliance. in '22 hopefully it is BG3 plus the Hidden Path game.

Yeah military budgets/expenditures are what's most commonly used to assess the macro-level military capabilities of states, because they are the easiest to use and to understand and they naturally lend themselves to comparison. But many studies have shown expenditures are a very poor variable for assessing military power/capacity, not only because in some countries the numbers don't accurately reflect true expenditures but also because in other countries (typically Western democracies) they are highly inflated (bloated?) in value and padded with expenditures only tangentially/marginally associated with military capability. In the U.S., for example, there's a lot that goes into the defense budget that's not defense-related because the defense budget usually passes with overwhelming support and so it's a good vehicle through which to pass pork-barrel spending that individual members of Congress want for their states/districts. Plus, there's a ton of spending that's welfare for troops and their families that you won't find in most other national defense budgets. Not saying we shouldn't be spending on the welfare of our troops; just saying it should be counted under the general social welfare part of spending and not as defense spending. And yes, then you also have a LOT of waste and mismanagement, because you can more easily get away with that kind of waste and mismanagement when it's associated with something so serious as national defense, whereas the public would never accept that kind of waste and mismanagement in any other area of spending. A side-note: the U.S. intelligence and black programs budget is very small compared with the defense budget. I think the black programs are probably actually managed better than the regular defense programs.

I'm looking forward to Starfield mainly. Other big games I'm interested in are not likely to release in '22. There is that D&D game being made by Hidden Path Entertainment, which may release in '22.

As a huge ABBA-phyle this made my day.

Yup. This was a big part of what I researched and wrote on in my doctoral project. And every semester I have to explain this to my students in my intro to international relations class. Also, I use WotR articles a lot in my classes for current world affairs exposure for my students.

Slim pickings for me in the current Steam sale. Picked up Disco Elysium (55% off) and Patron, and DLCs for Solasta and Surviving Mars (no, not the horrible recent release). Most of the games on my Steam wishlist are still in EA, so can't get them. And the games I am truly looking forward to, like Avowed, Starfield, DA4, and inXile's new IP RPG, are a long ways off.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1287840/Disciples_Liberation/ Anyone here played this game? I'd be interested in your thoughts or feedback, especially related to its combat.

Just a side-note on D:OS, I have only tried the first game, and hated it so much that I am unwilling to try the second one. Re. BG3, and again to note, I am not playing the EA and only know the game from a LOT of time I've spent discussing it on various forums plus watching every video of it I can find. Anyway, here goes, in no particular rank order: Don't like TB combat at all as I find it too slow, aggravating, and immersion-breaking. But, on this issue, I have come to terms with the fact that this is not going to change in BG3, and as long as they give me easy/story difficulty modes that I can switch to any time within the game so I can breeze through disliked combat I should be okay. Relatdely, don't know if there will be a robust set of difficulty modes and toggles that can be changed even after you start the game. Party size of four. This could be a dealbreaker all by itself. Too many Larian home-brew mechanics I dislike, such as elemental surfaces, barrelmancy, shove, etc. All of them I find to be cheap, lame gimmicks. The way Larian does party movement (i.e. their chain-linked party movement). No true pause function during real-time exploration. Only a pseudo-pause function by force-triggering TB combat. Do not like their concept of origin characters, and especially that a custom PC has no connections to the game/world and is the most irrelevant and disconnected member of your party. In a party with origin character companions, they are the "stars" of the party; they are the ones central to the story. Your custom PC just doesn't matter in the game. Not a single likeable companion for me so far, and especially the question of whether I will be able to have a full party (of six with a mod?) of likeable and good-oriented companions. Relatedly, no Lathander as one of the included gods? That's bullcrap. Having one companion with some deep dark secret and who is not what they appear to be is fine, even interesting. Having this be ALL the companions is just plain ridiculous, and reflects unimaginative and weak writing ability. Party companions locked at the end of Act 1, and companions not in your active party are lost to you. Game visuals/art-style looks way too much like D:OS (or more specifically like Rivellon, a game setting I hated). A writing style that is all about being hip and edgy and cool and angst-ridden. Even their so-called humor is just not funny to me. And may be a few other things I can't quite remember right now.

What's priceless is that you can stick this on to any vessel so long as it has the power output to support it.

I've never heard of this game, and watching that trailer I had exactly this same reaction. Prolly not a game for me.

This is one of the very few (may be the only) things you and I disagree on, Bruce.

No TP camera was why they did not get an otherwise guaranteed sale from me for TOW. And if Avowed is supposed to be "Skyrim-like," then the one thing Skyrim did totally right was including a TP camera, no matter how imperfect it may have been. So, for me, and I imagine quite a number of others, no TP camera = no sale.

Thanks for pointing out the Steam page. We've known the release date as that was part of the reveal back in the summer. But now I can put it on my wishlist. From what I have been able to gather, the premise of the game appears to be that humanity has advanced far enough in spacefaring technology that we are at a point where we can go anywhere within the solar system pretty easily and routinely. And the game is about us taking the next big step, leaving our star system and traveling to another star system for the first time, something far more challenging and dangerous than what we've become accustomed to. For me, given my academic background and personal interests, that is a truly awesome premise for a game. Sooooo looking forward to it.

^This. So this. I think the amount of time the devs had to devote to tinkering with and balancing the mechanics may be is what took away from some other critical parts of the game. So lock down the mechanics; don't keep reopening that can of worms. Put the focus of game development into the story, world, characters, etc.