Yeah, I was watching Potato McWhiskey and this is his take. They have metrics that show most people don’t actually finish a game and that indicates a pretty big flaw in game design.

One interesting thing the devs brought up was the ability to pivot from one civ to another based on new information. Like if you discover your continent is mostly plains and horses, then maybe your next iteration looks more like the Mongols, with bonuses to cavalry. If your early conquest didn’t go off, maybe you pivot to a more science or culture oriented civ.

I don’t hate these ideas, it just depends on how it actually feels in game.

Hasta luego, Shoshanna!

I have a couple of very minor commits in Linux and, in the 3.0 era, had my name at the top of a source file for a platform that never saw the light of day and was later removed wholesale.

Still feel that invisible feather in my cap.

Bah, Imperial Units all the way. How else would I know how many stone I weigh, or how many King’s Pubes I am tall? I don’t want to convert from kilometers (whatever those are!) to gentlemans-strides or shilling miles to get where I’m going.

It’s subjective. Easy builds can be super fun. Especially if you earned it by getting some gear. It’s also an accessibility issue. Not everyone is 25 years old with lightning reflexes (or, conversely, not everyone has 20 years of history with the genre).

Anyway, my point was only that if you’re bored with being OP, try something different. If you think you’re invincible but killing things is a slog, maybe shift your gear to be more offensive etc. The way these games work, difficulty is entirely up to you.

I enjoyed D3 and D4, I think they both do difficulty well (at this point, D3 was stupid at launch). In both there are now hundreds of fine grained tiers you can shift up or down to find the right difficulty for your gear/build/skill.

That said, holding down a button to win is more of a build issue unless you’re running embarrassingly low difficulty. There will always be easy builds and more challenging, technical, timing based builds. Finding a fun build is part of the fun of ARPGs.

Hear hear. This has Ankh Morpork written all over it.

I’ve only used Jellyfin, what does Plex do better for the non-expert user?

I mean, fuck Elon and Tesla but if you’re spending money on a car you’re giving it to a bastard one way or another. The CEOs of Ford, BMW, et. al. might not be making asses of themselves on the global stage, but I’m sure they’re still horrible. Even used cars run on gas 99% of the time.

Child abuse is still illegal here regardless of corporal punishment. You can get CPS called on you for a lot of things that aren’t physical abuse too.

But of course I’m sure it being illegal in Europe means it’s totally non-existent. If there’s one thing kids are known for it’s having enough awareness to self report their parents bad behavior behind closed doors, right?

Because at some point after the first few million you turn into a dragon that must hoard wealth and the people that generate that wealth become a cost to minimize.

There are definitely some places the CGI could be improved these days (thinking distant group shots) but yeah, it’s incredible how well everything else holds up 20 years later even in 4K.

Kropotkin always hits.

It really depends on where you are and who you know. Half the Catholics I’ve met have been social justice leaning progressives, the other half are single issue Trump voters.

I feel guilty about it, but I appreciate the monthly pass. I played EUIV for exactly one month, at a total cost of like $7 (got the base game for free at some point) with all the bells and whistles. It seemed like a good compromise because you’d have to pay it for years at this point to cover the DLC out right, but it is a disgusting level of rent seeking behavior.

Now it bothers me that I’d need to put another $7-$10 into the machine to access those saves, but not as much as if I’d throw down hundreds of dollars on it to own the content for a 10 year old game.

I love that this exists and I think I know what I’m getting my wife for Christmas

In Cogenitor, Starfleet wouldn’t get very far if it had to roll up to every first contact demanding a species conform to human morality. It has to take a neutral position or first contact becomes an ultimatum. That doesn’t mean Starfleet is pro-slavery, it just means it recognizes that it’s not in a position to force that change on a species it met five seconds ago. Now if the species was trying to join the Federation (down the line) obviously that’s a different story…

The Orion episode too… Uh, weren’t the “slaves” actually just pirates? Can we trust anything said when it was just a setup to steal the ship? Not to mention that just because a character says something doesn’t make it true or reflect the morality of the show/writers. Maybe that Orion is just an idiot or rationalizing his shitty behavior…

I have a few hundred, but 5500? Sheeeit. The game is definitely evergreen though.

Enterprise doesn’t deserve to be in that list. It may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s way closer to the other series than Discovery or Picard.

Also, uh, sibling sex and pro-slavery comments? I must have missed those episodes.

Can’t wait for the expansion, 10/21. I’ve been putting off a new play through for it, and Wube always puts in so much polish (as the FFFs show).