Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh hey, I thought of something actually

Diminishing Value of Elites/Commanders

When you encounter groups of enemies composed entirely of "Elites" (eg. Elite Guards) in random circumstances in which you would expect them to be doing something more useful. Even worse is when enemies with higher ranks just start appearing in groups, so suddenly you have to fight a squad of "Enemy Captain"s and their grunts aren't even mixed in. Worse than that is when this all occurs due to level scaling, so after a point you'll only ever seen "Elite Bandits/Bandit Chiefs" travelling in packs with good equipment, and when you see a battle it'll inexplicably be composed entirely of officers.

I suppose a sister-peeve of this is that tendency to just use a higher rank or position as a shorthand for "stronger and better equipped". As if the US could have won WW2 faster if they personally sent their strongest soldiers, Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton, straight into battle where they would inexplicably be more durable and deadly.

8/10

Indeed, the US has moved on from replacing democracies with strongmen to replacing regimes of all flavours to bloody power vacuums conductive to the likes of ISIS growing.

Quote from: smjjames on March 12, 2015, 09:41:59 am

We nearly did with Iraq, but that seems to have been more not understanding or underestimating the sectarian conflict over there.

The whole problem with Iraq is that we did try to install a democracy without having the faintest idea how the country operated, or didn't operate. Since we were unwilling to redraw borders, we could have saved everyone a whole bunch of bloodshed and money by putting in a monarch or a better strongman.

That sure didn't work for the Iranians. The difference between leaving a dictator around and installing one yourself is that if shit hits the fan when your installed puppet is running things, you get the blame and enmity of a bunch of people that otherwise wouldn't be able to find your country on a map. That's the sort of thing that produces the likes of the current Iranian regime.

@GJ, did you play the expansion? The Cold War campaign has, IMO, excellent Espionage scenarios that always were half the appeal of the campaign for me.

I liked some of the Cold War scenarios (espionage was unique, the "install an allied puppet regime" scenarios were fun, etc) as well as the scenarios of a few other campaigns, but I still found that RoN had a lot less versatility in terms of scenario design than EE and AOE2. That isn't to say they weren't fun, though

The death of the Republicans is greatly exaggerated, unfortunately. While Hispanics are a growing demographic, over time they tend to stop identifying as Hispanic altogether and swing to the right in the process, something that can be seen by the Tejanos that are as ethnically Hispanic as anyone in Mexico but identify as "White" or "Mixed Race", are very possibly Protestant, and as Republican as the cattle ranchers.   Meanwhile, while I don't have strong data, I seem to recall the Millennial vote being very decisively split between those who got the vote when Bush was leaving office and those who got it near the end of Obama's first time, with the first group being overwhelmingly Democratic and the second tending towards being independent, less politically active, and far more open to certain Republican views. Hell, I seem to recall an exit poll that claimed 18 year olds voted more for Romney than Obama, though I'm a bit skeptical of going that far.

The waters of the Net Neutrality debate have been muddied by the messy state of the American telecom industry from the start. For one thing, a lot of states and municipalities pass laws that make it exceedingly hard to compete with established telecom companies, or else just straight up give one company a monopoly (usually for some kind of side benefit, like "we give you a monopoly and you give our schools unlimited bandwidth"). If this wasn't the case, NN wouldn't be an issue since competition would drive companies that engaged in throttling into irrelevancy.

Now, the idea of Net Neutrality itself seems simple enough, but it really is more complicated than it looks. For one thing, what constitutes actual "Net Neutrality" tends to be very vague, and thus it opens up a can of worms with regards to regulation. For example, in Slovenia, providers are punished for bundling free services, for example, providing a free pseudo-DropBox to customers. Classifying ISPs as a "utility" also leaves a lot of questions, considering how competitive other "utilities" tend to be. The rules were 300 pages long, it seems a bit naive to assume it's quite so simple as it appears.

It's really uncanny that they'd remove a relatively niche champion's core item, promise to buff them in exchange, and then ruin their entire kit for shits and giggles. I mean, don't get me wrong, Veigar's stun was annoying as all hell with certain champs when handled by someone that could reliably land it on your face, but his kit is so limited that it actually somewhat balanced out, since he'd drop everything on the target and if it didn't get a kill he'd have to waddle away with absolutely nothing left to contribute thanks to his massive cooldowns. Without the stun, the Q is minor poke, the W is never hitting anything except the wave, and the ult isn't going to be enough to secure a kill.

I can conceivably think of one way for this to be redeemed (though it would take a lot of tweaking), and that would be to rework Veigar's AP stacking into something more like Nasus, where he could reliably stack a lot of AP somewhat quickly, either by buffing the Q stacks or by straight up adding AP stacks to his W. Then his nerfed ratios and weaker stun wouldn't matter as much since he'd be getting 400-600 AP per average game from stacks alone anyway. Depending on how things worked out, it could produce some kind of weird ranged AP burst mage tank (RDC, maybe VS, then tank items). Add some built in CDR and you have a brand new, viable late game AP champ that doesn't need to fold to the LeagueofBlinking philosophy in which every champ must have a mobility boost and abilities that make them masters of everything (see: pre-nerf Yasuo, Gnar). Of course, it would be really easy to overtweak and produce a champ capable of melting full build Sion, but it'd be a nice rework of a relatively straightforward and soon to be obsolete champion.

Somewhat on the same topic, I've heard rumours that Kassadin might have his ult range cut down from 750 to 450, or slightly more than a flash. This makes me a bit annoyed, since Kassadin has been crawling back into the meta after beatings from the nerf stick mostly because of the recent item reworks destroying the mana regen of his former pre-6 counters, long ranged lane bullies, while his W lets him sustain and poke forever. His damage is really underwhelming in of itself, his ult only realistically ever has 4 casts, his early game is quite weak (assuming his lane opponent isn't an idiot that walks up to take poke every 7 seconds without returning fire once), and he's only circumstantially useful anyway, mostly against heavier AP teams or squishy teams. Put a Kassadin against a team with two or three AD bruisers and he becomes totally useless. I really don't want one of my favourite champs to end up like Syndra.