Bay 12 Games Forum

I still enjoy Nemesis as a game mode, but it's a royal pain in the ass to start one. Nobody agrees on a plan, so everyone tries to pick what they think is the worst champ, and winds up giving the enemy team a workable mix.

And when I ask for suggestions, I don't get them until after I've picked and get yelled at for picking whatever I picked.

I tend to just say "all ADCs" before the game starts, and everyone tends to agree pretty fast. Except when we have the one guy that thinks all supports is weaker.

At least in NA, from what I can tell, nearly everyone dropped exactly one tier. My two Plat friends landed G5, all of my silver 4/5 friends landed bronze 4/5, and my gold 1 friend landed silver 1.  I was silver 2 and landed bronze 2, but I climbed to bronze 1 in a day before taking a break by duoing with one of my former silver 5 friends.

I don't really feel like playing a lot of ranked, though, since it's bizzaro-land as high bronze/low silver is littered with everything from season 4 bronzes to season 4 golds, so most of the games I didn't duo in (since they bring the MMR lower than most former golds) are complete shitshows, either hilariously easy wins or frustratingly massive losses. Second game I play, my team is composed entirely of actual bronze players, the other team has a mixture of silvers and golds, by 9 minutes I'm 1/1/0 (after going for a suicide attack when I get caught in an inescapable gank) but the overall score is 3-18 for the other team. Fourth game, my team has a former gold 3 ADC, gold 2 jungler, and gold 4 top, I go 2/0/0 in lane when suddenly everyone roams over because I'm technically the "losing-est" lane and the game ends as an absolute stomp of something like 39-7.

Anyhow, playing Kassadin is hilariously straightforward in Bronze (assuming you get an actual bronze lane opponent and jungler). His weaker laning phase isn't punished really heavily and you can actually get a head up with a kill or two just through using his poke in conjunction with his shield to get good trades. Half the time the enemy team doesn't expect a gank from mid, and Kassadin is incredibly good at securing kills so you can snowball incredibly fast even if you don't totally dominate lane. I find that I can die between 1 and 3 times in lane or on ganks, but so long as I pick up a few kills during that time I will hit the "Kassadin Singularity", at which point Kassadin can jump on a semi-squishy target (say, an ADC during a botlane gank), delete them immediately, eat whatever damage is given in retaliation, and then jump back again, possibly while spamming /laugh. Once this singularity is reached, unless the enemy teamcomp is particularly anti-Kassadin (as in, it has a whole bunch of bruisers with gapclosers/hard CC and no super squishy targets), Kassadin will not die again and will rake up a massive KDA regardless of the performance of his teammates. He just scales so damn well, and since the changes to his ult he doesn't really benefit from going Archangel's, so he hits his powerspike much earlier.

High Viscosity Space

Willing to accept this for two reasons. First, controlling a ship that you can't modestly accelerate without having to decelerate an equal amount to stop would be annoying. and second, how the hell am I supposed to catch a ship with theoretically near-infinite velocity that shoots past when I'm waiting stationary for a target?

A lot of people identify Thatcher with the collapse of local British industry, but realistically she just happened to be around when the unsustainable British model came crashing down, and she handled it better than most of her predecessors would have.

For one thing, British companies tended to consist of large groups of diverse companies owned by a handful of magnates, yet by the 70s (and even the 50s to some extent) only a few of these companies actually generated a profit (eg. Jaguar for BMH) and basically kept a bunch of totally unprofitable, bankrupt companies afloat instead of actually expanding these productive sectors and letting the unprofitable ones go. The owners tended to not want to ever let workers go (even in the most unprofitable companies with the most unwieldy workforces) and the unions definitely ensured that layoffs were few and far between as well, so the problems only grew worse. By the time Thatcher took over, the few profitable British companies were being driven out of the market by German and Japanese competitors since British profits went into keeping unprofitable ventures afloat. So she took over a country with a screwed up economic base, panicked workers that actually had to worry about losing their jobs for the first time in decades, and a major energy crisis (that the Labour government had done a terrible job of handling). Realistically, most of the things she's blamed for were the responsibility of those who preceded her (especially the Heath and Wilson governments), and she handled things in such a way that Britain at least still had a few industries that it was internationally competitive in.

A disproportionate amount of people only support freedom of speech when they don't find that speech offensive, which is precisely the kind of speech that needs defending. I sincerely doubt the people marching in support of Hebdo would consider letting Holocaust deniers and racists be free to say what they want, which is basically what free speech comes down to. To quote Mencken,

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Ireland in CM or 1066 is generally pretty straightforward, with a clear, relatively easy goal to achieve and should help you get a handle on the basic mechanics. I think 1066+ Spain isn't too bad either. Don't go OG Ireland though, they tend to get repeatedly raided and annexed by Vikings.

The major Viking powers in OG tend to be easy-modo, though they require slightly more micromanagement than Ireland. The Sons of Lodbrok and Harald Fairhair are both particularly good since they have the the benefits of easy raiding/conquest targets and being the strongest in the neighbourhood, respectively.

If you want a fairly easy but somewhat more powerful (if complex) early start, try either the Ummayads in CM or the Ummayad heir in Seville. As the heir, you can safely expand southward against infidels while helping to secure your position in Spain, and as the Ummayads proper it isn't hard to take Asturias and then push into France (though they aren't quite as strong as they used to be, so you generally have to wait for Francia to explode as the result of a Karloman/Charlemagne succession crisis, which I find happens within about 30 years from the start in 90% of games).

The problem with the Abbasids is that they're very large, but their ruling dynasty is ridiculously secure because of all the positive opinion bonuses they get (Sayyid, lots of Piety from being Caliph, lots of prestige from inheriting a gigantic empire) and their expansion is quick because of incredibly strong CBs. The only limitation is their military strength and decadence, but decadence vanishes when you're winning holy wars left and right.

The Muslims really aren't balanced at all, and never have been because of their weird mechanics. One patch you have the Fatimids marching through Constantinople, the next all of Africa and the Holy Land is a patchwork of HRE/Castille/Venice colonies. By TOG and CM, I've only seen them ineffectually collapse in on themselves and be pushed back hard (the earlier patches of TOG) or else occupy Turkey, Greece, the lower Balkans and half of France before 1000 (the current state of CM, last time I checked).

They aren't even that fun, because all their neat features carry with them the incredible bore of decadence micromanagement and having to murder all the relatives that slide back into decadence after being convinced to reform, as well as all the relatives that your idiot cousins tried and failed to reform. It's only worse with you basically requiring a full 4 wife harem and not having any Chaste trait, meaning that within a few generations you're combing a family tree of several hundred members for a handful of decadent members ruining things, until it gets to the point that while your vassals are completely loyal and your army can crush all infidels underfoot, you're basically spending 90% of the game dealing with relatives.

Quote from: Baffler on December 02, 2014, 10:26:53 pm

Do you deny then that the CIA collapsed the communist regime in Afghanistan, or Iran's Mohammad Mossadegh, or Jacobo Arbenz, or armed Contras, or the tried to overthrow the Sandinistas or the Castros, and half a dozen other things? They don't.

Those operations were conducted by perfectly human and downright boring means.  They dont just wave a magical wand and conjure a revolution out of nowhere.

The actual process of creating an army in a foreign country from scratch is done by the Green Berets and it would take a long time if you wanted a big force.  It's also done through conventional military channels and the constitution requires congressional approval for long term military deployments which means you can't hide a massive operation of that type.  So the US doesn't just conjure up militaries of foreigners, that would be wildly impractical.  Small foreign units are sometimes are useful (that's why the Green Berets exist) but what's much, much more common is that the existing military leadership can be won over.

Unless I misread something, he isn't saying anything like "The CIA created the Ukrainian Army and is running all operations in the country", he's saying the CIA has had a hand things such as the Orange Revolution and the Maidan, which hardly requires anything that isn't relatively "boring". It seems to be incredibly naive to think that the CIA had no involvement at all in either event and simply sat back and watched as allies of the EU (and, by extension, the US) took over a strategically important country completely on their own.

Further, while there are plenty of Russians fighting for the separatists, it seems just as silly to act as though the DPR/LPR are literally just fronts for the Russian Army, like the people living in those regions were loyal flag waving Ukrainians happy with the current state of the country and were unfortunately taken hostage by foreign invaders. It also seems silly to suggest that Putin himself orchestrated the rebellion, as if he would create a warzone on his own border so he could constantly have to navigate between Russian public opinion and Western international outrage, all for the possibility of gaining a fairly small amount of land that would likely be a devastated mess.