Bay 12 Games Forum

Depending on what sort of fan it is, you might try sticking a bowl with some ice water in it in front of the fan. Seemed to make a very notable difference for me that summer the AC went out. If you're dealing with a ceiling fan, a lil'cheapo desk fan could do the trick for that, and you could justify the cost by taking it with you when/if you need something like that.

But yeah. 'Bout the only other things I could think of is better cooling for the electronics (which would be expensive and/or effort intensive) or some fairly extreme measures. There's a lot you can do with carpeting and suchlike to adjust how your room retains heat, from what I've seen, but that kinda' precludes the "not paying" part, ha. But yeah, not!carpet floor (hardwood, tile, etc.), metal furniture, making sure the room's very sparse... stuff like that. If you're really going balls to the wall there's a fair amount of lil'engineering/furnishing tricks you can pull to help cool things off, though my own knowledge of such things is fairly sparse.

Shameless bump, and while I'mm here, can anyone tell me their favorite evolutionary explanation for a quirk of humans?

There's only one evolutionary explanation

The gene coding for that behavior or what enables that behavior managed to reproduce more at some point in history, or at the very least was not made to reproduce less by the trait's manifestation. Without some serious experimental shenanigans (that I'm not entirely sure we have the capability to pull off, yet) you can't really say more about that. For all we know the gene sequence that holds yawning managed to lock in because it reduced the spectrum of light we're capable of seeing and that somehow managed to let our ancestors reproduce more effectively (perhaps even entirely by chance, haha!). All hail the RNG, harrum.

You can only compare late age Ermor to the other Late Age since there is no "Shattered Timeline Era".

Yeesss... and there's a number of other LA nations with a strong death presence. Ermor's got a slight advantage in caster quality, but pretty much everything else has more casters, and better spell access outside of death.

So... How do you rate Caelum and Aero and Ermor, with their versatile and strong choices of troops, and strong magic to back them up? Other factions get largely unbalanced choices of troops, favoring one style or the other, while certain nations happen to be good at everything and wrecking-ball all other opposition. The factions need balance, bottom line. How many times have you opted to play as Jomon late age?

Aero... do you mean Arco? Arco's solid across the board, with the elephants for early expansion and then the caster presence to leverage their higher map move chaff stuff excellently later, after everything and its little cousin can make those elephants demolish your own army. Heavy astral and good spread otherwise makes them an absolutely vicious communion nation, too. Arco's nasty in most of the eras due to that communion punch and solid early expansion.

Caelum's always had major fatigue issues for me (flying wrecks your dudes fatigue), insofar as their non-caster stuff goes, not to mention the problem inherent to things like the enemy deciding to laugh and cast storm. The mammoths are alright (same niche as the Arco 'phants, and the same problems), but they've got less of a unit presence (again, the flying thing) to help back it up than Arco. Archers are alright, but short bows are comparatively eh. Magic spread isn't exactly mindblowing either, though air magic is pretty solid and they've got what they need to bootstrap to a fair bit of excellent low hanging stuff, eyeballin' 'em... they'd definitely be relying on the pretender or summoned stuff for late game casting, though. Ubiquitous flight does offer a lot of strategic advantages, though, even if pound for pound most of your flying units are on the sub end of par.

Ermor... doesn't have versatile or strong troops, at least in LA, and while it's got strong death, it doesn't have strong anything else.

Jomon's actually not that bad. Their yari-dudes are good for blocking stuff and their archers are one of the better ones in LA. Elite stuff's kinda' so-so, unfortunately. They've got a solid combat magic presence as well -- which is the big thing -- and alright communion potential (especially via forged crystals.).

Quit giving me these quips about 'that isn't how actual players play' because that's the game as is, and it's relatively easy to counter expensive priest spam. Don't make me PBEM you and prove the brokenness.

Indie priests are kinda' cheap And you'd be going well out of the way of simple chaff spam to do it, which was... kinda' my point. Couldn't play yeh even if you wanted to, though... don't have access to the game at th'mo.

Also, I do not have issues with fatigue outside of tournaments or specific instances where a spell-caster blows their whole load on an exhaust spell and passes out the whole match to delay 20 of my soldiers. Worthwhile full battlefield effect fatigue spells are difficult to get to far as I remember.

That's why you have five or six casters with maybe a minor earth bless if they're holy There's a couple of full field fatigue spells, checking on it -- one for fire and one for ice, at the very least, both at enchant six, 4 ranks in the respective path, which is a little high but pretty doable. Then a handful of decent AoE ones (sleep cloud, etc.) much lower down and easier to use.

It's why I opt for defensive magic in Dom3. Those types of spells fall pretty flat when you've got all sorts of counters and buffs ready, of which there is a wide availability. Isn't it something like three branches are defensive and utility oriented mainly?

Ehn, not exactly. Or rather, depends on what you call utility. There's only one major direct damage school (evocation) and two largely non-combat ones (Conjuration, construction), but the rest of them have pretty good mixes of offense and defense.

Also, my game experiences might vary from others as I always went with having dormant [the long one] pretenders to enhance my dominion and magical abilities. Might give me an unfair advantage against things to have rainbow blessings on all holy units.

Yeah... I leaned toward that myself, but I'm terribly aware that it's usually a fairly suboptimal thing to do. SC for the early expansion, rainbow for early rainbow-y stuff, etc., so forth, so on, is often a better idea depending on how capable your nation is of early expansion or conflict. If you've got a dormant pretender and your neighbors have an awake SC, there's even odds you don't survive 'till the pretender gets out, heh. To say nothing about the nastiness of what happens if you start near a blood sac nation without your pretender up and about.

I'd argue the armor system itself almost needs fixing. Can't be too detailed with it as I don't remember the specifics, I just remember that 1 unit with 15+ armor can be practically invincible to anything not special/blessed/Notaheropretender. What's that late age Fire nation, Abysia?  With the guys in plate mail, tower shields, AND fire maces, with blessing ability? 24 resources to make. That shit is incredibly broken and should be removed completely, and you should have to spend crystals and research energy to create such elaborate equipment, not start the game with such ability [See below]. Would cut down on rushing castles to rush chaff to win.

Iirc it takes like two/three level of research and some n2 or w2 casters to pretty much neuter most early game heavy armor rushes Probably less than that, it's been a while since I muddled about with Dominions. Most heavy armor period, really, when it doesn't have a heavy earth bless (which even that may not be enough) or heavy buffing backing it up. Little bit of fatigue spam and they keel over dead to spearmen.

Fatigue is incredibly deadly in Dominions, heh. If you're not seeing fatigue issues with something like that Mict, it's because it's not being leveraged against you, not because it doesn't exist. It's less drastic early on (but even then, a couple dudes spamming some of the early fatigue spells can wreck some serious havoc), sure, but in the later game some of the battlefield wide stuff can absolutely neuter huge swathes of anything that actually has fatigue. It can get pretty incredible, ha.

Re: some of your later stuff in that post, don't get me wrong, some of the nations do have comparatively notable advantages, but it's never because of single units like that -- not even when it's a decent bless strategy (even EA or LA mict's relatively trivial to drop if they're not doing something more than just spewing blessed jaguar warriors around.). It's all about the ability to leverage combined arms -- particularly what the casters bring to the table -- not the sole ability to spew chaff. Armies in dominions live and die by their magical backup. The rest provides the lever itself, perhaps, but it's the casters that provide the leverage. You can get away without much magic use vs. the AI, but even a semi-decent human player would tear y'apart if you try that.

With the fixed units it alleviates this strategy, unless of course they're like LA Ermor and have fucking stupidly broken chaff soliders [which are free, cost nothing to raise..] and then the strategy is still to zerg rush.

Trying to say this as unaggressive as I can, but things like that make me wonder if you actually play Dom3 much Mict. LA Ermor's chaff units are pretty close to trash. They're broken, sure, but they're broken because of how useless they are against anything with two brain cells to rub together. They're hard countered by priest spam and like a half dozen specifically anti-undead spells, some of which can wipe out huge swaths of LA Ermor freespawn in one casting. They tromp the AI (which doesn't know how to react to chaff spamming, undead or otherwise) and basically nothing else, because they're so one dimensional it's almost painful

People hate playing against them because they ruin the land they're in, not because their chaff is a threat. LA Ermor can sometimes be dangerous if they make it past the early/mid game, once they've gotten enough summons and casters about to leverage the few turns the chaff can buy them before being annihilated -- but whether they can reach that point is almost entirely dependent on the whims of the game's other players. Before that all it takes is a few indie provinces mass producing priests to completely walk over the undead freespawn and just a little extra to murder off their (painfully monochromatic, if very good at what they actually do) casters.

Coo-king? co-oking? What is this thing you speak of? The closest thing i can find is TV Dinner and Sandwich. That does look really good though and it makes me wish i could do this "cooking" thing.

Is called recipe, comrade. You follow it and delicious food magically appears.

Unless you lack proper cooking utensils. Then is called proper experimental methodology, and you repeatedly go through it until something edible results.

Also occasionally effective is what I call the "stir method". With it, you put many things in a bowl and warm it until safe to eat, stirring as you go. This method is very easy! Occasionally creates culinary monstrosities that toe the line of edibility, but very easy. Also encompasses preparing many things and then throwing them in bowl and stirring. Difference is that one is mixed and cooked and the other is cooked and mixed.

... seriously though, basic cooking is as simple as following directions and paying bloody attention, and there's a lot you can do with that.

But the Armikrog developer is 'only' a bigot and fundie, of which there are millions in the USA, with hundreds of billions of dollars in total possession, so the million or so he'd gain in revenue is not really significant there

It's always significant; this is basic "Tragedy of the Commons" stuff. Just because the harm one does or supports is relatively small compared to all the harm that is done or could be done does not mean that one does no harm. Harm is harm is harm. Just because many people litter does not entail that you should not concern yourself with littering. Just because there is already a great deal of trash on the ground does not make it acceptable for a person to throw more down. Same concept, y'ken?

I'd rather have fundies preoccupied making nice games than doing fundie stuff (especially when more fundies would open their minds to video games because of Armikrog).

The problem with this is that you're basically saying, "I will accept that you do undesirable things so long as you do something else, first." S'saying you can beat all the hobos you want so long as you pay the hobo beating tax (the paying of which will distract you from beating hobos, to some degree)*. It's still saying, "I will support that undesirable thing." That a caveat is added doesn't, unfortunately, change that. There are situations where something like that may be your best option (It's definitely a thing on the level of world politics), but in most cases it's definitely not. In the scenario being considered, it's definitely not.

*Now, you can say that they're going to beat hobos anyway (and this is likely true), but that doesn't make it acceptable for you to support the hobo assault just because it will slightly reduce the frequency of such attacks. Instead of giving them the support needed to assault three hobos in order to prevent them from assaulting a forth, give them no support at all. And maybe go out and interrupt when they've decided it's the hobo beating hour.

Gods, I hope not in this case. Lowest rung is twenty bucks. I haven't been able to justify that much spending on a single entertainment product in years

Haven't had to, either. Sales are a wonderful thing. If it's as you say, then they're probably aiming to release with the traditional game price point of 50-60 bucks, which is just... sorry Can't do it, and I kinda' don't want to support that sales practice anymore. Maybe get it five or six years later when it hits a christmas sale or something and drops down to a buck and a quarter or thereabouts, eh.

Pretty doubtful that'd happen, yeah. S'mostly a balance thing... stuff like limited weapon selection for your chaff (and other stuff, really) has/had a subtle but surprisingly significant effect on what your army could deal with particularly effectively. Hammer unit's good (or at least better) vs. one sort of enemy compared to sword unit, and vice versa. Untrained chaff had niches that elite chaff didn't (sieging, mostly. Maybe patrolling, if you didn't have the better stuff for that.), unarmored better for some uses than armored, etc., so forth, so on.

If the combat system in general shifted up a bit, there might be room for it... but that's pretty unlikely, so a kind of 'custom' in-game unit builder is also pretty unlikely.