Bay 12 Games Forum

How dost one open this file?

It's plain text editable. Open in notepad or an equivalent.

Closest I can remember seeing is Attack of the Paper zombies, though it's more RTT than RTS.

There's also a few fantasy-RTS games that have undead factions, but most of those aren't really 'zombie' like (i.e. lots and lots and lots of them ). Of those, the closest to it I've personally played is Heroes of Annihilated Empires.

It's playable-until-victory as-is, with the non-lua version. Just kinda' barebones and empty in some places, plus some of the features aren't as sexy as they could be.

GH2's being ported to lua primarily (caveat: iirc. The thread on the GH forums about the lua port gives the full reasons, I think -- check the general discussion subforum over there) because JH (the dev) has found he doesn't really have the time to implement the amount of content he'd like to, so he's shifting the majority of GH into something other people have an easier time of using (The only part of not-Lua GH that's not an absolute bitpain to mod is items and mecha. More substantial content is just a mess for anyone not conversant in pascal/whatever it is GH2 is using, apparently.). I.e. making it so that interested community members can shoulder some of the burden of fleshing out GH2's content (missions, spinners, etc, etc, etc.) and sexing up the unsexy bits..

This is, uh. Wrong.

Doomed specifically have three trees (shadows, darkness, and primal magic) that scale of magic and magic specifically, i.e. the tooltips aren't lying for once. They also get a boost to the power of these trees as they gain levels, one of the few classes that have anything that scales with character level. Everything else scales with either willpower or mindpower (which is will+cun).

Most of their heavy damage talents do scale off willpower, however. The exception is primarily vaporize, which despite its downside hits like an effing brick -- it had to be nerfed somewhat recently because it was one-shotting high level players in the hands of doomed class'd adventurers and random uniques. The other two magic scaling trees primarily grant various utility abilities, some of which are quite useful.

Doomed also have a massively easier time of hate management than cursed (cursed are basically gimped in comparison). They have an entire tree dedicated to a talent called "Feed," which targets something in your LoS and constantly regens your hate (amount scaling with willpower) while the enemy remains in LoS.  Later talents in this tree lets you start draining health, stealing their damage output (-%damage all on them, +%damall on you), and filching their positive resistances. All in all, hate management for Doomed is quite easy, despite them using hate based talents considerably more actively than cursed tend to.

As for their overall strength, Doomed take a bit of getting used to, but in recent betas they've been nerfed multiple times simply because a number of their talents were too powerful. They've always been tricky to play, but they're definitely not underpowered at the moment.

Movement infusions are freaking incredible. It's better than PD and CPD in 90% of situations you'll encounter and teleportation is very easy to get in accessible non-inscription format (staff, amulet, wand).

The character had teleport on tap, though, via a (elm) conveyance staff in the alternate weapon slot. It saved th'critters life quite a few times and has absolute ridiculous synergy with unstoppable -- if everything's not dead when the duration on unstoppable hits two or three, you simply swap weapons and teleport out, no muss no fuss.

As for the orcs, as you read the lore, you see that the dude that did what he did is actually a fairly sympathetic character -- the orc species is an incredibly desperate one. They were brutally enslaved and then basically genocided for attempting to free themselves (and get a little well deserved vengeance in the process). He did what he did to save his species from complete extinction, for all that what he did was indeed absolutely horrible. There wasn't really a choice for them, though. The female population at the time, apparently, was no longer large enough to maintain a viable species.

They're not exactly nice (They're expansionists with a bit of a vengeance kick -- that probably includes a little counter-genocide), but compared to some of the other races (Halflings, the little midget bastards), they're not that bad.

Yeah... as a general rule, acting "good" does nothing but make you lose out on concrete rewards. You might get achievements, but you usually lose out on loot and XP. Even failing the Melinda quest tends to give a better payout than actually completing it.

The player in T4 is a pretty horrible person, heh, and a number of the quests are set up to actively encourage this. T4's chock full of delightful What the Hell, Hero? (or perhaps Moral Dissonance, but DG's well aware of how evil his main character has to be in order to win the game ) moments.

What does erk me though, is the amount of people willing to support the death penalty when they are unwilling to actually execute someone themselves, and I find it hard to believe that many of those who say they would, would be able to take a needle, jab it into her or him, while he or she begs for mercy, and the family watches.

This, I think, is a point to make. It takes a lot of something -- guts, determination, whatever you want to call it -- to actually take the path of the lesser evil, because it's much more immediate. Condemning the irredeemable to a slow death via torture (read: incarceration) is a lot easier than just killing them. The effect isn't as immediate, even though it's a worse (To wit: Likely years of suffering, followed by death. As opposed to simply death, ideally as painless of one as possible. It's a death sentence either way, one just takes longer and has more hardship before it.) "vengeance" than just killing is. For some reason, this lack of immediacy seems to sooth most people's moral misgivings about killing someone. It doesn't sooth mine, unfortunately, which is why I do advocate execution over lifetime imprisonment. To me, it's the more moral -- or at least less immoral (if nothing else, the path of less harm) -- choice.

The genuine issue, as I see it, isn't about the killing of the irredeemable versus lifetime imprisonment (They're effectively the same thing, with the latter being crueler), it's about what the bloody hell the moral response to an irredeemably dangerous human being is. We haven't found a (moral, anyway. Lobotomies or dismemberment might work!) way to make it so these people aren't a threat (and often a deadly one) to our communities, and so our moral compasses seem to implode.

The only options I can see are to fix the problem (i.e. neutralize whatever it is about the individual that makes them a threat) -- which we can't seem to do and can't afford to make a mistake in trying to do -- kill them quickly, or kill them slowly. When confronted with a choice of unworkable, immoral but workable, and more immoral but still workable, I can't see a rational choice to make besides option two, the choice of actual effectiveness and least harm.

It's a pisspoor situation, to say the least, and gods alive if only there was a 'workable but not immoral' option, but in a scenario where someone's been grievously harmed and the person who inflicted it is going to suffer (either through rehabilitation or death), I'd rather the net suffering be as little as possible and as thoroughly contained to the person who did the original harm as possible.

All that said, the Davis case did seem like a miscarriage of the legal system and it's damned enraging to see pissant technicalities put a human to death, especially one that, at least on the surface of things, looked innocent. But what to do about it? A person was just effectively murdered by the system, and the worse someone might be punished for it is disembarrment or (not life-time) imprisonment. We can (and should) try to prevent things like this from happening in the future, but for the present, how is that equitable? The effect (punishment) won't fit the cause (murder). Th'hell can a person genuinely do about this?

If my parents didnt raise me to be helpful to other people, i would most likely be a socially inept assclown like that troll.

It dosent smell right to let theese sadistic products of maternal alchoholism waltz around free in soceity.

Does not compute. You do realize there's some hypocrisy in there, right? Not saying that what the fellow did was particularly forgivable, but that doesn't give free reign to his (however justified) detractors

Also, it takes two to tango. "Parental alcoholism" was the phrase you were looking for. Incompetence would probably work, too.