Bay 12 Games Forum

Some kind of sick bastard cut down joshua trees in Joshua Tree national park. I ask, why?

Hey, I remember that. Apparently people were doing it so they could more easily go joy riding around in 4 wheelers or somethin' like that. Not even doing it for firewood or something ostensibly functional, they're cutting shit down just to get it out of their way so they can go fuck up the metaphorical lawn with tire tracks.

I'm not saying I hope they end up dropping a tree on one of the fuckers, but... maybe a little.

Doesn't look like it. Some models or somethin' are sold out, but it seems like there's still active offers.

Uh, not to be supporting the message quoted or anything. My still living grandfather is a WW2 vet, but he was navy and it's a lot harder to get your hands on an offshore bombardment.

That sounds like fear-mongering to me. Thinking that you'll become an alcoholic the moment you taste booze is just as dangerous as thinking that you can drink as much as you want with no consequence. Fear is healthy, but irrational fear only weakens the healthy fear.

Pretty sure it's rational fear to acknowledge you're damned likely to not stop at one if you start, like the dozen+ people before you. Least when you have a serious history behind you, you're probably real damn better off not even running the chance.

Surest way to not get caught in the same shit is to not step in it to begin with, and unlike some things it's pretty damn easy to just... not. "Family has a history of alcoholism so I don't touch the stuff" is just about universally accepted as a reason to not drink, from what I've encountered over the years.

Huh. So the latest E+ or whatev', you can still go catch a bell then give them something ranged and watch them sow the seeds of infinite destruction everywhere, right? I remember that being basically my one and only strategy to get anywhere the last time I spent any time playing elona. It was all slog slog slog BELL *carnage ensues, dungeons fall, everything dies*

Pretty sure it was a bell, anyway. Something stupidly fast, whatever it was.

Dunno if it's been mentioned yet, but I definitely noticed it. You'd think competence that basic would be a standard thing, but apparently not for whatever barrel bottom they've dug through to find people to represent these chucklefucks.

I used to have a huge problem with the minus sign/line symbol - which is actually supposed to be another, longer line but that one never exists on any keyboards - but I'm pretty sure in over it now

Iirc standard(/american english academic standard) practice for typing is to just use double minus signs -- like, for example, this -- if you're trying to go for that thing. In writing it's the longer line, in typing people quickly learned ain't nobody got time for that shit so far as getting the full line going or dealing with autocorrupt screwing with the double. Quicker and less potentially confusing, it is.

Your criticism is on point with regards to this being a battle simulator, and all other aspects being subservient to that. You conquer territories to finance your army, you research spells to either improve your battle performance or summon troops, you build forts to recruit your faction's troops. The only thing that doesn't really feed into the battles is Dominion itself (and even that, IIRC, gives you +1 morale.).

Unless D5 changed things, dominion itself can play pretty heavily into battles; above and beyond special dominions or globals that only effect dominion influenced areas, it has direct and substantial effect on the strength of prophets and pretenders, and import for stuff like immortals. Probably something else I'm forgetting, heh.

... that said, personally the dominion games like... haven't been about the battles for me. They're pretty great and I like hands off-ish stuff a great deal as a general thing, but with dominions it's always been the battles enabling everything else -- the territory exploration and exploitation, the army building and commander outfitting, the skulduggery and world changing spellslinging. I've never really spent terribly much time on the battle organization and often enough don't even watch the fights, particularly if nothing odd happens in the results. Basic formation and spell orders and that's about it.

Battles were there to get territory to get gems and resources to get crazy explode-y things and rampaging supercombatants (which were more about the bling than actual combat performance for me ) and so on. I honestly don't think I'd mind something that was like... dominions without the direct army vs. army encounters. All magic artillery, cloak and dagger, and champion duels/small squad battles, with maybe a fairly loose economy, but without most of the fiddly army stuff (and especially its logistics).

... gods, if someone like married dominions and ogre battle I think I'd be in some sort of game heaven.

E: Though now I'm kinda' wondering how a "commanders only" Dom game would play out. You'd probably have to fiddle with things to make the early game not a complete slog (like... somehow start with 10-15 commanders and a spread of cheap magic items?), but after that it might be neat. Pretty certainly would be a very different playthrough, in any case.

... I mean, scale of America being what it is you're still talking hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, near as I can recall from seeing general policy evaluation over the years.

Like, no, relatively speaking it's not actively genociding the american population as a whole, but you're still considering death tolls that would depopulate smaller countries, some outright, and likely pretty damn close to active genocide for some of our minorities. I'm thinking, say, transfolk as an example who are already massively shat on even with token attempts to protect them coming from our less reactionary groups -- without even that I'm not nearly as confident as you seem to be that our primary source of domestic terrorism and politically inclined murder isn't going to kick things up another notch.

Full bore US right-wing policy making would result in shit that's very much outside normal political stuff in terms of death and general societal harm, is what I'm saying. Particularly relative to what gains we've managed over the years and, like, not the ruddy Gilded Age or somethin'. Right-wing politics and media may have been doing their damnedest to normalize that crap for the last few decades but it damn sure ain't normal.