Bay 12 Games Forum

More serious than flooding, anyway. Current forecast where I'm at has 100% chance of rain every day 'till wednesday, then 80% until a week from now and 50% as far out as the prediction goes.

Incidentally, it's raining right now :V

Creatures in the game fly around in the sky but are actually simulated populations which, if they die out, disappear. They need to eat, rest, etc etc or else they die. They also migrate from island to island.

...huh. So what I'm reading from that is xenocide, xenocide as far as the eye can see. What happens when there's nothing left alive besides the players that intentionally wiped out every critter population?

Burnin' down the house~

... y'all do have fire insurance, right?

By contrast, what would define a "divine" not considered as abusive as hell and still maintain its "divine" nature?

Eh, it's possible. You can have a position of power and authority without your relationship with those impacted by that becoming abusive. Divine stuff has a much, much easier time of it when they're more limited beings... stuff in the direction of the greek/roman gods (though pretty emphatically not them specifically) or small spirit type junk. But it's not impossible to have capability or nature generally ascribed to divine entities and avoid showing stereotypical abusive behaviors. Stupidly difficult for most monotheistic formulations given the whole physical reality is what it is with everything that says about the creator entity's decision making thing, but not impossible.

You just have to avoid things like capricious or disproportionate harm (so hell type stuff is right out, eye parasites are right out if there's the ability to prevent them (unless you're the god of eye parasites and bugger everyone else, I guess), genocide/mass murder is probably off the table for the specific divinity, etc., etc.), allow for some degree of give and take that's not entirely one-sided/at your whim, so on and so forth. Stuff that makes for a relationship that's not master and servant with a side of "beatings will continue until morale improves _{also they'll probably happen occasionally regardless}".

When you're dealing with a relationship where all the power is on one side, it withholds the right to inflict any amount of harm on you it pleases, and there's no check or balance or means of leaving... that shit has a real hard time being healthy, y'know? It's not impossible but the standard of behavior for the one in power is real damn high, and unfortunately most scripture abrahamic or otherwise ascribes behavior to their divine that doesn't meet it at some point or another.

Though "made it and dumped it" sort of formulations sorta' get a pass. You could call it abusive by way of neglect but mostly it's just not a relationship anymore. The divine's kinda' a prick but they're also just not there so... *shrugs*

Mind you, you can skip destroying the sunwall (tho, do remember it's a military outpost and one that had been constantly launching attacks to enslave/genocide the local orc populations so, uh, wrecking it isn't exactly a barbarous thing) if you feel like it.* Makes things harder and I'm not sure the game acknowledges it much but that's actually optional.

Strictly speaking I don't think you have to even bust open the bridge or free the enslaved orcs; the campaign's win condition is straight south from the starting town and open as soon as you get out whatever your starting area is.

* I actually tend to just 'cause the map layout for it is kiiinda' annoying, heh.

The wood elves probably come the closest... maybe. They mostly seem to just want to be left alone. Iirc the dwarves arguably aren't far off from that, too, but they have a nasty habit of digging too deep, heh.

... everybody else is pretty rough though, aye.

Nightmare's harder than normal but largely only somewhat, from what I've noticed... most of what play can win on normal can win in nightmare. Tedious bullshit only really kicks into gear with the difficulties above it.

In a void I'd wager you were unlucky, basically. Maybe doing something weird vis a vis character build or itemization or somethin', I'unno.

Go more aggressive, mebbe'? I usually kill urkis/most-everything-in-the-west-except-sometimes-the-crypt without really giving a damn about resistances or HP stacking or whatev', personally, heh. Even on nightmare. Some of that's due to mods, but most of the sentiment is still applicable to vanilla. Can't be one-shot by something if you one-shot it first :V

... the out of sight thing is an issue, mind. High sight/light radius (or track, or something equivalent to it) is pretty high priority if you're going to be playing lazy. _{though OF's generally supposed to be lit up and not much attacks at >10 range so maybe make the window/resolution bigger so you can see everything you're supposed to be able to see?}