Bay 12 Games Forum

There were some LotR maps in WC3, exactly how you describe them. I've never really enjoyed them, but my brother played them a lot. Can't remember the names either, unfortunately.

Some of them were straight up LotR maps, still. Handful based on Warcraft lore (Azeroth Wars comes to mind; if for some reason you want to watch people play it, there's at least a few dozen hours of gameplay vids on youtube), some on other franchises or original stuff. Occasionally based on real life, though those tended to be more in the direction of civ-like stuff.

There's a good... at least six or seven, maybe a dozen or more, maps of that sort that were top tier-ish so far as WC3 went, though. Did about as good a job as possible in WC3 and still able to be played online, heh. Half want to say there's still one or two getting the occasional update, even.

Fate is still around. Could never get in to it, a little too cartoony for me after cracking out for a good hundred hours in Diablo.

Iirc the devs went on to make the torchlight games, which've ended pretty alright as that sort of style of game goes.

I remember fate pretty well, and fairly unpleasantly, heh. Somehow managed to be more grindy than diablo was (and not really in a good way), and the combat always felt sorta' clunky, problems more mechanical than aesthetic, for me. Had at least one good idea, though, with the way it handled pet vender trash management. Not as good a one on that front as, say, the latest ToME, but it was a nice QoL improvement at the time regardless.

Quote from: Antioch on September 28, 2017, 09:24:49 am

Warcraft 3 is a weird rts because it relies so much on heroes that it already was half a MOBA on its own.

Its not surprising that DoTA originated as a warcraft 3 mod.

The entire MOBA genre originated from DoTA.

Maybe the term, but DotA originated as an AoS map, and those things trace back to starcraft 1. The original Aeon of Strife map was a bit different from the competitive lane based stuff the style shifted into, but there were others during the time period (Romance of the Three Kingdoms based ones were the most common I can recall) that were about as dead on as you could get with the game's engine.

Quote from: MrRoboto75 on September 26, 2017, 10:38:19 pm

Starcraft I always irritated me in that I can only select a dozen units at once.

That was the case with Warcraft 3 as well. Starcraft 2 doesn't have that limitation, though.

And it's from yesterday and I don't care, but it's possibly worth noting both SC1 and WC3 custom maps had their attempts at getting around that limitation. The latter, unsurprisingly, having much more elegant (and functional, for that matter) methods... eventually.

Pretty sure anyone that played SC1 maps very long remembers trying to get things to go places by making a zergling/zealot/civilian/scv have a seizure on top of a beacon, though.

... in any case, I still occasionally get pangs for the old LotR maps in starcraft 1. Usually heavily scripted, autospawn rather than much of an economy, centered around back and forth capture of regions of the map by way of special units supporting mass hordes of other junk... good stuff. Roughly analogous to an AoS without lanes, which has always been the direction I wished the things had gone in general instead of down the DotA pit. They got pretty neat as time went on and folks sussed out more editor tricks.

Don't think I've seen a WC3 or SC2 map intended to mimic the style that really felt the same, though SC2 ones definitely got closer by a significant amount. WC3's engine made much anything involving lots of units trend pretty hard towards unpleasant.

Can't be arsed to do something that looks better, but let me just copy/paste the first results I got from google when I just searched for lead paint:

Protect Your Family from Exposures to Lead | Lead | US EPA
https://www.epa.gov/lead/protect-your-family-exposures-lead
Aug 30, 2017 - Lead paint is still present in millions of homes, sometimes under layers of newer paint. If the paint is in good shape, the lead paint is usually not ...

It, like a number of sketchy as hell junk people got up to previously, is not nearly as gone as anyone sane would like it to be.

I avoid drinking tap water.  Most places, its disgusting.

I don't even question it at this point. For reasons neither I nor the multiple doctors I've talked to about it can figure out, several years back what appears to specifically be panhandle tap water started making me literally sick if I drink it consistently for a few weeks. Basically causes bits of my throat to swell up, causing what amounts to a nasty sore throat.

Short term or intermittent exposure (glass of water in a restaurant, someone else's house, drink from a water fountain, stuff you don't usually use as a primary source of drinking water) doesn't cause it, it's been consistently repeating in places dozens and hundreds of miles away from each other (which makes it being pipe conditions or something pretty unlikely), and literally nothing else I've caught in my life causes the specific reaction. All it takes to not happen is to not drink the tap water. All it takes to cause is to drink primarily tap for a few weeks straight. S'friggin' weird.

I've just shrugged and stopped drinking tap water. Takes months to match the cost of a doc trip, longer if there's any testing involved, basically just not worth the cost to nail down cause. Kinda' hate using bottled 'cause I regularly forget to recycle 'em, but it's cheap-ish, convenient, and doesn't make me sick, so... *shrugs*

Taste wise it's... usually tolerable, though, in my experience. Also fine for cooking. Not good water, per se, but there's worse things to use when it comes to H2O. _{most of the time it doesn't even have tiny stuff visibly moving under its own power floating around inside it}

'Course they won't stop, but they're three days away from the physical possibility of passing a repeal going back to about what it was under obama. Which is to say that specific avenue of GOP sabotage of american infrastructure will no longer be terribly relevant for at least a year or two.

Plenty other ways their persistent campaign to murder americans en masse by way of administrative malfeasance will remain relevant, of course, but at least a legislative means of attacking the ACA will be largely neutered for more than a couple months.

I wonder who's REALLY responsible for the state of the healthcare system as it was before ACA was done?

Lots of people? Various politicians inclined towards opposing regulation (which are indeed primarily GOP ways, but not exclusively), the insurance companies being what they are and unwilling to mitigating its problems, our medical care being what it is and unwilling and/or unable to mitigate its problems (though I forget quite when some of the laws exacerbating that side of things came in), demographic and economic shifts making noticing or doing anything about problems harder, bloody minded inertia, etc., etc., etc.

Pre-ACA we were just kinda' not really trying even as much as the ACA does to make our healthcare system be worth a shit. Letting the market be the market, with bit of help from whoever could be bribed on the legislative side of things, the occasional tidbit getting in there when things went really badly. To the surprise of no one with a lick of sense, that lead to things going increasingly to shit.

... if you're talking responsibility, well, there's a lot of it to go around. The industry (insurance or otherwise) members complicit in doing all sorts of skeevy junk in the name of profit (shonus mentioned some probably a few dozen pages back, now, ferex), the politicians working to prevent anyone from stopping them, the ideologues that fornicated rhetoric into getting anyone to think either was a good idea, the voters that kept putting fucks in office that would cheerfully do so, the population in general that didn't get a fuckton louder, sooner, about the mess. Etc., etc., etc.

Bits and bobs among pretty much everyone, basically. Primarily all the shits older than about mid thirties to early forties, since they're what's living that actually had the means to do much of anything about it while the problems were building up and starting to kick into high gear, but it falls on pretty much all of us with any particular societal/political weight to varying degrees. It takes a village to screw over a hospital as badly as we were screwing up our healthcare. Not to say we're not still humping it with vigor, mind, but since a bit before the ACA and in the time since, we've at least been trying not to thrust with quite so much enthusiasm.

I feel like it would have taken less time to stop, think, and create some kind of plan for replace. They've just straight wasted almost a year trying to kill it with no thought to what comes after (or at least no public plan, which is what's important).

If by almost a year you mean nearly a decade, that is. You'd think it'd take less time to stop, but apparently during the entire period between the ACA being even a suggestion and now the GOP's policy wonks shoved their heads so far up their own arses they did that thing where they fold up into themselves and disappear with a pop.

I can only assume the republican party subsequently thinks it would take a few centuries to come up with a plan to replace, and so fighting to put tens of thousands of americans in the grave is a larger priority/more achievable goal.

I'd be surprised if they didn't, myself. Gods know everyone except the top chucklefuck or two in our chain of command realize those guns pointing at hostages are far more effective a deterrence than anything they could do to crap on the water.

Any case, greatly reducing civilian casualties in no way means you're particularly likely to avoid ending up with an untenable amount of civilian casualties. There's a difference between a city leveled and a city with merely tens of thousands to millions of corpses rotting in it (as opposed to millions to tens of millions), but it's something of an academic one at the end of the day.

E: In any case, in actual news it looks like Collins has publicly declared against the latest healthcare dumpster fire. GOP being GOP gods only know if that's going to remain true if it goes to a vote, but at least at the moment it looks like we're notably more likely to pass the 9/30 deadline with the ACA still largely in one piece and no more sabotaged than it was earlier in the year.