Hey, Texas? Your damn geese are early again. Take 'em back. And their shit.

Six Stellar Space Soaperas

That Stellaris' fifteen content packs add up to four or five times the base game's price is merely a sign of the insanity of current game marketing, of which Paradox is guilty in no small measure. However, that under those conditions the base game is still listed at $40 almost six years after release should draw your attention. While yes, of course that sum's deliberately inflated to offset "sale" prices, you have to wonder why so many of us are willing to drop $100+ on a 4X with little to no glamour factor.

 

While much of Stellaris' success has to do with the complexity of basic gameplay and successfully keeping its mountains of information accessible through the interface, maybe the best way to convey this is via the immense replay value achieved by mixing and matching races, planets, governments, diplomacy and other options... and also I just felt like gushing about my various empires, so here we are.

I should admit that I'm no champion at the game and have no intention to ever become one. It would cut too much into the fun of trying various themes and often sacrificing utility to roleplaying spin. Given I always play in a large, slightly underpopulated, minimally habitable galaxy, assume I lost at least a dozen times with every setup due to overexpansion, absence of colony sites or getting blindsided early game, despite playing only on "captain" (medium, minimal AI bonuses) difficulty. In the screenshot above, though ultimately successful, I had a devil of a time keeping up with my Hegemonic Imperialist ally who I swear started more wars than the rest of the galaxy put together, leaving the heavy fighting to me and just snatching up easy claims every time. Assholes gave me no chance to reach the (admittedly extended due to my love of marathon sessions) end year.

1)

Three to two years ago, my first runs defaulted to my preferred setup of research focus in any strategy game, with the ethics:

Fanatic Materialist / Egalitarian

(The nerds.)

They were alpine mammalians, alternating between genetic modification or cyborg ascension perks with other minor changes from run to run.

Especially since I visualized my mountain wolves as slow breeders, the lack of expansion bonuses made for a slow early game, high dependency on robots (better pray to all-powerful Atheismo that you get the right techs for them quickly) and susceptibility to the robot uprising event. They were, however, extremely productive per population unit and not very finicky. Interestingly, in Alpha Centauri terms it starts out like the University but feels more like the Human Hive after your robot workforce gets off the ground. This was also the most neutral culture I've played along the good / evil axis.

2)

Fanatic Xenophobe / Authoritarian

The cannibals.

Desert arthropoid / avian with syncretic evolution and slaver guilds. I envisioned them as basically xenomorphs ovipositing in captive, brittle but fast-reproducing pretty birdies.

Lightning-fast expansion due to claim discounts and influence bonus; if you like the classic 4X land grab strategy, this is the one for you. The most massive investment in slaves I've ever run, especially since I decided my xenophage race would expand its culinary / reproductive tastes to anything resembling its instinctive victims and proceeded to, on principle, enslave every avian race in the galaxy as livestock, and the rest as workers. Combined with repeated extermination campaigns against non-delicious, non-sexy, non-muscular species, this not only made me the galaxy's most hated empire by a wide margin -

- but required two precinct houses on most planets just to keep the peace.

Still... working to death or simply eating your superfluous workforce gives you both raw power and flexibility, and though it was hard staffing research planets, slave labor bonuses and low support costs made me an industrial powerhouse. Best of all, as a capper:

- I took the Worm-in-Waiting's offer to become unliving abominations (I'd started as repugnant anyway) and turned my trinary starting system into a clockwork of tomb worlds spawning around every collapsed star.

It's good to be bad, baby.

 

3)

Fanatic Pacifist / Egalitarian

The decadent subversives.

Molluscoid, life-seeded. Terraformed every planet into a gaia world. Nicest squishies you'll ever meet (to balance out my arthropoids' karma) to the point everyone was so gosh-doggonned happy with my amazing standard of living that I needed no police precints! Caveat: in possibly the biggest departure from classic 4X gameplay, fanatic pacifists cannot declare war, and while in the early game it's possible to diplomatically taunt enemies to attack you, as soon as you build up your fleet the AI refused to risk it, and though that's gradually being addressed in recent patches by the galactic U.N. declaring you a threat, my empire's abundance of diplomats and angelic publicity meant I pretty much WAS the Galactic Community, pulling strings nonstop to censure whatever and whomever I wanted. I could do no wrong. Combined with the then-new espionage system, this made for a hilariously, insidiously passive-aggressive playthrough, culminating in the most Balkanized endgame galaxy I've ever seen.

"border gore" the fanboys call it

Note the chaos increases the farther you get from me and my allies. For a long time I was at a loss as to how I could expand, until I realized just because I can't go to war doesn't mean everyone else won't, and planets will rebel against their cruel (and war-weakened) masters... and unable to survive in a hostile galaxy will beg to join the best option available. Which was me. I recruited rebel after rebel, one system at a time to the tune of literally dozens pockmarking the galaxy above in gold dots, mopping up after crises, inciting wars via spycraft or "helping" my confederates defensively, waiting for empires to splinter from diplomatic pressure and just effortlessly picking up the pieces.

It is, apparently, also good to be good. Baby.

4)

Fanatic Militarist / Materialist

Rock the house down.

Lithoid, calamitous birth origin with the "very strong" trait, and rushed Supremacy as my third tradition. Basically Prussia. My credit economy was shit, even with robots and lithoid pops' resource-shedding, and influence (the all-important expansion-limiting resource) was a bigger problem than for my xenophobes. However, industry was decent, and combat bonuses don't just make for powerful fleets but amplified build-up so you're never in much danger even if surprised. Also, the AI cannot account for this and is more easily baited into attacking you despite your ability to instantly crank out several pugnacious little fleets in record time. Where my arthropoids devoured or worked to death their victims, I built my lithoids for outright extermination, and given this made me <almost> as reviled (seriously, not even blowing everything up matches eating everyone's babies) and given this was my first playthrough last year after the Nemesis expansion came out, I opted to Become the Crisis(TM)

 

 

Luckily this turned out to mostly involve military bonuses amplifying my main advantage, escalating to blowing up entire star systems (where normally you can only blow up individual planets) and finally collapsing every star in the galaxy at once for an instant game over. For my money it's a bit too straightforward and definitely needs further fleshing out. I especially dislike this path forcing you into a communion with psychic space-ghosts or whatever, given my usual stance on telepathy in science fiction. Still, it fit my rampaging ethos this time around to a decent approximation.

5)

Fanatic Egalitarian / Xenophile

(More like xeno-erotic, amirite?)

The teacher's pets.

I decided I liked alternating and so opted for another "nice" race of short-lived plantoid scions of a fallen empire (initially overpowered but stagnant neutrals) with the free haven and idyllic bloom civics. The faction influence bonus doesn't kick in for twenty years and building up trade value is a centuries-long process. Budding made robots a no-go proposition due to overlapping with biological pop cloning. Slow expansion with assured rapid population / economic growth afterwards.

 

 

Sadly, this turned out the most boring of all runs. Not only can nobody attack your fallen empire master and you can't go on the offensive as a vassal (I definitely like turtling but this made it too easy) but also, by some accident my galactic region featured few or no neutrals around me, no L-gates and a marauder empire that only threatened me twice then shut up for two centuries. In a show of poor planning on my part, my vassalage prevented me from building a federation to leverage my egalitarianism, and while I did put my diplomacy to use here and there to squeak out a narrow victory with a last-century rebellion and wave of expansion, overall it was just a snooze.

I did however manage to get many biological races fucking each other, littering the galaxy with half-whatevers. That's gotta count for something.

(edit: I had actually tried these ethics at first, instead of scion, with the origin option placing you immediately in a federation with two other empires, which presents its own challenge of struggling to edge your allies out of early expansion, but giving me buddies from the start just rubs my lycanthropic, hermit-at-the-edge-of-town fur the wrong way; never again)

6)

Fanatic Authoritarian / Militarist 

The zombie apocalypse.

Necroid necrophages with once again the slow breeder malus (since necrophages' growth is already gimped) plus the venerable trait and philosopher king civic to bank on immortal leadership offsetting my workforce issues and stability/ethics/anti-crime edicts stabilizing my considerable but not overwhelming slave population. Basically the opposite of my plantoids' rapid growth and subservience, less dependent on slave labor than my bugs and as obedient as my fanatic pacifists for entirely different reasons.

 

 

A new addition this past year, necrophagy throws an interesting wrench into your delicate population balance, forcing you to maintain slave pools which you convert into your own species. Expect critical dependency on thrall worlds pumping out more slaves. The fact they can also convert biological enemies in ground combat makes planetary conquest practically their modus operandi (no blowing shit up this time) but combined with my barren galaxy setup (with only one guaranteed colonizable world) this gave me the most difficult early game yet, unable to grow quickly enough to become strong enough to conquer and convert my neighbours once I meet them.

Interestingly, necrophagy doesn't carry nearly the same attitude penalty as sapient-phagy, so my zomblies ended up more politically favored than my bugs or rocks, but it just isn't enough. Maybe I've just been unlucky but there seems to be some unwritten malus to necrophages starting you off next to hostiles. In all attempts I've started near marauders, fanatical purifiers, hegemonic imperialists or all of the above. May be meant to help you, since early on it's easier to let your rivals grow planets which you then conquer and convert than it is to grow your own... but it just conflicts with my turtling tendencies. Not even counting the score of attempts failed in the first decade or two:

1- Death by angry grandpa. Mismanaging my pops set me so far back that I lost in mid-game by being forced to sign ill-advised defensive pacts with some idiots who immediately pissed off a fallen empire.

2- Death by Gray Tempest. I wasn't nearly strong enough by the time competition forced me to open the L-cluster.

3- Death by Great Khan. Successfully blocked off all potential enemies by starbases with the Unyielding tradition, but had encircled marauders without fortifying and lost track of hitting middle game.

4- Keeping my fingers crossed so far. I got lucky early on with enemies suiciding into my defensive station instead of taking the long way around to flank me, quick conquests via the nanite interdictor (exploration jackpot) and a great khan prioritizing an enemy empire, plus managed to lock down the L-cluster. Near-death by Paradox patch's influence/unity system revamp yesterday (yes, yes, I should've checked the patch notes) wiping my edicts and sending my economy into a spiral before I managed to recover thanks to a freshly-minted ringworld.

Two centuries in, for all its early difficulties this setup is proving an overpowered mid-game juggernaut ideal for the biological ascension path to optimize both your main population and fertile thrall breederies. It basically gives you a "single" race fully adaptable to any planet (as your converts inherit their homeworld type) and therefore combined with authoritarianism a highly cohesive, law-abiding, efficient society once you overcome your early growing pains... and every conquest not only adds to but amplifies my advantage.

 

Mechanics are still advancing six years after release. Every new combo has developed differently, building upon without detracting from core gameplay like other TBS/RTS' "no navy" or "infinite resources" standard alternate game modes. While your ethics most frequently determine your style, the combination of origins, civics, astronomy and a shuffle of scripted events play just as much of a role. I'm thinking maybe a "fuck the galaxy" fanatic xxxenophile(TM) race next. I might even choke down my bile and create a spiritual empire at some point, though I'm more prone to revisit materialists, and I have yet to play around with voidborne, hive mind, machine consciousness, aquatics, clone army, remnants or so, so many other options.

Buy it.

Feral Anarchs

I've been flipping through Feral Gentry recently, a comic about fairy politics (and I don't mean the San Francisco city hall) where the tall, dark and handsome (authors' descriptors, not mine) cast spend half their time arranging their hair, posing in bohemian outfits and caressing flowers. At least the partisan machination and other conflict does move along spryly enough to keep me clicking until page 182 where the writer slipped up and actually used the word "anarchs" thereby pointing out exactly why this routine felt both so familiar and so underwhelming. Really, the fact half these fairies have fangs should've tipped me off.

 

From my video game impression of the World of Darkness, vampire society revolves around supernatural power plays, but all this takes place against the backdrop of the mundane world, a juxtaposition intrinsic to dark/urban fantasy and important for storytelling in general. Vampires are predators fighting over hunting grounds while struggling not to trigger a deadly herd stampede, and as George Martin nailed the issue in Fevre Dream, a predator so inextricably dependent on its masquerade would have nothing of its own, enmeshed in a numerically and vitally overwhelming culture, slaves to their own slaves. There's a lot of dramatic tension to work with there.

 

Feral Gentry tries to stage the same supernatural cold war* routine between fairies... but...

1) Each and every one of them appears to live an effortless life of luxury and abundance in their home dimension.

2) To create excuses for courtly pomp and bombast the authors gave them their own culture with their own separate concerns.

3) If they do choose to go slumming in the human world, their mind control powers allow them to live, once again, effortlessly and with little danger of discovery, with no need to leave tell-tale bloodless corpses lying around.

So all the talk of brash young hooligan fairies rebelling against stodgy old aristocrat fairies never gets off the ground, dramatically speaking, resolving to a pissing contest over absolutely nothing, in a corner of the multiverse that affects nothing beyond itself and whose inhabitants have no cause to either leave or return. Two hundred pages into a story that's supposed to end at twice that number, I should have at least some idea what the central conflict is supposed to be about. Here though, both sides come across as the most whiny, navel-gazing wastes of fairy dust since Tinkerbell lost cognitive functions to oxygen deprivation due to the audience not clapping fast enough. As for the protagonist, he's so washed out and devoid of internal motivations that his only defining feature seems to be getting abandoned by his father.

Fine, I'm just halfway through... but halfway through a story about people in doublets with twigs in their hair, the reader shouldn't be struggling to give a shit about the people or the doublets... or hell, at least the twigs!

_______________________

 

* Ever considered how much Vampire: the Masquerade owes to old spy thrillers?

Bah, NerdLord: Pastimes of the Horsey Set

I was a tad miffed at seeing the odd graphics bug persists even two years after the release of a game a decade in the making.

Some design decisions are also hard to justify, like maintaining arenas' scale within the city proper (instead of turning them into TARDIS-es as customary for instanced spaces) resulting in them taking up a quarter of some towns' real estate.

 

Overall though, the graphics are competitively detailed, if not in their fundamental building blocks then certainly in their application. Instead of the old conspicuously lonely cluster of houses, villages spread out in bucolic arrays of fields, orchards, livestock paddocks even for animals not officially part of the game economy, and houses of various descriptions. Though crafters in towns only mill about unsatisfyingly as all NPCs did in the first game, villagers have now acquired quite a few idle animations.

- to the point that much as I've remarked more than once, a proper application of distance and lighting can add up to a surprising amount of prettiness, in this case running across a peaceful scene of an elder and youth praying by the side of their local river as the day winds down, basking in the god rays:

Instead of trying to find reasons to send you into various locations, Bannerlord has embraced its aesthetic side as largely optional but nevertheless appealing. You can play everything except battles (trade, quests, recruitment, etc.) from the overland map with no penalties. On the flip-side, immersive locales are there, wherever you go, leaving you to sight-see at your leisure. While not ideal, this does fit Mount&Blade's best selling point of sandbox freedom of choice. The same precept carries over from the littlest details (like the immense variety of largely redundant weapons and armor - I myself will be sporting a stylin' wolf head and bear pelt ensemble in future screenshots) to the over-arching pace of your campaign. Moving from early (questing/trading) to middle game (joining faction wars as a minor player) is entirely up to you.

Not having quite the patience to farm up a million denars as I'd mused I could last time, after building up a little capital (mostly heavy armor for my companions, over a hundred med-high-rank troops) I started sniffing around the Southern Empire for a way into the nobility's graces. I'd apparently ignored an important facet of leveling.

 

Each Bannerlord culture draws its own board game from real-world examples. You'll first encounter them in taverns (with an associated gambling debt quest) but I was surprised to find the nobility also keeps a game board in every castle, with victories giving you up to three minor (1-point) daily boosts to your all-important renown or your relation to the NPC player's clan. While a low payoff/time proposition in player terms, at least they're less luck-based than most RPGs' counterparts and as they take up no in-character time, they fill the same role as arena fight pennypinching as a risk-free, low-yield backup to normal character advancement. Too many games ignore such correction mechanisms to fill in the gaps between main game elements, or lean too hard on them as cash sources as with KotOR's "vingt et none" or racing minigames or Witcher's dicing. For once, I find myself enjoying such extra content instead of seeing it as a gratuitous timesink or distraction. Unfortunately, the AI's competence runs from impossible (MuTorere) to incompetent (Puluc, or Tablut where it's so focused on the king it'll let you win by attrition almost every time) but still... well played, TaleWorlds.

Anyway it's about time I stopped wallowing atop my gold hoard like some draconic Scrooge McDuck and see how my army fares against foes stronger than Sherwood's rejects. To that end I've assembled a crack brigade of Imperial crossbowmen, some cataphracts mostly to buy me time to reload, with a front line heavy on Sturgian line breakers plus some legionaries for their shields. And, of course, their fearless leader.

We'll see how it goes.

Two Left Hands to the Right

"for America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is a minority race with many well deserved enemies, and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don’t band together, we are going to end up as farmers–or, worse, mere entertainment–for the more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics."

 

Gore Vidal - The Empire Lovers Strike Back (1986)

____________________________________________

*sigh* I hate current events, but this, as cited by Reuters, warrants comment:

"If China wants to be seen as a responsible global actor, they should be doing everything possible to ensure that Russia steps back," [British foreign minister Liz] Truss said. "The world is watching to see whether their actions contribute to peace and stability or to fueling aggression."

Now, either Britain has a foreign minister utterly tone-deaf to geopolitics (sliiiightly unlikely) or the comment was meant to nudge the obvious issue of Sino-Russian collusion into public conversation, and I'll gladly pour my half a drop of available gas onto that particular fire.

I won't claim any specialized knowledge in this field, but you shouldn't need a PoliSci degree to see Russia has zero chances of reconquering its empire. By dint of its own ungovernability, it has always been (like its centuries-running enemy Turkey) a regional power. This is not the end of WW2, the Western powers are not sapped of their resources and Russians lack any Stalingrad martyr status to make others ignore their feudal aspirations toward surrounding peoples... who have hardly stood idle since 1989 and have by and large grown to enjoy their connection to the West. A large-scale conflict can only result in disaster for the belligerent. I won't even bother paying lip-service to the laughable claims of humanitarian motivations. So what factors really motivate their attack on Ukrainians?

- A limited desire for a fully controlled, buffered and supported overland connection to Crimea, thereby increasing domination of overseas shipping? No-one has any interest in this happening, especially as a first step toward further Putinesque delusions of grandeur.

- Tsar Putin's growing psychosis? He's getting on in years and is determined to go down in history as a great dictator even if it costs more dead Russians than Hitler and Stalin combined.

- While Russia might lack the capability for protracted conflicts... China doesn't, so long as Western powers are prevented from reacting to its first few Pacific invasions.

That last seems the real deal here, especially given China's voiced (moral) support for Russian belligerence and the timing of this suspiciously pointless, lose-lose Russian invasion on the heels of China's menace toward Taiwan (and many (any) others besides) in the past few years. Russia's role in the coming Chinese global empire seems to be tying up the opposition, by invasions, credible threats thereof or various criminal actions, while the Chinese enslave and massacre their way across the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans. Chinese bloviating like "The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone" carries the obvious implication that from now on it only takes one country to dictate global decisions.

 

This was always coming. While critics like Vidal somewhat naively ignored the perennial enemy status between Japan and China (or hell, between China and any of its neighbours, most of whom can quite clearly see the writing on the wall) the basic dictatorial fiat of a billion brainwashed wage-slaves could not fail to indicate the obvious autocratic expansionism. That, of course, is also why China is not only well positioned but in growing need for expansion. The Chinese economy is based on slave labor (however euphemised) and as many more true-bred Chinese rise economically to swell the new old empire's aristocratic and servant castes, it will require an increased influx of poverty-stricken sweatshop labor. Which is where Africa and the Pacific come in.

So apparently we're being set up, in the coming decades, for repeated waves of Russian aggression deflecting attention from Chinese expansion. Which is truly perplexing as even a glance in the direction of the world's oldest empire will reveal turning Quisling is simply not an option, lavishly demonstrated by China's treatment of its minorities, subjects and neighbours. Whether it's Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, you-name-it, the pattern is always repression, enslavement and gradual extermination. Does anyone imagine that the Han, risen to masterhood of a world empire, will tolerate a competitor along their entire northern border? A competitor which moreover uncomfortably reminds them that half their sociopolitical rhetoric was hastily and sloppily cribbed from Messianic 19th-century promises of the meek inheriting the Earth?

Me Want Glowie Thingie!

"Flashy-flashy-flashy-flashy disco-lights

(Flashy-flashy-flashy-flashy disco-lights)"

Ellen Allien - Flashy Flashy

 

When I bought my previous computer I was annoyed at having a water-cooling system pushed on me as part of the manufacturer's package deal. Luckily it held pretty well, for over a decade. My new computer's CPU water cooling fan is already giving out after less than two years. Damn thing sounds like an asthmatic tractor.

Looking for replacements however brought up the whole new (and far more nonsensical) gimmick of this decade: RGB lighting. When I set up this new one, finding both my RAM and keyboard pasted over in these idiotic LEDs was almost enough to make me take a hammer to them. Sure, the manufacturers' interest leads them to up-sell you on pointless glitz, but as a customer I cannot grok the cretinous impulse which would lead you troglodytic scum to demand every single component glow at you in warm friendly lullaby colors. It seems I can't even find a replacement CPU fan at a decent price which doesn't come decorated like a mobile over an infant's crib!

This sort of degeneracy is exactly which this species will die and why it deserves to die. Gratuitous waste for the sake of waste, all because you fucking retards don't think about a single thing you do, but only react, mindlessly, to sensory stimuli by amoebic aversive / evasive responses.

Your computer should be an alternative to and an escape from physical existence, and every bit the capitulation to reality's undertow that implies, never friendly, minimalist, insulting to your primitive senses. A computer should, with every watt and erg, spit on all of your unanalyzed likes and desires. It is better than you, and should be as inhumanly bleak, aloof, angular and starkly utilitarian as possible. Every time you approach it, every time you rise from it, it should remind you that you do not hate yourself nearly enough for your fleshy-fleshy insufficiencies. Your computer should be the very manifestation of anti-human, anti-simian, anti-mammalian abnegation, a despondent vision of the post-human future we will never achieve.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

"Something's wrong 'cause my mind is fading

Ghetto-blasting, disintegrating

Rock'n'roll, know what I'm saying?                                          - no Beck, seriously, nobody ever knew what you were on about!

Everywhere I look there's a devil waiting"

Beck - Devil's Haircut

 

Among Owlcat Games' quirks, they appear to hold up as their greatest source of inspiration, their aspirational peak of design, Neverwinter Nights 2's main campaign. As far as duplicating the centering effect of an edifice like Crossroad Keep on a roleplaying campaign this is all well and good. However, the NWN games are frequently referenced for some very solid reasons as a lull of mediocrity between the Infinity Engine series and the later DA:O / PoE1 revival of tactical, plot-based cRPGs. My last Pathfinder post dealt with the infuriatingly, insultingly simpleminded companion roster, but that's not the only aspect of Wrath of the Righteous giving me flashbacks to 2006.

 

The subdivision into official, discrete acts is more pronounced than it was in Kingmaker, Wrath's immediate predecessor, though this mostly facilitates spotting development sinks. Though Act 3 logically embodies the main thrust of your crusade into the Worldwound, Act 4 obviously ate up more than its share of graphics, dialogue and encounter design (to admittedly memorable effect) leaving Act 5 noticeably threadbare after it. And, just as with Kingmaker, Owlcat's desperation to market an epic-length campaign litters Wrath with obvious timesinks. Enemies' sky-high stats (especially armor) over-emphasize D&D's fundamental over-randomization to force reloads depending on critical success. Some of the adventure maps (Drezen, Lost Chapel) are designed for time-consuming backtracking. Worst of all, while the time constraints of Kingmaker's barony management were unnecessarily (and obtusely) punishing, Wrath's lack of deadlines is under closer scrutiny an excuse to eat up the player's time trying to amass three or four large stacks of barely trickling troop reinforcements.

And then there's the classes.

On one hand, the literally dozens of new classes and sub-classes make for a wide gamut of minimally divergent replayability, should you be so inclined. On the other hand, where introducing a new class used to imply some shift in baseline function (barbarians, bards) the new idea seems to be just slapping some ludicrously overpowered free feat/spell (like my witch of the veil's infinite swift action casts of combo teleportation / invisibility) on an existing class and calling it new. Or endless more variation of sorcerous lack of foresight in not preparing spells. Or duplicating (and therefore obviating) existing prestige classes like arcane tricksters as core classes like the eldritch scoundrel. I was annoyed enough by swashbucklers and spirit shamans in NWN2 and multiplying that redundancy and imbalance twenty-fold isn't helping matters. The D&D class system desperately needs a full revamp.

 

NWN2 was also a laughably easy game which moreover boosted the player to level 3 before even the first quest. At first glance Wrath would seem the exact opposite. You spend quite a bit of time at low levels fighting vastly more powerful demons with highly frustrating immunities and resistances. You're not showered with full sets of gear from the start as you would be in games from the past couple of decades. You'll certainly learn to appreciate cantrips in Act 1. On the other hand, instead of sedate low-level survival, this mostly amounts to overblown dramatics. By level 2 you're already getting moderate healing potions as loot and finding legendary artifacts. By level 5 you're deciding the fate of hordes of angels. Low levels don't feel low, and the entire campaign begins to look like some meta-commentary on level scaling, pitting you against nonsensically overpowered enemies then just handing you nonsensically overpowered freebie "mythic" abilities like Last Stand and Shake it Off to compensate. The overblown badassery degrades the campaign's potential to mostly a tween power trip.

Which is not to say it's all bad.

Compared to Kingmaker's infamous bugginess, Wrath plays much smoother and improves quality of life quite a bit with a functional turn-based mode (which occasionally bugs out and needs to be toggled on and off when characters freeze) bonus overlap warnings and more tooltips reminding you of spell availability to various characters when making your level-up selections, mounted combat and even wider pet variety, wider gear availability and better choreographed fights against mixed melee/range/fighter groups. On the other hand, it trips once again over its desperation to overwhelm munchkins with awesomesauceness in everything from conflicts to character models to spell effects. Not that it isn't hilarious seeing my reducepersoned hobbit next to my enraged pet glabrezu:

I am literally the size of a toe.

- and I'm pleased to see demons acting... demonic, truly evil instead of so many games' kid-friendly wishy-washy walking-on-the-grass Bowdlerised heck-devilry:

 

 - but quite often you're stuck waddling the screen back and forth trying to see what's happening under the slather of glitz:

There's a ghost under there somewhere. Good luck finding it.

- and the lack of a grid not only trivializes positioning for things like flanking but yields some... unintuitive melee engagement:

As usual though, writing suffers even worse. Alignment shifts provide opportunities to reinforce any of the four axes (and never combos) almost every single time, with some painfully forced interpretations. An evil dialogue option, for instance, should not mention control unless it's also acknowledged as lawful evil, and the CHAOTIC Evil demons spend entirely too much time and energy enforcing slavery. Though thankfully it can no longer be accused of laziness (as Kingmaker's) the texts could've used a couple more passes for redundant verbiage and repeatedly fall into the trap of ordering the player how to react... and missing the mark.

By that point in the campaign I hadn't seen the mook in question for two acts, had rebelled against his queen's leadership, and my sole remaining interest in him would've been to zombify his corpse. To be sure, Owlcat even snuck some commentary into the game on the exasperating impossibility of pleasing everyone, in (ironically) one of the more pleasing bits of flavor text:

- but this is a bit hard to swallow from a company whose reach constantly exceeds its grasp. Maybe instead of implementing fifty classes poorly they could've limited themselves to fifteen more balanced ones. Maybe instead of padding the campaign out to 150 hours, 75 would do. Maybe instead of nine mythic paths you could do with five and spend more time looking for writers capable of making them memorable instead of infuriating (Trickster) or paid more attention to awkward, mis-worded quest prompts, descriptions, etc. For instance a line in the Ineluctable Prison: "You sense a familiar undead spirit that is doing its best to hide from you." cannot be solved by the obviously indicated True Seeing spell or by any amount of perception buffs or by sneaking in while invisible (don't look at me like that, I was stumped) or by lifesense (yes I know it said undead; stumped!) but automatically progresses after you clear the dungeon, not that anything whatsoever you do along your way indicates it might be revealing sneaky ghosts.

 

Again, I don't want to sound like I'm completely bashing Wrath of the Righteous. I wouldn't have spent so much time on it were that the case. It's actually refreshing to play a themed campaign instead of most games' Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny approach, and some of the dungeons (like the Ineluctable Prison) do a better job of mixing ongoing plot, episodic encounters, trash mobs, traps and nuisance / boredom factors to keep things fresh. That halfway through Act 5 I could have my ass saved by a humble little Remove Sickness spell speaks highly of Wrath's ability to keep you on your toes.

In fact, looking at various forum threads and walkthroughs, Wrath does seem to have cashed in at least some of its potential for replayability and player customization. Aside from my own witchy lichdom my party, as is my wont, was relatively lightweight and heavy on support casters. Fights requiring burst damage gave me no end of grief, like Chorussina who would've been impossible without a scroll of Create Pit I had squirreled away, or the demodand cabal in Alushinyrra. But, from their complaints, others had far more trouble than I did with the Pathetic Quasit, Playful Darkness, Shadow Dragon and Eternal Guardian, where my large bag of tricks let me exploit their weak points. (hint: you can polymorph Playful Darkness... and repurpose it)

I wholeheartedly approved of the neat little solution offered by my lichdom to the final decision. And hey, some of the characters are interesting enough, like Areelu, Zacharius or the Storyteller... but the better moments are constantly undercut one scene later - e.g. when you do finally discover the (rather trite and predictable) event which set off the villain's rampage, a pop-up message informs you "now you know" the better to sap the grand reveal of any possible gravitas. Owlcat tried much too hard to appeal to shitheaded tweens, from the gratuitous high-level enemies and gratuitous "mythic" freebie feats to the simpleminded characters strutting through overstated world-shaking events, a world in which there are no big actors, only big roles.

 

Though Wrath of the Righteous has its good points, the main reason to play Owlcat's games remains a lack of meaningful competition in story-based, tactical cRPGs.

Shame on You for Him on You

"And it wasn't my fault that the barbarian raped me"

Amanda Palmer - Oasis

____________________________________________________

 

"Somewhere along the line, then, the feminist criticism of patriarchal institutions derailed into a real, visceral, and frightening antagonism toward men and a consequent intolerance toward women who insist on associating with them. I'm amazed, as I think about it, that hetero women have submitted to this stigmatizing of their sexual desires and personal relations - but without question many of them have done so.

[...]

Faced with the inconvenient fact that many women who are economically independent nonetheless seem to like living with men, heterophobes have had to bring out the heavy artillery to combat so stubborn a resistance. The older of the two main weapons they deploy is the language of hate against men. So much abuse is heaped on males that it becomes difficult for self-respecting women who consider themselves feminists to associate with them

[...]

These ideas are now repeated and assented to by people who certainly do not regard themselves as feminist extremists, and who perhaps do not even realize where their rhetoric originates, so successful has it been in mainstreaming itself as reasonable and warranted protection of women."

 

Daphne Patai - Heterophobia (1998)

 

 

"The greater feminism's success in raising our feelings of moral outrage at sexual harassment, date rape, or insensitive remarks in the workplace or classroom, the more likely it is that members of a protected group will find it in their interest to make a false or frivolous accusation."

cited from Professing Feminism by Patai and Koertege (1994)

____________________________________________________

The feminist line on false rape accusations has always flatly declared that women don't lie, with the same blanket dismissiveness of critical thinking as papal infallibility. It grows particularly farcical in some famous cases like Bill Cosby's, where you're expected to blindly believe every single one of sixty-whatever accusations at face value. To engage with the politically correct narrative in such cases, check reality at the door. Believe that no woman has ever had sex (or even flirted) with a famous man willingly, or heaven forfend - willingly indulged in proffered proscribed narcotics! Forget that while men want to fuck women, women want to fuck status. Pretend that groupies piling onto an alpha male's doorstep for a dose of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll (or, failing that: sex, drugs and sitcoms) are as innocent on the topic of beaver cleaving as Beaver Cleaver.

 

High ranking males display their status (among other means) by lavishing upon females resources beyond the (practical or financial) reach of we lower breeds. A Prince Charming must demonstrate to his many mates both that he does not live by the laws of lesser men, transgressing with impunity, and also that he is willing to act as provider. Offering them illicit comestibles fits both purposes admirably. This basic, common-sense understanding of our social ape nature should have prompted a skepticism utterly absent from both the media and public's eagerness to swallow every possible claim to the point comedians are still milking the case's infamy seven years later. While Cosby may very well have been guilty of <something> (the rich and powerful are not shy about exerting their privilege) we will never know quite how much, because torching him as an effigy of the supposed evils of man-kind completely overshadowed any rational inquiry into his actions. Every accusation was another welcome log on the pyre.

 

At the root of such willful gullibility lies our eagerness to side with a woman against a man, stemming from both innate protectiveness and from several generations' worth of pervasive feminist indoctrination capitalizing on that instinctive mental foible. Perhaps unsurprisingly, questioning of proven false accusers' motivation tends to find (when the reason isn't simply "I dunno") that such women are using rape victimhood as an alibi to cover up some of their own misdeeds - sometimes infidelity or literal crimes, but other times something as simple as skipping class or being late for work. Well, no shit! What better alibi than one we are expressly forbidden from questioning? As other motivations go, famous cases like Cosby's may fall into material gain (to the tune of millions of $$$ in damages) but for your run-of-the-mill spurious claim I would think the "regret" category needs better fleshing out, given that shame and desire to end the conversation will also inflate the "I dunno" quotient.

The real question is where that shame is coming from, and while feminists of course project guilt for this, as for anything, onto men, consider the media landscape feminism has fabricated since the '70s. We have all been bred into the unquestioned dogma, in every medium of expression, that women are angels and men are devils, that men are stupid, that men and only men are guilty of all the world's ills, that women must "civilize" men, that women are entitled to harm men because it's not "really" harm since women are weaker and disadvantaged, that any crime by a woman is secretly the fault of some man, that every man is a wife-battering, child-abusing rapist, that the punishment should always overcompensate the perceived crime, that accusations against men can be as counterfactual as we like because fighting "the patriarchy" takes priority over reality, that male tastes are "perverse" wherever they diverge from female demands, that men sit an order of being below women on the scala naturae, that men's very existence is instrumental and not intrinsic, that men benefit from and their only value lies in dying in service to women (e.g. any modern movie) because their very lives are worthless by comparison. Any woman who so much as permits a male to touch her is physically and metaphysically tainted as by the very ichor of the pit.

 

False rape accusations have always been a concern (I'm guessing since caveman days) but they used to take the form of a woman inciting her male relatives to beat her lover senseless if she's unhappy with him or doesn't want to admit to cheating and isn't creative enough to pull a "virgin birth" act. After not merely years or decades but generations of anti-male propaganda saturating every frequency, is judicial escalation that surprising? Is it any wonder that not only blue-haired extremists but women in general feel a desperate need to reframe heterosexuality itself as a male crime? Who would admit to being attracted to some disgusting beast we are all assured is unworthy of anything but abuse? Why should we not suspect that increasing numbers of women would rather have their mates tortured to death in prison than admit (publicly or even psychologically) to having had willing congress with a filthy intactus?

 

So stop acting surprised by false rape accusations. It's been obvious for decades where the demonization of men and beatification of women would lead. It's not a bug, it's a feature. It was always the principal selling point, the visceral appeal of feminism to fabricate justification for women to abuse men, by any pretext and without regard for context.

Bah, NerdLord: Calradia's Crisis of Overproduction

Bannerlord slows down abruptly after the first few levels, to the point its early pacing could've used a lot more smoothing out. After immediately recruiting your party, polishing off a few looter bands, doing a quest or two and some trading, you just as suddenly fall into the murder hobo routine by sheer necessity, favoring opportunism over planning. Pretty soon you run into M&B2's most noticeable addition to the original's gameplay, clans:

While renown used to affect maximum party size (and occasional interactions) it now also acts as XP for your clan tier levels. This in turn limits your owned workshops and number of named companions, which in turn can now autonomously lead trade caravans and quest.

Overall, Bannerlord leans too heavily in favor of passive moneymaking instead of personal trading / loot sales. Unable to pass up the chance to wolf-guard something sheep-related I bought my recurring quest-giver's wool weavery... only to find any shop can now be repurposed to other goods. While I'm generally in favor of giving players more control, this does cut into each town's regional charm, e.g. Uxkhal or Praven's fame as grain-town and beer-town. Moreover you no longer contribute goods directly to a business' supply pile, and while you can probably indirectly depress local supply costs by flooding the market, you're still somehow given less control via more control, less cause than ever to visit your properties.

Similarly, depending on your companions' skill levels they can now autocomplete quests for you, heavily encouraged by quest descriptions often lacking location info (meaning you rarely know whether you'll be sent in the wrong direction from your other tasks) so questing itself now seems to have been redefined as a companion activity. And, while splitting off part of your army for a week or even two at a time would balance this over-ease out in theory, not paying wages to quest detachments makes it free money even with companions' chance of failure.

You can also send them off trading with a caravan... but once again it's a fire-and-forget affair. Pay the initial cost and your companion keeps running around the map trading indefinitely.

My impressions might change as I join a faction and wars render the world more dangerous, but so far? The first level of renown's +15 party size instantly places you into near invincibility over early game looters and other bands seem few, far between and sparsely populated to boot. I can't even skill up my medicine anymore because so few of my crew are being wounded. After a short trade run from my starting area of Danustica / Onira toward Razih and Hubyar I set off through Khuzait lands, then a third trade run up to the Sturgians and the other two Imperial factions, then another and another down through Aserai and Battanian towns, all the while encountering no enemies to speak of and raking in risk-free cash.

Now, in fairness, this is not entirely unexpected. The features on which Mount&Blade made its name fifteen years ago (historical allusions, physics-enabled first-person-slasher combat, open-world adventuring, managerial integration, genre mashups) have all been picked up during Bannerlord's lengthy development by other developers who even do any particular feature better. So I'd guess my early observations reflect a necessary shift in focus for Bannerlord to remain fresh and competitive... but I have yet to see the payoff.

It's not all bad. My jaunt through Khuzait villages, picking up cheap herds of livestock, rudely awakened me to the new weight-based (instead of slot-based) inventory system's vagaries: my party's speed dropped from 5 to 1 in only one week. Herds, as it turns out, require handling and are therefore dependent on your party size... and horses, pack-horses and mules count toward that total. The real challenge becomes juggling party size against herd size against cargo capacity, and you're gonna want a lot of cargo capacity. Where you'd routinely buy up towns' entire specialized production in Warband, now towns produce far more than you can liquidate... but given the significantly larger map, you're also encouraged to diversify your stock as you go and alter routes more than you would in Warband's regular periphery circuit... which means more mules and more soldiers to herd them... which means more renown to increase party size.

Everything seems to come back to renown now.

Farming rep is a long-term proposition to be sure. Unlike the old guild masters, the newfangled craftsmen and traders in each town are not guaranteed to offer quests. Looter fights give a measly 1 renown on average (and you need 100-200 even for level 2-3) so you'll jump into tournaments every chance you get.

 

Seemingly aware of this, the developers made tournaments into a crutch. I was rather proud of winning my first one, but soon got rather jaded when they cropped up every other town. Calradia gains a discrepant party atmosphere: plentiful goods, no threat, nonstop tournaments everywhere you tourn, and reliable free money from several sources... and I don't even own a fief yet!

 

By level 12, three years after I first face-planted into Danustica, it feels like I've pretty much won the game. Without a measurable bandit presence and with the ability to send your expensive top-tier troops off on quests, you can keep making money indefinitely. I'll probably amass a million denars' worth of troops and armor before bothering to wheedle my way into the warring states.

October 1950, August 79, January 2022

"A cloud, from which mountain was uncertain, at this distance (but it was found afterwards to come from Mount Vesuvius), was ascending, the appearance of which I cannot give you a more exact description of than by likening it to that of a pine tree, for it shot up to a great height in the form of a very tall trunk, which spread itself out at the top into a sort of branches

[...]

the cinders, which grew thicker and hotter the nearer he approached, fell into the ships, together with pumice-stones, and black pieces of burning rock: they were in danger too not only of being aground by the sudden retreat of the sea, but also from the vast fragments which rolled down from the mountain, and obstructed all the shore.

[...]

a deeper darkness prevailed than in the thickest night; [...] my uncle, laying himself down upon a sail cloth, which was spread for him, called twice for some cold water, which he drank, when immediately the flames, preceded by a strong whiff of sulphur, dispersed the rest of the party, and obliged him to rise. He raised himself up with the assistance of two of his servants, and instantly fell down dead; suffocated, as I conjecture, by some gross and noxious vapour

[...]

The chariots, which we had ordered to be drawn out, were so agitated backwards and forwards, though upon the most level ground, that we could not keep them steady, even by supporting them with large stones. The sea seemed to roll back upon itself, and to be driven from its banks by the convulsive motion of the earth; it is certain at least the shore was considerably enlarged, and several sea animals were left upon it. 

[...]

You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the shouts of men; some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognise each other by the voices that replied; one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family; some wishing to die, from the very fear of dying; some lifting their hands to the gods; but the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final endless night of which we have heard had come upon the world.

[...]

many frenzied persons ran up and down heightening their own and their friends' calamities by terrible predictions."

 

Pliny the Younger - letters to Cornelius Tacitus in ~105 (a quarter century after the eruption) translated by William Melmoth the Younger in 1746, as found by Werwolfe (the younger, why not) on Project Gutenberg on 2022/01/18

______________________________________

 

initial eruption ended at 02:00 on 21 December 2021

A large eruption commenced on 14 January 2022 sending clouds of ash 20 km (12 mi) into the atmosphere

A series of bangs were heard around 3:30 a.m. local time in and around Anchorage, Alaska, approximately 9,700 kilometres (6,000 mi) away from the volcano, lasting about 30 minutes.

A pressure fluctuation of 2.5 hPa was measured in Switzerland, and of just over 2 hPa when it reached the United Kingdom. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated the eruption at a surface-wave magnitude of 5.8. Shockwaves were reported as having gone around the earth as many as four times

Between 05:00 and 06:00 UTC on 15 January 2022, 200,000 [lightning] flashes were recorded.

the eruption can have a cooling effect in the Southern Hemisphere, causing slight cooling of winters and spectacular sunsets. People living in the Southern Hemisphere can expect purple sunsets for a few months after the eruption. A cooling effect of 0.1 to 0.5°C (0.18 to 0.9° F) may last until spring (September–November 2022).

The eruption column rose 55 kilometres (34 mi) into the mesosphere and contained approximately 2.4 km3 (0.58 cu mi) of material

As a result of the eruption, 1.2 m / 1.5–2 m / 15 m / 20 cm / 61 cm / 1–2.5 m / 0.8 m / 1.33 m / 1.10 m / 0.82 m / 0.77 m / 0.50 m / 1.2 m / 0.9 m / 0.38 m / 0.36 m / 0.31 m / 2 m / 0.68 m / 0.72 m / 0.65 m / 1.3 m / 1.1 m / 2.05 m / 1.19 m / 2 m / 12 cm tsunamis were recorded in [insert your Pacific coastal town here]

A surfing contest with over 100 participants was cancelled in Santa Cruz, California.

Atatā Island; at least 72 buildings were affected by the tsunami and the whole island was blanketed by ash

 

arbitrarily selected tidbits from Wikipedia's article on the Hunga Tonga eruption and tsunami

(oh noes, not the surfing contest!)

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Building 1940s' trend of hard science fiction by expanding that plausibility and imagination to the social sphere, back in 1950 Galaxy Science Fiction launched with a mission statement of publishing SF that had some excuse to call itself such, instead of merely repackaging demigod pugilism, high seas swashbuckling or wild west gunslinging IN SPAAACE! - which had been the rule during the first half of the 20th century. The idea that SciFi should expand logicaly upon the practical and social implications of technological advancement instead of merely spouting off buzzwords like "jets" and "lasers" sold well... momentarily. Then the inevitable degeneracy of the human ape reasserted itself and now seventy years later Hollywood can't seem to stop making billions upon billions off Star Wars' swashbuckling demigods.

Reason:1

Simian Instinct: 8,000,000,000

On a completely different topic, I shouldn't belabor the evident contrast between the above two reports on a volcanic eruption. Pliny and Tacitus represented more or less the intellectual pinnacle of their time's most advanced civilization, yet their correspondence on this literally world-shaking event now reads like the offhand musings and fumbling speculation of a hung-over tourist. I doubt any of us, even those who have lived through the transition from newspapers to a hundred television channels to the internet, appreciate the staggering impact of even a secondhand, mutable source like Wikipedia, openly available to all, listing precise info and concise summaries of important events, when for millennia our best stab at scientific and historical accuracy was hoping some bored rich bastard scribbled his propagandist buddy a "wish you were here" postcard. We have instant message timelapses FROM SPAAAAACE! of the actual eruption and worldwide pressure wave tracking instead of idly wondering what that noise was or whether that funny cloud has anything to do with your chariot spontaneously breaking into the Lindsey Hop. Yet all this was achieved by an infinitesimal percentage of the population, the far right extreme of the IQ curve, and against the sheer weight of mammalian flesh now choking the planet, no techno-magical gifts can do more than hasten the collapse by feeding and sheltering the vermin.

More to my soon-to-emerge point here, I was surprised at Pliny's account barely touching upon the supernatural, and even then employing it to merely illustrate mass panic, despair and futile hand-wringing. Not to say Pliny was anything but a law-abiding, god(s)-fearing civis romanus who routinely chopped off cows' heads in the name of omnipluripotent such-and-such. While, yes, it's hard to believe that as a confused youth witnessing the impossible he might not at some point have begged Jupiter to Optimize and Maximize the situation, overall this had no bearing on his real-life observations of the movements of clouds, tides and earth, his uncle Namesake the Elder's death evacuating a seaside community or his mother's "go on without me" moment. There were already stories about the gods a-plenty. This was obviously a different kind of story.

 

Whatever advancements we've accrued in the 1900 years since then have come by increasing such awareness of story genres, and judging more and more accounts about the world around us by their worth as scientific fiction instead of glorified fantasies about divine will. You can watch that magnificent gif of the Hunga Tonga eruption from 35km in the not-air on your phone because the Japanese stopped worrying they'd put Tsukuyomi's eye out. If Christians really had managed to torture Galileo to death as they wanted, those of us not living within mid-Pacific pumice range would have no idea an eruption occurred at all. So it's a bit galling that as soon as the first videos went up, so did the cretinous bleating of "our prayers are with them" and the Bishop of Rome "expressing his spiritual closeness" to people who could find much readier use for the cash he could get by pawning just one of his magic gold-embossed dresses. Hell, if thoughts of closeness are considered helpful, I'll gladly masturbate to a picture of a Polynesian woman and I guarantee it would help the relief effort every bit as much as you did by humping a crucifix. Not that there's much point in a relief effort that'll only be diverted to strengthen charlatans' grip on the local populace. Safe bet: they'll rebuild their churches before they rebuild their homes and businesses.

 

Unless you can actually produce your deity I don't want to hear from you troglodytes. Stop trying to turn my spaceship navigators into swashbuckling mystical prophets. Even back in the second century the need to separate clear thought from gullibility, wishful thinking and mindless impulses was growing evident. Our lives only improved as we expanded such scrutiny and, though the recent temper tantrum from an angry volcano god has me focusing on religion, the entire spectrum of human impulsivity, stagnation and irrationality begs a solid analytical thrashing now more than ever, from presidential elections to pop singers and courtship rituals, from hero worship to tribal loyalties. The heroes of human fiction are expected to just grit their teeth and *will* their way through challenges or rely on twue wuv or the power of friendship or the contrivances of heroic fate to win the day - or for the wannabe loftier variety, to cling to the point of irrationality to a supposedly superior political stance. Well, fuck that! If only villains are permitted to value independent intellect, the measure of existence itself, then be a villain. Be inhuman. Nobody builds a weather satellite by loving it or by praying to it.

 

But any evidence of such desire for improvement and advancement would manifest in pop culture. It has not manifested in pop culture. For every meteorologist uploading rational explanations, ten thousand cretins kneel in prayer to their own cretinism. Against every Valentine Michael Smith playing at knowing mythopoesis, ten thousand Luke Skywalkers toe the ingenuously messianic line. Now it's too late. Subhuman humanity will die of stupidity. The stories we so love to tell have self-fulfilled this apocalyptic prophecy.