Gormongous

If I had a dollar for every time, up until this moment, that I jumped over an empty space, threw a rope, and prayed that I'd grab it in time, well... I could at least buy a copy of Spelunky for a friend. Good to know.

I always figured that the "Life" thread was the place for drunkness, but I guess like with "Random Thoughts" and "Weird Medical Shit," parts of "Life" are being split off, probably for the better. I'll be back and drunk myself tomorrow night after department happy hour. I have been grading papers for two weeks now and I need a beer or three so bad...

In academia, it's usually phrased as "a call for further research," which you usually write when you know something is important but you don't know why. Alternately, because you hope something is important and you want someone else to prove you right. No real comments from me about the Bogost piece, though.

Why can't we post time-skipped Youtube vids, again? Start watching from twenty-five seconds in.

Honestly, only half kidding, I'd make a dating sim that required etiquette, poise, and elocution. The Kinect would measure your posture, heart rate, pace of speech, tone of voice, and whatever else in order to select an appropriate response from the NPCs. I don't doubt it would quickly become the most hated game ever made, but it'd be cool to see in action. Actually, anything that used the Kinect's biometric data to output some sort of conversation simulation would be great.

It'll be a great game in a year. Right now, there is obviously some kind of battle going on between the Europa Universalis IV design document (which was all about transparency and elegance) and the traditional Paradox design philosophy (which answers any sort of systems shortfall with more complexity). So the game has all these systems that are simple in theory but arcane in practice. For instance, the trade system at launch was a beautiful example of a fun, effective mechanic that rewarded the time you put into it, but it was found to be exploitable, so now it takes an enormous investment (setting up merchants at the right points, embargoing the right nations, putting ships along the right routes) that most players won't realize they have to make in order for it to be cost-effective. Like with diplomacy, if the system doesn't produce the intended effect, Paradox just adds a few more variables and leaves them undocumented, letting opacity and mystique serve as good, challenging design. Compounding it is the fact that Paradox still prides itself to some extent on the difficulty and inaccessibility of its games, even if their stated mission has moved away from that the past few years. I don't doubt that the attitude on their forums that anything else is a baby game helps very much. Paradox really needs to stop catering to those five thousand active people on the forum, since most of them get their fun from having no clue why they just got their ass kicked and therefore are a terrible echo chamber for good design. I don't know. I still have a lot of fun playing EU4 as it is now, but the game just kicks me in the balls way more often than it should. And, you know, I actually wouldn't mind being kicked in the balls, if only I had i) warning, ii) an explanation, and iii) something that I could even pretend to do to prevent it.

The AI has the same restrictions, but the AI knows exactly what they are and always stops short of them, while the player has to keep a spreadsheet open to get the same results. The specific problem with the AI and difficulty is more that the 1.2 patch drastically overhauled how the AI responds to player actions. In the launch version, the relations score (kind of like the opinions score in Crusader Kings II, but between nations) dictated everything, with "attitudes" just giving a general modifier to said score. That was found to be exploitable (see the trend here), so most of the player's diplomatic options towards a given AI nation is now determined by that AI's attitude, which is determined by hidden goals that the AI recalculates on a regular basis. For instance, even if you do nothing to AI Bohemia as Brandenburg, they'll hate you (as in, set their attitude to "Hostile," making almost all diplomatic options irrelevant) for taking Neumark, one of Brandenburg's cores, just because the AI is programmed to covet rich nearby provinces and hate their owners regardless of short- or long-term strategic feasibility. It makes the diplomatic game a crapshoot, because a two-centuries-long alliance can be broken in an instant when you take a province that your AI ally has no claim on and has never made any move to take themselves but secretly wants anyway. The real irony is that one of Europa Universalis IV's selling points was that the new "relations score" system made diplomacy completely transparent. But apparently transparent systems are exploitable and that's a no-no, so they just abstracted the weird black-box nature of EU3 diplomacy one level out, into these attitudes, which are as inscrutable as ever.

In my opinion? I think it's a shortfall in design philosophy. In a game that's so big and so complex, it's impossible to sew up every exploit, not without making the game unplayable for lower-tier players, which I think it almost is right now. Regardless, it's a chimera of a design goal. Paradox needs to balance its variables and modifiers so that the exploits are what is difficult and boring, not the proper gameplay. By doubling down on the existing penalties, Paradox has shown the "right" way to play the game is not the one it seems to be designed for. Progressive conquest of neighbors through claims is aggressively punished, while the gamey "catch-and-release" tactic with vassals is not, so the latter is how they want us to play, it seems. Either overextension, aggressive expansion, and the opinion/attitude system need to be redesigned to punish only player exploitation rather than any player action, or... I don't know. I just know that currently the game is entirely about military conquest, since there's pretty much nothing else to spend money on, but most of the options given for doing so aren't really options because the penalties are so harsh, in order to discourage edge-case exploitation. Sorry, I know that's not very lucid. I'll think about it more during the class I'm teaching and then get back to you.

As I understand it, now the game makes a secret check on the guardian's education sometime from age twelve onward, which determines the ward's education. That still gets you through the first half of the raising process and can count for even more, since education events have a drastically reduced chance of firing after your child has four or more.

I lied, I played a game as Brandenburg-to-Prussia-to-Germany, but man, I didn't really enjoy it much. Especially after you've reached about a hundred provinces, any new province puts everyone around you in a coalition for at least a decade. I only got as far as I did through diplomatic annexation, although becoming emperor stopped even that. Still, I'm proud of my bright aquamarine blog, even if I'm hemmed in because Russia inherited Hungary and Great Britain. Oh yeah, I also played a game as the Ottomans, in an attempt to reunify Islam. Castile inherited a united Holy Roman Empire, so that was more or less the end of that. I did have a lot more fun, just because in its current state, Europa Universalis IV fucks with you less when you start out big. It's pretty much the opposite of Crusader Kings II in that respect. But hey! Apparently there are even more serious bugs going on. A forum member did a systematic test of the combat system, since everyone was feeling that year-long battles in the eighteenth century meant that something was off, and discovered that combat modifiers are not being applied at all. Basically, while unit types can improve in tech, the weapons the system has them use are not being improved, so by 1800 you have Napoleonic infantry, with crazy high morale and discipline, still fighting with bows and catapults. I expect to see this hotfixed within the week, but it's still enough to put me off the game some more. This is why no one should be allowed to review Paradox games until they've been out for six months. Even more than Creative Assembly, Paradox has become the masters of "feels right, but isn't" with gameplay and systems.

Always raise heirs yourself. Later patches have made the AI better at raising them, but it's nothing compared to the focus a player can give to it. The only reason you should ever have the AI raising your heir are if you have the wrong education yourself (like Martial or Clerical ones) or if all your stats are so very low (and I mean sub-ten) that it's worth taking the risk for the higher chance of incremental stat improvements.

My Risk: Legacy game blew out too, mostly because several of the players had already played enough Risk to last a lifetime and weren't swayed enough by the changes. Was that the case with your group, or was it just "busy gamer" syndrome?

Man, whatever. It's an epidemic.

I've heard your voice when we played Monaco together, so I think I'm justified in saying that only someone not from this country could mistake you as not from this country. What a weird unpleasant dude, not deserving of any tip.

Just don't pan it all the way, I think he's saying. 75/25 is usually a good way for two people to talk on two different channels. I haven't listened to this, but I'm excited to. My podcast schedule is too empty with DOTA Today and The Idle Book Club on (semi-)hiatus.

As long as you're smart and careful, Elective is the best succession law, especially if you breed for the diplomacy stat. One of your sons or nephews will end up with twenty-plus in it, which makes them a virtually unassailable candidate for the crown. I only ever switch to Primogeniture (preferably Agnatic Primogeniture) once I have three or four crowns and I start getting worried about a split vote at an inopportune time. As a side note, I know it's still the consensus on the Paradox forums to breed stewardship for max demesne, but I prefer diplomacy for three reasons: i) all traits that give diplo are positive/neutral traits, so your diplo heir will be virtuous and well-liked; ii) the twenty-plus opinion bonus is useful for maximizing vassal relations and taxes; and iii) high diplo plus a high chancellor lets you fabricate claims in a couple years, allowing you to fabricate county claims on entire duchies between truces. Those matter more to me than ten more gold a month.

Love your post, syn. I consume an ungodly amount of anime, maybe a hundred shows a year, but there's a reason I only talk about anime i) on this forum and ii) with my friend who's doing grad work on media/cultural studies. It's because the two times I've joined fan communities (Anime Planet way back when, then AnimeBytes last year) I've immediately been hounded as a snob who hates fun. There's a level of on-demand infantilization among the anime-consuming public that's pretty much a cultural force at this point, which I hate in every way except for how it puts the game-consuming public into perspective. Also, What is it about harem anime? How can there exist hundreds of shows about spineless guys being assaulted by sex offers until they finally settle for the first girl they met, every time. I want/need/gotta know why.

For me, Yoko was bad at first (because cheesecake), then good (because she's independent and capable), then bad again (because Kamina's death wrecks her as a person and defines the rest of her life). So I don't know. I guess it's a net loss, but not show-ruining, in part because she is at least two slots away from being the main character.

Or even Rí Vanaman.

Yeah, I like Ryuuko's character a lot, I just don't like the director/writer/designer putting her in the goofy fetish outfit (and that they seem to find this the most interesting part about her, which is patently false). That's an especially good point about her pragmatism, Codicier. Most revenge-based shounen-type anime are incredibly concerned with making sure you understand the protagonist's reasons for seeking revenge and how they feeeeel about the whole thing. I just finished watching the whole run of Rurouni Kenshin and oh god, this is pretty much all the show is: long-winded speeches about pain and desserts. With Ryuuko, it definitely feels like she made the decision to seek revenge a long time ago and has internalized the relevant feelings, so there's not much need to talk about it, especially not to her enemies.

Yeah. While it looks more responsive than I expected, I just watch that right thumb scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. My own thumb starts to ache. The wrist-operated mouse has the muscles of the entire arm and shoulder backing it up. The thumb-operated gamepad just has the thumb. Because of that, I'm not convinced that the controller going to be better than an acceptable substitute for mouse-driven games like this.

I haven't watched it yet, but GAINAX has never been great about women or women's issues. The last time I feel like they were really alive to the whole thing was back when Anno was directing. Gunbuster, Evangelion, and His & Her Circumstances all have interesting female characters who don't just exist for cheesecake and exploitation. But the people who worked on those aren't the people who went on to form Trigger, so I'm ever more skeptical that there's a big picture to be had with Kill la Kill. Of course, I haven't seen Melody of Oblivion or Panty & Stocking, so I'm willing to be told I'm full of shit on this.

Okay, so "baby" is a pejorative, "kid" is not. Gotcha.

It seems sometimes like moving into a newly built house is the real "roughing it." I had a colleague who basically lived several degrees removed from first-world civilization in one way or another for nine months after moving. Hope it turns out better for you, though!

I think it's a mind game or something. Just stare at the moon or whatever trying to figure out how the texture's repeating and suddenly the moon starts staring back...