Gormongous

You and me both, with Stellaris. I'm trying to take heart that the lead dev is Henrik Fåhraeus, the original lead for Crusader Kings II up until "phase one" of the DLC ended with The Old Gods. It's not like he doesn't have his own missteps, like the entirety of Sword of Islam, but he's certainly not part of Johan Andersson's faction in the Paradox that's all about multiplayer and hardcoded "fairness."

Before corpses, it was certainly a dominant strategy to drop the lead rank, but not invariably the right call. Sometimes, hitting the second rank would be more effective to shuffle the ranks, or you might not have time to wait and so you'd hit the back instead. Honestly, I think of Darkest Dungeon's development as an excellent example of a developer designing a very specific kind of system (positioning determines character abilities) without fully apprehending the optimal player reaction to such a system (disrupt enemy positioning, through skills if possible and raw damage output if not) and then putting a Big Fairy Wall of Nope in the way of that player reaction (the corpse mechanic, effectively a delay timer) instead of expanding the game with actual mechanics that respond to the reaction rather than flatly prevent it (give every type of enemy abilities that they could perform in every rank or make certain damage types more effective on different ranks or different enemies that usually appear in different ranks). I've found that it's the natural reaction for many developers making their first deep-dive strategy or roleplaying game to design this way, by knocking down optimal strategies until nothing's optimal—but it's never actually that nothing's optimal, it's that the optimal strategies are now too time-consuming and tedious for most players to use... and the game's less interesting as a result, because there's less of an arc of player competency. Red Hook Studios has done this repeatedly with Darkest Dungeon, unfortunately: they also changed Sanity from a bar that would fill up over and over, giving the character worse and worse quirks, to a bar that would fill up once, give a character a quirk, then fill up again and kill them. It turned Sanity into just another health bar because a few high-level players were able to push too deep into the larger dungeons too early by ignoring Sanity, letting their characters become crazy piles of shit, and then dismissing them. Instead of making the system reactive, they dumped roadblocks into it instead, which is disappointing.

Yeah! That Sulla piece is really genius insight, I read it back in the day and then totally forgot about it.

I actually see this quite frequently with Paradox. Often, as opposed to the vocal minority being a bunch of people who don't know how to control their tone, the vocal minority are people who have invested enough time in the game and its systems to understand them better than the developers themselves, at least in terms of unintended consequences. The number of times that the EU4 devs patched a new feature into the game or overhauled the values in a core system; dismissd a line-by-line criticism of the changes by TheMeInTeam or someone else with stature on the official forums by saying, "Detractors represent a vocal minority, overall our numbers on Steam are up"; and then quietly patched in watered-down versions of the fan's suggestions three or four months later, because it ends up that adding a generic "Western Europe" trade node does in fact make the New World only profitable for Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and maybe France to colonize, was enough to give me deja vu. I know that Chris isn't saying this, but it does seems like some developers fall into the trap of thinking that all negative reactions are coming from the same place, regardless of content, and not actually parsing the critiques from the complaints. EDIT: With Paradox specifically, this situation is not helped by the status of their community managers as "patch apologists" who seem to have been put into place expressly to prevent fan reactions from ever reaching the devs' ears, if the latter aren't seeking them out.

Yeah, I agree. It spoiled the symmetry of the game's combat, too, and really felt like an attempt to make it harder for the sake of being harder. It's the same way I feel about some of the uses of Aggressive Expansion in Europa Universalis 4, the devs are just saying, "We don't have a good reason why you shouldn't use this strategy, but we don't want you to use it anyway, so here's a mechanic that specifically punishes you for it!"

I'm glad we agree! I honestly wonder if there's just someone high up in Clinton's campaign pushing her to attack, because if you're not attacking you're being attacked or something, and it's a misstep every time. Outside of an organized debate, Clinton's not good on the attack. She's so much better at being this reasoned presence, the kind who rolled her eyes at the Benghazi hearings. I hope she learns lessons about how to campaign effectively against Sanders and that they help her against Trump. I'm not sure she's ready for the full force of that hate machine...

All you say is true, but Clinton has other issues with honesty that aren't a matter of past history. For instance, I have no idea what the hell she was trying with her attempt last week to cast doubt on Sanders' commitment to universal healthcare by literally saying, "I don't know where he was when I was trying to get health care in '93 and '94." The answer, of course, is that he was right behind her during one of her televised speeches (and she not only thanked him personally in the video from which that screencap comes, but wrote him a thank-you note on a Polaroid of them together). Furthermore, he wasn't just an incidental supporter, but about universal healthcare in general and Clinton's plan in particular. I have to conclude one of two things: either Clinton cannot remember who her allies were in the struggle of a lifetime over an issue near and dear to her heart, or she can and has chosen to lie about them were in order to make them look bad. Neither reflects well on her. And, lest you say that this was an isolated incident, this was the second in four solid days of gaffes by Clinton. The HIV/AIDS comment at the Reagan funeral, then impugning Sanders' record with healthcare, then stating her intention to put "a lot of coal miners... out of business," and finally claiming that not a single American life was lost in Libya. At least now that the internet is a thing, the presidency is not a job where you can say whatever you want, off the cuff, and apologize if it doesn't land the way you want it, but that's certainly how Clinton's treating it lately, which doesn't speak too well to me of her two decades of political experience.

I don't think it's necessary to lock this thread. If a couple of posts by one person made a thread irretrievable, then the Feminism and Social Justice threads would be locked ten or twenty times over. Hell, even the WiiU thread would be locked under those circumstances.

My issue with that piece is that the author freely switches between descriptions of "lifelong advocate" and "flexible realist" when it suits him. I would have a lot more patience for many Clinton supporters if they'd just make the latter argument by itself, that Clinton actually has shown a great deal of talent at tailoring her positions to the popular trends over the past couple decades and that that's an underappreciated aptitude for politicians to have, but I keep hearing that, deep down at the very core of her being and regardless of her words or actions, she's been a lifelong ally for universal healthcare, LGBTQIA, people of color, and whatever else and that those are the true colors that'll show in office, in the same political climate that drove Obama hard to the center. The writer calls himself a cynic, but I think there's a solid seam of naive optimism in the bedrock of their thinking.

Honestly, the entire Democratic primary is filled with condescension. The number of Clinton supporters who have told me that Sanders doesn't have achievable positions, his supporters don't understand how government works, they just want to be part of a "revolution," they just like him because he's white or male, and/or they're going to ruin things for the one "viable" candidate the Democrats have is absolutely mind-boggling, especially considering how little I talk about politics in my daily life. I have literally had passing acquaintances hear that I support Sanders, nothing more, and start lecturing me about how I'm a naive idiot. It's incredibly toxic, all around.

Salt used to have the iconic meanings of purity and hospitality, now it means bitterness and regret. Language!

Honestly, the more I learn about Clinton's foreign policy experience, the more I think that having a complete novice in the situation room would be better than having Clinton back in there, with more power than she had as Secretary of State. Clinton pioneered a massive sale of arms to Saudi Arabia and to other authoritarian regimes in the Middle East that have been accused of human rights abuses, after Saudi Arabia and Boeing (two of the parties involved in the sale) donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. The State Department under Clinton countenanced the US embassy in Haiti to help Hanes and Levis keep the minimum wage there at thirty-one cents an hour, the lowest in the Western hemisphere. Clinton backed a pro-American candidate in Haiti, because the popular favorite was too close to Chavez, and saw to it that they received US government funding for their campaign. Haitian officials have alleged that the election was fixed, in some way, but no worries, because Clinton's brother Tony Rodham got a contract to mine gold in Haiti out of the deal, despite having absolutely no qualifications to run a gold mine. When Honduras' government was overthrown by a right-wing oligarchy, Clinton militated against Obama's condemnation of it and ultimately dictated a policy of implicit support. Later, it turns out that a family-friend-turned-lobbyist prevailed upon her to continue funding to the new regime, despite human rights abuses, and to drag her department's feet on a mediated settlement between the rival factions. Under Clinton, the State Department funneled billions of dollars and materiel into Mexico to fight the drug war, even after being presented with evidence that this support was being used against the populace instead. The Clinton Foundation has received a million dollars from a government-owned corporation in Morocco in connection with its illegal occupation and exploitation of Western Sahara for phosphates, after which Clinton has spoken supportively about the Moroccan government. And all of this is not to mention Clinton's well-known work spearheading the destruction of Libya (which was, like Bush's war against Iraq, largely done under false pretenses and contrary to information on the ground) and the mishandling of Syria and Ukraine. Clinton is wholly the inheritor and, in many cases, the instigator of Obama's worst foreign policy missteps, most of which show that her friendship with Kissinger isn't just a matter of tea and good music. EDIT: And lest any of you think that's liable to change with Clinton at the reins herself, she even suggested last month that the way to stabilize Libya and Syria are US military presences, much like the sixty-year deployments in Germany, Japan, and South Korea.

Not to cherry-pick from your whole thing, but of course she's outperforming everyone in votes. Until yesterday, the Republican primary was split four ways, albeit unevenly, and Clinton's currently ahead of Sanders in the Democratic primary. This is a non-fact and has minimal predictive value for how she will fare in a general election, especially against an opponent who is actually willing to use her twenty-odd years of scandals and gaffes against her. I agree with other posters that Trump is liable to enervate much of the Republican base in the election proper, possibly in equal proportion to the angry reactionaries and independents that he'll pick up, but relying on the Democratic machine to churn out another win because there's no better option at hand is exactly the reason that Clinton doesn't exactly have a commanding presence among younger voters and the further left.

Yeah, for some reason, people don't like to acknowledge that this is the risk of running a centrist candidate under the aegis of the Democratic Party: you won't attract nearly as many independents or young voters as someone further to the left. Personally, I'm surprised that Clinton's not courting those groups more aggressively; the idea that she needs to stay close to center to attract "reasonable Republicans" defecting because of Trump is a total fantasy, more outlandish than anything that's ever come out of Sanders' mouth. Simply relying on Sanders to act as a sheepdog to herd the left back into the Democratic voting base is a strategy that'll be prone to backfire, I think, and vote-shaming them has never really been able to pick up the slack, historically speaking.

The hope for me now is that, the longer Sanders stays in the race, the further Clinton is forced to the left to engage with his base. Anything that forces her to make concessions beyond "lesser evil" and "united front" fear-mongering is good. She's also picked up some of his policies, at least for now, so she's not just saying, "I'll see what I can do," about, say, the banks anymore. I still worry about Clinton overall. I think she is a much weaker candidate than most people credit: record unlikeability, prone to gaffes (the AIDS comment and asking where Bernie was in the nineties, in the same week!), and still undergoing three separate federal investigations. She is possibly the candidate I'd be least likely to match up against a fascist demagogue, given the choice.

It's called Gemclod. I'm about halfway through it right now and I'm a little mixed, I think? The first two authors are excellent, but then the next two try way too hard to roleplay insane/incompetent overseers and cause a lot of (strangely tedious) chaos in the game that isn't as funny as they think it is. Now I'm on the fifth author and, while enjoyable, his writing lacks some presence (which may be because his avatar in the game was killed in the previous year and he's had difficulty coming up with an in-fiction reason why he's the overseer now).

I feel for them, with that design challenge. It's hard to make a combat system where "not getting hit at all" isn't flatly superior to "weathering hits effectively."

I finished the second cour of Natsu no Arashi. I don't really know how to feel? Part of it is probably just finishing a series that is freighted so heavily with nostalgia, but part of it... I don't know. The big motif throughout the second cour is when thirteen-year-old Hajime will feel the first stirrings of love, thereby setting down the road to adulthood and leaving the titular summer of Natsu no Arashi behind. For the first half of the cour, this is mostly expressed through the character of Jun, a young girl who cross-dresses as a boy around Hajime because she values his friendship more than the romantic feelings that she also harbors, and that's fine. For the second half, the focus is on Hajime's immature crush on Arashi, the ghostly girl who's subjectively three years older than him and objectively sixty, and... I don't know. There is a succession of incredibly affecting "first kiss" moments between the two, each dangling in front of the audience the possibility that here is the beginning of the end for the idyllic playtime of the anime, but none of them quite stick, and then the final episode is basically the first and last episodes of the first cour remixed, which is concluded with a post-credits button where Arashi muses that her summer "isn't over just yet." The overarching thesis of Natsu no Arashi is that the past is an immutable object that influences the present more than the present could ever influence the past, even were you given the power to travel through time. Things happen and you can't just make them unhappen, right? So, even though I'm disappointed by the show's careful preservation of interpersonal stasis between the characters to the very end, because I crave resolution as a viewer, I understand what I'm being told is that the present is the thing to which I should be paying attention. Today, right now, there are goofy antics going on. Tomorrow, the next day, or the day after that, Hajime will have actual feelings for a real, living girl and leave Arashi to her ghostly eternity. That moment in the future is already determined, but for the moment, the moment that happens to encompass the entirety of the anime, trying to anticipate it is like the recurring scene of Hajime trying to write a happy ending where he, at age eighteen, confronts Arashi with his boyhood crush for her undiminished and she finally reciprocates it in the way he wants: the words for it just aren't there, no matter how he looks. Yeah, I like Natsu no Arashi, more than it probably deserves. Hell, more than anything that hinges on "time-travel hijinks" probably deserves.

Also, man, Nick turning Stardew Valley into Depression Quest 2: Skip Work and Eat Bread in Bed was rough to listen to...

The use of Proto-Indo-European was an interesting but ultimately peculiar choice for a "prehistoric" language in Far Cry: Primal. By now, after two centuries of research, the phonology, morphology, and syntax of PIE are about as well-understood as they're going to be. A big chunk of the actual vocabulary has even been reconstructed to most scholars' satisfaction, making it mostly a thought-exercise for a trained linguist to build a dialect from it: run a few phonal shifts, drop some of the more obscure cases, and regularize word order. I mostly see its celebration in multiple interviews as this great gesture of authenticity to be a sign of video games' usually tenuous relationship with historical reality; for example, no one lost their minds that Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire had conversations derived from PIE back in 2001, but now... Still, it's a direction in which I'd like to see more games go, using non-industry specialists to build more detailed worlds. But then Ubisoft did their Ubisoft thing and made it weird: they set the game in Central Europe during the Mesolithic period, thousands of years before PIE existed and nowhere near its hypothesized place of origin around the Caspian Sea. Despite all we know about PIE, there are few things we can say for absolute certain, yet one is that people in Europe around 10,000 BC would not have spoken like the characters in Far Cry: Primal do. And then, what's more, the language is rendered in the subtitles like caveman speak from an old movie! "Me see big scary bird, walk high in sky." That's AAA game development to a T: spend thousands of dollars developing multiple imaginary languages, then translate it into a childish pidgin to conform to audience expectations.

As much as I love the idea of Simoun on paper, an anime that is explicitly about a society in which our understanding of gender is more fluid and in which religion can literally be weaponized for mass destruction (further explained by Ogiue Maniax here), I am finding it almost impossible to watch. Between a protagonist who spends most of her time in her room, refusing to fight, while the rest of the cast waits patiently for her to get her shit together and a plot structure that seems to threaten the cast constantly with front-line combat at the end of one episode before pulling them back at the beginning of the next, it's just not a show that inspires enthusiastic or sustained viewing. I'll get through it, eventually, but at this point I'd almost rather resume my efforts to push through Space Runaway Ideon, which has some actual historical merit to it. Instead, I'm watching the second cour of Natsu no Arashi and enjoying it a lot! I know I didn't post in here much about the first cour, beyond to say that it was an interesting pastiche from every stage of Shinbo Akiyuki's career (with Arakawa Under the Bridge and Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru having the closest overlap), but once I finished it, I liked what it had to say about the relationship between the horrors of the past and the idylls of the present enough to write up a blog post about it. The second half of the show has proven interesting along those lines because the characters have reached a basic sort of equilibrium, by the end of the first half, and are now just pleasantly interacting with each other in various contexts. Unlike so many Shaft shows, which are aggressively about something specific, Natsu no Arashi is basically a sandbox for Shinbo to do whatever he wants to do, so there's a heavy dose of Shouwa nostalgia that's sometimes positive and sometimes negative but usually something to do with hime cuts, strawberry everything, and recreating album covers from the eighties and nineties. I really can't recommend it enough, even though it's definitely minor Shaft. Also, there was yet another retrospective/comparison of Rebuild of Evangelion with the original Neon Genesis Evangelion, this one focusing on compositional elements from both works and coming down surprisingly hard on the side of the Rebuild movies as the "superior" experience. The long-awaited release of 3.33 in the West really did open the floodgates of opinion, it seems...

Probably for the best. They were an optimal strategy, to the point of being unfun.

I get it, though, in the abstract. They're people who don't believe that our political system works and want someone to fuck it up. If that person fucks it up for the better, that's great, but if they fuck it up for the worse, it's still an improvement on business as usual. It makes me wonder if the Democratic Party's national machine is going to shift over the next few years to court disaffected and anti-establishment voters like the Republican Party's has (albeit with horrifying results).

I've only ever picked it up from conversations with my handful of friends who are veterans—rather, expanding it out from "BOG" because I feel silly using military initialisms. I wasn't aware that it was seen to have the dehumanizing connotations that you ascribe to it, just that it includes the many "advisors" and "contractors" that now constitute a military presence in foreign countries without being "soldiers," per se. I'll try to exercise more caution, I guess!

Yes, but restraint of military force is as applicable to NATO's function as the use of military force. The desire for a new NATO that folds Russia and the Arab League into its ranks, to help prevent them from acting at cross purposes with Western powers, and that puts other countries in the Middle East at the forefront of any potential policing actions is a lot more complex and nuanced than just wanting more boots on the ground in Syria—which is literally Clinton's explicit plan for "defeating" ISIS, the exact same failure of policies that have defined the last fifteen years.