Dewar

Did you kill the dragon? That was the hardest fight in the game for me.

Interesting, I hope that they get a WEP together and get to do that in the end.

I'm watching him getting destroyed in a war he shouldn't have started, so that's been fun I highly recommend his playlists that are multiplayer with Mathas and NorthernLion. A little less informative, but a lot funnier.

If you ask me, every war should start with a demand that you can acquiesce to if you so choose. Unfortunately, I'm in a situation where everyone is fabricating claims on me constantly, so the claims map mode became worthless a while back.

It's actually a Norway playthrough. It's nice becuase he actually makes some pretty big mistakes and manages to recover from them, which is teaching me a lot. It's especially surprsing all the loans he's willing to take out in order to win important wars. I've never been one to go into debt in these sorts of games, but I've been doing a lot better since I started being willing to pay Bohemia 2000 ducats to just go away. I think what's really killing me at the moment is that I picked a lot of Military Ideas and I pushed hard for colonization which put me behind in Military tech without giving me much of real value. I'm pretty sure it's a terminal issue, but I've managed to get enough allies that I've had a good period of booming trade, province improvements, and general peace. At this point I'm trying to just round out the game without losing anything else. The game ends in 1850 or so right?

I haven't been able to make that work. Is it as simple as looking the proper direction and hitting E?

Neither looks right. I just assume that the smiley implies a period.

I don't like being that close to things if I can avoid it.

I love the LMG in BF4, but the one in Titanfall performs nothing like it. Where it's good (I hear) is rodeoing enemy Titans. You can take out a whole Titan on one clip and, if you get the slammer mod, it's only half a clip.

Played a bunch yesterday and I think I figured out the problems I have with the game, illustrated with this nice story: After a long time of peace, during which I got my trade in order and got my monthly income up near the 100 ducats mark, my relations with all my usual enemies had warmed some so I started un-declaring my rivalries and selecting those folks who were embargoing me so I could embargo them back. Suddenly, Bohemia and their ally Russia declare a war over the stupid island out in the Baltic sea that's between us. I didn't really want it anyway, but I didn't have any option to give it up. Russia alone has twice the troops I have, so they quickly eliminate my land forces and carpet siege my whole country. What they didn't plan for was the fact that I had more than 200 ships, mostly lights for trade but still a significant number of heavies. I completely decimate their navy and they are unable to land troops on the island that is actually the war goal. So here I sit, -70% warscore, unable to willingly give up the island since they don't occupy it, and they are unwilling to take any amount of money or other provinces. I just shifted the speed up to max and let time spiral by. The only thing that's keeping me from being able to keep it up indefinitely is my -15 monthly income, so I slowly accumulate loans over the course of 30 years of this. Everyone's war enthusiasm is in the toilet, but there is no physical way for me to surrender. Finally, a few months before I go bankrupt, they finally buckle and are willing to take a crappy side county that I didn't want anyway. All three of our countries are in complete disarray, multiple smaller wars have broken out against all of us, complete pandemonium. There are two things that they could easily do to avoid this situation. First, they could give me the CK2-faction-style "accept demands" prompt when the war starts. I would have happily just given them the island if they'd asked and I'd certainly have handed it over if they threatened war. Second, not allowing me to give up whatever the hell I want to end the war is dumb, especially the war goal. If that island is all they wanted, why not let me give it to them. There are also a couple of things that would be nice to make this situation more fair. First, making the improve relations thing actually do something. France has the top military in the world and they were my ally with a +200 opinion of me, yet they left me hanging out to dry. I was +50 with both Russia and Bohemia before the war started too. Obviously none of these things actually mean anything, so why even include it? Second, if they made the war goals that each country wants more transparent. I have no idea why every single thing on the surrender list had the red thumbs down on it. Some insight into these things would be helpful to at least know why my economoy was ruined for 30 years.

That sounds more like what Heroes of the Storm is trying to do. Smaller hero pool but lots of different gimmick matches.

I've had to spend the last couple of weekends hunting for a new rental, but with that out of the way I can get back to programming. The last couple of times I've been on the Google Hangout has been deprecated in favor of the IRC channel, but the IRC channel hasn't really been talking much about game development. Is there some alternate version of game dev chat going on somewhere?

Are you thinking a 4 way joystick or an 8 way?

That's good that your current job seems to be very sensible. I've had it both ways, one place that treated me like a sack of garbage for the one month I gave them notice, and another that was super awesome and basically gave me my last two weeks "off" with the only real responsibility being to write down what I do every day and then teach one of the other people on my team if necessary.

Austia is firmly against me since I've been vassalizing and attacking various countries in the HRE. Hungary is on my side, and I'm working toward getting in with France. Losing the Poland/Lithuania/Bohemia block really hurt me as I was putting in a lot of resources to stay good with them and they were the only countries in a good location to be a reliable counter to Russia. I've been watching a Scandinavia playthough on Youtube done by Arumba. There's been some good trade tips on there, so I think I'm going to hop on after work today and do my best to just dominate trade in my area and win by sheer amounts of cash. My income is already pretty crazy. Maybe I can bribe Russia to be my friend and we can divide England between us.

Sounds like the Nokia guy who originally floated the idea of spinning off the Xbox, but then took the leadership over that division, might have pissed some people off. I can't imagine why.

Wait. is that real?

I go to special effort to avoid getting in fights in close range areas. Rather than being in the building with the capture point, I'll be on top shooting at folks as they try to come in. There are open areas in most of the maps. Most people will run toward you so frantically that you can really think about where you want to have the fight and lure them in. I use the secondary for long range sniping of grunts if I'm somewhere where the fight isn't at the moment, but generally I'll just switch over to my secondary if needed.

Wow, three months? I hope they don't treat you like shit for that whole time.

I'm usually a controller person since my first major FPS was Halo, but I'm doing well with the keyboard and mouse. At the same time, the aiming is sloppy enough that I think a controler would do well.

The pistol's sweet spot is far away, just inside locking range. Cloak or being up high out of direct line of view helps, as does jumping around like an idiot. The Shotgun has pretty good range on the one hit kill. It's the weapon I go up against the most by far.

After he hit me with it the first time, I thought I could stay away from it, but the range is deceptively long. The next time he hit me with it, I thought I was far enough away by a fair amount, and the third time I was just standing up so I couldn't have dodged if I wanted to. For all the strength and heavy armor, I didn't feel that strong. I regret not just going with a Dex build and at least being able to roll around. Everything kills you in one series of hits anyway.

We found an apartment (well a town house anyway!) It ended up costing more than we were planning on spending, but I think we can balance the budget all right. It has an awesome kitchen and a great location, which I realized were the two most important things to me.

Well, giving the final boss of a game the ability to de-level you is a sure way to get me to look up cheese tactics online. i ended up spending about 30 minutes watching internet videos and casting poison repeatedly, but I have now beaten Demon's Souls. Dark Souls 2 PC can't come quick enough.

Whatever you do, don't get caught in the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Just because you've spent a bunch of money up until this point doesn't mean you should stay in Uni if it doesn't feel like it's for you. If you want to stay, then certainly fight for it, but don't stay for the wrong reasons. http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/how-the-sunk-cost-fallacy-makes-you-act-stupid.html