clyde

I help people throw it away, then Mack digs it back up 1000 years later. Spoiler Alert: We wrap everything in plastic. You are going to find plastic wrapped in plastic.

If you're playing Banner Saga, consider listening to episode 248 of Three Moves Ahead.

I work at a rural, residential trash-site. I sit in a cabin and watch people to make sure they know where to put things (they usually do), aren't dumping anything illegal (which people attempt daily), and I help the physically incapable folk.

I check the leaderboards. Man, I don't know if today's seed was especially brutal or if I'm tired, but I struggled all the way tonight,

My job has a lot of down-time and the majority of my job is just maintaining an alert state, so that's where I do the majority of my personal writing.

I just discovered something new... again. Regarding the destruction of Kali's altar.

It's doable if you don't buy medical insurance, live with a room-mate, don't have a car, and never go to restaurants or bars. It's a fragile existence though.

I think that having threads like this one has a beneficial effect on the tone in the video-game threads. I share your appreciation.

Introversion responds to Pedercini's criticism. http://kotaku.com/prison-architect-creators-respond-to-our-prison-archite-1508504242

What I would be asking myself is "Do I have an opportunity that will give me more capability to focus on what I want to do with my life?" Working all the time can just change your lack of money into a lack of time. Quitting a job to focus on writing can turn your lack of time into a lack of money. It is possible to find a proper balance though you may have to make some sacrifices. But be wary of running away from something you hate instead of running towards something you love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7ZVWIELHQQY

I honestly consider shield-bearers to be my most useful unit. The reason is that they can ruin the opponents armor and make a wall while doing so. I'm going to assume you read the post on an earlier page where I break down the relationship between health/damage and armor. So the shield-bearer that has the "Bring the Pain" ability is kinda bad-ass. If you upgrade his armor-breaking value (the blue shield with the number beside it), he can prepare the biggest opponents to take a lot of damage. I have my armor-break at 4 of 4 available and what I do it focus on the most armored units and use his special ability. That removes 4 armor points from the opponent, removes a little bit of armor from any adjacent enemies (the dredge do that as a passive flaw whenever they lose 3 armor-points at a time) and it also makes it so any opponents that hit your shield-bearer before his next turn will lose 2 more armor-points everytime they hit him. So let me illustrate: The opponent is 2 large dredge and a smaller one. We will call then Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, standing in that order. Groucho has 15 points of armor and 12 points of health. Chico has the same Harpo has 10 armor and 10 health (and he only communicates with whistles and pats). You walk up to Chico (who is in the middle) and bring the pain. Chico loses 4 points of armor. Both Groucho and Harpo also lose a point of armor. Groucho 14a/12h, Chico 11a/12h, Harpo 9a/10h All three of them hit you. I'm not going to calculate how much damage you take, but it'll be around 4 armor points and 1 health. When each of them hit you, they lost 2 additional points of armor (because Bring the Pain was active). Groucho 12a/12h, Chico 9a/12h, Harpo 7a/10h ......you are at lets say 11a/11h So then you bring the pain on Groucho removing 4 of his armor and 1 of Chico's because Chico is standing beside him. Groucho 8a/12h, Chico 8/a/12h, Harpo 7a/10h They hit you some and you are at 9a/7h (I'm not actually calculating that, it's not that important to my point) But everytime they hit you, they lost 2 armor each again. Groucho 6a/12h, Chico 6a/12h, Harpo 7a/10h Now your team comes in and mops up: Sven comes in with 18h and is like BAM! Hits Groucho for 18(Sven's health) minus 6 (Groucho's remaining armor) and Groucho is fuckin dead. If Sven had hit before your shield-bearer did all that armor removal, he would have only done 6 damage. Now your archer is like "I want some too." and she doesn't move before taking her shot (giving her +1 extra damage for every 2 points of armor the target has lost.) She's at 7a/8h and she shoots at Chico. 8(archer health) minus 6(targets armor) plus 4 (Chico's lost armor divided by two. 9/2 rounded is 4) So she just did 6 damage. It doesn't kill Chico, but now Chico has a 10% chance of missing your shield-bearer during an attack (+10% chance of missing for every point less of health the attacker has than the targets armor) I think you get the idea. If you remove armor early, your entire team does a lot of damage later. The shield-bearer removes damage more effectively than any other unit. What happened to Harpo?

I typically get atleast one character killed during every battle. If I do the optional second battles, it's not odd to have one left standing. I believe the skull thing is (how many enemies your character has killed) / (how many they need to kill for their next promotion). I think that the death-mechanic is that they are injured and recieve -1 to health/strength until they heal. If you take them into battle anyway, they can recieve an additional penalty and take longer to heal.

Are you asking how to calculate the big-shield dude's damage? Or are you asking how to effectively use them? I've run out of supplies and gradually everyone left the caravan. I'm not sure what the game-mechanic consequences of that is, but it sure did affect my morale as a player I thought that the setting and story would be tiresome during my second play-through, but I'm not finding that to be the case because the familiarity of the setting and characters is foundational for my enjoyment of them.

Great discussion. I especially enjoyed the speculation on what makes Banner Saga recommendable in spite of its flaws. Regarding narrative decisions being arbitrary versus consequential: I'm currently on my second attempt to finish the game. During my first attempt, I died in Boersgard and it seemed appropriate enough to be happy with that narrative ending and to start again. I wasn't frustrated, it just felt so believable to me (it being my first loss probably heightened the sense that my failure in Boersgard was true). So I'm playing again and I'm making different decisions. My party make-up is significantly affected. I have a larger pool of fighters to use when others are injured and I can refine my tactics with the availiblity of classes. In retrospect I don't feel cheated, it's just that I don't see how I could pretend to be ignorant of these consequences during my next play-through. I think that FTL suffers from the same problem and it's advertised as replayable. In FTL, the first time you see an abandoned ship or an out of control weapons-system on a colony, you make an uneducated guess as to what would be best. After a few games though, you can see that if a conditional choice does not appear on your list, then it's probably a bad idea. When the player realizes this, those conditional choices become a known benefit to adding specific races to your crew or equipment to your ship. There is still a problem though, I have very little ability to speculate which instances I may encounter. Compare this to Spelunky. In Spelunky, I'm in the shop and I have enough money for one of these: glue, more bombs, a glove, or a present. I look at the items I've already obtained to assess my strengths and weaknesses. I also have played enough where I have a somewhat useful understanding of what types of situations I may encounter later (I might believe that I will be able to get to the city of gold during this run, or I may think that I should go to the mothership for a jetpack later). I don't have very reliable information, but I'm still making an educated decision aware of the risks and rewards. That quality is what I would like to see more of in the narrative choices of Banner Saga. It already has some of them; do I want to raise morale by resting? Or am I too low on supplies? I can look at a map to gauge the distance to our next destination when choosing between supplies and enchanted clothing. There's still a chance that my cart will break an axel or something else may happen that I didn't plan for, but I had enough information about a perceived risk and reward (in the game's systems) that I had a reason for my decision. Having that reason is what makes me feel like I own my decision. I also don't think that risk/reward decisions exclude ethical connotations. During my third play-through, many of the decisions I've made will appear to me as nothing more than a question that pops up and says "Do you want to handicap yourself at no benefit?" Those types of decisions could have been changed slightly to communicate to me (on the level of third play-through knowledge) "Do you think you are going to need the archer more? Or the provoker?" Again, not a solid this-or-that, but just a query of "Knowing what you know about the consistencies of this game and its inconsistencies, which one is a better gamble?" Sometimes I use three willpower points on an archery shot that has a 70% chance to hit, not because I'm confident of the outcome but because it I think it may be worth the risk. The game would benefit from the same in its consequential narrative decisions.

It appears that my frustration about not being able to use a variety of class combinations was due to the fact that I lost a lot of available characters due to poor narrative decisions. I like that, it makes the failure of my first attempt more justifiable. It's going to be hard role-playing a third time when I know how to not lose characters. I wonder what the balance of this type of thing is (narrative choices that give you bonuses). Making the narrative choices in FTL felt a lot different when I knew that I needed a conditional option than when I didn't know. I like consequences, but these decisions seem to be based on optimization rather than a narratively believable risk/reward.

I'm glad I started over. I enjoyed my first attempt all the way to Boersgard, but I'm enjoying my second attempt atleast as much. I'm making different decisions during the dialogues and getting significantly different results. I'm not the type of player who needs to get the good ending on the first play-through, but if you are you may want to read a guide. What's cool about it for me is that my first play-through (not to the end, I just died when I died) feels so much more deliberate now that I am seeing what my choices affected.

What I mean is that it's just the end for the person who dies. Everyone else just keeps going.

I have a hypothesis that discussion is actually just clarification of opinion. Sometimes the opinion changes during the discussion which can make it last longer. Also, this explains why I talk A LOT when I feel that I'm being misunderstood or misrepresented; I feel the need to clarify my opinion.

Regarding having an opinion: Just keep an open mind and be respectful. If you think twerking is ridiculous and someone says that your attitude is racist, it's not too much to ask for them to explain their perspective a bit. Consider it and move on. I think that a lot of people just feel that they don't want to fuck up, so they just never mention something again if it gets a negative reaction; that's why you can end up with a list of rules. Instead, be willing to make sincere mistakes and then welcome criticism, eventually a list of dont's turns into a set of heuristics and then you stare at the ceiling five years later while listening to a favorite album and you go "Ohhhhhhh!" and you grok, but that's just one more piece. It's like everything else, nothing is ever finished. For a long time I wanted a house. That was my goal. If only I had a house. I have a house, now I have to mow the fucking yard and fix shit. It never stops; when it does, it'll be because I'm dead. Everything is movement, the only end is death and that's subjective. Almost related: My cousin mentioned that evolution was ridiculous on Facebook and I was like "why?" She then asked me a question that seemed to be a sincere point she was confused about (she wanted to know where the common ancestors went after we branched). I had never considered that before and did a little bit of research and reported back to her. Later on it occurred to me that not every creationist is inflexible. It can be scary to ask questions about something that has been presented as heretical. I felt that way when I started watching videos on Marx and I felt the same way when I started lookong up Libertarian videos; as if I was going to get a knock on the door. It was really cool to have an opportunity to give someone a safe place to ask a heavily poiliticized question. I live for that shit.

After watching a cool design for robotic houses that could kill you by smashing your between automaton walls I found this 45-minute documentary that is just nice to sit back and watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8zP7yP8hdLE All the opportunities to learn the real truth about one world government black-ops that pop up during the video, adds to the experience for me. This is the cyberpunk future... with ads.

I get pretty much all my news from: Polygon Rock, Paper, Shotgun Steam's front page Neogaf and I follow Twitter feeds like @figames

@ Frentic Pony: I posted your comment in the Philosophy and Economics thread and I'm hoping we have a discussion about this there. https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/8878-philosophy-economics/page-3#entry270356

Why wouldn't building affordable housing employ the same quantity of people and end up providing habitats for the many poor rather than mansions for a few rich folks?

I was just defeated for the first time in Boersgard. I think I'm going to just roll with it (Chris Remo playing Metro 2033 style). My people are tired, moving from one desperate situation to the next. I lost all my Varl and all my fighters by the time we arrived in Boersgard, hospitality there was our last chance. I'm looking forward to starting over again. The times that my intentions as a player were misunderstood were few, but enough of them accumulated that I look forward to starting over with an understanding of the mechanics, the world, and the game-systems. I'm also interested to see how much variation there will be in my party composition and the caravan-events. I never felt that I could compose a war-party to my preference; I have much more freedom to do that in Factions. I think I would have preferred no limitations to how I made my team (even though Factions does have it's own). If I have 30 Varl in my caravan, it feels like an arbitrary limit to only be able to use two bespoke Varl characters at a time. I can think of a lot of ways that the game could have used more general systems to it's benefit. If dredge are catching up with us, why not allow me to make make a war-party whose absence will have a direct correlation to the count of my caravan. Then allow me to keep them back an extra day for each successful battle (without healing) until I decide to retreat with the remaining members? The main characters wouldn't have to be used, but I wouldn't be against sacrificing them, it's not like there is a huge quantity of dialogue that another character couldn't move forward. In this completely different fantasy game that is inspired by Banner Saga, I wouldn't mind being forced to use nothing but archers and a spear-man when things get desperate or when events happen that divide the caravan, but those situations would be more fun for me if it wasn't the usual case. Anyway, here is my favorite part of the game so far, don't read this spoiler if you haven't gotten to Boersgard or visited the godstone Dundr.