Cordeos

Lovers pox* Accidentally becoming King has happened a few times to me. In one of my earliest successful games I was the King of Ireland and was able to use my marriage alliance with the Holy Roman Empire to claim the Kingdom of France. Then I went on Crusade and became King of Jerusalem as well. Due to some succession law stuff I was not paying attention to I lost the Kingdom of Ireland to a brother when my ruler died. Quickly realizing how much of a pain managing my remaining two kingdoms would be for a newbie I gave Jerusalem away to another brother and switched to French culture to appease my vassals. Jerusalem quickly got swallowed back up by various Muslim kingdoms, sorry bro. Another time I had married into the line of succession for the Kingdom of Italy while being the King of Navarra, but wasn't heavily pursuing it because I was busy with the Reconquista. However some faction in Italy realized how awesome I was and successfully overthrew the King of Italy to install me in his place. The game failed to notify me of the revolt until I became King.

there are only a few Crusader Kings II DLC categories. Some add music, portrait variety, how armies look on the map are all the micro DLC. The rest allow you to play as new factions, or enhances them in some way. All the DLC is added through patches to the vanilla game, you just won't be able to play those religions without the DLC enabled. : Sword of Islam lets you play as a Muslim ruler. Legacy of Rome adds content for the Byzantine Empire. Sunset Invasion adds the Aztec Invasion. Turning this off is a good idea since the invasion won't happen. The Republic lets you play as merchant republics. The Old Gods moves the start date to 867 and lets you play as various flavors of pagans. Sons Of Abraham lets you play as Jews and adds some religion game play features. Rajas of India lets you play as a Indian religion. Charlemagne moves the start date back to 769, probably as far back as it will go. (I secretly hope for a rise of Islam DLC) Way of Life added some more character personality options for deeper role playing. Horse Lords allows you to play nomadic factions and reworked how steppe nomads operate. I usually play with all the DLC turned on except Sunset, since it really messes up late game. But if you start at 769 and have an awesome empire Sunset can be a fun late game challenge. In classic Crusader Kings style Sunset Invasion also adds a new STD to the game.

Mechjeb is the only mod i've used. They actually tied some of ita functionality to the science unlock system so you can't do everything right away.

As far as I can tell there is no level scaling. I am just now lvl 8 and keep running into monsters that are lvl 15 right next to areas with lvl 7 monsters. I also saw a ?? monster and ran away very fast. And yes the starting zone seems big, but its nothing like the second area. I keep getting more quests and have more undiscovered locations showing up all the time. But I need the xp to beat the aforementioned creatures so its all good, if a tad overwhelming.

The DLC for NV are all really strong. Especially Lonesome Road.

the first zone is full of shrines that give you free ability points. In general do all the side stuff because you level more and get more loot. Meditation refills potions and bombs.

So this happened:

OMGGGGGGGGGGGGG

Flamethrowing quadcopter http://i.imgur.com/rdGXk1W.gifv

"This video contains content from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It is not available in your country"

I must say I am really impressed with the representations of women in Just Cause 3: Alessa: Female radio announcer questions you, the hero of Medici about the silly vehicles you bring her and is a super inspiring radio personality. Annika: Badass female mercenary, wears actual armor. Gets annoyed with machismo. Dimah: Super smart inventor. Rosa: Ideal democratic leader. Both sides also have female soldiers and its no big deal. No stupid love story.

Universal healthcare sort of goes along with guaranteed wage. Hours worked really doesn't correlate to productivity, more hours usually reduces it, see Korea for a great example: http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/english/oped/opinions/3698-insider-perspective-seven-reasons-why-korea-has-worst-productivity-oecd vs. http://fortune.com/2015/10/06/sweden-6-hour-work-day-what-u-s-can-learn/ A happy well fed, low stress, not overworked employee will probably do more quality work in less time. The economic impact is tricky, but I do think a guaranteed income cuts down on bureaucracy costs and allows more people to purse their passions and start businesses which would benefit the bottom of the economy more. Obviously there would have to be more taxes on those that are wasting their money on multiple houses and giant yachts, but fuck the aristocracy. There is a larger issue of consumer capitalism being an unsustainable economic system that generates more economic growth from car crashes than safe drivers, but that's another topic The US currently is not even close to this policy or anything close, we have a party that seems hell bent on dismantling all social services so they can buy more overpriced weapons to protect us from a few brown people with old guns and poorly made bombs. European nations or Singapore are more likely to reach this point first, hence why I am trying to get out of this country ASAP.

One of the reasons I want to move to Europe is how far ahead it is on these issues as opposed to the US. We just keep falling further behind on social and economic issues.

If you do something like what Milton Freedman proposed, a negative income tax, you would get your basic income as a wage supplement. If you were unemployed you would file income tax with a $0 income and receive a full supplement. Lets use a $15/hour as our base. With that wage you should be making around $2,400 a month. If you make $2,000 a month you would get a negative tax of $400 added to your income. If you make $2,800 you have $400 that will be subject to whatever rate of income tax we have in this system. If you were unemployed you would file income tax with a $0 income and receive $2,400 monthly. For this system to work you would have to be registered with the government. So those who come through the immigration system or are refugees/asylum seekers would already be registered with the government and would qualify. The need to register with the government to receive basic income obviously would be an issue for those who don't use the legal immigration system. Hopefully we would legalize people who are working here, but you don't want to open the doors and say "Come to America for free money!". A better work visa program would go a long way towards fixing this.

An actual mass movement caused by the ~80% unemployment AI and driverless cars will cause probably. In the above case our economic system, which is heavily based on consumption would require a basic income to keep going, if no one can afford to buy things, than no one can make any money at all. There are some saving inherit in a basic income since it would replace all social service programs. No more food stamps, medicaid, housing credits etc, just one simple payment everyone qualifies for. So a lot of bureaucracy can be eliminated. Canada ran a basic income experiment in the 70s. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html Its probably viable, especially if we can tax the aristocracy more and cut the defense budget. Idealy you would have the basic income cover food, housing and healthcare. So people could survive off it and not have to worry about starving, homelessness or their health. It might actually be fantastic for the economy since people could get more schooling or start a business without having to worry about surviving. Good article on the subject: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-income-tax-questions-explain

I wish my upload speeds were better so I could post more videos:

I launched all the ships separately and assembled in orbit, but while thrusting there is a lot of wobble in between the ships.

I think the AI had air superiority the whole game, the bomber waves we sent were 40+ so they could survive long enough to hit their targets, so air transport was hard. Also we were using most of our land forces holding the middle, this was a few years ago so the details are a little hazy, but I do remember how happy we were when it was finally over.

Some discussion with a developer and some gameplay is shown. I am so freaking excited.

Venezuela is having an election on Sunday and I am pretty worried that it will descend into violence. The regime is very unpopular due to its horrible mismanagement of the economy causing widespread shortages of most products. There have been campaigns of gerrymandering districts and shutting down opposition press to try and keep the government in power, but at this point it seems likely that the horrible state of the nation will create an opposition victory. As much of a leftist as I am, I cannot tolerate the authoritarian behavior of the Chavez and post Chavez governments.

Playing games with severe limitations reminds me of a Supreme Commander game I played with a friend once. We turned off nukes, experimental super units, and tier 3 artillery. The idea was to have a game where we had to win with conventional land and air power. We played on this map: All units must funnel into the middle of the map to get to other bases. Resources are pretty limited because its a smaller map. You can send units onto the mountainous area next to your base which ends in a cliff next to the enemies base. What we hadn't realized was the factions we were playing had flaws with their bombers, if a bomber drops a bomb on a shield the bomb explodes at about the altitude of the bomber, killing the unit, so building massive bomber waves didn't work. We also could never push through the middle of the map because we were pretty evenly matched with the AI. After trying several strategies that failed miserably we decided to try and build a missile and artillery base on the cliffside. However whenever our builder units left the base enemy bombers would destroy it. So we built a line of doubled up shield generators to protect units on their path to the cliff edge. We eventually were able to build a ton of missile launchers and artillery pieces to start blowing up enemy shield generators in the first base, then bomb their buildings. It was one of the most arduous Supreme Commander games I ever played.

It requires some very specific machinery, I don't remember where it is on the unlock tree.

Its actually surprising how weak the giant docking ports are. I have been trying to design a giant ship for long range missions that can deploy scout craft and a mining vessel while the main ship remains in orbit, the ship is very unstable unfortunately. I need to get back to designing it and see if i can find a better way to connect 6 smaller ships, one large one to a gigantic vessel that is more of a mobile space station than a ship..

I just dont think I can slog through another bioware conversation simulator. I liked the combat and exploration so if the game drops the need to talk at length with everyone maybe i will get it.