Edgwyn

Lilith and the others are all providing excellent advice on how to make the strongest possible party. You are unlikely to find that degree of optimization necessary on normal difficulty. I personally enjoy playing with a substantially sub-optimal party that includes a Slith (with a pole arm) and a Nephil. All four of my characters use bows as secondary weapons because I enjoy it. The default party has multiple weaknesses, but a more diverse party can be interesting instead of the most optimal party.

In the last few months, Paul Krugman seemed to be trying to thrown his objectivity out of the window. While he was never my favorite economist, I used to respect him for his accomplishments in that realm. As he has dipped farther and farther into politics, my respect for him has dropped.

The ballooning of the powers of the executive branch precedes the cold war. FDR dramatically increased the power of the executive branch and attempted to (and in several ways succeeded in) suborning the Supreme Court to the executive branch. While the Supreme Court has in many ways recovered, the legislative branch has not. Policies are set by the executive branch agencies, not by congress. In my opinion, this is a very bad thing, but somewhere between few and none of the Senators and Representatives of either party seem to have any interest in actually doing their job. President Obama certainly did his best to make this situation worse and President Trump is likely to continue that trend.

Well, so far, there has been no drama. The votes are going on as scheduled and the electors pledged toward Trump are voting for him. According to the NYT at 4:45 PM, the only defections have been four electors pledged to Clinton voting for someone else. The media has certainly not covered itself with glory this election cycle and today is just continuing that theme. Proving collusion between Putin and Trump would be hard if such collusion even existed. Right now, collusion is up there with Obama was born in Kenya.

—Alorael, who actually does this more than he should probably admit. For medical and scientific articles Wikipedia is actually quite good at providing interesting and relevant information. And he finds it oddly gratifying to find an article that he read show up in the ultimate public space of Wikipedia. Somehow it feels like science has really made it and become real when it's a little blue superscript number.

One measure of the significance of an academic paper is how many other publications it is referenced in. I wonder if being referenced in Wikipedia counts to those who measure such things.

I would do Portal than Angierach then Fort Haledon, but it does not matter much

I don't know the details either, but I think that if it had a realistic chance of changing the outcome then the democratic party would be funding it, so no.

If your tinkermage has blade training 3, then their blade will squirt acid, but with a fairly low chance of it actually happening, and if you do not do a lot of melee attacks with your tinkermage, it might not be noticeable because you do not see it. None of the skills will result in your TM throwing multiple razor disks unfortunately.

An easy way to see what happens would be to give your TM one point in the battle skill yankshot while leaving battle specialization at zero. In combat, you will then be able to use the yankshot ability (by clicking on the lightning bolt). That will show you that the skill works despite the the lack of the specialization.

The specializations enhance the skills in their particular area (by increasing their power/chance) but they do not enable any skills. My suggestion (and I am not the character building guru) would be to concentrate your specializations in the area that you use most. For my TM, I have all of my specialization points in efficiency. My normal skill points are divided between efficiency, utility and basic skills with almost no points in battle skills.

Your tinkermage can have any of the battle skills now. The point at level 25 will just enhance their battle skills, it does not enable them.

I was certainly expecting it to be much harder. I found it easier than Avadon 2.

Yes, it is true that the Dixiecrats became Republicans and ended up joining the party that had supported the Civil Rights act. It is one of the stranger acts of political alignment in our history. While the usually given explanation is racism, that doesn't make a great deal of sense at the time (Why did Strom leave a party that at the time had a bunch of open racists to join a party that at the time had fewer open racists?). While race was certainly a factor, big government versus small government/states rights certainly played a factor with the FDR and LBJ administrations having both pushed an increase in federal power while the Dixiecrats want to tell you that the civil war was about States Rights.

If the democratic party and its supporters continue to believe that racism and sexism is why they lost the election to a candidate that most of country views negatively, then they are setting themselves up for failure. There are plenty of female politicians who are seen more positively than Secretary Clinton (pretty much everyone of them who is currently in office with the possible exception of Nancy Pelosi). Secretary Clinton attracted a smaller percentage of the Hispanic and African American vote than President Obama did. The increase in the portion of white voters voting for Trump was almost negligible over the number of white voters who voted for Romney. The Republican party presented a more racially diverse set of primary candidates than the Democratic party did. While certainly some percentage of the white people who voted for Trump are racists, some percentage of the African Americans who voted for Clinton are racists also. The facts is that the vast majority of Trump supporters (of which I am not one) are not "deplorables" and that speech hurt Secretary Clinton.

Finally, changes to civil rights are extremely unlikely in both directions. With a Trump presidency an expansion of rights in unlikely to happen, but a contraction of rights is equally unlikely. Trump can say what he wants about deporting Muslims, but that is simply not going to happen, it does not pass constitutional muster in any modern version of the Supreme Court. The closest parallel that I can think of is the internment of US citizens of Japanese decent during WWII, which was a temporary measure, made it through a Supreme Court with 8 Democratic Appointees (FDR a Northern Democrat) for and 1 Republican Appointee against, and has since been seen as a complete injustice with a formal apology made. The Supreme Court deliberately avoids quick reversals, so I do not foresee losses in the recent gains for the LGB community. On the other hand, I do not see a lot of hope of gains for the T community, which of course does impact several regulars on these boards.

Slartibus, I don't think that sexism against Secretary Clinton was much of an issue in the judging of her personality. The reality is that she has never been very engaging which is among the reasons why she lost in the primaries to President Obama (a "community organizer") and in the election to President-Elect Trump (a salesman). Both men she lost to made their entire careers on selling ideas/things to people. Secretary Clinton was more focused on the technical side of the law during most of her career.

The E-Mail scandal was major mis-handled by the FBI and DOJ in multiple ways, both big ways in favor of Secretary Clinton and big ways against Secretary Clinton. What makes it interesting is that most of the mis-handling seems to have come from political appointees of President Obama and not from the career employees. This provides at least a little bit of hope that the FBI/DOJ's objectivity were not destroyed by President Obama's administration. It is likely that I know a lot more about the rules for treating classified material in the US than the majority of people on these forums. While only a small percentage of people have been prosecuted for what Secretary Clinton did, most have been fired or seen their hopes for any further advancement terminated. Ultimately, Secretary Clinton was given a pass on the basis of incompetence since her actions did not seem to be a deliberate attempt to harm anything.

I think that had Senator Sanders been the nominee he would have fared even worse. While a portion of the Democratic party has no issues with a socialist president, the middle of America still does. Campaign commercials linking Senator Sanders visions of America to Venazuela's downward spiral would have been so incredibly easy to make (accuracy is not important to either party).

President Elect Trump's scandals would have hurt him more against anyone who wasn't Secretary Clinton. Rightly (she is at least an enabler) or wrongly (they are two different people), Secretary Clinton ends up being associated with President Clinton's scandals in addition to her own. So you end up with the bad behavior seeming remarkably similar. Trump has potentially sexually assaulted women, well so has Clinton (Bill not Hillary), Trump has built his wealth in a less than ethical manner well so has Clinton (both), etc, etc. There was essentially scandal fatigue.

Personally, I did not want Senator Sanders, Secretary Clinton, Mr. Trump or Senator Cruz to win. Both political parties need to have a serious look at themselves. I think that one of the major turning points was when Secretary Clinton stopped pushing her ideas and changed her messaging to "at least I'm not Trump". You don't win anything by saying that at least I am not the other person, but that is the strategy that she went for in the final push up to the election.

Finally (and i know this is too long for most to read), the cynicism and corruption of the Democratic party was well exposed this election, but it seems like it is being ignored. The Republican party is not much better, but at least it does not have the holier than though attitude. Expanding on Owenmoz, the history of the Democratic party is one of tossing token items to a minority without any actual interest in the minority. That is not new behavior, it goes back at least to the wave of Irish immigration. The Democratic party does want everybody to forget that the majority of the opposition to the foundational 1964 Civil Rights act came from them.

The voter turnout was close to 52%. Not fantastic, but certainly acceptable.

Forbes' take on the income correlation was that Clinton did better with both the rich and poor than Trump winning the middle class voters. It appears that Trump may have been the first Republican since Goldwater to loose the affluent vote. The concerns that Callie mentioned are not those of the poor, but those of the middle class.

As to the race piece, Trump surprised me by doing better among Hispanic voters then Romney did. At least according to Pew's numbers, the margin of whites voting for Trump was almost identical as those who voted for Romney. Clinton was unable to keep Obama's high margin for the democrats among hispanic and african-american voters.

Unfortunately like ability has become a necessary skill for a politician, just like it is for a salesperson. There is certainly plenty of room to doubt President-Elect Trump's skills and abilities as a businessperson. There is no room to doubt his ability is a salesperson. President Obama's resumee was very thin on accomplishments when he was elected, but his skills and abilities as a salesperson/community organizer were very good and his likability was good. Obviously I would prefer someone with more skills and abilities in many areas than either our current president or our president-elect, but here we are.

My educational background is in engineering. Nobody cares if the engineer in the back cubicle is like able or not, there just care about their skills. On the other hand, if that engineer is going to deal with the customer/public in any way shape or form, they need to learn to at least fake like ability. Just like the highly skill neurosurgeon needs to be able to learn to simulate at least a little bed side manner even if they are never going to do anything but surgery.

She's a damn good politician. She has a comprehensive agenda that has a lot that I like. (Her chances of making that agenda happen are nil, like all presidential platforms, but she's aiming for the right goals.) She's not perfect, but she's very good.

The thing is, if she were a damm good politician she would have won the election. Secretary Clinton is simply not a good enough communicator to be a damm good politician. Try comparing her to FDR or Reagan. They were both damm good politicians. They had many of the same politician "virtues" that Secretary Clinton had, but they could communicate so much better than she can.

As I consider my opinion and read other opinions of how she lost the election that she should have won, more and more it comes down to communication and likability. You can even call it charisma if you like, but while she may have it to her closest friends, she does not have it on the national stage. She could (and often did) present better plans, more thought out policies and was closer to factual (despite a level of personal corruption that would get any non-political appointee fired or jail time) than her opponent, and arguably won the three debates, but she couldn't make enough people like her.

While not disagreeing (or agreeing) with anything said above, I do think that there was a major difference in this game over the other two Avadon games. In this game, I felt off balance and threatened (which is a good thing). The lack of an actual home base (due to shifting from Nightshade to Green Refuge to Zethron's lair) to me made a difference and was noticeable. In Avadon 1 and 2 you had a room with your name on it in Avadon. Here you are running around with a rebel. In the previous two games I never thought that Red Beard was actually going to kill me. Yes there was Miranda's story and the eternal prisoner, but he never seemed that crazy to me until this game. I think that while Jeff might not done a lot with the dialogue he did do a lot with the tone this time.

This topic has a list of all of the locations to find lock picks. http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/14810-lockpick-locations-spoiler/

In the Avadon 2 Strategy Central, there is a file that has all of the possible ending dialogue for that game. I don't think anyone has done an actual plot summary though.

Also, depending on some options at the very end of the game, you might actually have all of the playable characters active at once. In that case, they all need to be well equipped.

I have really enjoyed the use of healing and slowing pylons in a couple of the harder fights. The combination seemed to help keep my characters in the fight (Tinkermage, Nathalie and Khalida).

I haven't upgraded versions yet, so this is technically a miscellaneous bug in 1.0, but on the mac version, I received the medal for "partnership over" while playing on normal difficulty instead of hard.

I just switched to full screen mode on my early 2011 15" MacBook Pro with Intel HD Graphics 3000 running Sierra. When I put the mouse on the top or bottom border, it shows the menu bar/dock and continues to scroll, so it seems fine to me. I have not run long enough in this mode to see any lag issues. I seem to have exactly the same screen resolution in full screen mode no matter what setting I choose (did the screen capture option to display coordinates to verify).

If a mortal can kill a god, then it is not much of a god. I just don't see knocking off Zeus or Odin as much of a possibility. As I recall, they were only ever threatened by beings of their ilk (titans or giants). To me, the achievement is that I am smacking down the Tawon by showing that their "gods" are not really gods. As near as I can tell, while Tawons gods are created through Necromancy, they are in fact sustained by the worship of their followers. There are examples in both Avadon 2 and Avadon 3 of their gods weakening when mortals forget about them.

In terms of the hidden switches, they can be quite hard to find. You might want to consider

http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/14836-a-cheat-to-make-secret-switches-more-visible/

No, there is not any reason to keep dice. Usually in his posts on items in the strategy central post for each game, Randomizer has a list of items that are needed for quests. For example in Avadon 3, he lists seven items that you should hold on to, two of the items have no value to you except for keeping them for the quests.