Edgwyn

Ishad, there were a bunch of times where I was wishing for the orb of Thralni so that I could jump over a river, especially when I was running around trying to knock out various side quests. Pylons would have been nice as well, since word of recall only works in one direction, you can get home quickly to sell a load of loot, but then it takes a while to get back to the dungeon. There are ways that I think that the game could be made more accessible while retaining the story, but of course there are a fair number of folks who like it the way that it is and would consider my changes breaking it.

Alorael, yes, you are correct, that is where Glorious Revival is. Randomizer, my problem is that I do not want to miss the vast majority of interesting things, especially when I found the quality of those interesting things much higher in Nethergate than in other games. I suppose that means that the payoff is worth the work, but it still seems to me that there is a lot of things that I could have missed by walking two squares away from a trigger or coming by at the wrong time. Some of the items are true Easter Eggs with no effect on game play (like the names of the four bears in the circle warrens) but there is a lot of stuff that can help your party that is hard to find. Slartibus, I guess my traipsing across everything tolerance is limited to talking to every named person in every city/fort/whatever, but not as well developed out of doors. I like how in A:EFTP the cache marks are reasonably visible. I don't mind running into walls and casting lots and lots of piercing sight spells based on where there are empty spaces on the map (though I prefer the visible buttons that have appeared in the last three games to running into walls), but while I am going to expose every square outside, I am not going to step into every square outside. Ultimately, I am a casual gamer with completionist tendencies. The three latest games and the built in scenarios for BoA seem a lot more accessible to me than N:R. I haven't played Exile or Exile 2 (I can't remember which it was) since 96/97 so I do not remember it well, but I do not think that I struggled with it as much as I did with N:R.

I finally finished N:R. It took me three tries over the past year. I know that several people think that it is the best of the Spiderweb games, but I think I need to partially disagree. It has the best story of the approximately 15 CRPGs that I have finished over the past 30 years, but the game is hard (not tactically, not due to the older engine). The problem for me is that so many of the side quests (which are necessary to build up your party) are next to impossible to find. In the last three Spiderweb games, it is pretty obvious who is going to give you a quest. You have to go back several times, but they let you know that they might have something for you later if not right now. There is none of that in N:R. There are also a lot of outdoor events that you essentially have to stumble across. I would have given up for the third time if I had not used Matt P's walkthrough of N augmented by Synergy's N:R item list. It would have been a shame to give up, because then I would have missed out on finishing the story. If Jeff gets around to re-making N:R ( in the next 10-15 years), then I think it needs a lot of tweaks to make it more accessible to more casual gamers. Speaking of Synergy's list, would it be possible for one of the current Mods to edit it? Two of the five Nether arts spells are labeled NETHER SPELL, two (Clouds of Night and Make Exilir) are labeled with the generic LEARN SPELL:, and one (Glorious Revival) is not listed at all. Glorious Revival is available at the Burial Glen, once you have a certain level of experience. I would suggest using the NETHER SPELL nomenclature for all five.

Supporting an amendment to the constitution would not violate the oath, since there is a specific process in place to amend the constitution. Trying to change the constitution by extra-legal means would be a problem. If you look at the 1950s/1960s civil rights movement, the best protection that kids going to school received was from individuals who had sworn that oath. The interstate commerce clause has been stretched to the point that it has almost completely eliminated the 9th and 10th amendments. The part of me that prefers efficiency is happy about that, the part of me that prefers individual freedom is not. The oath that commissioned officers of the US Armed Forces take is the same as that taken by US Senators and Members of Congress, Supreme Court Justices and other Federal employees. The working is slightly different from that of the President which is specified in the constitution. The requirement for our oath (but not its wording) comes from Article 6 of the constitution. The wording of our oath was established by congress over 150 years ago.

If you are going to try to fight Redbeard, I would strongly suggest that you read the strategy central post on how to fight him. It is a very difficult scripted fight. http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/14818-fighting-redbeard-spoilers-obviously/

I have had issues multiple times with getting games on steam to run and have had to execute various troubleshooting steps. I do not like having an extra layer of complication between my games and I. The only games that I have bought through steam are those that are only distributed that way. Of course, I do not buy a lot of games, so I am not a very good sample. I prefer buying directly from Jeff, because I can afford to do so and give him the extra support. I am willing to pay $20 for a game of the quality that his are. Obviously there is nothing wrong with paying less, like the deals you can get through Steam. There are two game franchises that I play on Steam, and for both I have bought the DLCs at very steep discounts. These franchises are from medium size publishers so I do not see the need to pay full price.

It won't be quite that soon unless he hires a programmer to help him. At a product a year he has 11 years to go (Avadon 3, Exile/Avernum 3-6, Geneforge 1-5 and Nethergate) putting the fourth version of Exile into 2025 or so. I am not sure that he is currently sustaining a product a year so that puts the remake even later, and of course he might do a new series in there, pushing Exile version 4 back even farther.

In addition to Jeff's programing skills, having the game continue while you are in another window could mean that a party of wandering monsters get the drop on you, or you stumble into a turret or mine or something. While the turn based nature of combat would serve to reduce the damage, the game only playing while we are actively in its window is a reasonable design choice. That said, I do wish that there was a way of walking faster.

The book version of The Stand used Influenza that has been weaponized and made more aggressive and lethal as its agent. As Sylae pointed out, Outbreak (both the movie and Robin Cook's unrelated book) was Ebola, as was Executive Orders and I believe Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. Outbreak the movie was okay as a movie, but I think that the overall concept was pretty good.

Which game are you trying to do a screen shot of and are you using a Mac or a PC?

So, in Ultima (like Spiderweb games) I had to choose who each of my characters was going to attack, with what and how, and in Wizardry I generally did not (multiple groups of monsters and spell choice being the exception). I see the distinction, but since I am not familiar with the context, I assume that this is only for CRPGs? The paper RPGs of the same vintage as the early Ultimas and Wizardry tended to be extremely tactical by that definition.

Some stores used to have AD&D groups loosely affiliated with them, that would provide an opportunity to play the game the way that it is meant to be played (with people). It has been years since I have looked, but a few times in the last couple of years or so I have seen places where Warhammer groups gather so there may still be options for AD&D. Maybe some on-line searching might turn one up. I just did a quick google search and found a couple of groups within an hour or so of where I live that were looking for members.

I finally finished my CKII game. It is the first time that I have made it through. I learned a lot about the game, although there is still a lot that frustrates me. I ended up resorting to some outside of the game interface assassinations, primarily to avoid my frustration of having a vassal rebel and then suddenly get 90,000 troops added to their forces for no reason. The fact that a Republic can keep a title without having any of the counties that belong to that title was frustrating also. Ultimately, the Hispanic Empire was not as stable as it should be, but we made it to the end, with the Empires of Hispania, Britania and Mali, and the Kingdoms of France (75%), Aquitane, Brittany, Mauretania, Africa (title but only 25%), Denmark, Lithuania and Jerusalem all under my rule. My son was also heir to Hungry, so in another generation that would have been part of the Empire as well. My initial plans had been to seize control of the med. It started out really well, but Pisa got in the way and I got tired of fighting all of their mercenaries. By that time, Francia had fallen apart and I had control of Ireland, so an Atlantic strategy seemed like a thing to do seize control of the passage to the new world. Obviously there is no naval combat in the game, but by the end, my empire would have been able to control the Atlantic. The HRE is the premier land power in Europe (they have a chunk of Francia, plus expanded a bit to the East), Pisa is probably the dominant power in the Med (but trapped there), and Norway is the leader in Scandinavia. Future plans for my empire were to try to obtain Poland through marriage and expand my holdings in Sweden and Eastern Europe. That plan was kind of thrown a curve when I ended up with Jerusalem near the end of the game. The Shia's and Yezzidis control the area around it, and I would really need to take out the Sultanate of Egypt, leaving me with Pisa between the two halves of my Mediterranean holdings, which while insignificant in the game, would be a big problem in real life. It will probably be a month or two before I play again, but I will probably play as England or a Scandinavian country next time. In the future I would like to be Southern Italy, but I want some more practice first.

You are right, I missed that.

The author of the article pointed out that Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, has a relatively small portion of its population (16% of total population = 20% of the Muslim population) that favors the death penalty for apostay. The author fails to mention the steady erosion of female and minority rights that have occurred in Indonesia over the past five or so years. Culture does play a huge rule in the situation with Islamic countries as well. The definition of modest dress for women varies in part based on culture, though there seems to be a trend towards movement towards more restriction. The modesty police mentioned in one of the articles that I linked to reminded me of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Saudi Arabia. There have been a lot of abuses there with members exceeding their authority to enforce their own rules without being disciplined. Westerners used to be specifically warned to avoid them and told that you can expect to be hit by them in certain circumstances. Somehow I don't think sending a young Kevin Bacon there to organize a high school dance will solve the problem.

Here are some examples of the conflicts between the Hasidic communities and their neighbors. I never stated that the authorities encourage it, my point was that not enough is done to stop it. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/nyregion/shadowy-squads-enforce-modesty-in-hasidic-brooklyn.html?_r=0 http://nymag.com/news/features/east-ramapo-hasidim-2013-4/

In part by not accepting them. Many of the Western democracies have refused to enforce their existing laws and standards of behavior on their Muslim populations. In the interests of "Multi-Culturalism" certain populations have been allowed to govern themselves (In NY this includes not just Muslim, but ultra-orthodox Jews as well) ignoring Federal, state and local laws. Some countries have gone so far as to recognize Sharia as a alternate judicial system. Essentially, many of the Western countries while greatly discouraging their majority populations from radicalizing themselves encourage their minority populations to radicalize. Until both sides of the various political spectrums agree that this has to stop and that there needs to be one standard, then it will continue.

While the conquest of the new world was certainly disastrous for the indigenous people and while it included the forceful spreading of Christianity, I do not see it's purpose being the spreading of Christianity. I believe that it was exclusively for economic reasons with the spreading of Christianity being an almost accidental by-product. I realize that especially on the Spanish side, the establishment of missions went hand in hand with the establishment of government outposts (presidios), but I do not think that the Spanish were in the new world to spread religion, they were there to find gold/resources. With the French and English, the spreading of religion was even less well organized and in many ways they were more about dumping some of their troublesome religious minorities (who proceeded to convert the natives) than about converting the natives. The crusades of course was a religious war and it did inspire a degree of fanaticism among the population (e.g. Children's Crusade), but even there, for many the crusades were an excuse for pursing wealth and power, not anything else. And of course the Crusades weakened the Byzantine empire either hastening or causing its fall to Islam, since sacking Constantinople was more enjoyable than actually fighting in the holy land. Alorael, the problem with attributing Islamic violence to post-colonialism and poverty is that there are hundreds of Millions of Catholics, Hindus and Buddhists in countries struggling with post-colonialism and poverty with a lot less religious based violence. Central and South America and the Indian Subcontinent have plenty of post-colonialism and poverty, but lack the religious based violence. Of course unlike India and the Philippines, the Central and South American countries have very little religious diversity. I think that your second point quoted above is excellent, that failed states enable religious extremism (and cultural if you look at failed states in Africa).

Okay, I didn't realize that anyone outside the White House equated our Syria policy of the last couple of years to actually providing useful assistance to anyone (kind of like our policy for the Ukraine). Alorael, while the leaders of the various Islamic expansions probably were more imperialistic than religious, the theme of violent expansion of the religion seems to resonate stronger with followers of Islam than it does with the other Abrahamic faiths. Slarty, nicely done, another post without actually having to produce content.

Piling on here, Qatar is not particularly fanatic friendly though most of their foreign policy is based on stopping the fanatics on the East side of the Arabian/Persian Gulf, not the West side. The Saudi Arabian royal family was put in power by the Wahabis and so, yes they have as the basis of their government a degree of fanaticism. That said, the King and the Princes that matter have spent 60 plus years trying to make sure that their fanaticism does not kill the goose that lays golden eggs. Private citizens in both of those countries do send money to ISIS, but then so do private citizens in almost off the countries represented on these forums. Could the Saudis and Qataris do more to stop the flow of money, certainly, but that is different than actually sponsoring them. Finally, I have no idea which fanatics you think Obama started sponsoring. The Saudi fanatics have been sponsored by every president since FDR. Our sponsorship of the UAE (who Biden just pissed off) increased dramatically in 1990 under Bush 39 and our sponsorship of Qatar increased dramatically in 2001 under Bush 41. Most of the countries between Saudi Arabia and Iran tend to be far more concerned about Iran than anything else and so tend to support the US based on a counterbalance to Iran. They all have more tolerant laws and policies (at least for Westerners) than either Iran or Saudi Arabia do. I suspect that the Persian versus Arab thing outweighs the Sunni versus Shia thing which outweighs the some freedom versus no freedom thing amongst them however.

Necris, pretty much the only reason that Ebola and several other equally nasty organisms are studied at all are the security implications, fortunately it requires a certain degree of patience, knowledge and equipment to weaponize a BW agent, even going with the lower standards of weaponization that a terrorist would be happy with. Biological toxins are a little easier to exploit, but there hasn't been much use of them either. While terrorist groups have used BW and CW type agents, they have tended to be the cult type groups. So far, fortunately, the results have been underwhelming. Home made explosives is effective enough for most terrorists and is so much easier to obtain and use. The problem with any actual epidemic is what happens when the health system is overwhelmed and you do not have enough ventilators for every flu (or what ever other disease you want) patient who needs one. While we have been very successful with the Ebola patients who have made it to the US, we have had the luxury of providing overwhelming medical resources to each individual. In an actual epidemic, that would not be possible and the survival rate of infected patients would go down.

Going back to the "do the Western nations have it coming", very few of ISIS's killings have anything to do with the Western nations at this point. Most of their killings have been of people whose families have been in Iraq and Syria for hundreds to thousands of years without interruption. There have been plenty of foreign interventions to support regimes, sometimes though the question is if they are worthy of support. We supported Noriega for years before toppling him. We intervened in 1950 in Korea and 1990 in Iraq to support regimes, 1994 in Haiti, the Vietnam war started as supporting a regime (which we then toppled), Lebanon a couple of times in the 20th century, etc. There is not a shortage of examples of stability operations, the question is always is it a regime worth stabilizing. After WWII, the simple answer was that if the regime said that they were anti-communist we would support it no matter what else its problems were. ISIS has gotten as much attention for killing half a dozen Westerners as it has for killing a few thousand Iraqi and Syrian civilians. And yes, if ISIS were just in Syria or in Syria and Libya, it would not get as much attention as it does for being in Iraq.

I do not think that the West brought this on them selves (I find it interesting how that argument is acceptable in foreign affairs but unacceptable in areas like sexual assault and domestic violence. Certainly, the British and French were involved in that part of the world pretty extensively from the late 1700s until WWII and at the end of WWI redrew the borders with the intentions of making weak and conflicted states. The US funded and supported various governments and factions of governments after WWII. None of that has prevented the exercise of religion in those areas, and none of that justifies the rapping, killing, destruction of cultural artifacts, etc that is going on in that area. What the West's history in that area may justify is the inability of the governments in those areas from doing effective things about the situation. These type of atrocities have come into and out of favor in that part of the world many times over the centuries. Of course, these types of atrocities were common in almost the entire world, the difference being that almost all of the western and a good chunk of the Eastern world has refrained from these types of atrocities since WWII ended. With media coverage, the muslim incursion into Spain, the Spanish reconquista, the European settlement in the Americas, Mao's cultural revolution, Stalin's entire reign, etc would look ver different. Even relatively modern atrocities like the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans or in Africa did not have the media/electronics/internet/social media presence that ISIS has due to lack of funding. Personally, I do not believe that there is any place for a bloody Caliphate (or really any Caliphate) in the modern world, but then I do not think that there is any place for bloody Protestantism, bloody Catholicism, bloody Agnosticism, bloody Hinduism, etc. Their enhanced funding does make them very dangerous outside of the area. As the various Protestant and Catholic terrorists demonstrated a few decades ago in Northern Ireland, it does not take a huge amount of money to carry out a terrorist campaign. If your funding is coming from other countries and their governments are making no effort (currently the case with most governments and ISIS) or only half efforts (US government with the Northern Ireland terrorists) than they are going to be well funded, especially when you add modern crowd sourcing onto ancient religious obligations. There needs to be a concerted effort to shut down the money pipe, which is hard to do (due to freedoms) and especially hard to do when every government wants to be extra hands off with its Islamic population in order to show how enlightened the government is. While I would like to see Putin stopped from rebuilding the USSR, and think that it would be much cheaper in the long run to stop him now, I find it more likely by several orders of magnitude that Americans in the US will be killed by ISIS/sympathizers in the next five years than by Russian supporters of Putin. In terms of the rest of world being united against ISIS, most of the World has indeed said ISIS is bad, then rolled over and fell back to sleep. The number of countries willing to stop the cash flow, equipment/weapons/supply flow, people flow and then actually take action on the ground to stop them seems to be hovering around zero.

I wouldn't be surprised if the fears about Ebola undergoing a mutation to be able to survive in air aren't based on a Tom Clancy book, since it was a major plot point in a book that sold pretty well. There has been slow but steady work on vaccines for Ebola and several other diseases that I don't like thinking about for years, but there has never been a priority for funding them, with most of the research dollars coming from government/defense. It is hard to justify all the spending on a vaccine for a virus that kills less than 100 people in a typical year (all of whom are overseas) when we loose 30-400 times that number in the United States due to the flu each year. Developing a vaccine that would protect more effectively against more types of the flu would save far more people in the US and overseas than an Ebola vaccine will. In terms of 50 or so "white" people, from 1976-2012 Ebola killed fewer "black" people in 36 years than the flu likely did (assumption for world wide) in one year. Based on US demographics, the worst flu year in that same time period killed 40,000 in the US, of whom (ignoring age and socio-economic factors), around 5,000 would have been "black" and 35,000 would have been "other". So in that one year, more "blacks" and far more "whites" died due to flu than the total number people who have died due to Ebola to date.

I'm afraid that I am going to make some of those broad statements. Vignettes tend of focus on individuals, and individuals do change their minds. The percentages that you gave have nothing to do with individuals, they are statistics (and like most statistics, probably more made up than anything). For any group (political party, religious denomination, fan group, etc) there will always be a certain core that will not change their mind no matter what. Some examples are: Marion Berry keeps getting re-elected despite his felony conviction and association with corruption; people (including me) believe in God despite what others consider overwhelming evidence to the contrary; some twi-hards still think Kristen Stewart is a good actor. While Marion Berry is no longer Mayor of DC (he is on the city council instead), while the number of Christians in this country has dropped and while the number of twi-hards has dropped, groups of people hold these beliefs despite individuals making decisions not to support them. Talking to individuals about race/gender/economics is definitely an effective (but slow) way of making change. Arguably it is the only real way to actually institutionalize change. President Truman's executive order desegregating the military was effective in helping push the ensuing civil rights movement, not because it was a top down directed change from the Commander in Chief, but because if forced interaction between racial/ethnic groups at the individual level that in a way that we cannot imagine today did not exist. The actual executive order changed few if any peoples minds about racial superiority. It was the interaction on an individual basis that changed the most minds. For gender, I am not sure that there is going to be an actual big moment to turn to the way that there is with race(reconstruction, the executive order, the civil rights movement). Men have always been around competent women, and many of the arguments about protected class can do as much harm as good (Title IX is an example of a well intentioned but fundamentally wrong law). I suppose that Disco, the repeal of don't ask/don't tell and the approval of "gay marriage" can be seen as milestones for gender/sexuality, however, especially after the Disco era, there was far more interaction between "gay" and "straight" than there ever had been with "black" and "white". I definitely think that more minds have been changed about various gender identity/sexual orientation issues when a person that they are friends with "comes out of the closet" identifies themselves in a new way than with all of the political time and energy devoted to it. In my opinion, the repeal of Congresses "Don't ask, Don't Tell" policy for the military was a non-event due to the fact that a high percentage of the military knew "gay" people in high school and in the military. Professionalism kept it from being an issue as well, but I think that only a minority needed to rely on their professionalism. Again, that re-enforced to me the one on one versus the broad political action. Finally economics. The "average" american tends to become less idealistic as they grow older, which tends to result in more support for the conservative economic spectrum than the liberal economic spectrum. That is one area where I believe that the opinion change does not come through one on one interaction as much as the political/government process. The one on one interaction with someone on welfare ends of competing against the one on one interaction with the tax bill.