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trollilith: Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Voters right now are frustrated that improvement has been so minimal, but outside of the hardcore right wing it isn't personal, because Obama is really too boring to hate. unfortunately the hardcore right wing now constitutes a huge chunk of the US population, and they're disproportionately likely to vote seriously, 40% of voters still doubt whether Obama is a US citizen The poll that produced that number was flawed, not representative, and has been debunked. The hardcore right wing, meaning people who will rarely if ever vote for a non-Republican, is a decent chunk of the population, but there is a similarly sized chunk on the left, too. I'd love to see the data that says they are more likely to vote than hardcore leftists, if it exists, which it doesn't. Anyway, yes, there are lots of people who watch Palin and Beck and will never touch Obama, and lots of people who will vote kneejerk democratic too. What's different compared with recent U.S. history is that a large chunk of the electorate identifies as independent. but it's always like that to a certain degree here. that's the result of a two-party system: everyone drifts to the imagined center and fights over the swing voters. it's the exact same reason why people put new gas stations adjacent to competing ones, and not further away. Quote: you're also underestimating the number of people who actively prefer an ineffectual government, because they've been convinced that letting it collapse under its own weight is in their best interests you're not a u.s. citizen, you don't count

Being partisan is the ticket to the Republicans losing the next election -- perhaps not badly, but definitely losing it. Where do you expect the country to be in a few years? The economy? Voters right now are frustrated that improvement has been so minimal, but outside of the hardcore right wing it isn't personal, because Obama is really too boring to hate. The economy isn't going to be any better in 2012. And guess who is going to get blamed for that by Independents, if the Republicans they voted in to change things instead spend their time just obstructing Obama (who was _also_ voted in by Independents)? "Party of No" only works when you're in the minority. If that's still the Republican platform, Obama should be thrilled.

Hey Dintiradan -- is that Mike Jones? And either way, why is your avatar helmetless?

There are disadvantages to both systems. In a multi-party system things are more likely to become thinly spread and weak, while in a two-party system things are more likely to become polarized in an ugly way. Multi-party systems almost inevitably lead to coalition-forming on some level, but as Dantius and I both mentioned, that happens in the U.S. too -- it's just less transparent here. "The shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." William Golding One thing I am curious about: in the U.S., political power inevitably follows the course of a pendulum, though an invisible hand (ha, ha) can sometimes alter its speed. Does the same thing happen in multi-party democracies as in Europe or India?

Excalibur is absolutely right, by the way. Presidential policy obviously has some impact on the economy, but it's a very tiny impact compared with all the other factors involved. Presidential election chances are at the mercy of the economy, they don't control it, despite all the rhetoric that surrounds "trickle-down economics" and "Bush-era tax cuts" and "bail-out packages."

It's true that the Republicans have been a lot more exclusionist towards disadvantaged groups in the last few decades. But that's just all political maneuvering; the Republicans engineered a bizarre alliance in the 90's between economic conservatives and religious fundamentalists. Even into the early 90's, Democratic support for gay rights was lukewarm at best, and more frequently they opposed them. Attitudes have shifted as the country's demographics have shifted, and both parties have repositioned themselves to take advantage of this -- most recently visible in the last 2 years, as mainstream Republicans have rather dramatically distanced themselves from anti-gay rhetoric. In reality, the party platforms are flexible; they bend with the times, shifting inch by inch to grab the biggest market share of the electorate. In 2008 the "Party of Lincoln" ran ads shamelessly using a candidate's ethnicity to imply a connection to terrorism; the Democrats have done equally shameful things that would make Thomas Jefferson roll in his grave.

Originally Posted By: FnordCola G2 is especially unlikely because conversations with Litalia in G5 indicate that she's been pretty thoroughly retconned into the G2 PC. Absolutely not! Litalia's backstory has shifted from one game to the next. She likely was in a position similar to the PC, but the details don't fit for her to be the PC. For one thing, when you leave the valley in G2, Ghaldring is still incubating in a sealed chamber -- he is not stalking you in the forest to gain your allegiance.

G1 is probably too old, although with Geneforge alterations who knows. G2 seems unlikely. G3 is quite plausible, particularly in conjunction with the Monarch hypothesis. Monarch fits the G5 PC about as well as the G4 PC does, and while it isn't certain, the comments that Alwan, Greta, and Litalia make about Monarch in G4 make it sound quite possible that Monarch is the G3 PC gone mad.

Look, it's a copy-and-paste-plus-bizarre-commercial-link bot. Look, it's banned!

There's sort of a continuum of facepalmity. Student of Trinity, for example, is quite close to Chokboyz's zero point, but not quite there, while at the other extreme ETiSD approaches but does not quite reach 1. Mind you, not all facepalms are a bad thing.

Jeff probably has an adequate number of power-gamer types already. Just guessing.

"Tintin returns the favour" ...

Unfortunately, the image this conjured up for me was New Centurions.

Seconded. Thanks for donating so much of your time to such an unlikely cause, and thanks for being one of the few people here who have never caused me to facepalm.

The timing of the beta testing is different from any of Jeff's releases in half a decade, or maybe longer. I would guess that the time between (American) Thanksgiving and Christmas is the busiest time of year for the target demographic, between the academic calendar, holiday travel, and the holidays themselves. It's entirely possible that a number of Jeff's regular beta testers said they couldn't commit to Avadon's timetable.

The real question is whether from just that picture you could guess that the person had gone to Harvey Mudd.

That's actually incorrect, as far as Parry goes. The game checks for Riposte BEFORE it checks for Parry, so Parry will never reduce the chance of getting a Riposte in.

Well, we know what the Blades of Exile source code looks like, and it seems totally implausible that much of it could have been used for Nethergate. The dialogue engine was unchanged. But neither the graphics code, nor the combat code, applied at all. I suspect that lines, and maybe occasional segments of code were copied in, for dialogue and certain UI elements like item description boxes. But the vast majority of the BoE code simply could not be converted into Nethergate, it would have to be rewritten entirely. For Geneforge 1, it is more plausible that certain snippets of graphics code, for example, were reused. I still suspect it was a ground-up rewrite with copy-and-paste moments.

Xoid, I find your choice of comparisons somewhat confusing. I would make the following engine distinctions: Group 1: * Exile 1-3 and Blades of Exile. Group 2: * Nethergate. * Avernum 1-3 -- similar to Nethergate both in terms of graphics and mechanics, but with some clear differences. * Blades of Avernum and Nethergate: Resurrection. Similar to Avernum 1-3 especially in terms of graphics. Group 3: * Geneforge 1-5 -- a single engine which evolved in terms of graphics. Changes were relatively minor through Geneforge 3, but there were larger changes in graphics code for Geneforge 4 and 5. Mechanics nearly identical throughout. * Avernum 4-6 -- identical to the Geneforge engine in some ways, but with some clear differences mainly in terms of graphics code. As far as shared code and assets go, we KNOW that games up through at least Nethergate: Resurrection contain assets that date back to at least Exile 2 -- you can find them in the resource fork of the Mac applications.

Yeah. Spears are however affected by Str, Polearms, and Blademaster -- Quick Action never affects the damage output of a hit.

By Base Damage I mean what is listed in the item info window as "Base Damage." This is always equal to (Weapon Multiplier * Weapon Bonus Level), but people seem to have an easier time with the equations if I list it the first way. The alternative (which I myself prefer) would be: Average Damage for Weapons = Weapon Multiplier * ( (Weapon Bonus * 1) + (Attack Bonus * 0.75) ) I also found Dantius's explanation here to be very confusing.

If this thread gets locked, it had better be accompanied by an image similar to what you can find here: http://lemmingexplodes.ytmnd.com/

Nethergate had underground cliffs that you could jump off of.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: owen ben singano uachave and may i ask why rebels/ traskovites/sholai have russian names........i mean im russian and i kind of disagree a bit with it He wanted the Sholai to seem foreign, so he gave them names from a foreign language. There's not much more to it than that. There's a little bit more to it than that -- the vast majority of Sholai names in G1 (and I think in the rest of the games, although there are far fewer Sholai) are all named after characters in Chekhov's works -- many from _Three Sisters_. Some of Chekhov's writings are very much in key with the atmosphere of Geneforge -- _Ostrov Sakhalin_ comes to mind -- so I imagine his writing served as an inspiration to Jeff.

It's definitely a bug. The documentation in the Exile games says specifically that changing equipment takes an AP. It mentions a lot of things that take up AP, and it never says "but you can do this an infinite number of times at the end of your turn, and follow it up with any one action free." I think it's quite clear that it was not an intended part of the game system that you can change your equipment 20 times, and then cast a spell. The thing is that without the more creative user-made equipment options and more varied monster-fighting situations found in BoE, there was almost never a reason to change even one piece of equipment in the middle of combat. So it is not surprising that this was not raised as an issue during the Exile Trilogy time.