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Exile/Avernum doesn't have any proper cities. It has tiny community centers in the middle of areas with lots of farms, which are simply called cities. In X1 and X2 it was clear that the bulk of the population did not live in any of the forts or "cities."

Ugh trollation. Look, this is pretty simple. Language involves a very large set of complex and interrelated rules that allow us to make sense of it and hence to communicate. These rules are not static; they change, gradually, over time as different speakers do different things with the language. In addition, it is not necessary to follow every single rule in order to be understood. This has less to do with language change and more to do with the basic cognitive ability of being able to reconstruct an ordered whole from disordered and incomplete parts. As a result, "correctness" in language lies on a continuum -- it is not boolean. Additionally, the true test of "correctness" is simply whether a native speaker hears an utterance as totally normal, as sounding off, or as incomprehensible -- or as something in between those poles.

Which in turn would make the game less interesting. Crippling is not the solution. There is a very, very, very simple solution. Add an option in the OBoE Preferences called "Don't show distant enemy actions onscreen."

Originally Posted By: Kelandon Originally Posted By: Lilith seriously if you honestly think "to go boldly where no man has gone before" sounds better than the alternative you should probably not tell anyone how to write anything ever again Face it: you love meter. Especially iambs. Oh, sweet iambs. Mora had a little iamb.

Hawthorne (any -- there are multiple Hawthornes!) wasn't creating a situation, he was dumping people he didn't want in a pit. Getting rid of them. Nobody in the Empire cared if they survived.

I've definitely seen that. It requires a REALLY large battle -- and/or a medium sized battle with enemies that throw webs -- for it to be a problem with sound turned off, but it does happen.

Yes, those are possibilities. But again, there is no convincing evidence to suggest that the displayed numbers are actually wrong.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan I've always assumed that sending people down was more trouble than it was worth, so the Empire saved the punishment for either high-profile cases (like the Five), or in cases where execution would raise a huge public outcry. You don't need to exile every political dissident or rebel or thief or whatever; just exile a few examples and let propaganda keep the rest in line. The trilogy is REPLETE with examples of people who were exiled for reasons of expediency -- common people who speak out in the wrong way -- and even more commonly, for simple prejudice. Lots of people were exiled over their religious beliefs, over their sexual orientation, over insulting an Empire official in some way, and over not following Empire regulations (such as around learning magic), and plenty were exiled for petty theft -- just look at the Abyss. Quote: Also, I've always assumed that there was just one exiling portal (say on Pralgad), so unless you were from there, you would just be executed or imprisoned instead. Also incorrect -- there is evidence in X3 of Exiles from multiple continents. And what Dikiyoba said about the nephilim portal.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity I mean, if that's really the population scale of Avernum, then it's a tremendous surprise that some lucky pestilence hasn't wiped out everyone. And it's a generous reflection on the supposedly tyrannical old Empire, that an entire planet's worth of dissidents only amounted to so few people. Originally Posted By: Exile: Escape from the Pit A well-maintained sign says: Passed through portal 117832 Just backing up what you said in the rest of your post. Quote: I always thought that explaining clearly to the player that the zones represented isolated sites of special interest, rather than adjacent tiles, would have given a more satisfying sense of scale to those games. You mean kind of like an X1-3 style world map provides?

I agree with all of this, and this is really what I was trying to say, too: there are arbitrary elements to math, even if they are different ones from the arbitrary elements in most disciplines.

I agree that abstraction and deductiveness are different about math. I just don't see how that makes it less arbitrary. Deductions have to start with something to deduct from -- there must be a First Cause, if you will -- and whatever that is, is just as arbitrary for math as a set of scientific or historical observations are.

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires You act before others and enemies. This is inaccurate. Often you will act first -- it doesn't take a whole lot of Dex/QA/QS/Gymnastics to do so -- but if enemies have more than you, they WILL act before you in battle.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity But math really is unique, because it's so entirely abstract. Other disciplines all have some arbitrary elements... Math, though, is different. Math is what's left when you take away everything that's arbitrary. Math is what has to be just so, and couldn't be otherwise. This is an assertion that sounds nice, but there's no substance to it (at least not any that's been explained). Why does the fact that math is entirely abstract make it any less arbitrary than (for example) language? Yes, numbers and operations follow patterns and rules of logic, but so do (for example) languages. What makes the patterns and rules of logic used in math so totally devoid of arbitrariness? Or to put it more briefly: Why couldn't math be otherwise?

Originally Posted By: So Much Killing Slarty, regarding your analysis reposted by Randomizer, and in particular your comments at the end on expected vs. actual damage, The quoted analysis is slightly old. Since then, we discovered that the damage formulas are slightly more complicated than we thought: for all damage, the "bonus dice" contributed by skills (strength, melee weapons, spellcraft, sharpshooter, etc) are equal to 75% of the skill total, not all of it. That is what is responsible for the damage difference and once that is taken into account, I believe the averages line up quite neatly with the formulas. Quote: there is definitely something off about Jeff's random number generator or the way he uses it. It seems streaky, or he is caching some of the results and re-using them when we wouldn't expect. The best evidence of this is the weird streaks of parry and riposte: you will sometimes get a guy with a 6% chance of parry succeeding three time (or more) in a row. On average, that should happen maybe 1 in 5000 tests, but it happens much more often than that. The same happens with low riposte numbers. It usually lasts a turn, then things go back to "normal". It's so obvious that when I see it happening in a turn, I switch my later PCs attacks to another enemy. We can't rule this out, but I think it's more likely that Jeff modifies the chances in some way after they are displayed onscreen but before they go into the RNG. He's definitely done this with ceilings and floors on to-hit chances in many games. Another possibility is that there is some unknown-to-us circumstantial modifier, which could possibly explain your observation that it "usually lasts a turn." For example, suppose a successful parry gives you a hidden bonus to parry for the rest of the round? And it's also possible that your results are statistically normal and just look weird. For example, your 1 in 5000 number is about accurate if you do trials of three attacks at a time and look for only 3 parries WITHIN one trial. However, your anecdotal evidence presumably comes from an essentially undivided string of attacks, so you are looking for ANY chain of 3 parries. Were the attacks split up into groups of 3, this would include, for example, a group of 2 hits and a parry, followed by a group of 2 parries and a miss. This increases the odds substantially. According to my calculations, the odds of getting a run of 3 parries (with 6% parry chance) out of 9 attacks are about 0.14%, or about 7 in 5000. The chance will rise disproportionately as the number of observed attacks goes up, at first. Either way, I really doubt the RNG is the culprit. If you are really interested, I think the next thing to do would be to test parry with a skill of 1 under repeatable, as-neutral-as-possible conditions, and see if we observe (a) an unusual number of parries, and ( any pattern to their occurance. But I am a bit skeptical.

You want this table: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=191367#Post191367 Lilith expanded on this in a follow-up by adding something else to it (I forget what), but I can't find that one.

I think it will jump-follow -- recentering the screen after movement ends or when the screen shifts far enough. It definitely will not follow during movement console-style, though.

He's talking about the Video Game Stunt Double Deathmatch Tourney. But it will take a few more years of neglect before that one is as behind as the original Deathmatch!

Yes, I remember that one SoT -- it was inspired Originally Posted By: MissSea Yes, but the flip side of prescriptivism is descriptivism -- linguists who are trying to determine <i>why</i> we use the language we do. And couldn't you say that understanding is the same as quantifying emotion? No, I wouldn't. Quantification implies changing the form of something -- perhaps cosmetically or perhaps through significant truncation -- to make it numerical. Looking at it functionally, you get an output that is totally different from what you put in. Understanding does too, but it produces a complex cognitive structure rather than a number. They are totally, totally different processes, whether applied to emotion or anything else. Also, that's not what descriptivism is -- it has nothing to do with asking why we use particular linguistic forms. I know you won't like this link, but it's a reasonable description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_linguistics Quote: And watch out bashing prescriptivist language teachers -- don't you need to learn the rules before you then break them? How else can rebellion and revolution take place unless a recognized set of rules is first applied and then broken? Prescriptivist teaching *can* be a good way to learn the rules. The problem is that it is invested in maintaining the same set of rules, but actual language use changes over time, often slowly but sometimes fairly suddenly. If you are a prescriptivist, you think that your rules are correct and the vernacular is wrong, whereas a descriptivist viewpoint always places the vernacular first. For a simple example, which one of these is "correct"? (1) Who did you go to the prom with? (2) Whom did you go to the prom with? The descriptivist answer is 1 and the prescriptivist answer is 2. (Some prescriptivists might go further and assert that you can't split prepositions and objects in English, although that has never actually been the case.) Typically, pronouns have case in English that must match their use. However, over the last century this has eroded in some circumstances, including when an accusative pronoun from a later prepositional phrase begins a sentence. That's actual use. That's actual, current, English grammar. But it's not what English grammar has been standardized as in the past. Which do you prefer? *shrug*

Originally Posted By: MissSea How do you describe happy? Or sad? What does hate mean to you? Those are all abstract constructs. Are they really? They aren't physical objects, but they are objectively identifiable human experiences. Are experiences abstract constructs? Quote: Linguistics seeks to quantify these constructs, even if it lacks the the formula of how to arrive at such an undefined limit... Not really. Well, at rare times I suppose, but that's kind of like saying "math seeks to calculate the value of irrational numbers to more and more decimal places." While technically accurate, that is a tiny and unrepresentative part of what math as a discipline seeks. Likewise here. Linguistics is not about mapping out specific semantic domains with increasing precision -- that's a goal more often pursued by prescriptivist language teachers.

CONSIGN IT THEN TO THE FLAMES: FOR IT CAN CONTAIN NOTHING BUT--

Wowzers. Dantius made a post that I strongly agree with.

Originally Posted By: cfgauss Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES that seems quite unfounded to me. How exactly is math the largest set in the space of all relationships? Basically by definition. If you found things not in this space, and labeled them X_i, which were described by relationships, X_j ~ X_k for some j,k if X_j and X_k are related, then you could define a set X = {X_i}, and the orbit space of relations, R(X_i) = { x in X : X_i in x with x~X_i}. But then you could study X and the orbits R(X_i) with the usual tools of math, because this defines the set and relation structure. You can also easily impose any other structural requirements you need. So by contradiction we can show that this collection and relations not in the space of all describable things is in fact describable by the usual tools. My bold. So basically you're saying that can study all of these relationships with math, because you have decided that math defines all relationships. That sounds like circular logic. Presumably you could study all of those relationships with history, if you also decide that history defines all relationships. What's special about math that makes it a priori the definition of all relationships?

Hmm. I think I see what you're saying, but I disagree completely, because if I understand you right, it really hinges on this statement Originally Posted By: cfgauss Math is the 'largest' set (by construction) in the 'space' of all sets of relationships. that seems quite unfounded to me. How exactly is math the largest set in the space of all relationships?

Whoops! There was a slight error in my original post, which I've now fixed. Basically, the weapon multiplier times the weapon power IS the base damage for weapons -- I had it listed twice for weapons, once in each form. For spells, however, there is a totally separate base damage amount, which is why both had to be listed. Now it is fixed.

Originally Posted By: cfgauss But this isn't correct. Math studies relationships... History is all about relationships... Similarly, physics is described exclusively by math because it's all about relationships... This makes no sense logically: if relationships are the only reason physics is described by math, then why can't physics be described by history? The answer is that, while on one level math, history, and physics are all about relationships, there are other differences between those disciplines that are TOTALLY relevant to this conversation. That relationships are essential is an accurate, but inadequate definition of any of those disciplines. Originally Posted By: demons will charm you Mathematicians may pursue branches because they are practically relevant, but the branches themselves exist and are true regardless of their ties to the real world... Everything else is, at base, drawn from inductively determined truths. Math isn't, except to the degree that the axioms most commonly used are those that seem to be true in reality. I think you could say this about many fields by drawing a distinction between the platonic form of the field's domain, and the way it is substantiated/instantiated in the flesh (a distinction which is actively pursued in some fields). In particular I'm thinking of computer science and linguistics. I'm not sure how different it is to start with the given axiom of ordinal numbers and the most basic, can't-be-defined-in-terms-of-other-operations operations, than it is to start with the basic axioms of a syntactic theory (the most basic components and the most basic operations), or the simplest components of a programming language, etc. CS and Lx tend to provoke more practically relevant research than math, but less than other fields. It's not a coincidence that I have tended to group those fields together (under "abstract sciences") in demographic surveys here. However, I think you could apply that division to most fields, it just isn't done so much.