Dikiyoba

25% on 3 turn BF means it will on average, last close to a turn longer. 3 turns isn't long, especially since it's likely to be cast by someone acting late in the turn order, and therefore the first turn is going to get wasted. (Avadon seems to do that differently, btw, for whatever reason -- in Avadon statuses decrement on a character's turn, here they seem to decrement with each new round.)

Status effects in Crystal Souls happen/decrement on a character's turn, the same as in Avadon.

Dikiyoba.

The 90% accuracy cap when on casual difficulty (and normal too?) is awful. The cap makes most big fights ones last a round or two longer without making them more difficult (since survivability and stockpiling resources isn't an issue) or more interesting in any way. And cheating doesn't help with this issue, because you're at the cap most of the time anyway.

Dikiyoba.

To clarify, I'm not objecting to the fact that the nephilim and slitherzaki portraits (or other animal-humanoid combinations) have a digitigrade (walking on tip-toes with an elongated heel as part of the leg) stance, or that their limb segments are angled instead of being straight up-and-down like in humans. That's how many mammal hind legs look. I'm objecting to the fact that the shins project straight backwards, because there are no legs anywhere on Earth that work that way. And there are enough examples of bipedal (whether permanently or just on occasion) digitigrade animals that there's no excuse for not knowing how their legs look.

Basilisk lizards:

Birds:

Kangaroos:

Gerenuk:

Bonus image:

Dikiyoba.

Don't worry, you've actually missed very little. The vahnatai warriors will disappear no matter what you do, and Garzhad doesn't do anything too exciting in that battle (you can't kill him, obviously). You don't even need to kill the remaining Empire soldiers, unless you plan to leave Ornotha Ziggurat without the Crystal Soul and return to finish it up later.

Dikiyoba.

..is that you will suddenly see something terribly unrealistic in a picture (or at least a variation on a picture) you've seen a hundred times before.

And you will never, ever be able to unsee it. Instead, you will notice all the other times it occurs. And there will be a lot of them.

Why, Avernum, why?

Dikiyoba.

The fate of Kyass was a disappointment, and I don't even remember exactly what he did in A:EftP.

Dikiyoba definitely does not miss the sewers. Sewer levels are almost always boring.

A few more:

1. There are two Reflective Shields available in the Giant Lands, one after the outdoor combat at the ruined monastery, and the other in a chest in the Giant's Cave. Not a bug, but it's pretty weird.

2. Elderan has a female death cry instead of a male one.

Dikiyoba.

Too bad about the cavequake; it's an inconvenience but makes zero difference otherwise, as you can just land north of Saffron.

It also makes the layout of Almaria make a lot less sense, storywise. Almaria shouldn't be an important hub for supply and troop movements when there's a huge waterfall and lots of rock separating it from the Dark Lake and Eastern Gallery, yet the game still treats it as a major hub.

Dikiyoba.

That is bizarre and strangely hilarious. Just to clarify, those screenshots came from the demo, not the full game, right? The demo and full versions are separate now. And version 1.0 for Mac? (I doubt you ended up with a beta version, but at this point, who knows?)

Dikiyoba could not attack friendly soldiers in Fort Ganrick using the Windows demo v1.0. Nor is there any evidence of a friendly spider in the Under Draco scripts for either the Windows demo or full version.

Here are a few minor errors.

1. When talking to Tor in the Gunston Homestead, this dialogue only shows up if you a nephil in the party (rather than a human, which is what would make sense):

2. Dikiyoba got the quest "The Vahnatai Ritual" to do the Ritual of Welcoming from Bon-Ihrno. Dikiyoba completed the ritual and proceeded to go to Oglai and bring down the barriers without speaking to Bon-Ihrno again. Now Dikiyoba can only tell him that the barriers are down and is unable to complete the quest.

Thanks everyone. (And don't worry about it, Lilith, it was a long time ago and I made my fair share of mistakes as well.)

Dikiyoba is gone for good now. Later all!

So this really isn't the right note to go out on since I've been so harsh recently, but...

I find I'm no longer interested in or involved with the SW community, haven't been for a while, and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. I figure it's best to make as fast and clean a break as possible. I'll probably pop back in when A2:CS is released. Until then, good-bye, good luck, and best wishes.

I'll be around in CalRef chat for the time being, but the best way to contact me is through my e-mail, Dikiyoba (at) gmail (dot) com. Feel free to keep in touch.

Dikiyoba.

Eh, the passenger pigeon's numbers made it more vulnerable, not less. Traveling and roosting in huge flocks made it easy to hunt and meant it needed huge areas of habitat to feed in. Plus apparently reproduction could only occur successfully in huge colonies, so once the numbers began to drop enough, the birds stopped nesting successfully and its fate was sealed despite thousands of individuals remaining. Many other species survive just fine with a few thousand individuals. The closely-related mourning dove is doing just fine despite 20 million of them being shot by humans every year.

Now the eradication of smallpox, that's an achievement. (Oh hey, rinderpest was eradicated too, apparently, and quite recently. You'd think there would have been more in the news about that. Is that disease that evolved in cattle and so had no role in any natural ecosystem, or was there some "wild" rinderpest that later came into contact with domestic bovines? The Wikipedia article makes it sound like the former.)

Dikiyoba.

How about the musical whine of a mosquito's wings, the soft coo of defecating pigeons, or the lustrous gleam of a cockroach's exoskeleton? Don't discriminate against the apalling sort of animal.

Do pigeons really coo when they poop? Anyway, yeah, all those animals are cool too. Male and female mosquitoes have different wing beat frequencies. This means that males can hear a nearby female despite being in a huge mating swarm of other male mosquitoes. The species we think of when we say "mosquito" or "cockroach" don't need appeals for protection, though, because they've benefited from humans and are quite difficult for humans to control. Though cockroaches and pigeons have non-pest species that either need protection or may need protection in the near future.

Dikiyoba.

i have a laptop but i use it as my main computer and plug in the mouse from my desktop, because my desktop is like 5 years old and barely works any more

My poor laptop is basically a mobile desktop at this point, since it needs an external fan and I need a mouse (using the trackpad for a prolonged period of time hurts my hand) and I use it for long enough at a time that it's easiest to keep it plugged in.

or having people shoot laser beams at me

That sounds like more fun than it actually is.

Dikiyoba.

—Alorael, whose actually not convinced that even large losses of megafauna will make much difference. Losing insects is bad news, though. And climate change is really uncomfortable whether or not species vanish.

I think the ecological importance of a species matters more than its size. While tragic, the loss of the giant panda or a gall aphid wouldn't change much. Lose the African savannah elephant or a bumblebee, and the ecological disturbance will be much greater.

Dikiyoba has been stressing the utilitarian value of the environment for humans, but really, ecosystems, species, and natural processes are worth preserving for their own sake. Nature is full of beauty, awe, drama, spectacle, subtle patterns, and unexpected encounters. The massive spread of a condor's wings, wolf packs warring over territory, clear air that allows you to see far and wide, earwig mothers tending their eggs, songbirds defending their territory through song, clear water in meandering streams, plants creating chemicals to defend themselves against herbivorous insects, colorful bacterial mats in geothermal pools, a hawk swooping down on a snake, barn swallows playing with an airborne feather, a lion's roar, the acceleration of a cheetah, the oddness of the aardvark, the strangeness of sloths. All these things will pass eventually, because all things on Earth do, but why would you want to end them prematurely?

It gives us wind farms that kill endangered species

The first few generations of wind turbines do, but the modern ones don't, provided they are set up properly.

Dikiyoba.

The general impression that the planet is going rapidly downhill has been a media staple for my entire life, which is now nearly fifty years. The end has always been nigh, but in fact it hasn't come. I've heard jawboning about how pressing the problems are for decades. My impression is that this energetic consciousness-raising has mainly been a way for people who don't have any more useful ideas than anyone else to let themselves feel as though they've done their bit, by spreading the word. In fact that's the easy part, and isn't worth much.

That's because there have been environmental crises throughout all of human history, but the Industrial Revolution made environmental crises bigger and closer together. The 1960s and 1970s are just the most recent change in attitudes toward it. We've been hearing about environmental crises for the past fifty years because there have been environmental crises for the past fifty years. Either we resolve them (the ozone hole is slowly shrinking, non-CO2 air pollution throughout North America and Europe is way down, USA rivers no longer catch fire) or we don't and they either drag on and on (endangered Pacific salmon stocks due to dams and other river mismanagement problems) or reoccur (loss of fertility of farmland, energy crises). Progress is being made, but there are always new problems cropping up. And for each new crisis, the quality of life for humans goes downhill. Maybe it's direct, like when chemicals get into our groundwater and make us sick, or it's indirect, like when American settlers extirpated the wolf only to discover that there are suddenly a ton of disease-spreading deer eating all the vegetation in sight. It'll take a massive change in cultural attitudes and norms to prevent the crises from happening in the first place, but working to stop them and repair the damage they've done is better than nothing.

---

Also, SoT, if you want me to stop being mean to you, don't send me a PM full of backhanded compliments. Actually respond to the polite and reasonable requests and objections people make. Because right now being mean is the only way to get any sort of response from you.

Dikiyoba.

There has been an environmental crisis for fifty years or so now; so if it's really a crisis, it's a slow one.

Do you enjoy being incredibly wrong or something?

List of environmental disasters

North American Dust Bowl

London Smog Disaster

Pollution-caused diseases in Japan

(Anyone have any good links specifically on pre-Industrial environmental disasters? Dikiyoba knows there are lots of them, but Dikiyoba's Googling powers are weak.)

*It really bothers me that some people exclusively drink bottled water. Bottled water in the U.S. is scarcely regulated, whereas tap water must be tested multiple times a day. Tap water doesn't fill natural bodies of water with plastic.

Well water is a potential issue, though. So are old pipes made of lead or something. Those are valid reasons to avoid tap water. Still, there are far better ways to get clean water than through bottled water, both in terms of sustainability and cost.

I do care about the environment, but only to the extent that it aids humanity.

Dikiyoba would argue that all of nature (except for things that are obviously bad, like an individual tiger that eats people or malaria) aids humanity. You never know where the next scientific/medical breakthrough might come from, or what will bring someone inspiration or peace of mind (plus tourist dollars!). And since you never know what might be useful, it's more cost-efficient to leave it in place rather than finding out years down the line that you need it and have to spend millions of dollars trying to restore it, or is often the case, spend millions of dollars try to restore it now so you don't end totally boned down the line.

1a is a yes because he's well known enough that prospective watchers write theses about him.

Doesn't 1a mean famous *within the fictional universe*, not real life?

Dikiyoba.

See, I paid attention in school, and I know that the semicolon not only separates two independent clauses, but is also the delimiter for lists of lists.

Consider yourself lucky. Not everyone gets such comprehensive grammar education.

Dikiyoba.

Student of Trinity, are we really going to do this again?

Dikiyoba is in before this thread turns into A Pattern all over again.

To some extent it's because scientists are neither expected to nor trained to write well, but there's also a culture of bad writing. I don't know if editors drive it by demanding impenetrable verbiage or whether it's entirely self-motivated, but it's pervasive.

Well, if new scientists aren't trained to write well and all the scientific papers they see are written poorly, then they're going to copy what they see and produce badly-written papers of their own. It's nearly impossible to break the cycle without training scientists how to write well first. Publish-or-perish institutions and overwork don't help either.

Dikiyoba likes to imagine that the typical scientific paper titles are created through party games. You know, like Telephone or the One Word at a Time Story.

I don't know when that time is.

It's typically once a month.

Anyway...

Economic Left/Right: -7.75

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.36

Dikiyoba has somehow gotten more authoritarian since the last test. Oh well.