Ceiling Durkheim

I think it counts as a non sequitur.

Most freeze attacks are long range, though, so attacking from afar doesn't actually help much. It buys you some time when dealing with basilisks in particular, since they can only damage you in melee, but that's about it.

That, and battle frenzy doesn't stack with haste. It actually gives substantially more AP now (5 vs. 2), but back in A5 those 2 and the 2 from haste worked together, whereas now frenzy just gives you (the stronger form of) haste. All told, I think battle frenzy is underrated on these forums. It's true that adrenaline rush is the discipline you want to use (in tandem with haste wands/scrolls) in the hardest fights, as well as the easiest, but I actually find myself using frenzy much more than rush overall. With my fighters, I find I use rush in about the easiest 20% and the hardest 10% of battles, and frenzy in the other 70%. After all, you only get about 50-100 uses of group haste in the game, and there are far more encounters than that, not even counting the fact that you're likely to use haste 2-4 times in the hardest/longest fights. There's no long-term limit on hasting yourself with frenzy. The main difference now is that it isn't worthwhile to get the extra 4 points of battle skill for pure casters.

You know, I don't think I ever tried that. I just assumed they were the same effect, a la speed potions and Battle Frenzy. If I ever get around to finishing that Torment run, I'll probably try that on Zahur "unspeakably foul series of curse words" Firecaller.

Hence my reference to supporting Taygen. TV Tropes* sums it up nicely "A Nazi By Any Other Name: Taygen in the fifth game, down to the concentration camps and plan to annihilate all creations." *(will ruin your life) It bears noting, however, that it is often difficult to deduce a person's moral beliefs about real life based on their beliefs about fiction. If an interlocutor of mine were to express views that I consider analogous to SpaceCadet's about the real world, I would find that seriously troubling. But it's difficult to say what qualifies as really analogous between the two settings, since fantasy by definition brings up situations that haven't occurred in real life. Mauve deer: I'm not willing to assume that someone would agree with a real Nazi By Any Other Name on the sole basis that they agree with a fictional one.

Niiiice. A Taygen supporter, I take it? On the subject of the Barrier of Winds: it was meant for defensive war. The Awakened realized that the Shapers were going to try to kill them (like they, y'know, ended up doing), and so they worked on defenses. If you can't at least discern a difference between offensive war and self-defense, I don't see much point in discussing ethics with you.

Or if you have points in quick strike. But yeah, 9n + 1 are the magic numbers. 10 is easy enough with +AP items, quick strike, and such. 19 AP is technically possible without the 'Adrenaline Rush' battle discipline, but you need all 3 types of +AP items (shoes, armor, pole weapon or shield for +3), quick strike (up to +2), the fast on feet trait (up to +1), and haste (+5). 28 is possible with Adrenaline Rush, haste, and 3 AP worth of other bonuses. The best craftable items appear very late in the game, so it's worth it to save at least 10 focusing crystals and fine leathers/steels for the endgame.

Ah. That would make sense of his second statement. His first, regrettably, remains either incorrect or else opaque to me.

Why? A drayk has the same capacity to think, feel, and suffer that a human produced from biological birth does. Also, what about drayks and serviles who are born, rather than created? Neither species is sterile. Even if we assume (though God alone knows why we would) that a Shaper should be allowed absolute control over a servile s/he Shapes, does this apply to that servile's son, grandson and so on ad infinitum?

I can't speak to anything on the PSP, but Wesnoth on computer is completely free.

That just...wow. To invoke an analogy that gets a lot of play in the games: should a parent have the right to kill or enslave their adult offspring on a whim? @Tirien: I haven't seen a Shaper fyora, but I bet it would be adorable. I'm half-inclined to mess around with character graphics in order to make one now.

Oh God, I forgot that part. I knew the environment on Sucia was gradually degrading, but I forgot that was the cause. In response to one of your previous statements: there are a lot of individual Shapers who seem to want to make things better for outsiders, and in general sympathy for non-Shaper humans is one of the more acceptable forms of dissent among Shapers. Still, Shaper law as a whole isn't terribly nice to outsiders.

Battle For Wesnoth has elements of this. The main character in each campaign both recruits an army and is usually one of its stronger combat units. Makes for some interesting strategic decisions, especially in smaller missions, since the hero can add substantially to your force's strength in battle, but also causes a game over if s/he dies, and can only generate more troops from certain terrain types (keeps), which are usually far from the action. It's also completely free, which is a plus.

Quote: Neither is "start a massive rebellion and murder lots of innocent people because you disagree with the treatment of other innocent people." As you may recall from Geneforge 1 and 2, there was a group called the Awakened. They tried to free themselves from Shaper control in a relatively peaceful way, hoping to coexist with Shaper society as equals. Guess what the Shapers did to them? The Takers come to power and become the rebellion because the Shapers exterminate everyone idealistic enough to think they can actually reason with the Shapers. Put more generally, the reason that so many in opposition to the Shapers in the latter part of the series are murderous fanatics is because the Shapers killed off everyone who wasn't one. I don't say this to justify various atrocities the rebels commit, but it does go to show the terrible ramifications of Shaper law. In fact, if you want to go far back enough, the very reason there are Takers/rebels in the first place is because the Shapers left an island's worth of sentient creations to die when they barred Sucia.

Do we ever really get to see how that works out? I thought Kiki in G4 was the only servile of that type we encounter, and she doesn't do much besides give you missions. In principle, though, I agree. Even if serviles with a built in kill switch reduced the problem of rebellious serviles, they'd compound problems relating to rebellious humans. Various prominent rebels, most notably Greta and Litalia, cite the mistreatment of serviles as a major reason for turning, and presumably something as awful as a suicide command on a sentient being would be enough to disgust a lot of Shapers and outsiders.

I think the idea is that because the Awakened were more moral, they weren't willing to go to the (intermittently horrifying) lengths the Takers were in order to gain power, and as such got slaughtered. @Sage: yeah, it's pretty clear that the Awakened get slaughtered at the end of G2. The serviles of Penta in G5 aren't direct ideological descendants, but they do hark back to them, ironically since they're named after an Obeyer town from G1.

I agree that the Shapers think they're the good guys. One of the reasons I like the Geneforge series so much is because it's so short on Snidely Whiplash types (well, maybe not, but the important characters almost always think they're doing the right thing). I think it's fair to point out that the rebels are the same way. There are plenty of fanatics on both sides, and a lot of good people faced with sadistic choices, but few unequivocally evil people. Anyway, while I think the rebels are preferable to the Shapers in terms of morality, I think those who go for peace and sanity (most notably Astoria in G5) are better than either. In some ways the Trakovites may actually be the least morally compromised in their actions (Litalia has you do some nasty things in G5, but so does...everybody else, really), but I disagree with their main goal pretty seriously.

But...but...Leena and vahnatai Taygen! Their love is meant to be!

Are you suggesting that drayks are advocates of vahnatai creationism? Perhaps that's why the Shapers hate them so much! The truth is out there.

Quote: The drayks could be excellent soldiers and scholars and even laborers for a more tolerant regime. If memory serves, doesn't it say in G1 or 2 that the Shapers created drayks to function mainly as historians and keepers of knowledge? Shame they got barred, since they actually seem pretty good at it. At least if Isss-Ta is any indication. Though it also makes one wonder why the Shapers thought it would be a good idea to make the keepers of collective memory, y'know, dragons. They needn't be as helpless as servant minds, but it does seem like massive physical strength and fire breath would be fairly ancillary to their stated purpose.

The unlock spell only scales with tool use in A4. In A5 it opens "magic" locks on doors, a system apart from tool use unlocks, and in A6 it doesn't exist. So making the mage and tool user the same character only matters in A4.

An interesting argument. It's actually making me reconsider my stance on drakons, but not on drayks. Drayks, after all, never learn how to shape. At best they can craft essence into inanimate equipment, but even Shapers grudgingly allow outsiders to do this. And it's not as if drayks (or other rebels/Takers) even created drakons in the first place. I agree that invasive species have the potential to be very harmful, but I think there's a major difference between a nutria or a gypsy moth caterpillar and a being that can think and feel in the same way a human can. What you call a dangerous mistake, I'm inclined to call a person. Moreover, since humans are pretty much the ultimate invasive species, and more harmful to the natural environment than all the others combined (even in the Geneforge world, let alone our own), it seems according to this logic that the best solution to the problem would be to kill all humans as well. Would it be better if drayks had never existed? Perhaps, though even then I'm a bit dubious about the claim, since there are some drayk characters in the Geneforge series who seem strongly ethical by human standards. Drayks do exist, though, and have the capacity to reproduce themselves. This means that the problem is not whether they should have been created, but rather whether they should be allowed to exist, or be killed off. And given that they seem to have existed for a substantial amount of time before being barred (given both the number we encounter in the series, and the fact that creations derived from them exist in large numbers, i.e. living boats), chances are the Shapers killed off quite a few of them. I still have great difficulty seeing this as anything other than mass murder and genocide. And yes, many of the actions the rebels took are horribly immoral as well. Even in this, I'm not convinced the Shapers are much better, though. After all, "murder thousands upon thousands of people whose only crime was trying to live their lives under a regime that's existed since before they were born" sounds a lot like what the Shapers did (albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, though how much so remains unclear) upon their return to Sucia Island. The serviles there didn't choose to be born free from Shaper rule, but many of them died for it, and all would have if Zakary and Barzahl's ambition hadn't led them to contravene Shaper law.

And yet drayks aren't actually sterile. Whoever is at fault for this, it leaves the Shapers with the question of how to deal with them. Their answer: kill 'em all.

They're also effective on tanks for getting enemy attention. Actually, a tank-archer build, though unorthodox, is actually pretty effective. If you have elite warrior, you don't need all that much strength for heavy armor, and some of the best stat bonuses are on swords that don't do much damage (discipline blade, nephil warblade).

Huh. That's a good point. G1 is the one game in the series I haven't played to completion, so that didn't occur to me, but now that you mention it...yeah.