ActiveSheet? Please no

As long as nobody starts, not playing is the easiest way to avoid defeat. But if one player plays, the rest must follow or lose. And as long as either keeps playing, neither can stop. That is the tragedy of war: Easy to start, hard to end, until the fire runs out of fuel and only ruin is left.

The only way to truly win in war is to never fight.

If you have a choice, that is.

I keep thinking about the guy complaining that Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine got political with that one picture of his guitar, and the reddit comment or whatever asking what type of machine he thought the band was raging against - kitchen appliances?

I think he made decent enough content when the competition wasn’t particularly fierce, then kept coasting on the early adopter acclaim.

In my classes on analytics, we were taught to prefer using normalised axes starting at 0 to more accurately put changes into perspective.

Pretty sure the Nazgûl use stabby weapons, where chainmail is less effective (not completely useless, but an unlucky thrust may split the rings).

First Elsass-Lothringen, now Heckler & Koch… when are they going to stop taking our stuff?

(Yes, I know the actual history is more complex. I’m just memeing.)

Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.

I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?

Announcing the new “Royal Stables” DLC: “Marauders & Massacres” is sure to spice up your medieval farm simulation!

They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.

So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).

So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.

What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.

*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.

For the elites: conserve their hierarchy and the structures that enable the gradual accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

For the rest: conserve their place in the hierarchy and the comfort of the familiar.

Hourly wages for school teachers? I’m worried I might know the response, but does prep work outside school hours, in breaks etc. count as hours worked?

If you don’t pay for late checkout, you can’t check out late. If you don’t pay for the DLC, you can’t play the DLC. You can still check out at the normal time (which is the basic service) or play the base game, respectively.

Dammit, EAC may be an issue on Linux though. It’s kinda hit or miss whether a given developer will take the extra steps, particularly given the conflicting sources on just how complex it actually is. According to Valve, it’s a checkbox and dropping a file in your depot. Others claim it would require an Epic Online Services version of EAC, with all the baggage that carries, including potentially rewriting a whole chunk of your code.

It’s like booking a hotel: Basic price will get you a room for the night, with all the common amenities, but if you want late checkout, you’ll pay extra. Sure, they could fold that into the basic price and make it the norm, but if you know you’ll leave early anyway, you’ll be paying for something you don’t want.

The metaphor breaks apart if you look too closely - for hotels, early checkout is a convenience since they can get the room ready sooner for the next guest, so they’ll incentivise that, while the devs have already put in the work. On the other hand, the late checkout is a service of convenience while a DLC is an excitement feature, where the content is instead an incentive to pay more.

Either way, I feel like add-ons for games aren’t too different from add-ons in many other industries: “This is the basic <thing>, with the price we feel we can charge for it. This here is an extra you can have for an extra charge.”

I like how Julius’ lines fit the pentameter, but Brittanus’ “What?” shits right past it.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945

We have been trying to reason with the bigots for a long time, but it has become clear that their polemic doesn’t respect reason. What shall we do, then? Throw up our hands, let them erode our values and sacrifice our values on the altar of rigid principles? Die with pride “At least, we never resorted to censorship”? What good is our loyalty to that rule to the victims of that new, intolerant order?

The enemies of freedom have no qualms about using censorship and violence to silence the opposition. It is only right that we should meet them on their terms, if they will not meet us on ours.

I find myself repeating some version this sentiment every now end then: There are good reasons to hate (whoever the conversation is about), but this ain’t one. We don’t need to grasp at straws when there are solid branches.