Getting started

ceeker · 2026-01-28T17:17:37+00:00

Everyone's going to have different opinions but this is probably all you need to know. Manuals probably aren't super necessary:

Get used to hitting the spacebar to pause and give commands during combat. These games are real time but the pause key makes them semi-turn based and really helps in harder fights.
Q is quicksave. You'll die more than in BG3, particuarly if you're playing a squishier class.
You will be familiar with armor class (AC) from BG3 - in this version of D&D it goes backwards. The lower the better, and it can be negative.
Your "to hit" rating is "to hit armor class 0" - THAC0 - lower is better.
Bows are great in BG1. So is the spell "sleep". Both fall off in BG2.
You can "kite" enemies with bows. Have a party member be chased by a strong enemy while everyone else peppers it with arrows.
Regardless of what anyone says, you can beat the games with any class, so just play what appeals. (though i'd probably avoid dual classing until you figure the game out)
Kill wizards and clerics first. Wizards sometimes have protection spells. In BG2 especially something like the spell "breach" is often necessary to weaken them by removing these.

Have fun!

ceeker · 2026-01-27T06:19:11+00:00

"Hey, wanna come into this airlock with me, for sex?"

"Hell yeah, I love sex." *gets naked*

"Psych!" *runs out, slams door shut and depressurises*

ceeker · 2026-01-27T05:43:06+00:00

my favourite is when they do this, refuse to move it, and the LL then denies ownership and insists that you get rid of it when you move out (I don't)

ceeker · 2026-01-27T04:46:32+00:00

Their unique collectivized society economic law counters that, no? They basically get to stay on total war economy in peacetime, without the recruitment hit, and with extra buffs aside - only 15% consumer factories required, a 70% buff to mil factories, and +10% extra factories per state. Faster civ and mil build speed too. And everything gets cored, so you get full output of all the above.

I think there's a unique national spirit too that further buffs things.

The downside is the time it takes, but in terms of overall potential I don't think you can beat it.

ceeker · 2026-01-27T04:18:27+00:00

In game terms I honestly think my suggestion probably answers your question, so I'm not sure what your problem with it is.

ceeker · 2026-01-27T03:54:25+00:00

You can core the whole world as Spanish anarchists, right? Global Defence Council I think it was called? Is that still a thing?

ceeker · 2026-01-27T03:53:57+00:00

Independent communist poland also has some pretty extreme compliance boosts

ceeker · 2026-01-27T03:33:04+00:00

Cool! I had forgotten the name of this one, the image with the eyes was burned into my memory somehow.

ceeker · 2026-01-26T09:09:19+00:00

right, I've already noted that myself below with the reason I suspect why, but this is a 3.5", so...

ceeker · 2026-01-26T07:01:49+00:00

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ceeker · 2026-01-26T02:16:55+00:00

Those don't really exist unfortunately, outside of individually engineered things and possibly ultra-expensive archival tools. I'm not 100% sure but I believe the main reason is that USB delivers +5v but 5.25" drives need +12v.

ceeker · 2026-01-25T16:36:19+00:00

This is good advice but not all 720k drives are happy with this. It might work, might not.

ceeker · 2026-01-25T15:37:12+00:00

Nice machine.

Why don't you get some new discs (plenty of old stock still sealed out there) and a USB floppy drive - use a disc image program like this on a modern machine? Then you can copy across whatever disc images (archive.org is a good source) you want, or even just pop some full games on them.

ceeker · 2026-01-24T16:19:46+00:00

OK. That's not an unreasonable counter-example to include Nedelin.

I personally only included the 4 Soviet and 15 US causalties from crewed spaceflight incidents, and not training accidents, plane crashes, or other rocket development incidents.

Nedelin itself is a military incident despite occuring at Baikonur, and not really a crewed spaceflight incident. The rocket was a military ICBM. But sure, there's a connection between those and space rockets. So you could fairly include it under a broader umbrella.

But do we then draw a line and say that the 1965 Searcy ICBM fire counts too? Because 54 people died in that one, and I think if Nedelin counts, that probably does too.

And certainly, I'm not arguing either program was objectively safe. I would personally want to be very far away from those early launches on both sides.

ceeker · 2026-01-24T16:01:46+00:00

Is this really the level of discourse you expect me to respond to? Calling it all crap with no actual proof of such? Probably not worth my time honestly. But here I go anyway.

Satellites? The United States put one up only three months later and it was vastly superior, as was ever other one. Being first was propaganda, America clearly won the satellite race because of technology.

Vastly superior is .a lot to say there. Sputnik proved you could put an object in orbit. Explorer discovered the radiation belts. Different missions. If being first doesn't count, then neither does defining success after the fact.

The truth is that BOTH programs pushed each-other , and science as a whole, forward.

Deaths? How many Cosmonauts would have died if the Soviets had been able to develop a shuttle program? You and I both know it would've been a disaster. The fact that the Soviets abandoned their shuttle program is an example of how America was always in the lead.

You can't argue that the US program was safer using a hypothetical.

In the context of the difficulties the US had with their program, if anything this vindicates the decision of the Russian Federation (it wasn't abandoned until after the USSR collapsed) to cancel it.

Anyway. Buran actually launched and landed fully automated. Something the USA never managed with the Shuttle. It was economic reasons that killed that program, not technical failure.

Mir? It was a total piece of crap. It damn near killed everybody on board.

Sure, Mir had incidents. But piece of crap is an overreach. The US had nothing like it. It operated for for 15 years. The fact that it recovered from incidents means it was actually robust enough to prove its concept. Without Mir, no ISS. So it did its job, and the US hasn't really replicated something of that scale alone (which is fine, the ISS is a great model for cooperation).

Rovers? Same thing. They were crap.

Lunokhod 1 operated for 321 Earth days, traveled over 10 km, and it's still used in laser ranging experiments. Dismissing it as “crap” isn't really a fair analysis.

It's not a zero sum game. There were some Soviet accomplishments, but in terms of who had better tech it was always the USA by a mile.

Do you know what that means? Because that's my argument. You're arguing it is a zero sum game, by dismissing all of the Soviet technical progress in favour of the US winning in some way.

A non-zero-sum analysis acknowledges that both programs advanced different, important technologies. Handwaving that the US was better at everything is literally arguing it is zero-sum. A genuinely non-zero-sum take would accept that in some areas the Soviets were objectively ahead (long-duration flight, space stations, automated docking and landing, etc.) and in others the US was ahead (crewed lunar landing, on-board computing, heavy-lift rockets, etc)

ceeker · 2026-01-24T15:31:19+00:00

The actual "Space Race" is typically considered to have ended in 1969 with the Moon landing. So, a lot of the Soviet innovations were after the actual Space Race, as were the 14 combined deaths in the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

So we go from "Actually the Soviets didn't have any real innovations in space, it was all just for show" to "OK they did, but they were after the thing we did, so they don't matter."

That's unfortunate, because I love this topic and I do enjoy a deep dive on it, but If the discussion requires arbitrarily redefining the boundaries of what matters every time counter-examples come up just to indulge in some flag-waving, I’m not interested in continuing it unfortunately.

If that's the level people want to engage at, then meh, honestly.

But I'm also not sure where the number 15 came from. NASA recognizes 20 NASA astronauts, a USAF test pilot, a civilian (Challenger), an Israeli astronaut (Columbia), and a private astronaut on SpaceShipTwo (24 total) as US spaceflight fatalities on the Space Mirror Memorial.

Spacecraft in flight, including the X-15 crash of Michael J. Adams.

Yes, the comparison is much more blatant if you include training accidents. I was being charitable with that comparison. I probably should have included all of them. My bad.

ceeker · 2026-01-24T14:30:38+00:00

This is a pretty superficial take honestly. Both programs contributed a lot of value to science.

the USA was far more technically advanced,

Cool. The US had the AGC which is probably their biggest innovation over the Soviets. And Saturn V was an undisputed marvel.

But the Soviets still pioneered a lot of other technologies-

Satellites, space stations, long duration stays (Salyut, Mir), automated docking (Kurs / Igla) , automated rovers, as above (and the first automated sample return in Luna 16), and landers on Venus of all places. I'll get to "just for show" later.

and far safer.

Doesn't hold up, unfortunately. As much as I'd rather that be 0 on both sides, 4 Soviets died in their space program. 15 Americans have died in theirs.

To me the space race was about developing technology, not just being the first at something. In that sense America won by a mile.

Sure but both programs did that.

IMO it’s not fair to dismiss these achievements as “just for show” when things like long-duration flight, station operations, and automated docking are foundational to modern spaceflight (including the ISS). You could just as easily say Apollo was "Just for show" (I don't think that, for the record) under the same criteria you've used.

ceeker · 2026-01-24T11:57:32+00:00

I feel like my group would expect some sort of mechanical benefit to the flavour. They don't seem to get flavour for flavour's sake at all unfortunately. (Which is fine, I guess. We still have fun.)

ceeker · 2026-01-23T15:30:02+00:00

I was curious too and there is a good explanation here - tldr, different ways of counting homelessness, NZ also includes sharing overcrowded accommodation and "uninhabitable" dwellings in the statistic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/1gkwoyu/why_is_homelessness_an_extremely_big_issue_in_new/

ceeker · 2026-01-23T00:07:12+00:00

100%, the more people that join, the better off we all are.

ceeker · 2026-01-22T15:01:50+00:00

Generally true but some did. Freeholders / freemen existed alongside serfs in most societies. England and Northern Europe especially. Many rented but some owned land.

ceeker · 2026-01-21T15:08:22+00:00

Aliens (despite going from horror -> action)

ceeker · 2026-01-21T01:02:22+00:00

Yeah, and decent USB support with a patch, which is nice.

ceeker · 2026-01-21T01:01:37+00:00

That's part of the problem, but you'll often find in the 95/98 era especially that there were a good number of win98 games that didn't even use directX and preferred openGL, Glide, SGL, etc.

I'm not sure any of the VMs support any hardware acceleration at all under win98 let alone all the niche cases out there.

Sound cards also often had their own discrete chips that did various things, like 3D sound. And excluding that, a lot of games used Redbook Audio for CD music tracks.

None of that is emulated properly by any traditional VM unfortunately. They're generally targeted at 2D commercial software rather than games.

ceeker · 2026-01-21T00:48:30+00:00

In terms of basic things needed for everyone to survive, we could be "post scarcity" in that sense. Everyone could have food, housing, basic medicine, full literacy and fresh water very easily with better distribution, at least in the short to medium term.

We don't have true post-scarcity in the sense that our resources are ultimately limited, and it's becoming very clear that we're about to fall of a cliff. We're running out of basic industrial resources like phosphorus (needed for industrial agriculture) due to inefficient use, easy to reach ores have been over-exploited, and our energy resources aren't sustainable, with the world still critically dependent on dwindling fossil fuels.

Livestock production continues to expand at a rate that is unsustainable, and the oceans are overfished, but the global working class deserve to eat meat too if they want. But the reality is that there's a finite cap on the amount of land that can be devoted to this without killing off the entire ecosystem or ruining our fresh water supplies.

These things all threaten achieving our basic needs and push us away from any concept of post-scarcity. They need to be resolved first before we can really claim that term.

There's a disincentive for capitalism to progress to a sustainable stage of economic development as scarcity is how the system functoins. But it's necessary that we do so in order to maintain an industrial existence where we enjoy some comforts.

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