Quoting: GuestMeh, I dont' see the issue frankly. If the char doesn't want to be in the wheel chair, that's the char's choice. it doesn't represent all people in a wheel chair.

Sorry to break it to you, but fictional characters can't make choices on account of not existing. The choice was the author's all along!

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Quoting: CyrilIs there any chance that it will be available DRM-Free, like on GOG, like some other recent Paradox games?

First, Paradox games are DRM-free even on Steam - after downloading the game you can just copy the folder and do whatever you want with the files. You'll miss steam features like the workshop, of course, but it doesn't have restrictions as far as I know.

Second, I will speculate it is likely to come out on GOG, though perhaps may take a while. Paradox games used to be very dependent on Steam, but they have been trying to "fix" that recently and putting their games on a variety of stores.

Going into some more detail, their internal games starting with CK2 were only on Steam (CK2, EU4, HoI4, and Stellaris on release). But eventually they decided to use Stellaris (one of their most successful games) to test other options: they put it on GOG and also used it to test of their own store/app (so, for example, you can download Stellaris from Paradox Plaza directly, in addition to the steam key you get). At the same time they started building their own multiplayer system (with cross-play in mind), an experimental mod system (an alternative to the Steam workshop) and so on - but so far, their strategy has been one of publishing in every store they could, and not just their own. Their releases after that are all in GOG, I think. Imperator is, and I think most games from their other owned studios too: Battletech, Surviving Mars, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, etc (and of course all their old games, pre-CK2).

Of course I can't guarantee anything, but I would say that, from what we know of their strategy, it is very likely that the game will be released on GOG.

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It looks very good in general, and apparently the Linux version is smooth from day 1?

I'm looking forward very much to playing it eventually, but Paradox games have finally moved beyond my PC specifications. Well, it's not like I ever buy games on release anyway - I have way more patience than money .

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I'm mildly interested on the classic mode - both creep waves and removing underlords are things I approve of. But I'm not sure if it's enough.

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Quoting: riidomI'm on Kubuntu currently.. doing some research and getting opinions a few years back made me to pick it over KDE Neon.

I'd like to get some Plasma updates now and then though.. so how is situation today? Any problems with Neon, that I dont run into on Kubuntu?

On Kubuntu I use the backports PPA as a compromise. It isn't as recent as Plasma, but it gets some updates that the LTS doesn't get.

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I am deep into RTS these days. Managed to install Warcraft 3 and I am now re-playing the entire campaign, also managed to install Battle for the Middle-Earth 2 which I'm going to play through next, and installed some big mods for Star Wars Empire at War that I plan to at least test. And I keep playing my all-time favorites, Northgard and Offworld Trading Company. Might do some world conquests in Rise of Nations as well, and then if I'm not completely burned out I'll look into what other RTS I can install.

To break it up a little, I tried installing Sid Meier's Railroads with Proton; it never worked on Windows, and is generally very buggy, but seems to be working ok with Proton. Might play a little Rimworld or Europa Universalis 4 to unwind as well; kind of feel like starting a new Factorio game, but I will wait for 1.0 to drop first since it is so close.

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Quoting: PatolaFrom the linked Ethan Lee blog post:

QuoteObviously I can't share any of its contents, but between the API itself and the dev environment it actually makes me really sad that Stadia is a streaming platform and not a local hardware platform, as I would much rather develop for Stadia than any console... it's a real shame that it's cloud-based, because it really is a technological feat in pretty much every other regard. I just really like having my hardware and software run locally a wee bit too much compared to the average person.

-- Ethan Lee

We gain a lot of Freedom with Stadia because of the titles we could not play otherwise, like Destiny 2. We also gain freedom from expensive hardware configurations. Is it worth the loss of Freedom of how we play these titles? Not saying it isn't, just a philosophical question. Maybe a rhetorical one, that does not even need to be answered.

No way in hell it is worth it. Not that it isn't worth it on an individual cost-benefit analysis (i.e., it is probably advantageous for many people to use it), because Google is pouring a lot of money into subsidizing it and creating those immediate advantages, but the net effect on society is negative (i.e., long term it screws up the market and the community and the industry).

We are talking about companies that really want to have always-online DRM and to track everything you do in your computer. We are talking about companies that gloat about how the threat model for their consoles includes "users install their own software on the device". We are talking about companies that remotely delete e-books from people's devices. Taking control away from the software we run is something big companies actively pursue, for explicitly malicious purposes, and is absolutely a big selling point of Stadia for publishers and for Google itself.

Google and its "partners" could pour a lot of money into cross-platform compatibility. Into either making hardware cheaper or making games lighter. But the profit isn't there; the profit lies in gaining control: so that they can force people to keep buying the same thing multiple times, so that they can jack up the prices and people can't rely on old copies, so that they can remove inconvenient competitors because they control the walled garden, even just so that they can really kill their old games to force people to buy the more expensive new ones.

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This is an amazing 4X game. It is quick, easy, matches are short and everything but it is still a full 4X with a lot of depth and mechanics that should be envied by many bigger games. Also a shining example of good mobile gameing (it's hard to find proper strategy games for Android, due to the reduced scale of games mostly).

I'm definitely going to get it now for PC.

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This is quite exciting for me - it covers 3 out of 5 RPGs I enjoyed enough to finish in my entire life. xD

KotOR 1 and 2 and DAO are all great games, both story and gameplay wise, and hold up quite well nowadays (unlike, say, Planescape: Torment, where combat is a chore). A full recreation could open a lot of possibilities in terms of quality of life, fixes, mods, or just pure compatibility in the future.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou are conflating two different phenomena. Yes, US citizens benefit when US-sponsored coups keep fruit prices low. That is, where countries are coerced to produce things for export that could not be produced in the US in the first place (bananas, coffee, local mineral resources) and to hand them over for cheap.

US citizens do not benefit when US-sponsored coups and coerced trade deals create a situation where capital can readily arbitrage wages across countries. Yes, they get some cheap goods at Wal-mart, but their losses in wages among other things far more than make up for that. This loss is both direct, in that the manufacturing jobs themselves went somewhere else, and indirect, in that the bargaining power of labour is greatly weakened. When capital is very mobile and there are no trade barriers, it creates fairly direct competition between a wealthy country's labour and poor countries' labour--corporations can credibly threaten to move production elsewhere, and at the political level all kinds of social supports, labour rights, health and safety rules etc. can be evaluated in terms of "competitiveness" with those other places. Indeed, half the point of the whole exercise is not the production that happens in the poor countries, it's breaking the unions and cowing the left-of-centre political parties in the rich countries; "there is no alternative". If there are multiple poor countries, it also forces their wages, environmental standards and so on into competition with each other, making it harder for them, too, to improve living standards.

Old style imperialist coups for cheap resources are still going on; case in point, Bolivia. US consumers will no doubt benefit from that, at the direct expense of the Bolivians, if they can't reverse it. But if you look at the impact of NAFTA, it had negative impacts on the ordinary citizens of all three countries--Mexicans because their corn farmers couldn't compete with massively subsidized American (GMO) corn and so they had to flee to the cities and find sweatshop work in foreign-owned maquiladoras (or in prostitution, or drug dealing etc). Americans and Canadians because, just as Ross Perot predicted, there was a giant sucking sound as good union jobs went south and the manufacturing heartland turned into the "rust belt".

Offshoring production via neoliberal free trade is, as it were, imperialism come home to roost--it is an effort by elites to gain at the expense of the lower classes of rich and poor countries alike. It is distinct from classic imperialism even though the same people are often doing it at the same time.

I'm not conflating the two things - there are two different hierarchies at play; one created by neocolonialism, another created by class division. They intersect so that you can be screwed at the same by the elites of your own country and by the foreign policy of developed countries.

It's not just coups. There are acquisitions of local companies, strangling local industry by subsidizing high-tech goods, qualified jobs moving to other countries and brain drain, less strict environmental regulations, lobbying for regulations, unequal trade deals...

I think it is important for people in developed countries to realize that some global injustices actually benefit them, even if they are not well off in the overall. Because there are demagogues whose rhetoric will blame the most exploited for issues - "the reason you have it hard is because people over there accept wages that are too low, you are losing your job to them", and the result is screwing people twice over. When there are people in sweatshops, and someone frames the issue not as about those people but about "losing jobs" (in a country that is relatively much better off overall), it is very bad. This is what led me into this tangent in the first place.

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