Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI had a good deal of fun with this game. One thing that bugged me back when I played it though was that you were given a certain percentage chance to hit, and I noticed (became particularly obvious with powerful units with high chance to hit and lots of attacks) that the actual results seemed to average way below the given stats. So like, someone with 60% chance to hit seemed to hit around 40% of the time. Got frustrating.

But this is an open source game. You can promptly check the code to see whether the statistics are done wrong, or you're just experiencing selection bias.

This is one of those stupid smug comments that one sees a lot of in open source circles. Sure, I'll learn to code so I can check one thing on one game I've spent a bit of time playing. It'll only take 50 times as much time as I'll ever put in playing the game, what's the big deal?

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I had a good deal of fun with this game. One thing that bugged me back when I played it though was that you were given a certain percentage chance to hit, and I noticed (became particularly obvious with powerful units with high chance to hit and lots of attacks) that the actual results seemed to average way below the given stats. So like, someone with 60% chance to hit seemed to hit around 40% of the time. Got frustrating.

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Quoting: tuubi@Purple Library Guy
What about all the evidence we have of powerful, rich merchant classes in most feudal societies throughout history? Even vikings, known for their bloody conquests and raids as you point out, had a proper trade empire reaching all the way to the middle east and central Asia, as far as their boats would take them. There's not much romance in gathering wealth and it's the warriors and kings who dominate song and legend, but that's beside the point.

What about 'em? In case you hadn't noticed, we have powerful warrior classes now. And yet I'm not trying to claim capitalism isn't a real thing.

In the old days merchants existed and made money, but they didn't rule, and if aristocrats got fed up with them they took their stuff. What constituted dog and what constituted tail was different, and what was considered the important social virtue was different. Compound interest was often illegal. And who dominates song and legend is far from beside the point. Vikings had song and legend about great warriors, we have news shows dominated by talk of the stock exchange and media that talks incessantly about lifestyles of the rich and famous--many of them famous solely for being rich.

The vikings were actually a little odd in that their merchants, raiders, conquerors, and even peasants, were pretty much all the same people. But a lot of what they traded was precisely things they had stolen while viking--and people, actually; the viking slave trade was huge for a while. But these multi-role people, if you look at their own accounts, cared the most about the raiding and conquest and fighting--that was what made a man respected and followed. The merchant stuff was fine, but it wasn't as important, it wasn't what society was about. I really think we tend to overestimate that aspect because it's what we care about and it reassures us to think people back then were just like us, that what we care about is inevitably what everyone has to care about.

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Quoting: 14

Quoting: Purple Library GuyCapitalism is just the only system to actually base itself on greed as the main virtue (although most actual humans aren't really very virtuous by our society's standards).

I can't agree with this. I could be brain washed, but I don't think greed is a necessary component of capitalism. It was supposed to be more effort equals more reward, however that relationship doesn't scale linearly.

I think of greed as "I want more than you have" whereas "I want more than I have" is not always evil.

I don't think you're brainwashed. But I also think that most people don't actually know what capitalism is in much the same way fish don't know what water is. This also comes up in the way people tend to think of non-capitalist societies as being "really" capitalist except with funny costumes and titles.
The classical economists, whether Adam Smith or Marx, were writing at a time when it was a new thing and were much more interested in distinguishing it from other things that it was not. And as far as I can tell, they pretty much agreed on what it basically is. Capitalism is a system in which some people ("capitalists" or "the bourgeoisie" or whatever) employ other people for wages, investing money in those wages and in some sort of facilities or equipment (whether steel factories or software) for the employees to use to create some kind of valuable commodity. The capitalist owns what is produced, sells it for a profit, and invests the profit in more facilities or equipment or wages, so as to make a bigger profit. The facilities and equipment and stuff, or money earmarked for acquiring them, are "capital". That's why it is "capital"ism. Oddly, it has relatively little to do with markets.

This seems inevitable--how could people not have jobs? How could someone not be the boss employing them? But in the middle ages most production was done by peasants for their own use or to pay taxes. And most production in cities was done by self-employed craftsmen who gathered together in guilds to control prices and enforce quality and shut out competition. Almost anyone else worked mainly in return for food and shelter and even clothing--they might have a small supplemental wage to buy some minor luxuries at the market, but that was secondary. And merchants didn't employ people or produce things, they just bought stuff one place and sold it somewhere else for a higher price. Very few people worked for a wage, or using equipment belonging to other people. Early attempts to get people to work for wages actually met a lot of resistance.

So, where the greed comes in is that the essential nature of capitalist investment is continual expansion--you never stop re-investing profits to make more and more and more. And capitalist economic theories normally define people as maximizers--people who will do anything to increase the amount of money they make and/or wealth they have, who have no other motivations. Of course most people are not themselves capitalist investors employing wage labour, and even most small businesspeople are never really in a position, may not even really want, to reinvest profits and expand continually. But they're supposed to. That's what the right thing to do is, that's what success is. That's "entrepreneurialism"--becoming endlessly richer, through other people's work. It's an elite virtue--people who work for a living can't really participate in it, just as peasants couldn't participate in elite cultures of violence back in the day. But just as peasants were looked down on for not being properly violent (ie not having honour, seeking glory etc), the working class today is looked down on for not being effectively greedy enough. So yes, I'd say greed is capitalism's key virtue, even if real people have never fully bought into it or really had the opportunity.

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Quoting: Kels

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGreed existed before capitalism and will doubtless continue to exist after. Capitalism is just the only system to actually base itself on greed as the main virtue (although most actual humans aren't really very virtuous by our society's standards). Feudal societies based themselves on warrior virtues, and tended to disdain merchants as much because they weren't bloodthirsty enough as because they were too greedy.

How interesting that you mention that last part right after I read an article about how Bushido, the supposed way of the Samurai, was essentially bullshit made up by one man at the turn of the 20th century. And related closely to the similarly mythological idea of middle ages chivalry in Europe, itself made up well after the fact. In either case, personal gain was a bigger motivator than honour, and both Samurai and Knights revelled in their status as elites, and the upper ranks of both did pretty well for themselves financially.

You're looking through our lenses. And I don't think saying feudalism relied on bloodthirstiness is romanticizing. Sure, knights and counts and kings wanted "gain", and they liked plunder. But they defined gain differently. Nobody would go around trying to enlarge their fiefdom by buying the next baron out. Half the point of the conquest and plunder was to be, and be seen as, a conqueror and plunderer. It's not even just high medieval--the main viking thing was to try to make a big name for yourself which would be told in tales down the ages. Lasting fame was what the game was about. But how do you get lasting fame? By doing what society valued most. What did society value most? Violence, hands down. Nobody even imagined that you could possibly get the fame men craved by doing anything that wasn't violent.
Anglo-Saxons, who were basically a lot like vikings with fewer boats, believed very strongly in the "man-lord relationship". What was the man-lord relationship about? It was about the lord giving nice things, like gold armbands or snazzy swords or whatnot, to the men in return for their personal loyalty unto death. How was he supposed to get the nice things? By leading them on raids and seizing stuff from enemies, which he would then display his generosity by distributing, with extra to the bravest. These nice things were occasionally used as currency, but mostly these men, these "thanes", lived off farming either directly or knight-style by having subordinates who farmed and were sorta taxed. The nice things were mainly just nice things--analogous in a way to conspicuous consumption, but with totally different symbolism: Having a nice thing didn't mean "I am rich and successful in commerce or at a 'job'", it meant "I am a brave and powerful warrior relied on by my king". The base ethic was all about violence.
Similarly, there was certainly such a thing as "gain" for a feudal lord. But most wealth was "in kind"--your taxes from the peasants were in food and textiles and beeswax and stuff. So what do you do with all that? You maintain a big household and armed force. "Winning" for a feudal lord meant being able to maintain a bigger better army than the next feudal lord, and being able to get glory (and, yes, wealth) by using it violently. Being able to maintain a bigger better army required as much land as possible, ideally fertile prosperous land. So you seize more land so you can support more troops so you can seize more land. As times edged into the Renaissance currency got involved more and more--but that's deeply intertwined with a general shift to a different kind of society with different ideas.

Now in the real feudal/dark ages world, often people did do commerce instead of (or as well as) violence, often did make peace instead of war and so on. People were no more all virtuously violent then than people are all virtuously greedy now. Violence after all has a lot of drawbacks, it kills and destroys; if people all did things the "virtuous" way society would break down. The glory and violence oriented warrior societies always depended on the quiet work of people who were not being glorious or violent, much as our greed oriented capitalist society depends on people who are not themselves capitalists or acting on greed. But the quiet foundation of pre-capitalist society was mostly about agriculture and peasants. Commerce was relatively a frill until pretty late.

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Quoting: 14Haven't read the entire KS page, but I like everything I've seen about this game so far. I really like the idea of greed being the curse. Greed is not inherent with capitalism but it's certainly a potential side effect.

Greed existed before capitalism and will doubtless continue to exist after. Capitalism is just the only system to actually base itself on greed as the main virtue (although most actual humans aren't really very virtuous by our society's standards). Feudal societies based themselves on warrior virtues, and tended to disdain merchants as much because they weren't bloodthirsty enough as because they were too greedy.

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. . . I wonder if the game will play differently if I greedily wait for a sale before buying it.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: ShmerlIt's just a Tegra tablet with some Nintendo DRM mess attached. So once DRM is broken, Linux should be runnable :)

Can we stop all this talk of DRM on just about every topic that's posted? (not pointing the finger, I mean in general)
Scrolling down through the posts only to see DRM being talked about instead of the actual headline, is getting...well, a bit boring and disappointing.
Serious gamer's are not all that bothered about DRM anyway, it's all about playing and enjoying the game, so it's pointless bringing it up all the time.
There is a forum for that kind of topic.

Ironically, you would appear to have gotten the conversation about DRM going rather than stopping it. I would suggest partly because you couldn't resist the crack about serious gamers. The lesson is, if you're supposedly trying to stop an argument, don't take a position in the argument as part of your intervention.
Although since nobody was actually talking about DRM until you said this, another lesson is "If you're already ahead, 'quit while you're ahead' means 'quit before you start'".

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Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: tuubiNo. Make it stop. Please?

I don't see how anyone who experienced '90s Internet would want to remember it, let alone relive it. Dropsy was great, but I don't think my psyche could handle this one.

What's not to love about 56K dial-up, blinking text, and "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer"?

56K dial-up? Luxury. [External Link] We had to live in a paper bag in t'middle o t' road, with 28k dial-up from 10-12 PM, if we were lucky!

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Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, using meters to represent your height reminds me of a ton of jokes that were in Super Troopers 2. Stupid USA needs to start using the Metric system like every other country on the planet.

They have been trying to go metric since 1793 apparently! It's not easy to change the frame of reference you acquire in childhood (which is why any given "society" tries to plant its ideas of religion/politics/patriotism as early as possible), so the USA has significant popular resistance to any metric change.

Even in the UK where we have long since decimalized our currency (the US currency was always decimal, of course), and officially adopted the metric system of weights and measures, we also still officially use miles for distance, and pints for beer. I grew up with both the Imperial and metric systems, and use them interchangeably, but generations older than mine still think and talk in Imperial.

In case we feel too superior about the logic/modernity of the metric system (which originates in the French revolution of 1789), consider that we all customarily use archaic measures of time (24 hrs of 60 mins of 60 seconds) and angular measure (one revolution/circle is 360 degrees of 60 minutes of 60 seconds) without a second thought. There are metric/decimal alternatives for both, but we continue to use the systems derived from the ancient Sumerian base 60 number system, some 4000 years later.:O

I'm Canadian, and we went mostly metric when I was a kid. So it can be done. But one thing I notice is that while some metric measures "took" fairly easily, some imperial stuff hung on. I think it's because, while the metric system is very rational and easy to calculate in, the imperial system (having grown up through habitual practical use by people) tends to give you numbers that are easy to think in at the scales people use. So like, it's easier to think "2 teaspoons" than "howeverthefuckmany ml", and so to this day cooking is dominated by imperial measures.

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