Quoting: iiari@Teodosio: As a casual gamer looking to get into my first space strategy title who has never played IG2, I'm just curious what aspects of the gameplay you consider outdated? And which modern Linux space game you'd recommend instead? Thanks!

Personally, I don't think "outdated" matters much in space strategy games. Really, you should start with Master of Orion II, so that like the rest of us when you start playing more modern games you can complain that none of them is really as good as MOO II despite the glitzy graphics.
And hey, MOO II is available on Linux, at both Steam and GOG. For cheap.

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Quoting: Segata Sanshiro

Quoting: Purple Library GuySince when do communists rant about SJWs?

Marxist academics do rant about political correctness quite a lot at it. Zizek is a prime example, but obviously it's more from the "bourgeois white folk are changing language to feel less guilty about their own racism and doing so only worsens the problem, or at best sweeps it under the rug" angle rather than whatever this Dawid fellow is on about.

Hm, yes, point. I tend to feel a bit more benevolent about the whole thing. It's like, political correctness is the best non-radicals can do since the causes of the problems aren't accessible to them. Sort of like doctors without antibiotics trying to deal with a bacterial disease by treating symptoms, bringing down fever or what have you, and doing so all the more aggressively because they can't touch the underlying infection. If you can't deal with the causes, the symptoms are going to keep springing up, but what else can you do? Well, become a radical, but for a lot of people that just isn't something they've got a path to, so they're doing the best they can with the mental toolkit available.

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Fair enough. I'm not quite sure where you get from "Everyone getting to make decisions" to "homogeneous mass of drones", but it's cool.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI see you're triggered about this.

Just like Segata Sanshiro was triggered by SJWs and SJWs are triggered by Stellaris.
But you only say that to me.

Are you telling me you still didn't get Sanshiro's joke? Do yourself a favour and go back and read his post again. Then go read the article to realize that it was not "SJWs" that got all delicate about the accepting-refugees option, but the other end of the spectrum--ironically, it was the sort of people who supposedly hate the idea of political correctness who wanted to police the game's language. You're getting the wrong end of the stick from going off half-cocked and assuming the facts to be the opposite of what they are and what people say to be meaning almost the opposite of what they mean.

While you're at it, if you're a communist consider not talking like some kind of alt-right type. SJWs? Really? Since when do communists rant about SJWs?

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Segata SanshiroSince apparently all the content of Paradox's games reflect their views, then they must also be in favour of religious genocide, cultural assimilation, genocide of indigenous peoples, be followers of every major religion that has existed since the year ~800 concurrently, be fans of both Stalin and Hitler, colonialism, free trade, protectionism, etc.

Political correctness gone mad, something has to be done about these Marxist loons.

This motherfuckers ain't marxists.
I'm communist and i can't understand this level of stupidness about the SJWs.

Btw, it's funny how 2 or 3 comments from stupid people can make an ideology to be "loon", they don't represent us. This SJWs are just Soros puppets.

I see you're triggered about this.

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Quoting: lelouch

Quoting: melkemindI'm going to build a space wall to keep them out, and the Ragerian Dominion is going to pay for it! ;)

Know it's just a joke... but from which material build in space?

It's superscience--you just use a farce field.

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Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wvstolzingYou guys are so naive... It's not an ordinary trademark; it's a stylized version of the emblem of the KNIGHTS TEMPLAR. These poor developers found themselves in the middle of a TEMPLAR conspiracy. Fortunately, they don't seem to have alerted the Illuminati yet.

... or have they? :S: :woot:

Pendantry: Isn't the red cross actually a stylized version of the emblem of the Knights Hospitaller, the Templars' foes/rivals?

Pendantry? That's the kind of cross you wear around your neck.
I don't think the Red Cross is related to the Knights Hospitaller; it's just a Greek cross (arms of equal length).

Yes, "pendantry" is a sort of joke among a few people of my acquaintance--to make one's persnicketing on minutiae a bit tongue in cheek by deliberately putting an inaccuracy to contrast with the call for accuracy.

Hrm . . . you're right though. I was getting the Red Cross mixed up with the St. John Ambulance people, who are as I understand it direct descendants of the Hospitallers. They were after all a medical order who healed people in between slaughtering them.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThere is actually no irony in organized anarchism. An + archy = no ruler. Not, no rules. It's perfectly possible to be organized without a boss.

You won't find your definition in a dictionary.

You will find it in the traditions of Anarchism as a movement and in the basic derivation of the word. Please don't talk down to me on this issue, I have paid a good deal of attention to it over a large number of years; I may be wrong about it, but not in ways that can be got at with facile one-liners.

I had no intention to condescend. Sorry about that. I guess my experience with Anarchism as a movement has pretty much preconditioned me not to take it very seriously. A couple of my more impressionable friends from high school actually took up the ideology, hanging with a small group of self-professed anarchists. In reality the whole bunch were pretty much punk fans with angry slogans and a tendency to tag public buildings with their Circle-A logo, although they did read the literature and were very much part of a larger community as far as I understand. None of them seemed to know what they actually wanted though, beyond having no-one telling them what to do. They did like to call me a "slave to the system" and talk about the big brother and the police state, among other things.

There are certainly some young fools with no real idea what's what who profess Anarchism. It is awfully available as a thing to give your inchoate anger some respectability if you're at a rebellious stage. But then, there are young fools with no idea what's what who profess Capitalism, or one or other party within a Representative Democracy, despite having no idea what those things do or how they actually work. It doesn't sound as stupid because you know those things actually do exist and operate, but they'd seem pretty dim if all you had to go on was the way some teenagers ranted about them. Imagine you're in a feudal system and someone is ranting about how there should be something like the modern system only nobody explained it to them very well.
"So wait, you're saying everything should be run by merchants? Commoner merchants?! Who'd follow them into battle? How would they get castles built if nobody owes them any labour? Hire people with money they made from usury?! I think the Church would have something to say about that, don't you?"

But the longer Anarchist tradition, like with Anarcho-Syndicalism and stuff, is a bit more practical in my opinion. It's connected to the socialist tradition but where all-out non-market socialism generally is about taking capitalist owners' stuff and having the state run it on the people's behalf (that last bit being a bit of a problem in my view), Anarchism is more into taking both capitalist owners' stuff and for that matter State stuff and having the people own and run it directly. So unlike Libertarianism it is an egalitarian and even somewhat communalist approach; the idea is that people run stuff together, not as individuals in a war of each against all. It is in my opinion a very desirable vision, the real stumbling block being how workable is it in practice (and also, can it defend itself)?

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubiTake another look at the internal politics of these software projects. Far from anarchistic I'd say. More like highly organized and bureaucratic in Debian's case. And none of these projects have prospered without leaders.

Returning to my simple and basic point, it is perfectly possible--indeed, almost mandatory at any size--for anarchy to be highly organized and bureaucratic.
As to leaders . . . well, to some extent, but define "leader". Someone designated to do a task isn't a leader. Do policies get decided unilaterally by these leaders?
Heck, even in those Free Software projects, like Linux, with a benevolent dictator, the whole thing is kind of weird--these benevolent dictators have no power to coerce because not only is membership voluntary but the whole deal can be forked.

What would you call a democratically elected president? Or cabinet ministers? Surely they are leaders even if their power is not absolute? How about a hired CEO of a company?

To get back to the point, Anarchy with any sort of hierarchy or laws is surely bending the concept to a breaking point. I'd say this alone invalidates Anarchism as a political system (which was the original point of this discussion). I'll accept it as a philosophy, but the fact that the rejection of state and of hierarchy is central, I fail to see how you could even imagine an actual, functioning political system based on it.

Hierarchy yes, laws no. It's a matter of where you get the laws from. Anarchism to me is basically direct democracy all the way down--both on the political side and the work side. Everyone with an equal opportunity not only to have a vote and voice in decisions, but to propose them in the first place as well. Of course in practice not everyone can be involved in every decision or you get complete paralysis--I think in a broader scale anarchy you'd have to settle for splitting things up some, but leaving it possible for anyone to be involved in any decision they choose. This isn't probably the place to get really detailed . . . but as to laws.
If you elect representatives and they decide on laws for you, that is clearly not an anarchistic thing. But if someone suggests a law, and it's debated and modified and finally voted on by the people in general (or some self-selected subset of them if it's a relatively specialized law), that would be an anarchistic thing--if it wasn't decided by some leader/boss but directly by those the law will affect, that's leaderless governance and Anarchism in action.

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Quoting: wvstolzingYou guys are so naive... It's not an ordinary trademark; it's a stylized version of the emblem of the KNIGHTS TEMPLAR. These poor developers found themselves in the middle of a TEMPLAR conspiracy. Fortunately, they don't seem to have alerted the Illuminati yet.

... or have they? :S: :woot:

Pendantry: Isn't the red cross actually a stylized version of the emblem of the Knights Hospitaller, the Templars' foes/rivals?

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Quoting: Segata Sanshiro

Quoting: ArehandoroNo anarchism?

There wouldn't be ANY gameplay if there was anarchism. Just sit back and watch your lack of state progress on its own and, I'd argue, eventually re-develop itself into a state, but that's another topic :P.

Heh. Point. Although we already ignore similar problems with, as players, being individual despots running "Democracies", "Oligarchies", "Republics" and so on for centuries on end. I think the fiction that over the generations, the individuals voted for by the people, or the cabal of oligarchs running the place, always happen to have your exact preferences on how to run the empire, isn't really so different from the fiction that the anarchist self-organizing realm you're playing would always come to mass and/or tacit decisions that happen to be exactly yours.

Anyway. Fond of anarchism though I am, I would have to claim that if a game like this, set as it is in modern times, allowed it as an option, to be realistic it should be made a really super-hard one. It'd be like having a socialist option only even harder. Any attempt to establish an anarchist "government" in the modern setting would have to deal with a host of problems: The simple difficulty of setting up something that has basically never been tried in a big way, the internal problems coming from the wealthy having their stuff taken away and the various old hierarchies trying to stick, the financial, informational and simple old-fashioned violent warfare from all the normal countries who really don't want something like that to succeed . . . there are reasons why nobody's even really tried since Spain in the 30s. After all look what happened to them: Franco's Fascists, with help from the Germans (overt) and the British et al. (more covert), massacred the hell out of them.

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