The Gaming Den

That's the opposite of the way I'm used to seeing people use "rout" - but are you saying that you thnk the general election will be Clinton vs. Trump? That does seem to be where things are headed. The Republican establishment completely fucked up playing puppetmaster and don't have their ...

Given the conceit of them having a joint memory pool, I'll allow their breedbook to retcon any prior information about deep history by saying that the people who don't remember those events are just wrong about them and assume the Mokole are lying to make themselves look good if the Mokole try to te...

Eh, I think Hillary's prognosis with a narrow Democratic lead is a bit better; the Democrats don't vote in lockstep and if there isn't a solid majority then any proposals will need to recruit the center-right guys, who will be more willing to work with Hillary. If Sanders got a bit of a buffer so he...

Honestly I don't think the superdelegates lead is going to be as meaningful as the numbers seem, though it does give Hillary an edge. If Hillary loses in the popular vote too badly, I suspect she'll drop out rather than win by telling everyone who thinks the political establishment is screwing them ...

It is just factually true that Hillary is currently the projected winner, and so far Sanders has managed to prove that there is a possibility the projections are wrong but still needs to make further progress in order to actually win. Since it's a two-person race, there's no need to rally behind a l...

Honestly, I'm pretty dubious of any plan to negate or eliminate the Electoral College. Either plan will require the cooperation of people who benefit from the current system. The big stumbling block I see for the state pact plan is the battleground states; the current system makes them important and...

That really depends on if you have a good use for them. If you do, then they're not too expensive. It's just, if you do, you're probably going to war with too many different countries at once. There is basically no possible scenario in which the US needs more than ten of them. Like, even in the mos...

It does all of those things, actually. Also I think the AI actually does get a bit smarter; less inclined to take potshots and more inclined to make effective use of overwatch and suppression rather than futilely blazing away at people in full cover.

Did Firaxis ever present fluff to justify the whole thing in Enemy Unknown where you have the choice of three abduction sites and can only go to one of them? I would be significantly less frustrated with the game if you could send B-teams to those sites and have them be resolved randomly or by the ...

The weapons cache does not work the same way in a non-visual medium like a book or a cooperative storytelling game. A quick visual pan across a bunch of crazy looking weapons is cool, but verbally inventorying a bunch of weapons on shelves is boring as fuck. I wouldn't say that; the Dresden Files h...

Honestly, once you're talking nuclear weapons, if it matters that something supernatural but not incorporeal is specifically vulnerable to them you have left the power level covered by AS.

As a fan of old-school X-com, I must seriously object to the characterization of new XCOM. It made a large number of changes, mostly varying between definite improvement and different but valid. You can't build multiple bases, but you can get interceptor and radar coverage in places that aren't your...

The game's melee system got me the A God Falls achievement and I shall brook no disrespect to it. But fuck stun lancers. I am so grateful that one of the melee perks is fuck stunlancers (also vipers). Bladestorm gives you a free attack whenever anyone moves into melee range or attempts a melee attac...

There was apparently some issue with the pre-loading and verifying your game cache fixes some problems. Particularly the way it can hitch on combat events like reaction fire. I'm not having much trouble with bugs, but the geoscape is really pissing me off. It takes 3-7 days to do most events, during...

I got the impression he won the battles but the Council panicked. Though I like the implication that XCOM 1 was the Commander's fever dream fed to him by the aliens. The impression I got was that the Commander is literally the player and it's being very meta; when the invasion happened he did alrig...

No, erik was accurately characterizing Tussock's original position. China is of the official position that carrier fleets are rather like throwing spearmen at machine-guns. Literally a multi-billion dollar joke that anyone can sink in under ten minutes with a few tens of thousands of dollars in miss...

It hypothetically gets you the allegiance of vampires who you are not able to dominate, which is theoretically more valuable than humans with guns.

No one actually knows whether or not the anti-missiles work against those specific missiles. Or whether those specific missiles actually can hit a carrier group in practical terms where the ships are moving and launching chaff and messing with radar signatures to confuse the missiles into targeting ...

My money is on "fairly". I mean, the Secret Service has kind of been publicly humiliating themselves for the past half-decade, but there are a lot of people in the White House and odds are pretty good any vampire would not be able to actually isolate the president or mind control everyone ...

Feeding once per week unless you invoke vampire superpowers feels good to me. I mean, even ignoring herd size issues, if you want vampires trolling clubs for marks to be a thing (you do) nightly feeding is a huge timesink.

Staph is one of those diseases that can kill people outright. Not one of the faster ones, but it can spread to internal organs and trigger septic shock.

So yeah, strong antibiotic time.

Skip the doctor, go to the emergency room. Infections that spread like that can kill you from anywhere on your body in a distressingly short timeframe.

There are a number of reasons they aren't actually used in combat. But on the other hand they are also an incendiary round you can load into a 12-gage shotgun. So if you have ten times as many people with double-barreled shotguns as the other side has vampires who aren't susceptible to massed assaul...

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MnA9yyE2ma8/hqdefault.jpg That is what a Dragon's Breath shotgun round looks like. It's not even a very good incendiary as such things go. They are seriously for sale at thirty bucks per box of five. Humanity's capacity to set shit on fire is not to be underestimated. And you...