Ugh, I had written a lengthy post and lost it. I haven’t played Widelands itself much, but I have played Settlers 2 a lot. If anything I explain below is different in Widelands, please correct me ;)

Anyway, a TLDR for those that have no idea of what to expect: The Settlers 2 is a lot more about logistics and planning use of space than anything else. It needs very little input most of the time, it’s a very slow paced game.

The main things to keep in mind is available space, roads and resources. The game is separated in hex-ish tiles. Depending on how much free space there is, you can build a basic, medium or large building. As a rule of thumb, basic buildings require no resources to function (one exception being mines, which need food); medium buildings receive either 1 or 2 resources and deliver the worked result; large buildings are usually farms or a fortress.

So, imagine Age of Empires 1, but if you had to connect every building with a road network, with every worker and every resource traveling through it, one at a time. Once you set up something to be built, you’ll see a worker walking his way there, as well as resources being carried towards it. The busiest roads can receive a donkey that will also haul resources between the connected flags - you cannot manually upgrade roads, even if you have a surplus of donkeys.

Unlike AoE or pretty much every RTS, you don’t train units at all. You need a minimal military to garrison military buildings, which will increase your borders. Once any of these is fully built, a number of soldiers will come out of HQ and move to occupy it. HOWEVER, if you are attacked, only the soldiers within that building will protect it. You don’t participate in combat at all. The soldiers just line up and fight. When a military building is occupied by the enemy, it and everything that was within the lost border is destroyed.

Better title: Kadokawa employees are reportedly “optimistic” about the takeover. Subtitle: Kadokawa owns FromSoftware

Kadokawa suffered a ransomware cyberattack earlier this year, but employees were left disappointed by the response from current president and CEO Takeshi Natsuno.

As a result, employees are said to be “thrilled at the prospect of an acquisition by Sony”, according to a new report from Japanese outlet Bunshun (via Automaton).

HAAHAHAHA, Oh The Onion, you guys are… It’s not The Onion… (for anyone that doesn’t get it, PSN has been hacked a couple of times)

Anyway, the “thrill” comes from the expectation that the current Kadokawa leadership will get the boot from the acquisition.

Back in the day, devs shipped the game and that was it.

For PC, that remained true only up to 1996 or so, some games had update patches post release, which you had to find and download from the dial-up internet. For consoles, that remained true until 2006, with Final Fantasy 11 being a notable 2002 exception. Also, judging from some rom dumps, some games did receive updates after the initial release, though you’d need to buy the newer version and not even know what the fixes were

A number of times. One of the most memorable to me was when it really wasn’t what it looked like. Case in point

I’m white, my family is middle-ish class, I don’t pay rent.

Paris is too passé nowadays, you can’t be an asshole showoff when the place is full of peasants

My guess is that the bri’ish family is either composed of rich assholes wanting to show off they’re rich, or of scammers that still haven’t got caught. Seriously, that city is a magnet for scammers to spend money on.

Simpler plastic design I mean. I know that beyblades were always radical-goofy looking, but older ones you could still make out most of the shapes from a distance. Newer ones look like the one in the pic, 5 layers of different whatever just on the upper part. Maybe the plastic ones always looked like that and I’m just that old, ugh

Hate it as much as you want, it brings in money. Corpos can’t hear you over the sound of their profits.

I thought they were much simpler back then, no?

Israel also bombed the Syrian Navy, sinking 15 docked vessels. In self defense, of course, because those ships would be used against them. /s

Epic deserves shit for being a shitty company overall. The lower sale tax is great for devs, but most consumers don’t care, because the program is a shitty Unreal application pretending to be a shitty web browser

Valve can definitely lower their sale tax, they get loads of money off trading cards and skin sales, maintenance of that shit is waaay lower than the petabytes needed for games. At least some of the money is spent making better consumer stuff, like Steam deck and increasing the number of games that you can play on Linux with Proton. Doesn’t explain the 30% either way

One ended up working on a McDonalds. Fucking traitor

Depends. For turn based, or slower strategy, or where you don’t need too much info on screen, mobile works. If it’s something fast paced (Command&Conquer) or with lots of stuff going on at the same time (SupCom) or with lots of micromanagement needed, mobile might feel awful. It’s like only ever having a mouse with a working scroll wheel to play a game.

FreeCiv plays more like Civ 2 by default, while Unciv plays like Civ 5. The latter is also available for Windows and Linux, it’s java

W-what? NO! NOOOO!!! I was in a ship bound to Morrowind!

Don’t worry, mine’s been growing and blooming for years. Hopefully, I can help others’ seeds grow as well.

But having four different coats? Hard to believe.

It wasn’t a man, it was 3 kobolds in a trenchcoat, so it’s perfectly plausible

Also, a lawsuit last year was accusing the company of using AI to automatically deny claims - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health-insurance-denials/ — https://www.reuters.com/legal/lawsuit-claims-unitedhealth-ai-wrongfully-denies-elderly-extended-care-2023-11-14/

“This is an example of how AI is being utilized not to help people but to line the pockets of corporations and their shareholders,” Clarkson said. When these coverage denials are appealed to federal administrative law judges, about 90% are reversed, the complaint said, demonstrating the “blatant inaccuracy” of the algorithm. Only a tiny fraction of patients appeal the denials at all, Clarkson said.

though tbh, listing all games that taken the funko brand would be a massive task lol

That’s what the brandshield “AI” was supposed to automate. Hell, I could possibly cobble some python script to crawl through itch and create a list of infriging games/devs, something that wouldn’t take more than 1 day.