xthetenth

Yeah there were bad mistakes made at 2nd Kharkov. Primarily they didn't protect the flanks of their salient sufficiently and when counterattacked, kept most of their force on the attack rather than preventing encirclement. Relying on that happening seems foolish.

My poor Svietlana is such an unlucky ship.  I can't seem to find a decent team in it...loss after loss.  It isn't a ship with which you can carry your team like the Kuma or Phoenix. 

However, I finally ground my way through it, and got the Kirov.  It is a totally different game style than the early gunboat cruisers.  The Kirov plays more like an Aoba or the buffed Furutaka.

Speaking of the Furutaka, I finally bought it back.  The new "C" hull turns it into a baby Aoba.  It is so much better than when I originally tried the pre-buff version.

Kirov's cool but frustrating. Nothing generates citadels like a Kirov, and nothing gives citadels like a Kirov that has to turn. I've got an Aoba, and it's finally clicked for me, but I really want to go back to the Furutaka to see what it's like.

Konigsberg's a real cool ship, the rear turrets getting 360 degree turn makes it so great at just charging in and aggressing someone's face. It also makes it really great at getting way too deep too soon so look out for that.

Hearts of Iron 4 is a realistic game about realistic things:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/492401650195467777/8EFF4ACAC87B4C841414579741AFB92D8F221699/

Context?

You somehow missed Germany when mentioning folk metal. There's a bunch from there though it's often more rock than metal.

Main one I can think of to link right now is In Extremo which has been steadily progressing towards a mix from a start that's real heavy on the folk to stuff like this;

Folk + Other Genre has one of the great highlights of Germany's ongoing commitment to being really weird, too. There's a band floating around that's mixing folk and progressively more metal with electro-industrial, and in stereotypical German fashion has been very fucking weird in incredibly efficient fashion, releasing seven full length concept albums about a templar who gets turned into a vampire, something something. (The only reason I mention that is that the second album's named Kadavergehorsam which amuses me way more than it should).

Also they've got a song that's the St. Crispin's Day speech. Because why not.

So here's Japan's Linkin Park. Maybe it's just an anime thing that Japanese women raise the pitch of their voice up to fingernails on chalkboard levels? 

Huh, and me I thought MacArthur replaced their women with a breed of sentient squeak toys that could only communicate by giving themselves the Heimlich.

Pretty cool though, most of the Japanese music I've heard has been totally ruined for me by the vocal delivery even though it was otherwise pretty cool.

The game looks a little more interesting each time I see it, but this one caught my eye because the antagonist wasn't the typical modern attempt at a Ledger Joker "sociopath" villain.

Yeah, from the ending I immediately found myself thinking I liked the game's attitude. Somebody who brutally uses the unwritten rules of their society is good fun and a heck of a lot more interesting than killfrenzy the dude with the murderaxe whose murderaxe is his sole means of interacting with the world.

Also a fearsome, terrifying bad hombre with a bald spot.

Sword claimed to be used by the 15th/16th Century outlaw Piers Gerlofs Donia. 7' long and weighing close to 15lbs. According to legend, Piers was capable of beheading multiple men with a single blow with his sword.

As for Piers himself, if he did wield that sword, he would have to be over 7' tall, and tertiary sources (Wikipedia lol) seem to agree. Since he supposedly died peacefully in his sleep at age 40 of no obvious illness, I am gonna guess he had a pituitary tumor or something.

Don't forget that people in the Early Modern were as small as they ever got. There were some tiny dudes running around. So it's even worse than in these days when a 6'5" dude would be 'merely' 95th percentile for young adult males (ask me about getting a decent chair for my back).

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/medimen.htm

Fucking rad clothing system: 

 

I'm so glad I backed that. God damn. Also they're casually talking about systems I'd been desperately wanting in elder scrolls games.

There was also design work done on a scout/torpedo bomber variant, the XTSF.

I'll also point out the XP-71 for people talking about big fighters.

Bigger than the B-25.

Didn't get made but when has that stopped Luft 46?

IIRC, PCs were only ever more expensive than consoles of comparable power because consoles were sold at a loss (with a few exceptions, notably the wii).

Try and assemble a more capable gaming system than the xbone or ps4 using contemporary parts and doing it for cheaper. Neither of those was sold for a loss. The APUs they put in them are legitimately a really solid piece of gaming silicon. It's surprisingly difficult because they've gotten good at using the GPU for compute.

This goes triple if we're including the price of a windows license. Good luck with that one.

We're only just at the point where a PC is a more cost effective solution than a console, that giant window during the ps3/360 age where PCs could be cheaper and/or more capable basically hasn't existed for the bone and ps4. RAM has gotten way cheaper, but processors have done basically jack shit, if they're going to get a processor improvement it's going to be at the cost of moving from small cores to big cores in their design (and for back-compatibility reasons hoping that a virtual core on a hyperthreaded Zen design is worth a cat core) with the attendant cost in transistors. GPUs have gotten considerably more powerful for the price, but that's a borderline constant in the computer space (and in fact is quite possibly slowing down as well). SSDs getting cheaper is great but it still isn't relevant to the sort of bare minimum machine that would compete with consoles or with consoles that actually install their games.

What there is though, is a much sounder policy with the console makers to buy more performance with time rather than by asking their customers to fork over more money. As long as the now legacy consoles last well into the lifespan of their "successors", it's a much better model than subsidizing overly expensive hardware and then getting the customers to pay it back by riding an archaic console for too long with no upgrade path in sight. Xbone and PS4 have been pretty great consoles considering their low price tag, and have been a roaring success as far as sales go.

Incidentally, PC hardware is incredibly stagnant compared to any time in recent memory and isn't looking to get much better. The only huge advances in processors recently are Skylake having a killer memory controller which is great for people who like taxing their 980 Ti SLI, 1070 SLI and 1080 (SLI or otherwise), Broadwell-E is the worst E series in basically ever, with Haswell-E being straight out better considering the price hikes on BW-E, and GPU space finally got a node shrink and it's kind of a disappointment, with AMD seemingly having to hammer their chips with volts like goddamn Frankenstein and NV one step closer to Intel's business model of underwhelming performance upgrades and unprecedented price increases.

The days of the 8800 GT and C2D are long behind us. Heck so are the days of the 4870, Sandy Bridge and basically all the really really good stuff. There's only so much juice left in making transistors smaller and there's only so much design optimization left to do.

Isn't obesity linked to difficulty keeping your rockets rigid and getting them up?

It's on sale on Kindle for literally a dollar.

This. I'll get real pissy if you don't actually buy it considering the price.

Almost as pissy as I am that the second one is only a hardcover so far.

Ah, I see. I should read that then.

It's good. It's very straightforward, pretty much just going through the armored fights of 41 and 42. It's solid and I want the follow on to hit kindle.

Hmmm, I would be interested to hear his assessment of Mikhail Katukov. He seems to have been one of the more outstanding Soviet armour commanders.

He seems to be impressed with Katukov (Lelyushenko as well) throughout Schwerpunkt.

Bring a retarded idea to life!:

Hitler/Stalin/King Kerbal has given you a bunch of drawings for retarded weapons peovided by an idiot relative. Your job is to bring these ideas to life in as practical a manner as possible without making the results look too different from the drawings.

Failure is punishable by death/gulag/volunteering for a mun shot.

The GOOLAB needs more science personnel, comrade.

My vote is for a pendulum fallacy believing Munshot rocket.

Anti social cave fish react similarly to patients suffering from schizophrenia and autism. Or something.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/antisocial-cave-fish-may-hold-clues-schizophrenia-autism

The article does not state whether these blind, anti-social autistic cave fish have accounts for World of Tanks and post regularly on the NA Forums...

That's an easy test. If they can reliably hit a large red box labeled BATTLE but not things under red markers, we found out who's playing the game.

I learned that Yorktown seems to basically just have been the US' best fleet carrier up till Midway, it's not just a combat experience from Coral Sea thing like Shattered Sword claims. They were the ones who came up with the stopgap solution to US fleet carriers not having nearly enough fighters in the early days of taking the scout SBDs on, gassing them up and adding them to the CAP to take on torpedo bombers and even at Coral Sea were bundling up their air wing into coordinated strikes (scout bombers go up first and circle, torp bombers take off and go straight to the target, then fighters go up a bit later, and they bundle up with their bombers en route, with the TBDs using a handheld light to show the dive bombers up above where they are).

So it wasn't just Midway, it seems that Yorktown's officers had the best grasp of things at the start of the war.

Also man was there a fighter shortage, it makes my HoI 4 shortage of modern types feel a lot less depressing.

(Source is The First Team).

Well, Israel is being added to W:RD now.  I'm not quite sure what to think.

If ever there was a time to turn off the game chat that isn't literally all the time, it's now.

Well, I don't know. Every person who learned to play piano from their grandmother, it seems, learned to play complex melodies and harmonies at the same time, even if they don't rise to the level of being able to do it fantastically well.

You reminded me of this:

I like how this guy plays bass.

I really like how he plays bass.

I've never had anything but bad experiences with goths. I had to sleep on the streets for a night when I was in Leipzig because there was a goth music festival and literally every room everywhere was booked

I'm very comfortable with my only exposure to goths being in my music library. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of learning German, because there's a lot of music I quite like that I probably wouldn't enjoy nearly as much if I actually knew the lyrics.

I desperately wish that they were putting up courses from UNC, but have a lecture by my favorite history teacher:

Funny how much the resistance to fortification reminds me of the 1600s, when soldiers would demand extra pay for fortifying.

I was a die hard AMD guy since the 90s. I finally sucked it up and switched to Intel and couldn't be happier. AMD seems to have dropped the ball when it comes to being competitive in the consumer PC market. 

Core was the definitive modern architecture, and AMD was going in the wrong direction right at that time. Before then they were good if not better.

Bulldozer sucks as an architecture, and hopefully their new stuff will bring balance back to the force.

As far as CPUs go, with AMDs new Zen chips on the horizon there is absolutely no reason to get an AMD chip right now. I'd honestly wait until they come out later this year to upgrade, should drive CPU prices down since they'll actually be competitive with Intel chips.

Will they even be chipset compatible? I'm not super sure whether or not the prices on existing stock would drop. Most of the time they haven't been.

I've heard that before, and then Bulldozer came.

 

Which... didn't bulldoze at all.

It's yet another hyperthreaded wide IPC focused core design, it should be perfectly acceptable. I mean seriously, Apple's making really solid CPUs because the formula's that well established, and one of the main dudes from that was with AMD through a lot of the design of Zen. It's a lot easier to get close when your competition is grinding up against the land of diminishing returns.

To be honest, it sort of deserves it. Everything is dynamic, and the graphics are quite well crafted. It's a beautiful game even at the lowest settings. Right now I am playing at 1280*800 at Medium settings (but no SSAO, and Grass density/distance is turned to low and shadow quality is turned low as well). I am not noticing any FPS difference between low and my custom medium at 1280*800 which is odd.

That screams CPU bound (CPU is so far behind that it can't feed the GPU).

You could probably get a vastly better computer than that for pretty cheap, but no idea how the money would work out for you.

Apparently you're not because people are raging about how "casual" it is.

Those people are bad and wrong. If you want to flowchart your army, you want to play Visio. HoI is war Excel. It's a really good game about managing production, trying to balance efficiency and having the newest shinies, making war plans, and watching your plans go to total shit. The only things that are super wrong are that it could be more fleshed out, the AI needs to tone it down attacking enemies in bad attack terrain (to their credit, the western front of my France game was a giant all out brawl in the best terrain they could get), and the AI is weird about planes. It was fun having my desperate hail mary to get medium tanks into my army in large numbers and costly exercises to reorganize my armor units pay off, and the Isonzo reenactment was pretty fun.