Sacosphilz

As for why, well, I don't know Spanish either, so I thought I might be a bit indirect with my answer. I was going to go with either that answer or " " I only know a bit of Japanese. I never study it formally, but I consumed enough of various media to know quite a few things, and the Mandarin lessons I'm taking help me a lot with the kanji. Oh, and I have Japanese input (Microsoft IME) on at all times. I don't know how to type the characters on the natural keyboard but with this I can just type their romanized version or just draw the strokes. Should I run now?

@Glaistig: What I meant was that mecha can't interest me just by being mecha and just looking powerful and shiny, but if they fit the story, if their power and pwnage serve a purpose, if they can be justified as the symbol of awesomeness, then I'll buy that. Satisfied? And drills... well, we all know REAL drills aren't cone-shaped, but let's forget about that for now. I have an anti-destructive nature, so I don't see any 'creativity' in the destruction you speak off but I can see the beauty of the shape, especially when the motif is expanded upon to represent something greater like in TTGL. Completely off-topic, imagine if a MMORPG introduce drills as a choice of weapons. Would you use it? How many people do you think would use it? How imbalanced would that be?

@41.14th riddle: Is it the ? The ?

It is already off-track. @Israfel: About compatibilities between the principles, I still think any pair can go well together if you stretch your imagination a bit, but they probably aren't going to be that symmetrical when Manu implements them. He also inserted clues in the description of each principles which hint at the other principle(s) it's supposed to go with, and some clues are very obvious. You probably can't go too wrong following those clues. I also picked my principle combination through that method, except that Imagination doesn't seem to fit with the other 4 very well, but I picked it just because I like it. @Glaistig: Yes, I do watch anime, a lot of 'em, I just don't go admitting it too often. I don't especially fancy mecha (or drills), and I was actually avoiding mecha because they're too cliche, but I can always appreciate a good show.

I think Manu said that all principles are very powerful, because they're exactly that - principles. In my opinion, no principle is inherently more powerful than another, because there just isn't a way to fairly compare them. You may be able to compare certain things under the same set of rules, but how do you compare different sets of rules of the universe? That said, each principle is vast enough for you to make it awesome in its own ways. For example, I could say that Syntropy + Cyclicity + Entropy + Time + Imagination = Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann awesomeness (I wonder how many people got that reference just now ) and I won't be entirely off, probably. Anyway, if you go for those 5 principles, you'll have the exact same principles as mine, and here I thought I was offbeat enough.

From what I know, at each point in the story where you're offered principle bonus, if the number of different principles you know is still less than your MP level, you'll always be offered the choices of all 10 principles. I never tried not choosing the Nth principle though, so I don't know what would happen if you keep at it until the end of the story. On an unrelated note, I just noticed that after meditating 24 hours, the principle bonus I get wasn't 1.9 times the normal rate as shown, but square that amount (3.61 times). This seems to happen in every part of the story, but the skills bonuses are given at 1.9 times the normal rate as they're supposed to be.

Good question If you put it that way, I can't think of a better hint either. It should probably stay as it is. And yes, I'm sure it has helped a lot of others, but it just didn't help me much when I impatiently tried to beat them in MP3. My experience was like: Something like that

Maybe it's just me, but even after learning how to defeat them (from a few generous spoilers), the game's hint about Loreroot guards still continues to annoy me. It is phrased in a way that would be a good hint if you already know the important ritual choices, but most players in MP3 or early in MP4 who haven't learned much about creatures won't even know the existence of the correct choices or how to reach them.

Wow, it must be at least a decade since I last heard that riddle :lol: , although the version I know is very culturally localized, and it's not about a lone brave bunny and some primitive kittens, but about a girl unwillingly facing arranged marriage with a local aristocrat she doesn't love and her father who tried to cheat her into it. (The deal about white and black stones and their containers remain the same, of course, as well as the solution ) Makes me wonder where it really originated.

Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that someone whom MtG test says is "Red" is promoting "patience"? On topic: I'd love to have something to do during story mode too, but I don't feel that it's necessary. I could act as if I was very busy with other things in life and just enjoying a little story by a few paragraphs each day. This 'test of patience' also has a nice side effect of filtering out impatient players which crowd most other games. A random idea: How about integrating a little puzzle or game into the story? It can take from a few minutes up to a day to solve. The reward might be a small addition to meditation bonus, or in some case a new unlocked story choice. The issue would be how to make the 'mini-game' interesting, challenging, and not repeating itself when players replay the story.

@Glaistig: I sympathize with you but I don't agree with you on some points. I don't blame the players for doing what the game allows them to do, or at least I don't see a point in it. The players cannot be fixed. The game rules can. If you aren't happy with how things work out, opt for the change to the game rules. With the current system, the best course of action that I see (and probably many other players as well) would be to first accumulate as many losses as possible, driven by these motivation: - Having more honor points doesn't hurt. In fact, you need a lot of honor points to purchase certain items in the MD shop. - When you're a big loser, you can afford to hit more targets without worrying about honor, while people with more balanced profile have a hard time deciding to hit you and lose big chunks of honor points. On the other hand, striving for bonus from fight balance is perceived as impractical at best, if not downright impossible, so why even try? I agree that losing a lot is easy and cheap, but if it's a legit way to gain advantage in the game, I don't blame the players for doing it. I would do the same. That said, I'm not saying that I like the current system. It's never good for the health of any game when the best course of action is also the easiest one. The issues I see with the current win/loss system are: 1. It doesn't solve spam attacks for losses like it's supposed to. The only difference is that it no longer hurts the individual 'winners' as much as it used to, which might be a good thing, but that may be the reason for players to be even less considerate for others when they spam attack. 2. It destroys overall fight balance. It doesn't matter even if every single player plays the way Glaistig wants them to. When a loss count comes automatically with every fight but a win count doesn't, simple logic dictates that the overall balance will eventually be lost. 3. By destroying the balance, it contradicts the game's message to the players and frustrate them. Many old MP4-5 players might welcome the change to the win/loss system over the old one, but what would the new MP4 players think? How would they feel when the game keeps telling them to maintain fight balance while it is obviously impossible? I think it's withing the realm of possibility that this contradiction is enough to drive new players away from the game. Either one has to go. I'm not assuming that the fight balance must stay, but I don't like the other option either. See point #4: 4. It encourages the 'cheap' loss farming for advantage. Many players would hesitate to do it at first, because it is against what ideals they know about the game and/or the prospect for fight balance is still attainable for them, but when enough players start resorting to spamming attacks for losses, the game loses a lot of its charm. I'm worried that if this continues for long, this game will regress into something boring and uninteresting.

Now that you mention it, that secret feature is probably the answer to the first incident. (Yes, I've been using it too. It rocks too much. ) It's easy to imagine that feature to work that way if I were coding it. If the phenomenon is indeed that secret feature's fault, right now it's probably not worth the effort to fix it since people can barely read the current battle logs anyway, and fixing it might mean double storage space for the battle logs. Too much trouble for too little.

Thanks. :lol: I still don't know what to make of the first incident though. Any ideas, anyone?

You mean the identical armies battle as well?

There are two separate incidents: 1. A few days ago, I went idle in a public location. When I logged in again, I've unsurprisingly got some attacks on me while I was idle, but when I checked the battle log and my creatures, I found these two facts which I think were contradicting each other: 1.1. According to my battle logs, I won the last two battles with surviving creatures. 1.2. None of my creatures (except eggs and little birds) had any VE left when I logged in. 2. Just earlier today, I logged off while at the Path of Loneliness (with that tree ), but when I logged in later... 2.1. I've been attacked a few times during the offline period. (But I admit that this can easily be explained if I simply went idle and didn't actually log off, and I don't completely trust my memory on this one either.) 2.2. The first attack is from none other than .Muratus del Mur., who's supposed to be in a different MP level than me, but that might or might not be a bug. 2.3. In the last recorded battle in my battle log, it listed creatures I never have as part of my army. More specifically, it shows two identical armies but with different VE binding and bonuses fighting each other. I could not read or capture the battle log messages, but it seems to me that those creatures were fighting with the abilities that matched their appeared creature types. I'm guessing those identical rituals were actually one ritual used by the attacker.

I used Excel to take notes instead of pen and paper, but yes, this information means nothing as a clue. That's why people are giving it away freely. Anyway, I also used , and that might count as a slight hint, but you don't really need it. I'm not sure how 'random' other people's solutions are, but with mine, other than making the tiles all orange, I can make any combination of orange and black tiles, and the method is not random. B) However, I made a few discoveries before I could get to that step, and most discoveries are random to a degree - you just don't know when you're going to realize something that you didn't the moment before.

@Eldrad: Ah, so that's where I went wrong. The answer would then become much simpler:

... but your answer happens to be incorrect. If you'd like I can point out where you went wrong or let you figure it out yourself. Yes, please.

@ 100 pirates riddle: I think I'm making it more difficult than it really is but.... heck, I'd post something anyway.

@Eldrad: On 9/10 math puzzle: You left out one solution. On 3 crowns riddle: Trahern's answer made me think that there might be such possibilities, but I never fully thought them out. Good job on finding and defining the optimal alternatives. On 100 pirates: I've seen that one before, but I've completely forgotten the answer, so I'll be working on it. By the way, does 50% mean 50% of the other pirates (excluding the captain), or is the captain included in the total too?

@Your current 3 solutions: Two weeks ago, chewett sent me a PM asking for confirmation if 9 out of those 10 combinations can truly be solved, because he could only solve 6 of them at that time and had 4 remaining (1 fake). The three combinations you just solved, Trahern, were all in those remaining 4.

Ack, how careless can I be? I'll edit the answer into my previous post.

@Rendril: Sorry, it's not that I don't like your riddle. It's just that once a riddle is solved, even with spoiler tags, people will stop bothering with it (or it has always been the case so far in this thread). Since that riddle was easy for me, that post was a way of showing off without spoiling the answer. @Two-pair poker hands: Not sure if I got it right, but here goes anyway:

I hereby ban myself from answering Rendril's (first) riddle.