Profile of squippy

Well, yes you do. It's a standard and commonplace game mechanic: the capacity for upgrades is something that is factored into the base unit price. This is true across all sorts of games in all sorts of genres.

Frex, Elemental: Legendary Heroes has a unit designer that allows you to assemble units from a whole smorgasbord of abilities. Two of those abilities allow the unit to wear armour either up to chain mail, or plate mail. You have to pay for these abilities, but they do not actually give the unit that armour. You have to pay for the armour as well when you actually build one.

I assure you that is quite normal, and if Cons did not have the possibility of gaining access to Molotovs and AT grenades, they would indeed be cheaper than they are now.

You're off topic, games decided by RNG is only an aspect of the issue.

It's not off topic at all. If RNG is such a big deal, then asking how significant an impact it is has, or players believe it to have, is not at all unreasonable. I am actually quite curious to know, because it increasingly seems to me that this is an argument about something which, even if you don't like it, just doesn't matter very much.

I don't know exactly how many games were played in the course of OCF; a couple of hundred I would guess. Asking how many of those you, or anyone else, think were won by blind chance is entirely fair.

We're talking about game mechanism that haven't any limits. I repeat myself but it is far more confortable to face a churchill than a Panther. Because you have a better control of what damage output you'll deal to a unit with a lot of HP and less armor than the opposite.

I don't dispute that; where I disagree is that I don't think it means that one is preferable over the other. All it means is that they work a bit differently, which is entirely appropriate for a game based around asymmetric balance.

I think the chance-to-hit and chance-to-deflect mechanics are good ones that enhance the game. You're entitled to disagree if you like, but this is an expression of taste rather than a declaration of fact.

Perhaps, but I don't think that's what it is. Following on from what I posted initially, the original article says:

I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

So, this isn't the press putting words in the mouth of scientists, this is what the scientists themselves are saying. It's certainly news-worthy, but I don't see much in the way of gilding the lilly going on here. I don't know how else such a story should have been reported.

In my opinion, the concept of hit or deflect, hit or miss is not appropriate to an RTS game, you always need reliability in your actions.

Even when it's such a big feature of the subject matter?

I acknowledge you can say that isn't directly pertinent to how a game's rules should be built, but IMO that would greatly detract from the game. A reasonably representative reflection of the subject matter is part of COH's charm; the very fact that deflection exists is one of the things that attracts me to it.

All this talk about abandoned vehicles is another case in point. If I were to guess, the main reason it's there is to drive home the fact that armour must, absolutely must, be supported by infantry. It's a way to encourage play that is both better, and more faithful to the realities of the theme. Being careless with armour will punish you with more than just losing the armour, and the very fact that it can happen forces you to think about it. You've been forewarned, and if it happens to you now it's your own fault.

IMO, this is a good feature, both in terms of play and game design. I really don't believe that pure RNG decides games; experts, as they say, make their own luck, and I think if you win a game through RNG, you probably already had it in the bag, and if you lose because of RNG you probably already lost.

Even if there are some cases where a turnaround is purely due to fluke, just, you know, brush yourself off, recognise that shit happens, and get over it.

Ochams razor dudes.

The comet cloud is best naturalistic explanation; however, that doesn't necessarily mean it is the simplest, or the one that requires the fewest assumptions.

At present, everything in our understanding of the universe suggests that it should be swarming with life. Indeed, it's something of a puzzle that the entire galaxy has not been colonised already; it should probably have happened millions if not billions of years ago, even if one assumes quite slow sublight velocities.

In this regard, "aliens" is not actually a very wild proposition. An empty universe would be significantly stranger, and would suggest that all of our science is fundamentally flawed in a very serious way. In fact, none of the explanations we've been able to come up with for our failure so far to detect alien societies are good news.

So I feel you have to be very cautious in trying to appeal to Ockham's Razor; it is not at all obvious that the absence of ET's is the simplest solution. In some respects it is the most outlandish.

There have been a couple of other incidents of interest that have not garnered nearly as much interest because they are much more ambivalent. There is the famous "Wow! signal; there was a trio of inexplicable signals picked up in 2004; there are about 30 stars emitting too much IR. The splash that this one made arose precisely because astronomers do think that alien engineering is the best explanation currently available, even if it ultimately turns out to be incorrect.