[Repointing Death Quote Event IDs]

as much as i can give you props for figuring it out yourself (how much i wish other people would do that) you ended up using a lot of really high-powered stuff to do something very simple

#FE8 Boss Death Quote Editor by flyingace24
#

1
FE8 Boss/Special Death Quote Editor by flyingace24
0x9ECD4C
79
12
NULL
NULL

these are the first 10 lines of the death quote editor

just ctrl-f "4C CD 9E 08" (or, if that doesn't work, "48 CD 9E 08")

Oh, nice. Probably a dumb question, but how do you open it up with Notepad, then?

EDIT: Yeah, as for the ctrl + f, I did try it last night, but I was so tired I made the stupid mistake of not putting it in Little Endian.

And I've learned that like 90% of ROM Hacking is winging everything and learning how to do shit you've never done before.

EDIT2: And I realized I didn't say it before, so thanks for the prompt reply, Cam. I do appreciate it.

[Repointing Death Quote Event IDs]

I did manage to find it out. I made a test patch with NUPS to find out what hex values the Death Quote module was editing, then used No$GBA debugger to find the section of code that pointed to the list, then changed the hex there. Now to code it right.

Tbh, however, I have no idea what Cam really expected me to do.

[Repointing Death Quote Event IDs]

So I'm finishing up chapter 6 of my ROM hack (the KOT patch, for those who know it), but I've run into a small snag towards the end. In my hack, I essentially have a couple of enemies that proc map-wide effects that only end on their death. I would do this by having their death quotes proc event IDs and couple them with an AFEV or a turn event. I need a couple of the generics to proc event IDs for the chapter to work, and I know how to do that, but here's the issue:

Because I'm not making a completely new hack, and instead doing a remake of FE8, all of the entries in the death quote editor have to be kept. I want to add a couple more entries, but I don't have any room in the ROM, due to the way it is organized.

Does anybody know where the pointer is for the death quotes (FE8 preferably, but if you have it for FE7, I can work from there) so I can repoint the entire list to a place that has more room, or know of any way to make another list of death quotes in a free space of the ROM, thus artificially extending the list?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Serenes Forest, A Gift For You~]

Indeed, only a product of the highest quality and usefulness would be suitable for my dear Serenes.

[Serenes Forest, A Gift For You~]

Dear Serenes,

You've been so good to me. I just wanted to give you a gift I knew you'd love. It took me a long time, but I finally found something that would bring you a lifetime of endless delight! Here's a video demonstrating just how awesome it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELrZRru0UbQ

I've over-nighted the thing, so expect it at your doorstep tomorrow morning!

Delightfully Yours,

KoT

[Making Skill More Useful]

The fact that enemies typically have terrible avoid and weapon hit being fairly high makes it so that there isn't really that much of a need for skill. But thing is, since the avoid formula is far more reliant on speed than it is on luck, giving enemies better avoid would wind up making speed even more important than it already is.

It's kind of a tricky thing really.

Well, you can bump up avoid by increasing how much avoid LUK gives (So you get, say, 2 AVO per point of LUK) and allowing enemies to get decent amounts of it. That way, you don't have to jack up SPD to outrageous levels.

[Making Skill More Useful]

The idea isn't to make it less valuable. The idea is to make it so that a unit can not have super-high scores in a stat and still function.

Being able to fight with low SKL, with penalties, but not regulated to a side-line/bottom tier = good.

Being unable to fight with low SPD due to the stat being so important to combat fighting with low SPD is stupid = bad.

But you WANT units with really, really stupidly low values in stats to be bad, or need to have some amazing redeeming quality to counteract it.

You know why? Because the only time you can be ridiculously deficient in a stat and not be significantly harmed by it is IF THAT STAT SUCKS. Which is bad.

The reason why you can have low/mediocre SKL/LUK and not care is because the stats are deficient compared to everything else. So you either fix both problems at once, or neither of them.

basically the intention of my suggestion was that all characters can hit a maximum damage and a minimum damage, and having higher skl raises the minimum damage threshold. so with more skl, you'd have on average slightly higher damage output, but more importantly, more consistent damage output.

perhaps here's a good sample equation: max damage variance = 2 - 0.5*(user's skl - opp's skl), 0 if negative. so if you and your opponent have equal skl, your damage variance is 2 points. there's no damage variance if your skl exceeds the opponent's by 4. and if you have, say, 4 less skl, your damage variance is 4 points.

Oh, I misunderstood you then. While this would definitely make SKL considerably more valuable...

I wouldn't be a fan of something like this because variance in damage would be a major pain in the ass, mostly because you wouldn't exactly know if you can reliably 2HKO/3HKO a target -- it would be like a way more drastic version of having unreliable hit. I mean, not only do you have hit rates screwing with you, but you can't even be sure whether or not you'll be able to finish the enemy off even if it DID connect. It'd make FE6 RNG look GOOD.

And it wouldn't be too bad in the easier modes, where enemies are complete trash (you'd probably overkill them because of their crap stats, and you'd most likely have more SKL than them, so variance would be small), but Lunatic modes would be mind-bendingly, ball-crushingly random.

[FEE3 2013]

if i do it (probably not) i'll just dick around through hard mode and probably complain about how bad the ASM is

The ASM it burns my eyes

[FEE3 2013]

Christ we have two KoT's.

Oh, I don't know what your hack is but if it gets assigned to me, don't gimme an easy mode. I hate easy stuff.

Since I don't know who will be LPing it, I might just have the three files contain the same chapter in each difficulty. We'll see.

[FEE3 2013]

You know what? I've just gotten a new job lately, but I've wanted to have my hack shown in FEE3 for a while now. I'll throw my hat in.

Base Engine: FE8

Name of Hack: KoT Patch

Creator: Obviously Kitty of Time Me

What You'll Submit: Most likely a live playable demo, possibly an interview as well

Anything Else?: It has a bump in difficulty, so I'll *try* to get Easy Mode set up for the LPers; if not, stuck with Normal Mode.

[Making Skill More Useful]

nothing wrong with that

Except if you want to justify using 75% of your cast

[Making Skill More Useful]

There's a few ways to do it.

I just went with the simpler way and bumped up the hit from SKL and the avoid from LUK/SPD. Of course, this really only works if you normalize SPD a bit, since SPD is already too good of a stat if you have a ton of doubling. And even then, some people (*cough* Anouleth *cough*) aren't the biggest fan of this.

Upping the crit from SKL and then lowering the crit damage kind of screws over support bonuses and crit weapons and LUK a bit, unless you bump those up too -- except you can still hit around 80% crit if you line everything up, IIRC, even without modifying it -- and thus you run the risk of capping the stat somewhat easily. Also, I was worried that if you made crit chance high enough that it becomes almost as reliable as hit (i.e. close to 100% for SMs), then you end up with some classes that essentially get reliable double scaling from STR; then all you have to do if throw a few energy drops at them and...BAM!...Rutger reincarnated.

Changing SKL to affect ATK runs the risk of making SKL a bit of a STR clone, but it could work, given some tweaking and the right mathematical weights; i.e. ATK is X + Y, where X is derived from STR and Y is derived from SKL.

Not a bad idea, really, but I would make it so that Y can be a max of a certain % of X, based off of (Your SKL - Enemy SKL)...or I would make it (Your SKL - Enemy SKL)*Z%, where Z can be modified as necessary.

[Any GBA hacks where...]

don't take it personally

i haven't actually tried it so i can't speak for anything beyond "it's a bunch of nightmare and engine edits"

Nah, man. I was just playing with you.

Sometimes I forget you can't translate sarcasm well on the internet. ~.o

[Any GBA hacks where...]

kot's new patch apparently implements a few skills but it's otherwise just a reskin of fe8

Wow.

Way to tear into my hack AND my ASM. :>

And after all the effort I put into it too.

[Fixing a Minor Graphical Error]

So I was working on C6 of FE8, when I noticed a weird bar above Riev's head:

Does anybody know what's causing it, and more importantly, how to fix it? I'm almost positive it has something to do with text editing with FEditor, because it stretches way back to when I first started text editing.

Note that this is the only time I've seen this happen.

EDIT: Ignore this. I finally found out that my first ROM hack was planted in the middle of Riev's portrait, since I mistook all of the 00s for an empty section. Luckily, I moved the rest of my ROM hacks to an ACTUAL empty spot of the ROM.

I feel like an idiot. XD Oh well, at least my hacks look pretty-ful.

[Recent NSA leaks]

You say that as if the US government has never done anything like that before. May I refer you to the Japanese internment camps during WWII, where Japanese Americans had their property, businesses, and personal artifacts taken from them for no other reason that for being of Japanese descent? If we go back further, we can also look at the Sedition Act of 1918 which was, in general terms, the Patriot Act before there was a Patriot Act. So yeah, by "my logic," the government can step on any rights they feel necessary to keep things running smoothly and justify it by claiming it's a matter of national security or some other function essential to preserving US interests.

Oh no, I know that it has. As I stated, "The Necessary and Proper Clause seems to be used when no other logical reasoning exists for the government to legally perform an action -- usually with particularly stupid policies like price controls." What you cited were simply more examples of what I meant.

That's the problem: it is being used as intended. It allows the government to exercise authority not explicitly stated in the Constitution. I suspect it was written because of the Articles of Confederation. This precursor to the Constitution was very restrictive in what the Feds could do. This clause basically gave them the federal government the power to "do what needs to be done" to keep the US afloat as a country and political entity.

But this is where we disagree -- it is being interpreted FAR more liberally than its intended purpose. It was indeed a response to the Articles of Confederation, but it can just as easily be read as "state law cannot interfere with the federal government performing those tasks it is expressly obligated to do under the Constitution" and not "I can do whatever the hell I want to because I say it needs to be done for national interest." I heard the original version of this clause had the word "expressly" in it (which was either accidentally or intentionally removed, we'll never know), meaning that at least the original intent of this clause was the former interpretation, not the latter.

The clause needs to be re-evaluated.

Smartphones and email didn't exist when the Constitution was written, which is why they have more room to maneuver. It's not like Thomas Jefferson wrote a thesis on phone record data mining, so it's up to people's interpretation whether that's kosher or not. If NSA agents are doing the interpreting, their opinions may differ from yours or mine.

I actually thought about this. In Jefferson's time, in most cases, both the details of a conversation and its content were inextricably linked -- that is, if you were spying on somebody, you wouldn't know, say, when and where a conversation took place, but not know what they were saying. Today, they CAN be separated -- you can know somebody called, but not necessarily what they said.

I guess a good parallel to Jefferson's time would be snail mail. Say every time you tried to mail a letter, somebody from the NSA snatched it, recorded your name, the name and address on the envelope, when you sent it, and how much you paid for postage, and then proceeded to put it in the slot. Are you saying people wouldn't be calling that a violation of the fourth amendment?

Depends. Police in a stakeout of suspected drug dealers are under no obligation whatsoever to reveal they are police or explain what they're doing (and doing so could be counterproductive, so they actually have an incentive not to). The NSA might be able to justify itself under similar terms: by revealing a subtle method of collecting evidence, he has essentially "tipped off" any domestic terrorists that the NSA was watching them. I'm not saying I agree with this line of thinking or even that this is a strong case, but it is one approach the feds could take.

Against such a case, I would argue that people know in general that police have the right to stake out a suspect, even if they don't know who those suspects are. Likewise, people knowing in general that the NSA is reserving the right to survey phone calls would be distinct from, say, informing terrorist X that the U.S. government is on to them.

You might want to look at the 2008 Amendments to the 1978 FISA. The requirements for data collection without warrants have been...relaxed a little since then.

Oh, I know. I particularly love where the FISA court made it so that agents can utilize "accidentally uncovered" data (and I think even use it as evidence). Oops, I just "accidentally" grabbed all of your personal data. Just because something is a law doesn't mean it's constitutional.

[KOT Patch -- Fire Emblem 8 Reimagined!]

Pretty sure Knoll is lv10 Shaman for the exclusive reason of giving the player their preferred class for him to promote too. If anything, I'd switch Knoll to a higher level Shaman, to maintain that flexibility for the player.

I haven't even made the change yet; I actually prefer to do it that way; it all depends on how leveled the party is at that point in the game. If a level 18-20 shaman at that point is around the average party level, I'll do it. If it's way below the average party level, I'll be forced to make him a pre-promo.

Right now, the average party level at the end of C5 is around 8-10, but I can't project what it WILL be.

EDIT: I was doing some ASM hacks for PKL to alter S rank bonuses and I realized I didn't do it for my ROM hack yet. Anyways, it's done: S rank now gives 10 Hit instead of 5 Hit, 5 Crit.

EDIT2: I actually ALWAYS noticed a significant boost by Angelic Robe; I mean, it also helps tremendously if it brings you from 2HKO to 3HKO range. 7 HP is a ton of health, and HP is even more valuable under the mechanics of this patch than in most vanilla FEs.

[KOT Patch -- Fire Emblem 8 Reimagined!]

Personal opinion but +3HP sounds too little

The highest normal attribute cap is 30--that's the highest--but for HP it's 60. So by that logic the HP bonus should be at least double of the other stat boosts, meaning +4. Keep in mind that the HP cap is constant though whereas others are variables and might be say, 20 (which is a difference of 3x). Take that into mind and an appropriate value IMO would be 5, but if you really want to nerf it, I'd say no less than 4.

Just my personal reaction to it you don't have to do anything nor do I expect you to

I was actually debating this internally and was expecting some commentary on it.

While it is true that HP is of lesser value (inherently) and that Angelic Robe is obviously going to give more HP than other stat boosters would give STR/DEF/etc., my question is how much it should be in comparison. The power of healing is improved over vanilla FE8 due to healers have much higher MAG, and much of the time units are 2-3HKO'd, so the value of HP has gone up notably from vanilla. I was actually debating between 3 or 4, and decided to take the more conservative route. My concern with making it too high is that I trade HP 1:1 for other stats when determining base stats, so characters that have lower HP pools run the risk of becoming overpowered if Angelic Robes are too powerful. With that being said, since 2-3HKO'ing means 2 HP is roughly the value of 1 DEF, and you get roughly twice the HP as other stats for caps, I think I'll meet you halfway here and change it to +4 HP.

[KOT Patch -- Fire Emblem 8 Reimagined!]

If you want a Shaman, why not just change Lute's class? She would easily fit the typical Shaman role personality wise.

Well, the point of adding her was to give you a dark magic user both in the early game and one that is female (both of which aren't common in Fire Emblem); making Lute a Shaman, while it also does both of these things, means you forgo the traditional growth unit mage and means LutexArtur makes less sense, sense Artur is depicted as deeply devout and antithetical to the ancient magics. Also, that FE8 Lunatic hack did almost that same thing and I'm trying not to tread on people's toes here. Last, but not least, I want a character that fleshes out the story of Lyon, so we need another court researcher to do so; also, her darker, self-doubting, ambitious personality is aimed to question the beliefs of the Gary Sue-ish Moulder.

I'm hoping to make Knoll a Druid (which actually makes more sense considering how late he joins), and then we have Saleh as a Sage.

I may or may not also plan to any daughter I have in the future be named Cassie, because I love the name.

Always a plan B to do the Lute thing, though, if Cassie falls through.

[KOT Patch -- Fire Emblem 8 Reimagined!]

Just posting to let people know that I'm now officially moved and back on the saddle for this ROM hack. As proof, here's a nice little screenshot from C5x:

Still fine-tuning the balance now (it's hard when it needs to be long enough to make Ephraim & Co. not under-leveled going into C8, but not long enough to make it way too hard without a healer), but it's going along. I also have a couple questions you guys might help me with:

1) Amelia is also planned to be a soldier. Do you think the generic soldier animation would work with her (with enough pink) or does the generic soldier sprite look too masculine to pull it off?

2) I know that there are Halberdier animations floating around. Does anybody know where to get male/female ones? It's not a matter of not wanting to put the effort in, it's a matter of me not having a drop of artistic talent. I'll obviously give full credit in the OP for it.

3) I'm thinking of having Kyle's second promotion be the Wyvern Lord and Amelia's second promotion be the Falcoknight, with Kyle being more the Aran archetype and Amelia being more the Neph archetype. Is that cool with everybody?

Also, all things willing, C6 will be seeing a new character; Cassie, the female shaman. Cassie, beneath her innocent-looking exterior, is a deeply sardonic, stubborn, and reserved woman; driven by low self-esteem and a incessant need to improve herself, she is a natural match for the ancient magics. After spending her childhood researching the natural phenomena of Magvel, she was hired by Grado to help Lyon rediscover the powers of prophesy. As a nascent researcher, she worked under the supervision of Knoll, and the two made great progress, sharing a strong common interest.

One day, however, a disagreement arose over how their research would be handled; after finding out about the earthquake that would soon occur, Cassie wanted the magic and its prophesy to be announced to all of Grado immediately, wanting both to prove the worth of her research and to save the lives of countless citizens. Knoll disagreed, pointing out the natural distrust and hatred that Grado's citizens had towards the "dark" and ancient magics; his position was that having Lyon secretly prepare the nation for the earthquake would be the best plan, revealing only after the earthquake had passed that it had been the powers of "dark" magic that saved their lives. Knoll feared that Cassie's plan would provoke mass panic, a breakdown of society, and a massive rebellion towards a royal family that had "turned evil" and "fallen prey to the dark magics", and Cassie felt that Knoll's plan would do too little too late to save Grado from such a massive cataclysm and that all of Grado deserved to know of their fate so that they could protect themselves, dark magic or not.

Cassie, feeling disgruntled, angry, and betrayed by who she once viewed as her most trusted comrade, soon left her post as a researcher under cover of night, bribing a guard she knew had a sick wife to escort her out of the castle. She soon found out, however, that her liberal use of dark magic in front of Grado's citizens gave her a reputation that followed her everywhere she went -- unable to find a job by citizens who called her a "heathen" and a "witch", she soon found herself short of both gold and food. Riev, having heard of both her escape and her reputation, hired her on to help further his agenda, telling her that he was a trusted member of the Grado court and willing to grant her patronage and protection. Her first task was to assist Novala in capturing the Renais princess Eirika, who had last been seen ravaging the town of Serafew and tormenting innocents of Grado as revenge for losing her kingdom.

My current plan is to have Cassie have supports with Knoll, Moulder, Lute, Innes, and Duessel.

When I did my first attempt of this patch nearly a year ago, I had this very same idea and asked for a possible sprite for her. Kon was gracious enough to provide the sprite that will be gracing this patch (I never did thank you for all of your hard work -- if you're still here, know that I will be using this AND I DO APPRECIATE IT! ).

In still other news, I also have some of the patch notes for the next patch that will be released (so you guys have a head-start to complain about them ):

> Gust/Gale are given +1 MT, but -10 CRIT. This is designed so that assassins have a lethality chance of 10% with these weapons, instead of 15%. This should make SMs more of a viable choice.

> Assassin caps are changed. Assassins now have a STR cap of 29 and a DEF cap of 22. This should make SMs/assassins more distinct and allow assassins to fit their niche more (and nerfs them minorly), as units devastating when they jump an enemy but vulnerable in EP.

> In addition, assassin promo gains are now STR +2/RES +2. The HP bonus on promo was removed for the reason stated above, but the RES bonus patches up one of Colm's weak points and solidifies Joshua's position as a mage killer.

> There have been some other small changes to caps, mainly for mounted classes.

> Franz's growths are slightly different -- he now gets +5% STR growth and -5% RES growth. I did this so that Franz and Forde can be more distinct, which was made difficult by Franz's super jack-of-all-trades stats. Now Franz is more of the STR/SPD/LUK unit, designed more for a Pally promotion, while Forde is more of the HP/DEF cav, designed more for a GK promotion.

> Seth now has +1 LUK, but -1 RES. This both keeps him equal to the other cavs at 20/20, and prevents him from being crit as enemy CRIT can creep as high as 10 towards the end of the patch. You'll still need him to get a few boss kills to be more viable by mid-game, though.

> A couple of bugs with Inspire/Bulwark/Chief/Sovereign SHOULD be fixed. First, the unit now longer gives the aura when dead; second, it now works properly with green units.

> Fixed a bug where Steel axes and Steel lances accidentally gave 2 WEXP instead of 1.

> Angelic Robe now gives +4 HP, down from +7 HP. Come on, you know it was by far the best stat boosting item and needed a hard whack of the nerf bat.

> Duessel is now a general. No, like the class. Not the rank. We all know that he's a boss. In every sense of the word.

> S rank now gives 10 Hit instead of 5 Hit, 5 Crit.

> Fixed a bug with Riev's portrait.

> Fixed a bug where Pierce and Limber bonus damage was not applying properly in cutscenes.

[Recent NSA leaks]

What are they doing with the data it's collecting?

So the NSA was originally designed to snoop on foreign calls to prevent foreign agents from hindering/harming the U.S. After the outrage involving the Nixon wiretaps, the FISA Act specifically made it so that the NSA was required to collect a warrant to observe the content of a message when one of the parties that they were snooping on was a U.S. citizen (or a naturalized person, IIRC). NSA is bypassing this through two arguments:

A) A Supreme Court decision that says that any data handled through a third-party carrier (in the case of the NSA scandal, Verizon and other phone companies) is different from personal information, and is subject to being taken by the government through subpoena.

B) The NSA argues that the FISA Act only applies to the "content" of a message. Apparently, they don't think that the time of the calls, the duration, who you were speaking to, and when you were doing it (this is called meta-data) counts as content.

What the NSA does is subpoena a company like Verizon and says "we want every record of every phone call of every U.S. citizen" and compels them to comply under threat of government; they say they do this because Verizon would delete this data after a certain period of time to guarantee the privacy of their customers. The NSA is saying they need everybody's information so that whenever a terrorist pings up in the system, they can search the database and look up all calls between the terrorist and anybody in the U.S. In short, they can skirt the fourth amendment without needing a warrant.

[Recent NSA leaks]

That would be fine if it weren't for the US Constitution's biggest gremlin: Article I, Section 8, Clause 18 (The Necessary and Proper Clause). This gives Congress authority to pass any legislation that is "necessary" and "proper" to help any government agency carry out its duties. Since there is nothing in the Constitution that says Amendment IV takes priority over the Necessary and Proper Clause (as far as I know), it's really quite arbitrary which carries more weight. Since invasive monitoring procedures were considered "necessary and proper" to maintain national security, the NSA hasn't technically overstepped its bounds. It's responsible for national security, and it's implementing strategies for maintaining that. Our job is to be informed about policies that allow this crap and try to keep them from getting implemented in the first place. When that fails, all we can do is bitch and moan about a law until Congress finally decides to get rid of it or change it to something everyone likes better.

From the government's perspective, that's just a matter of degree. He still performed espionage, technically. The CIA defines it as securing information that a country holds secret. That's pretty much what he did.

A) By your logic, you can use the Necessary and Proper Clause to nullify just about any amendment of the Bill of Rights you want to for "national security" or any other obligation dictated to the government by the constitution. For example, you suggest that the Constitution, through that clause, would allow the government to disarm every American if they state that it is in the national interest because some of them might be radicalized. It was poorly worded, overly vague, and it's stupid to believe that it overrides the Bill of Rights, because if the government can arbitrarily ignore the first 10 amendments, it defeats the whole damn purpose of their existence in the first place.

The Necessary and Proper Clause seems to be used when no other logical reasoning exists for the government to legally perform an action -- usually with particularly stupid policies like price controls. I personally hope that they go back to reality concerning the interpretation of this Clause; that is, the federal government, when performing an act strictly obligated by the Constitution, that powers such as States cannot interfere with it; in other words, we should use it for its intended design, to restate the supremacy of federal law over state law, and for nothing more. Otherwise, it can be abused WAY too much.

B) If I were to make a case to defend him off the top of my head, I would argue whether a government has a right to keep that information classified as "secret" to begin with, since we are actually talking about the basic function of a government agency and not specific details that would honestly threaten national security -- it would be akin to charging somebody for espionage for revealing that the Patriot Act allows the government (with a warrant) to collect information on U.S. citizens using wire taps, if necessary. This is information that should be known by the American public to begin with, not something akin to war secrets. In other words, for it to be considered secret, the government should have probable cause that the release of such information would be against the national interest, and that it would DIRECTLY infringe upon the government's ability to perform those duties EXPRESSLY enumerated in the Constitution.

The government cannot questionably violate the fourth amendment (depending on whether we consider meta-data the "papers, and effects" described in the fourth amendment), and then prosecute the people who reveal the potential abuse to the public -- that's madness.

[Recent NSA leaks]

hong kong and china are different political entities

I was actually curious/unsure about this and looked it up. I remember Hong Kong was being enveloped as part of China when I was a kid (like late 90s, early 2000s), but it's more complicated than that. From what I read:

Hong Kong can technically be considered a part of China, but is known as the "Hong Kong Special Administration Region", and I guess they refer to it as "One Country, Two Systems". Hong Kong was given over to China on July 1st, 1997, with the caveat that they keep their same political and economic system as before. So while it is a separate entity, what I don't know is how much "pull" (official or unofficial) the government of mainland China has on Hong Kong, or if it's part of China in name only, if you know what I mean; most evidence suggests the latter, though.

Also, who exactly is in charge of extradition over there? I keep on hearing people saying he's trying to get sanctuary from China -- but if Hong Kong is essentially independent, why wouldn't he go to mainland China to do that? I'll be honest, not an expert of the legal systems of Asiatic nations.

EDIT: Just read something where it says that Hong Kong's autonomy breaks down in cases of "foreign relations and military defense," so I guess mainland China would take control in this case.

EDIT2: On a random side note, Hong Kong would honestly be better off being independent from China -- my god, they seem more different from China than the U.S. is.

And I should note that Snowden's CHOICE of refuge is what makes me suspicious (note that I am not accusing him of anything, simply posing the possibility of collusion, which is reasonable given the massive incomplete information we're working with here). And no, I don't get the espionage charge -- I think there's a pretty big gap between him and, say, the Rosenbergs.

[Recent NSA leaks]

In light of all the revealing going on about the secret surveillance programs and methods used by the NSA, what are you guys' opinions on this matter? Are you totally cool with it? Are you cool with it, with the only exception being that it was secret? Are you against it? Do you think Snowden should be tried for espionage for leaking these materials?

And if you're not from the US, what are your opinions about the whole thing? Would you care if this sort of thing happened (or is happening) in your own country?

1) With the NSA, here's the problem -- the 4th amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, with people's effects being protected from the government with the SOLE EXCEPTION of a WARRANT. However, I *believe* the Supreme Court ruled in the late 70s something to the effect that the government can acquire records from a third party so long as they give permission or submit a subpoena; in this case, the third party being Verizon or Google -- in effect, so long as you use practically any electronic communication, which naturally involves a third party, the government is able to get proof of communication without a warrant, but not the content of the messages itself. The NSA takes this to a massive scale, absorbing pretty much EVERY phone call record of every citizen that uses these third party, period -- this is called meta-data.

The problem is that you can use this meta-data to track/stalk people and can even derive an undue amount of personal information about a person without even checking the content of the message, using basic logical deduction. I think the Supreme Court needs to review this issue again, and I hope a case comes up which presents the opportunity. My concern is A) FISA courts failing to reject more than like 1/2000 warrants given to them, which is suspicious, and B) the NSA is supposed to monitor FOREIGN conversations, or did we forget the purpose of the FISA act here?

So no, this bothers me a ton. I'm a rather conservative person, and this is one of the few issues where your stance on the matter isn't really broken down by party lines.

2) As for Snowden, I really don't know. I'm REALLY glad that he brought this to light, since we NEED to have this conversation here and we should have this information, "classified" or not. This information goes to the basic function of the NSA. A guy revealing that the government is spending vast resources to spy on its own people should not be a crime -- never mind that the entity that is guilty of espionage against its own citizens is trying to accuse Snowden of it, which is hypocritical at its core. As for the people who claim that he should be punished for breaking down the U.S. talks with China, all he did was point out that the U.S. was doing what it was accusing China of doing. Why, then, is the story that he supposedly harmed U.S. interests by uncovering the information, and not that the government compromised its own position (and morals) by doing those acts which we condemned China for doing in the first place? I think he helped the case as to why we don't need a large and inherently dysfunctional government, and how it damages both liberty and national interests.

With that being said, though, the fact that he fled to China is a wee bit suspicious. I doubt that his intentions are completely pure. I think it will suffice to leave it at that.

[Making archers better]

That was done in Radiant Dawn, but it failed miserably at making them worth using because the accuracy penalty at 3 range was too great.

That's because they went overboard on the accuracy ding. I mean, I'm imaging javelins being around 70 hit and longbows being around 70-75 hit here, not like 55-65 hit. Enough to make them situational, but not useless.