Dark Side Unit Analysis Part 7: Dwarves and Zwergr


Dwarves have dropped their flavorful, interesting factional Ability of Drunkenness for...

Resentful
A unit type that inflicts damage to this unit will take 20% more damage from the next attack this unit makes against that unit type.

... basically a(n arguably) slightly less bad version of the old Human gimmick of Favored/Personal Enemy. Like, yes, they'll 'remember' everything that attacks them, but they also have to be injured each time they want the damage bonus, and while it's large enough that it isn't necessarily drowned out by damage variance, it's still pretty minor. I'm not sure why Dark Side did that. To move away from using Red Sands content?

Racial relations-wise, Dwarves have moved to...

-5 Morale from Orc presence in allies.
-5 from Demonic presence in allies.
-5 Morale from Undead presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Light Human presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Traitor Human presence in allies.
-3 Morale for Light Elf presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Dark Elf presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Zwergr presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Viking presence in allies.

... the same basic xenophobic Light race stuff we saw with Humans. Notably, they also don't get along well with Light Humans.

Zwergr AKA Dark Dwarves, meanwhile...

-5 Morale for Light Human presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Traitor Human presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Light Elf presence in allies.
-3 Morale for Dark Elf presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Light Dwarf presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Viking presence in allies.

... are, much like Traitor Humans, the flipped version of their counterparts, except that they don't care about the 'core' Dark races.

That Zwerg get along poorly with the so-very-useful Traitor Humans is one of many reasons I tend to struggle to justify using Zwerg, and far from the most severe one.

As with Humans and Traitor Humans, Light Dwarves have Of The Light and Zwergr have Of The Dark.


Dwarf/Zwerg
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 240
Leadership: 85
Attack/Defense: 20 / 16
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 75
Damage: 8-12 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Armored (+20% Physical resistance), Vengeful (If the stack is below 50% of its original numbers, it always crits), Resentful

Losing the Drunken mechanics really hurts, but it's nice they've kept their armor. They're also technically one of the better abusers of Resentful, since it combines nicely with Vengeful and crits don't have damage variance (Meaning a Vengeful stack is clearly getting a damage boost out of Resentful), but that involves taking massive casualties. And Vengeful isn't even as good now that crits are only 100% damage instead of 150%. Not to mention that the Viking could boost crit damage further, and no class does that in Dark Side.

Really, if they'd just been given Furious I'd probably rate them as still an okay unit, but as-is you'll have much better options well before you get access to Zwerg. Not even getting into their cost having been bumped up by 20 gold.

Design-wise, the Zwerg is representative of the main color trends of Zwerg units; swapping in red coloration, tending to have dark grey beards, and washing out the rest of the colors. It's not a bad look, but most Zwerg don't really stand out.

As enemies, they can be a problem, but that has to do with a change to Foremen, so we'll get to that when we get to them.


Miner/Miner
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 40
Leadership: 20
Attack/Defense: 8 / 8
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 22
Damage: 3-4 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Strike (Charge: 1. All Miners purge all ongoing status effects and raise their Defense by 10%, but cease to retaliate when attacking. Foremen in the army temporarily increase their Initiative, Speed, and crit chance)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Night Sight (+50% Attack in underground and/or nighttime battles), Resentful

With the loss of the Drunken mechanics, they're basically flatly worse, including that Strike's Defense boost is nearly nonexistent now. Also, inexplicably, Strike doesn't display anywhere except for the lower-right corner you activate Talents from, making it impossible to see unless it's both your unit and its turn.

They're overall a bit better off than they were in Armored Princess, but you have access to such amazing units before you get a hold of Miners, and Miners remain only tolerably decent if combined with Foremen. And the thing is Foremen have been bound less tightly to Miners, further worsening the argument in favor of Miners.

A funny mechanics note: using Strike on a Phantom Miner or a Flames of Passion Miner will instantly kill that Miner stack, since they have a status effect that kills them when it runs out, regardless of why it went away. This has always been true, but it's a lot more likely to crop up since Flames of Passion is essentially guaranteed access and is quite useful.

And yes, the Dark version has the exact same name.


Cannoneer/Cannoneer
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 800
Leadership: 220
Attack/Defense: 30 / 22
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 140
Damage (Default): 6-10 Physical
Damage (Siege Gun): 12-20 Physical
Resistances: 10% Fire
Talents: Salvo (Reload: 1. A ranged attack with equivalent range to the Cannoner's base, which does 18-30 Physical damage against a single target)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Archer (Range: 7), Siege Gun (Calls the Siege Gun attack against Gremlins and everything else considered to be an 'object'), No Melee Penalty, Resentful

Base damage has lost 2 points to max and 1 point to minimum and so too has Salvo been reduced, bringing them back to their original damage numbers. Otherwise... they've lost their Drunken effects, and that sucks. Resentful isn't exactly great for them, either.

And yes the Zwerg version has the exact same name, just like Miners and Miners.

When you do get access to them for yourself, it's difficult to justify using them over your existing excellent ranged options, particularly since they're still suffering from their dropped Initiative and unlike Warriors of the North they don't have the knockback utility. You'll always have access to Imps and Scoffer Imps in large numbers, for example, and Catapults are available from earlier and still generally more useful for bolstering you in Keeper fights. They're not terrible, just pushed aside by other, more accessible units, which is a bit of a recurring problem in Dark Side.

This includes that they still have the hidden quality that, if not targeting an Object, they only lose 20% of their damage when firing beyond their effective range instead of the usual 50%... but Imp and Scoffer Imp Fireballs don't have range penalties at all, Catapults can potentially spam their Talent to ignore ranged penalties entirely, etc, so even this is less notable an edge now.


Alchemist/Chemist
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1100
Leadership: 270
Attack/Defense: 25 / 35
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 170
Damage: 10-25 Poison
Resistances: 25% Poison
Talents: Potion of Poison (Charge: 1. Target a single enemy unit, with an effective range of 8. It takes 5-15 Poison damage and is Poisoned, while adjacent units take 30% damage but still get Poisoned), Fire Water (Charge: 1. 10-20 Fire damage to one enemy unit, with an effective range of 8, and Burns the target), Healing Mixture (Charge: 1. Heals an ally by 15 Health per Alchemist)
Abilities: Poison Protection (25% Poison Resistance), Acid Spray (Ranged attack striking through all targets up to 3 tiles out, melee range enemies can't retaliate, with a 15% chance to Poison each target), No Melee Penalty, Applied Science (When any potion Talent is depleted, it's replaced by a Talent that will add 1-2 charges to the potion Talent in question, with a 50% chance of either possibility. These recharging Talents have no reload time at all)

Notably, Potion of Poison and Fire Water have actually gained a step of effective range! (... in the GoG version, bizarrely enough. In the Steam version, they still have only 7 maximum range) And still only lose 20% damage if thrown beyond their effective range, which actually matters given Dark Side is really fond of really big battlefields.

I'm bemused that the EEEEVIL Alchemist is... a chemist. Modern science: evil! This is even funnier when you consider the plot, where lots of (Light) Dwarves get all offended about how they're chemists, not horrible backwards superstitious alchemists. Though admittedly a bunch of the ones that do this go turncoat, so it's not exactly inconsistent? It's all a bit strange, anyway. I actually quite like the Chemist's color scheme, in any event. One of the better Dark reskins.

They've straight up lost the ability to Magic nuke enemies, presumably due to the Dark/Light split mechanics. The healing isn't even any greater! Their ability to recharge potions no longer deals with a reload mechanic at all, which is nice for letting you keep the pressure on with eg Fire Water against Undead.

An amusing little touch is that Healing Mixture causes the targeted unit to play its 'hooray I finished a stack!' animation. It's a clever way of conveying gratitude for having been healed without having to invent any new animations, even if it works better on some units than others. On a more mechanical note, while the in-game description explicitly claims it won't work on mechanical units, Droids are fair game. Mind, by the time you have access to Chemists your Leadership will be so high that healing without resurrection only makes sense on high Leadership units like Archdemons, and even there is probably not very good, so in the end this oversight is more amusing than anything else, but hey.

Also not helping Healing Mixture's case is that it's bugged so you can't actually recharge it: when you use the charge, it gets replaced with the Talent for making more charges, and if you click that Talent the game will play the animation, end their turn, and have the combat log report how many potions they made... but they won't actually get back the ability to throw Healing Mixtures. Oops.

An easily-overlooked difference is in their AI: in previous games, Alchemists would generally stand wherever they started the battle and use their Talents. (This was particularly flawed in The Legend, since they couldn't recharge their Talents) In Dark Side they'll attempt to close each turn, and tend to prefer using their spray over recharging their Talents. Whether this makes them more or less dangerous basically depends on your army composition.

In any event, Chemists are one of the better Zwerg to consider splashing into your army. They suffer from tending to be pushed aside by Imps and Scoffer Imps like so many ranged attackers, and in some ways the comparison is more directly harsh -Potion of Poison is basically a Poison-typed Fireball, and Fire Water outright does Fire damage and inflicts Burn- but among other points when you're dealing with dragons or Demons the fact that they can spam a Poison-typed splash damage ranged attack suddenly gains real value compared against a Fire-typed one. Same for less extreme cases, like Knights and Paladins presenting decent Fire resistance and no Poison resistance, though unfortunately the game is ordered so you usually won't be getting access to Chemists when you're still fighting Humans with armor on a routine basis. It comes back to relevance in Atrixus and Helvedia, between the Demon fights and the armored Humans, and if you manage to ninja Sea Charts well you can actually get access to a shockingly early supply of Chemists from Sandy Island, so it's absolutely possible to justify using them, it just takes a bit more work than some other units.


Giant/Giant
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 7000
Leadership: 1600
Attack/Defense: 54 / 60
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 1
Health: 900
Damage: 80-100 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical
Talents: Earthquake (Reload: 1. Attacks all enemy units, the damage dropping off by 10% per tile out. Base damage is 60-80 Physical damage per Giant, with Soaring units taking only 30% of this damage), Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Likes Emerald Green Dragons (+1 Morale if Emerald Green Dragons are in the army), Resentful

Inexplicably lost their Ice resistance, but at least they've kept the Physical resistance and kept Earthquake hitting Soaring units. Losing Drunken effects hurts, though. On the plus side, if you let them get hit by all your enemies, Earthquake will totally benefit from Resentful against all of them at once. That's... not much of a plus, but it's there.

Aesthetically, it's pretty strange that dark Giants embrace the Zwergr red color scheme all the way up to the scales on their dragonskin being red. It would've been sort of an amusing/neat touch if dark Giants had Likes Red Dragons, but nope, they still have Likes Emerald Green Dragons. It genuinely surprises me this got missed, as the King's Bounty games usually have a high level of attention to detail. Dark Side has problems, but this is atypical of even it.

Thankfully, the Giant is the last Zwerg unit to have the exact same name.

Another oddity Dark Side introduces is that AI Giants will pretty much always activate Running... and then use Earthquake without having moved, completely wasting the Running and resulting in a weaker Earthquake than if they'd charged forward. Oops.

Unfortunately, without the other elements Warriors of the North brought to the table and considering how limited the support Zwerg actually get in the final game is, Giants are difficult to justify. I've tried on two separate runs to leverage them, because I really do like Giants as a gameplay piece concept, but they just don't perform that well. This is surprising given that Dark Side is really fond of having enemy battlegroups made of 10 or more stacks instead of the classic 5, and so Earthquake really ought to be more appealing than ever, but it just doesn't work out that way. For one thing, when you're facing the largest stack counts, suddenly things like Imp Fireballs are able to catch their maximum number of targets reliably on the first turn. For another, you've got Spells and Rage and whatnot that are much more useful and effective for handling the mass damage aspect, and it's more important to have units helping take out or disable key oversized/ranged/fast/Talent-based stacks.

At least they got a chance to shine in Warriors of the North.


Foreman/Chief Miner
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 600
Leadership: 130
Attack/Defense: 22 / 28
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 2
Health: 120
Damage: 13-14 Physical
Resistances: -10% Magic, 10% Fire
Talents: Driver's Whip (Charge: 1. A Dwarven/Zwergr ally below Level 4 gains +2 to Speed and Initiative for 2 turns. The chosen unit will be the slowest member of the army. Does not end the Foreman/Chief Miner's turn)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Night Sight (+50% Attack in underground and/or nighttime battles), Chief (Allied Miners double their Attack and Defense. Additionally, Miners using Strike gain +1 to Speed and Initiative and are guaranteed to crit), Resentful

... that is a really awful Zwergr graphic. I can't tell them apart unless they're side by side!

Losing the Drunken effects hurts them, but on the plus side Driver's Whip has been made a little more general. Keep in mind Engineers (Well, Mechanics when talking the Dark version) have dropped a Level in Dark Side, so this can effect basic Dwarves and Engineers in addition to Miners. (It would also include Repair Droids if they weren't now Neutral...) Huzzah! And... that's it, aside from Resentful being in.

The overhaul to Driver's Whip has the notable implication of finally doing away with a long-annoying element of Foremen: that when it's used by enemies, it can be utterly horrifying because the enemy army can be made largely of Miners with no flaws, whereas for the player the only time it being able to effect multiple units helps in a meaningful way is if you're using Phantom on your Miners or perhaps stealing enemy Miner stacks. In Dark Side Driver's Whip is something to pay attention to, but it won't cause literally every stack to come charging at insane speeds, and I really do appreciate that.

Mind, AI battlegroups often include two Foremen, so they still get to leverage the effect more strongly than you do in real terms, but the disparity isn't nearly so dramatic as in Armored Princess and Warriors of the North.

That said, Chief Miners aren't usually particularly worth fielding yourself. Miners are meh, and while Zwerg-the-unit are better off than, say, Dwarves-the-unit back in The Legend, they're still underwhelming compared to other, better-supported and more accessible options like Zombies and Demons-the-unit, leaving Mechanics as something Chief Miners support you might genuinely want to use... and Mechanics don't care much about the Speed boost, while you're better off using Skills and Items to handle the Initiative boosting. Especially since Mechanics already have a solid 5 Initiative and so don't need tons of support!

At least they got a chance to shine in Warriors of the North, much like Giants.


Engineer/Mechanic
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 1100
Leadership: 100
Attack/Defense: 10 / 12
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 60
Damage: 4-6 Fire
Resistances: 15% Fire
Talents: Create A Droid (Charges: 2. Creates a Guard Droid or Repair Droid stack in an adjacent tile, type randomly chosen, whose Leadership totals 26-32 per Engineer/Mechanic in the creating stack), Repair (Charges: 2. Heals an adjacent allied machine-type unit for 23 HP per Engineer/Mechanic in the healing stack), Flash Grenade (Charge: 1. Ranged attack which does 2-5 Fire damage to a single target enemy with a 25% to Burn it, and additionally always Blinds for a single turn all adjacent enemy units of Levels 1-3. Has an effective range of 7), Create Blinding Grenades (Reload: 0. Only appears when out of Blinding Grenades. Generates 1-2 Blinding Grenades with a 50% of either possibility)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Fire Thrower (Can fire up to 3 tiles out, hitting all units in a line, with no chance for affected units to retaliate. 15% chance for any given hit unit to be Burned), No Melee Penalty, Mechanic (Allied Guard Droids and Repair Droids gain +5 Attack and +1 Speed, and Flash Grenade is replaced by Create Flash Grenade when out of charges), Fire Resistance (15% Fire resistance), Resentful

I'm not so fond of the Mechanic's design, by contrast with the Chemist's. It's workable at the darker angle, but it's a bit too similar nonetheless.

Stats-wise, they're 25% of their old Leadership value, with their stats all massively slashed appropriately. (Aside Initiative and Speed being unchanged) They're also a Level down, as I mentioned earlier. They're also noticeably less effective per Leadership at creating Droids, even before you consider that there's no Neatness/Artifactor boosting effect unlike the previous two games. Their repair rate is technically very slightly better, but this is offset by, again, the loss of Neatness/Artifactor boosting. As with Alchemists, they also no longer have a real reload time on replacing their chucked weaponry.

It's an odd change overall, though not a bad one.

The one caveat to that is that while their price was reduced, it's by... 50 whole Gold. That's less than a 5% cost reduction, making them hideously burdensome to get to full Leadership and horribly burdensome to take casualties with compared to prior games. If you're going to use them, give serious consideration to getting a seed population and then abusing Blood Priestess Sacrifice like crazy to keep their numbers up, because their price-point is completely inane.

The bizarre thing is this is an issue introduced specifically in the GoG version: in the Steam version, they have a much more reasonable cost of 300 gold.

A non-obvious change is in their AI: in older games Engineers would generally stand wherever they started the battle, spawning Droids, hurling grenades, and mixing up new ones. In Dark Side Engineers will actually approach every turn, thus closing to flamethrower range of their own volition... though they still strongly prefer using their Talents over actually attacking, so it's not as meaningful as it is with Alchemists.

The main draw of Mechanics, if you're going to use them at all, is very much Flash Grenades. If you want a Fire-resistant unit capable of summoning meatshields, Demons-the-unit and Archdemons blow them out of the water while being much more accessible and widely useful and better supported. The one point in Mechanics' favor in that regard is that you actually have control over their summons, but that's less important than you might expect. Dark Side is simply not a game where precise control over your summons is essential.

Flash Grenades providing a mass Blind effect is essentially a unique benefit, by contrast... if burdened by being bugged so it doesn't let you reload it on Chemists. (The Talent for making more simply doesn't appear for them; it functions properly for Alchemists) At least it still only loses 20% damage for being thrown beyond its effective range.

I personally have never found them compelling enough -for one thing, the hard fights that last long enough that mass Blind might be more useful than fielding more broadly lethal units lean toward higher-Level enemies, limiting the cases where it actually applies- but unlike a lot of the Zwerg they have something going for them.

As enemies, they're annoying, but more for meta placement issues than anything else. Since Tactics in Dark Side doesn't let you separate your units until it's Rank 2, it takes longer than in prior games to reach the point of being able to do away with the Blind issues at the start of a battle -and since Foremen using Driver's Whip pushes them up to 7 Initiative and 4 Speed, they'll quite often go before your Imps and whatnot. Riiiight around the time you're liable to have gotten to Tactics 2 or a high enough combination of Onslaught and Foresight that you can avoid these issues, you're probably basically done fighting Dwarves. If they showed up later in the game, they'd probably be kind of forgettable.

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For whatever reason, you actually quite often get access to Light Dwarven units. This seems to be an accident that was overlooked, as what'll happen is you'll conquer a Dwarven realm and suddenly the shops will add a mix of Zwerg and Dwarven units, biased toward Zwerg. Most likely whoever was setting the shop contents was intending to make them all Zwerg units, and playtesting didn't catch the error. There's not really any reason to use Light Dwarves, but it's worth mentioning that the option exists more meaningfully than you tend to see on Elves and especially Humans.

Unfortunately, while there's some support for Zwerg in the game, it's not nearly as extensive as with Traitor Humans. Part of this is buggy/poorly-implemented mechanics; there's actually two different Titles that provide similar benefits to Nightmare's benefits for Traitor Humans, plus a Title that's widely effective and includes Zwerg in its Leadership slashing and Morale boosting... but as far as I can tell, these Titles aren't properly coded to activate, so in normal play they don't matter. Even so, Zwerg are also just genuinely less supported; the Zwerg-benefiting Titles provide less Leadership reduction and less of a Morale boost than Nightmare gives to Traitor Humans, and there's nothing equivalent to the Item that gives -20% Leadership and +2 Morale for Traitor Humans. All you get is a single newspaper for reducing Zwergr Leadership by -10%, which hey Traitor Humans get their own newspaper for an equivalent effect on top of all their other support.

This leaves Zwerg trying to justify themselves on their intrinsic merits, and with nothing on the level of Drunkenness to boost their relevance. Given that most Dwarven units have always been underperformers/undesirable in player hands...

Yeah.

Next time, we move on to Elves and Dark Elves.

Comments

  1. "stealing Red Sands content" sounds interesting, considering that it was the same guy who made Drunkiness mechanic in both Red Sands and WotN.

    Dwarf/Zwerg-the unit costs 240 gold, not 220.

    Dark Miner has different name in Russian version, but I don't know how to translate it properly. Basically, [light one's name] is a guy who works specifically at undeground mining, while [dark one's name] can work both in undeground mines and on surface ore extraction. Google translates both words as "miner" despite them being completely different in Russian ('шахтёр'/'рудокоп').
    As usual, Miner and his dark collegue do not actually get attack bonus at night - only undeground.
    Strike is not shown because icon for it doesn't exist. In most cases it would just make the talent/spell/skill/etc. in question to have empty icon but show description and like, but in stat window case showing description is linked to picture.

    Dark Cannoneer is called Artillerist in the original.
    Normal ranged attack (not Siege) has only 20% damage penalty for far range.
    Siege attack deals 12-20 damage.

    Alchemist and his dark analogue costs 1100 gold, not 920.
    Potion attacks still have the same range of 7. They also still have only 20% damage penalty for far range.
    It was once possible to use Healing Mixture on enemies of opposite alignment for 15-25 magic damage (no Shackles through), but it was removed relatively early.
    It's description says it doesn't work on plants and mechs, it's script shows it was supposed to be unusable on any inorganics, plants and units that are Immune to Magic*, but due to bug it works on everything. Also, it's description specifically mentions that (Al)chemist can drink it himself, yet he can't.
    *This actually looks weird to me - a potion is not a spell, after all, so maybe I shouldn't implement it? Hm...
    Applied Science' original name is 'person who works with/at applied science (applied scientist?)' as single word. It has equal chances for 1 or 2 potion charges. Healing Mixture creation doesn't work - it ends (Al)chemist turn and plays the animation but doesn't add more charges.

    Dark Giant just uses different word for 'giant' in Russian. We have like 4, I think? Not counting specific ones like 'jotun' or 'velet'. In KB case, light one always used the word that once meant Ancient Greek giants but is generic giant for a loooong time by now. Dark one uses THE generic word for 'giant', through it sometimes assotiated with specifically savage man-eating giants.

    Foreman and his dark counterpart, once again, get attack bonus only undeground - no bonus at night.
    It should be obvious, but Driver's Whip and Chief only affect allies of the same alignment.
    You have mention of Demons-the-unit buffing Zwerg units, which doesn't work.

    Dark Engineer is Technician in the original. As you may remember, in Russian version 'Mechanic' is used for the unit that is 'Repair Droid' in English. What a word-tangle.
    Cost is 300, not 1100.
    Flash Grenade has only 25% chance of causing Burn. It has only 20% damage penalty for far range.
    Switch from Flash Grenade to Create Flash Grenades works properly only for light Engineer. Dark Technician is stuck with zero Grenades after using one.
    50% chance for either 1 or 2 charges.

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    Replies
    1. Got to all of this.

      Strike does have an icon, though? And I don't just mean historically, I mean it still uses its old icon in Dark Side, it just doesn't show up in the stat summary window.

      I double-checked and Chemists do have the effective range of 8 for potion-throwing I have written.

      I similarly double-checked the Mechanic/Technician's cost, and it's 1100. I dunno, maybe the Engineer would cost 300 if I found a source in stores, but the Dark counterpart is 1100.

      As far as I can tell, English has never had a word for specifically referring to above-ground mining -and in fact I was surprised to learn in my mid-twenties that above-ground mining was a thing at all, because pop culture and linguistic constructions entirely avoid the implication, instead making it seem like all ore collection occurs underground no matter what you're digging for. (I was really amused to realize that Spellforce 1's depiction of iron mining, though still wrong in the details, is by far the most accurate video game depiction of iron mining I've ever seen, as getting red-brown ore out of above-ground mining operations is in fact exactly how iron mining works. I always hated what Spellforce 2 did to the resource stuff, and this added one more reason to the pile...) I couldn't begin to guess what the weird history there is. (It's also worth mentioning that in trying to see if I'd simply missed such a word that I'm finding that German apparently had a big influence on general European mining terminology, where a lot of words started out as German terms. And Spellforce 1 was made by a German company. Hmmm...)

      I'm sort of amused on the Giant terminology bit as it sounds like Dark Side would be better off if The Legend had labeled Giants as 'Titans' instead, which in English pop culture often gets used as basically 'greco-roman giants'. (HoMM 3 did this, as an example we've talked about before) Then Dark Side could have its Dark Giants be Giants, which is the most generic term but notably (almost) every time I've seen the savage cannibal giants they specifically get labeled Giants as opposed to some other term. (KB's Jotun is the only time I've seen 'savage cannibal giants' not get labeled as Giants... and it's not an English series and the Jotun came by only in the third game) And thus the original Russian's spirit could've been approximately preserved, actually. Too bad it would require the translators to have seen the future.

      I'm surprised how many bugs Dark Side managed to get onto Dwarves/Zwergr given how lightly Dark Side touches their mechanics. And it's not even concentrated on the actual changes! Ouch.

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    2. On Strike - um, what? Strike's talent activation button has icon, but it's a new one - old one had a wooden sign on stick, new one has clenched fist. Stat window need separate icon for talent (smaller, different resolution, frame being part of the icon instead of part of interface) - and DS doesn not actually have one for Strike.

      Engineer/Technician have cost of 300 for me. I even checked in-game (clean unmodified Steam version) - https://ibb.co/RT2K4Yn
      As you can see, 300 gold.

      Alchemists have effective distance of 7 for me. I can make a screenshot later, if you wish. Well, if PC would behave.
      It feels weird in combination with previous thing through. Version differences exist after all?

      Wait, have you thought that, like, absolutely all ore/mineral extraction was made by digging mines? Or just ore? I mean, it sounds stupid, but after your schools tales even idea of, I dunno, people imagining getting marble from undeground mines feels believable enough.
      I mean, I heard tales about American kids being shocked from learning where does milk come from, so...

      'Titan' is a separate word in Russian. This is not the word used for Dwarven Giants.

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    3. Huh. We may finally have found Meaningful Version Differences That Aren't People Misremembering Or Misinterpreting Things. I'll try to actually get to setting up Google Drive links or something in the next couple of days -this is too clear. Remind me what DS file I'm liable to need to extract for you to compare?

      I've heard stories of inner-city kids reacting with "He pulled that out of the ground and ATE IT" about vegetables; most Americans are city kids at this point, and a lot of them genuinely think food comes from the grocery store until sometime in their teens.

      As for my own concept, I was very hazy about everything to do with minerals/ores/metals. Pop culture was largely interested in underground mines to have ghosts or demons or whatever haunting them and/or to have the dramatic threat of cave-ins looming, while school touched on minerology but it was focused on stuff like 'if volcanic action produced it, we call it X Technical Term' rather than real-life practical applications. I managed o pick up on the fact that at least SOME rocks/ores/metals of value in the ground could be gotten without digging an underground mine, primarily because the Gold Rush inevitably called for school to bring up panning in rivers for gold, but the idea of a serious surface mine simply never came up, or at least only got alluded to/presented in very oblique ways. (In retrospect, TV sometimes depicted modern surface mines, but they were never identified as such or otherwise properly contextualized so at the time I had no idea why I sometimes saw these vast dirt pits being worked by heavy machinery) Video games often presenting deliberately fictionalized renditions of resource harvesting didn't help -since I knew stuff like Starcraft Mineral Fields were a gameified abstraction, I was set up to assume the same of Spellforce 1's actually surprisingly grounded depiction of above-ground mines/quarries rather than assume it was based at all on reality.

      So: I didn't explicitly think that marble was pulled up from deep underground or the like, but this is because I had nearly no model whatsoever to begin guess at how these things actually worked.

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    4. So about Strike - are our games simiar on this or not? Talent button having clenched fist picture, I mean. With old 'wooden sign in stick' not being anymore.

      Is food, like, produced inside of the store or something? :) I'm really curious.
      I am a city person to the point I, sadly, never even being at countryside, village or anything, but the idea of shop making food is still sounds amusing. I think when I was little kid (pre-school), media/books/whatever for kids (or, and fairytales too) often had moments/episodes with people farming and thus producing the food for everyone.
      I actually can easily imagine that kid who did not watched/read such stuff will be unfamiliar, but on purely emotional level it's still funny.

      I wanted to ask if English have words like "general word for worker of ore/mineral/etc. extraction, be it person who dig, a mining ingeneer, or someone else" or words like "coal miner as single word", but I guess if they exist, they are some very specific terms that general population don't use.
      You know, I'm now interested why does Russian language even have all this words. Hm...
      Side note: speaking of missing words - every time I read your "I barely knew/imagined X until I was late teen/grown man", I feel some emotion I can't really find name for.

      On unit comparison - just dark_alchemist.atom and dark_ingeneer.atom from game directory/sessions/darkside/ses.
      If you want to compare light versions too, then I'll need alchemist.atom and ingeneer.atom from game directory/data/data. If your game is modded (by GoG maybe), those files may also be present in game directory/sessions/darkside/ses - in this case take them from here, but tell me that.

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    5. I think I've got the file stuff set up. Got the previously-discussed AP and WotN files while I was at it. First time I've done this so I won't be surprised if I missed some step, but here we go;

      https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1U2vrCml8vb2G-A_78CXLiGVQT9mtFGgu?usp=sharing

      Oh, and the light Engineer/Alchemist files came from the data folder; as far as I can tell, they're not in the Dark Side session folder, no.

      Yeah, Strike's icon is a fist for me too. I just misunderstood your original explanation.

      I've seen pop culture play with the 'food factories in the grocery store' sort of concept, so I suspect that is more or less what a lot of kids have as their concept for a while. I wouldn't know personally as my own life had too many elements that pointed directly at real food mechanics from a very young age -farmer grandparents where 'milk comes from cows' was casually an assumed part of stuff they talked about, one of them hunted to bring in meat throughout his life, Looney Tunes among other cartoons similarly touching on farming as food production (Depicting farmers getting eggs from chickens, for example), I was always interested in learning about animals and their diet was invariably a major part of the discussion so I was continuously reading 'this is a carnivore, it eats its fellow meaty animals' or 'this is an herbivore, it eats plants growing in the wild' and never 'this is a factoryvore, it eats death-free nutritional supplements spat out of a food factory' and so had a pretty clear sense that food was more or less always a living thing, and I was always into video games and a lot of the kinds of video games I was into casually touched on ideas like 'you need farms to support your army' and not 'you need grocery stores to feed your people'.

      So for me hearing the 'he pulled that out of the ground and ate it!' sort of stories, or the 'oh my god you killed a living thing to eat it I'm horrified by that idea, now hand me more chicken nuggets' obliviousness... were (And still are) alien experiences where I have no idea what kind of life one would need to lead to zig-zag past all the blatant clues of How Food Works.

      (To be fair, I spent a while unsure where a lot of 'artificial' foods fit into all this; if somebody had told me that poptarts were somehow made in a factory without animal or plant components being part of the food, I might've believed them)

      I'm actually curious about the opposite: why does English in particular rely so heavily on generification and compounding multiple words into stock phrases? This is something I've long felt was a pattern, that where English goes 'okay, you work in a mine, it's a coal mine, so clearly you're a coal miner', other languages invent a singular word for the concept. (English approximation: "I know, we'll call you a coaler.") I've yet to find any evidence of other people even recognizing it as a pattern, let alone trying to hypothesize an explanation, and I've wondered for a while now if this oddity is in any way connected to English successfully becoming something of a global language, like maybe it's easier to learn it (In spite of all its stupid, incoherent nonsense rules filled with exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions) than average. (A hypothesis sparked in part by what I've read about Japanese kanji, where being a bare-minimum level of literate is a brutally high minimum bar, and my understanding is that an unknown kanji is unlikely to have its meaning guessable from context)

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    6. I need "dark_alchemist.atom"-like files, not "army_dark_alchemist.atom"-like. DS files you provided are for global map armies' animations/effects. Like, a Zwerg army that is represented by Chemist on global map.

      I checked WotN file and have not found any problems with Skald's ability. Tested your file in game - https://youtu.be/_TPQbS_pFrI As you can see, it works for me. So if it doesn't in your game, it must be somehow blocked by something outside of it's script. This ability doesn not use any other files for data, so can't just guess what can possibly cause it.

      Same with AP and Gizmo. Using your file brough back the bug with Stone Rain showing damage of Earth Blades, as expected, but Gizmo still shows the same damage in the book hint and when hover over target. And then deals that shown damage. https://youtu.be/elexR9K0Pdk

      Spikes are fine too - if Brontor attacked by unit, attacker won't receive counertattack, and attacker and Brontor are on adjacent tiles, and attacke doesn not have special "ignore spikes" parameter, then deal damage to attacker. Exactly the same as mine. Adjacent tiles check makes Spikes triggering on Dragon's breath impossible, and indeed - https://youtu.be/mj2EF9nWJaE


      I once heard from a phylologist that English got a strange wave of general language simplification a few centuries ago. She actually named specific century and theories on why it happened, but I wasn't really interested and forgot all that. And, of course, I don't know if it's true at all - she wasn't any kind of renowed specialist or anything like it and just told about this English stuff in informal talk.
      She believed that this simplification indeed later helped English to become global language. And I think according to her illogical rules are just remnants of older English; once it all (or most of it atleast) made sense. Any language have such artefacts, through it indeed feels like English have more than most.
      And yes, English is indeed rather easy to learn on 'I understand common speach' level. Speaking/writing on it is harder, of course.
      Btw, kid version of me found was most weirded (is it a word?) by grammatical articles (many languages have them, but not Russian) and by essentially lack of grammatical cases* with prepositions having increased role instead. Or just nothing being used there at all. Propably unclear again, let's take word "home/дом" for example and compare:
      Это мой дом It's my home
      Я иду домой I'm going home
      Я дома I'm at home
      You got the idea.

      * 'Grammatical case'. Two words, with one being pretty long to boot. And sounds rather 'bookish'? Like, it was made up by linguists to use among themselves. In Russian it's just 'падеж'. Short, means this specific thing, sounds perfectly fine in casual speach. Don't took it wrong, Russian have a some unwieldly words/word constructions (through usually for complicated things) or dumb things etc., it's just, well, we discuss this weird love of word-construction English have - and even linguistic terms are word constructions themselves. Amusing, in a way.

      You are correct about Japanese kanji. And understanding rare kanju can be problematic even for native speakers. And then there is pronunciation thing, like "this kanji normally pronounced as [sei], but in this specific word it is pronounced as [bu]" because, um, historical reasons?" Again, even native speakers have problems with it, sometimes even writing it's pronounciation; you may saw something written in kanji with smaller kanji above a word.

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    7. Try two to upload the correct files done.

      Well, the GoG bugs with The Legend are fixed by using a different .exe file, so... I wouldn't be surprised if AP and WotN also have their exe files modified for the GoG release. Or Dark Side for that matter.

      Hmm, was hoping I could google up something about this, but so far no result. References to many centuries of scholars/monks/etc hating the way the language was written at the time and desperately trying to push for more coherent rules (Generally with limited or no success), but not this particular topic, alas.

      But yeah, English seems to have a lot more habitual word-theft, and there might be cultural factors at work in other realms? Like, a thing that happens with immigrants to America is they may (Or may not) choose to Anglicize their names to better fit in, and there's a notable rate of this resulting in names that effectively have no apparent linguistic root because it's an attempt to make an English-sounding name out of something that's French or whatever. I've never been clear if this is a broader trend I've just only heard in regard to my own country or if it's actually more unusual than that.

      'Weirded' is, nowadays, a word that several spellchecks will recognize. When I was a kid it was one of those words kids intuitively arrived at as a sensible extension of what they were learning and then got glared at by teachers and told That's Not A Word. With the rise of the internet my impression is quite a few words have had this experience -gone from being suppressed by official sources to (often grudgingly) embraced because everybody uses it even though the scholars hate it.

      If I'm following you+Wikipedia correctly, you're saying that in Russian you don't say 'the house/a house/my house', you instead have variations on the foundation word 'house' that inherently denote contexts like 'the house I am referring to is mine'?

      And yeah, I've incidentally run across the 'kanji, with stuff above it to explain it' thing. (I first ran across it in regards to Metroid Fusion, because I learned the Japanese version had a Hard Mode the English-language version lacked, then discovered it had multiple language settings, and ended up digging into it and learning one of them was a For Kids setting that both stuck to a small, more child-friendly range of words but also added explanatory bits above a lot of the words so a player would know the correct pronunciation and all. And from there learned this is pretty common in Japanese-language games aimed at children, which was something of a lightbulb moment for me about assorted bits about Japanese pop culture trends I'd always found curious)

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    8. Your Chemist has 7 distance and your Technician costs 300 gold.
      So session files are overrided by something.

      Um, my home example was about grammatical cases. Variations of 'house' are about directions/position relative to it. For example, "it's time to go home" will be just "пора домой" in Russian. The first word means ''period of time, assotiated with something' (is there English analogue?), second one is form of "home" with built-in direction towards it. Or "I'm at home now" will be "я сейчас дома". "I" + "now" + "being-inside-home". We have a lot more complicated verb forms too, but you propably have enough with this already. Non-native speakers often find those word-forms to be really hard to get, but for us it's natural while, for example, English variant feels both weirdly simplistic and at the same time complicated due to all those additional short words.
      As for grammatical articles - we have sentences built in such way that it is normally inherently clear if it's 'a' something or 'the' something. And instead of things like "she ate her soup" we usually just say "she ate soup" - it is considered belonging to her by default. Actually putting 'her' in this sentence will mean that this soup made by her (as opposed to other food around made by someone else) or specifically personally for her while other people around eat something else. We have an occasional thing with "X is considered Y unless specifically said otherwise".

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    9. Hmmm. Just to check: my exe file, when I check its Properties, is listed with a version of 1.5.1048.1751. Is that different from your Steam version number?

      I'm unfortunately not really following the new linguistic explanations, which I suppose isn't really a surprise -explanations of grammar and so on in English were always largely incomprehensible to me. Still often are, honestly.

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    10. Steam version is 1.5.1047.1747, so it looks like we have our answer. Exe overriding session archive is still kinda weird through. And changing such stats by chance sounds questionable.

      Or I am just bad at explaining things. With language structure differences making it harder still. Ah well.
      Maybe I can try again.
      In Russian we words have many sub-forms (that aren't separate words) that add something to meaning. And we have this thing when some considered to have "X context" by deafault, unless said otherwise.
      If try with "it's time to go home" again. Key ideas of it are "time", "moving" and "home", right?

      In English: we need "it" and "is" to point that "time" is 'now', than we add "to" for pointing what to do, "go" to represent moveing, and "home" as our goal. You are a native English speaker, for you it all is inherently understandable. For kid version of me - not so much.

      In Russian: we take "пора", meaning "time period for something or assotiated with something". If "пора" used without at the beginnig of sentense, it authomatically contexts to "time period for doing something is now". So instead of English "it is time to" Russian just uses one word. Now we go to grammatical case thing - take "home/дом". While in English we need add word "go" to explain moving towards it, in Russian we take "дом" and apply one of 6 grammatical cases to change it "домой" - "[moving in direction to] home". So together we have "пора домой" - essentially "current time period is for moving in direction of home" = "time to go home". Propably sounds complicated for you, but for native Russian speakers it's intuitively undrstandable. English structure through... Oh, and in Russian once can instead say "домой пора" - and it will be correct as well, while saying "to go home it's time" sounds stupid unless speaker is Yoda.

      Try to imagine it from kid me perspective. Instead of words having default meaning that just alternated by context, English has all this "a/an", "the", "it's"... Instead of variations of single word that add context to it's meaning, English either uses prepositions, nothing at all or requires additional context for understanding. Like, for example, both Russian "на стол" and "на столе" become "on the table". The former means something needs/supposed to be put on table, the latter means something already being at the table - but in English it's the same; one NEED to have additional context to understand details.
      And than we have verbs... I still constanly make mistakes with them when write in English, and I have strong suspicion it will never change. I mean, look at this:
      "играть" - "play"
      "играю" - "I play"
      "играл" (male, repeatedly) - "he played" + additional context needed
      "сыграла" (female, once) - "she played" + additional context needed
      "поиграю" - "will play"
      "сыграю" - "will play once"
      "играя" - "while playing"
      "доигрываю" - "I'm finishing current playing session"
      "поигрывали" - "they(plural) occasionally played"

      Surely you got the idea here atleast. Try to imagine how learning your language felt to kid-me. On one hand, just "play/played/playing" forms look very simple. Almost uncanny simple. On the other hand - instead of just morphing one word one constantly MUST add all those context-giving words, prepositions, grammatical articles...
      It kinda works like "Russian puts more meaning in individual words, while sentense structure is not that important" vs "English put meaning into sentenses, while individual words contain mimimum information". Switching form one to another can be hard.
      I guess some people could say that this difference means something about our mental differences and the like but I know nothing about such things.

      ...It was not planned to be that long. Sorry.

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    11. Alright, updated the post to explicitly note these version differences now that we have strong confidence that's what's actually happening.

      I should note that the GoG version has a lot of additional GoG files, presumably in part to get the cloud save functionality to work outside Steam. (It still includes the Steam API file, to my amusement) I've already tried poking into them and have difficulty imagining any of them could explain THESE changes, but I felt it was worth explicitly mentioning, in case you wanted me to upload them too or whatever.

      This mostly doesn't sound *complicated* so much as it sounds like a long process to learn the full range of possible ways to say individual things in all their permutations, where in English you have to learn the abstract meaning of individual words but they're designed to be very modular once you do know the individual meanings. In turn I imagine it would make 'breaking into' everyday use of the language (Learning Russian as an adult) a longer process, but would maybe actually be easier to pick up as a kid where you're just going to hear all this stuff as you go from contextual use? I can still remember having a lot of trouble as a kid with trying to understand certain words because their underlying meaning was so abstract they could be used in far too many contexts, where I'd start out going "I guess it means X" and then it would get used in a half dozen contexts my original read of it couldn't work for. Not even getting into how many words have multiple very different uses where nowadays I can see how they probably did actually originate from the same root in a coherently logical way but for me as a kid I couldn't see the underlying connection between these uses.

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    12. Out of curiosity, what kind of files? Like, what's their file extension? Through it should be just technical stufff.

      Well, I heard foreigners who tried to learn Russian calling it very complicated. It doesn't feel this way for native speaker, and I never heard about kids having problems with it, unlike some Japanese kids with their kanji.

      Word forms have rules for how they work, there are, of course, exceptions, but generally one need to 'get' the tables and mechanic of word-forms - one doesn't need to memoryze 100500 variations of each word.
      Through if speak about things that give foreigners troubles - there is alos a thing called "animacy", which play a big role for how word form change. It's kinda like dividing all nouns in "person" and "not-person" group. Or maybe sentient/non-sentient. Basically, humans, animals, fantasy/sci-fi races are first group, everything else goes to second. There are some mixed cases, like "robot" uses 'non-sentient' declension in real life, but 'sentient' in sci-fi. "Microbe" is linguistically 'non-sentient', but in casual speach uses 'sentient' declension. And there are some illogical words, like "doll" or Earth-the-planet, that are obviously non-sentient and not exactly people, but use 'sentient' declension. Well, one can kinda guess why.
      English speakers may try to "move" animals to 'non-sentients' group, for example.
      Okay, I'll stop here.

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    13. Two hashdb files, two .info files, two .script files, two .ini files. (Plus an icon file) And yeah, I doubt it's relevant -one of them seems to be just telling the game 'this is the save file path in the GoG version'- but I'm very much not educated on this kind of thing.

      I pretty consistently hear that every language ends up getting foreigners feeling it's 'complicated' or 'hard' or some similar variation. Japanese kanji is the only case I've seen where non-foreigners also go 'oh god please make the hurting stop'. So I tend to default to skepticism about any given individual's assertion about a language's relative complexity/difficulty -in practice the perception seems to be driven primarily by being overwhelmed by learning a new system rather than being a meaningful judgment call of the relative complexity.

      Mostly-consistent modifiers would reduce the learning curve, yeah. I can still imagine a learning adult struggling with it and finding it a pain, though.

      Huh. That's an interesting verbal categorization system, and is suggestive of an explanation for subtle patterns in Russian pop culture I've consumed -that I've noticed that Russian pop culture seems to be a bit more willing to 'cross the line' on defining whether a class of being is a sentient being or not than English-language pop culture, where the sentience-or-lack-thereof is assumed to be baked into a given word. (Example of this creating trouble: when I was growing up, scifi wrestled a lot with this in regards to 'robot', where a lot of people clearly felt a robot HAD to be non-sentient or else it deserved a different word, while other people felt robot was inherently a word you should apply to any sentient automaton and use different terms for non-sentient robots) A language with explicit rules for declaring whether something is A Person or Not A Person would certainly seem to provide a clear grounding for playing with whether a thing is or is not a person, regardless of the accepted conventions therein.

      (I'm put in mind of a thing with Japanese that created a lot of trouble with translations and took me a while to make sense of: that where English draws hard lines between concepts like 'a steel-and-circuits person' and 'a person who is partially flesh-and-blood and partially steel-and-circuits', Japanese pop culture doesn't, with the word usually being used normally being translated into English as 'doll' but being more literally translatable as 'person-shaped' -a thing that LOOKS LIKE a human, but is not a human. So there's a bunch of cases of manga and whatnot where the translation went with cyborg, or android, or robot, or whatever, and it ends up janky when the story reveals that the 'robot' is pure flesh and blood, or the 'cyborg' is pure steel-and-circuits built on an assembly line, or otherwise the translator guess was wrong or the English conventions are simply impossible to map to what the Japanese is going for; English simply doesn't have a proper phrase or word for what I refer to as an 'artificial person' if that person is fully biological but isn't a copy of someone else)

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    14. If we speak about lnagueages anyway, I want to ask a thing. Well, it's propably silly to expect you personally to know answer for this, but...
      I mentioned animals in my previous comment; one my personal problems with English was that I should use "it" it relation to them. I think I still occasionally make mistakes with this. Well, a lot of Russaind do such mistakes.
      Like I said, in Russian animals, be it real-life ones or mythological, use "sentient/person" word-forms. And we call them "he/she", using grammatical gender if actual is unknown. If it's unclear, think of it like "words have default gender for linguistic purpose". Like, viper, shark, crow, lynx, manticore or gargoyle are "female" while crocodile, falcon, raven, nightingale, griffin or phoenix are "male".
      In English animals are called "it", as if they are objects. I know that people can call their pets "he" or "she", but it looks like exception. Obvioulsly, you as native speaker is accustomed to that, but it felt "wrong" for me-the-kid. Still kinda does, to be honest. Does it something like "English has inherent line between humans and everything else? With he/she being human thing."

      My PC problems got MUCH worse, and I won't be able to resolve them for a week atleast. I'll try to do anything, but it looks like that KB comments are on pause. Only silly questions for now :)

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    15. Usage of 'it' for not-inanimate-objects is actually one of those things that's both substantially changed over the course of my life and has always been a bit contentious. In school, yeah, I was formally taught that you use 'it' in regard to animals (Even in cases where it's totally unnecessary -a bull is a male bovine, a cow is a female bovine, but you were still supposed to use 'it' for either rather than he and she), and a lot of the books I read in my earliest days did stick to this approach, but especially nowadays a lot of people (Myself included) will default to using 'they/them/etc' for gender-unknown entities, and it's a lot more normal to use gendered pronouns for animals even when they're not pets.

      As best as I can tell, this particular tidbit is less about the English language itself and more about how the English-speaking world is tilted heavily toward a background of Christian-type beliefs/assumptions, and Christianity is, as far as I can tell, the religion most committed to drawing a line between humans and non-humans and declaring the latter lesser beings. ("God loves humans in specific, the world was made by Him for humans alone, only humans have souls", etc) And when I was a kid, Christian values had a lot more of a stranglehold on pop culture and education and so on (In spite of US law on paper demanding a separation of the church from governmental institutions like school) than they do nowadays -I dunno how much people outside the US have heard of this stuff, but there's a three decade or so period where America regularly got 'moral panic' from (Christian) parents about specific bits of pop culture; Dungeons and Dragons being reviled as Satanism, Doom inciting moral panic for also being Satanism (Never mind that it's all about heroically murdering the forces of Hell), Harry Potter having people burning its books because it 'teaches witchcraft' (lol), and assorted less memorable examples I only hazily remember happening. More subtly, when I was a kid, it was 'in the air' that pop culture and consumers of it had to treat the Bible and stuff derived from it with more respect, as if it had more legitimacy, than other religions, where it was okay to have Fantasy Buddhism But The Fantasy Buddha Is Actually Evil but a similar turn of events for a Christian-y Fantasy Religion was unacceptable, whereas nowadays you get people complaining about how The Evil Church is a trope they're tired of because it's 'overused'.

      Personally, I always hated the insistence on 'it' for things that aren't objects because the word 'it' is so heavily laden with connotations that you're discussing something that lacks volition, among other issues.

      And okay, that gives me a bit more time to get caught up on what I'm behind on, so works for me.

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    16. Russians are Christians too, in case you forgot. Quite religious for the most of it's history too (sans last century). Some, khm, passionate people would propably add a joke about non-Orthodox heretics not really counting for Christians. Seriously, I still occasionally see those jokes. Saw one even on Steam forums. Than again, it was a historical game, and in late-medieval Russia idea of "Catholics/Protestants = pagans who cosplay Christianity" was popular enough.
      Maybe Western people took the idea of being special closer to heart.
      I heard about some of things you mentioned, through I don't know how widespread or seriously taken they were. I mean, we (as propably everyone) occasionally have some similar clowns, but they are usually mocked. I think there were even some sort of joke-awards for some time in some regions, specially for such people.
      We had our dose of "Evil Church" trope during Soviet times.

      I can still comment on older posts if needed. Just new ones on pause.

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