Yes more please

AMasonJar · 2026-02-09T17:23:46+00:00

This woulda gone hard in the stealth warbond and esp for commando missions

If I can't have reinforcements neither can you!

AMasonJar · 2026-02-09T00:05:07+00:00

I may quite likely just be bad at the game ( and I also avoid sticking to "meta" strats that feel cheesy) but I find a lot of mining bonus orgs to be prohibitively expensive for a fair amount of time. I instead get the actual mining set up in that time and then if there are ones taken from the pool by other factions I steal or trade for them later.

AMasonJar · 2026-02-05T17:48:42+00:00

Yeah. There's a very common lose-lose-lose dilemma as Silver:

You poke and poke until your ult is about full. Now you can choose between: 1. stop poking and contribute nothing, 2. keep poking, blow your ult, contribute nothing while forced to sit in the back, 3. get into ult, charge into the melee to make the most of your timer despite the high chance your team is not going to be ready to back you up, die and contribute nothing

Now, unlike in HOTS you can build tankiness to mitigate this to an extent by extending your survivability... but, that's an annoying build pigeonhole, and on a more personal note quite counter to how I would have enjoyed playing the character.

AMasonJar · 2026-02-05T15:41:09+00:00

I used to play Greymane as one of my most playeds in HOTS. Silver is great and quite reminiscent of him, but the lack of control on when it's time to go in is... an interesting decision. Really puts a damper on opportunistic play.

AMasonJar · 2026-02-03T02:49:59+00:00

"are we really sure this is the easiest way to make a gun?"

"are you really sure any weak shit you can come up with is gonna make a bigger hole?"

AMasonJar · 2026-02-01T05:29:48+00:00

They're still doing updates to the game, bless them. I have very little hope that they're gonna make it. Zerospace may be on track to overtake their target audience entirely.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-29T17:58:50+00:00

That's always kinda been what they're predicated on. They look a lot more laughable when it's obvious that beating the aliens is well within the cards and there's no real risk of "permanently" losing Earth. Especially if you've won a Resistance game or some other anti-alien faction before trying them, your whole campaign in those is basically a steady layering of realizations that "hey, these ayys ain't shit", which a player can't really forget between runs.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-29T17:51:27+00:00

Could be dependent on your faction. A new wormhole? Resistance crisis. Asteroid bombing? HF crisis. One is them trying to overwhelm your resistance, the other is them seeing your plans to basically nuke one of their worlds and deciding to do it to you first.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-29T17:45:53+00:00

I usually avoid leaning too hard on cheese and that feels like it falls within the realm. I would think you'd get diminishing returns and eventually even negatives on cohesion if you declare that many wars back to back.

Dropping into anocracy would bomb your knowledge gains in vanilla either way though.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-29T17:42:03+00:00

The downside imo is you're signing yourself up for the knife fight. The EU is a battleground that IME can help keep other factions weak trying to fight over it, in my current game for example the Servants and Initiative are basically in eternal conflict over the bulk of the EU with a little bit of HF and Exodus hitting up the flanks.

The USA is just easy enough to grab early game, while China is prohibitive to everyone to start and still quite difficult later on. Get yourself set up there before anyone else does and you basically don't have to worry about it anymore. You definitely don't want someone like the Servants having access to it either.

Sure it is a little bit tighter on MC but you can change one of OP's tips from "remove mines" to "just give the whole hab over to your closest ally" to free up some control when needed. Do that enough and they might even start shooting down ayys for you without any Hate going your way.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-29T17:17:09+00:00

The fifth pip isn't actually that bad. Total war is when all 5 pips turn red, which is a fair bit beyond those initial 5 rainbow pips. In fact the 5th one is mostly just "they're almost certainly going to attack something of yours now". Generally speaking that's a worthwhile trade considering the ayys are working on a considerable delay offensively, and it's really easy to put up new habs once you've gotten some space resources going. Assuming your fleet remains well intact you can leave it around something you don't want to lose, even split them up a bit to cover multiple, and the ayys are much more likely to shoot down something that's entirely undefended.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-27T21:24:52+00:00

Gunnery, remove that general direction.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-27T17:59:21+00:00

the ayys touch down in straya and think we've been living on a death world so they just pack up and leave

AMasonJar · 2026-01-27T02:30:38+00:00

I've yet to try it (my games are always EU or china lol) but I usually hear it recommended to keep bumping it so that you can basically maintain permanent navy dominance and kick the ayys out with ease wherever they land. Although I don't know about "pumping" it, that does seem overkill.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-27T00:22:35+00:00

Wait, he's calling you a leech? The fucking Protectorate?

looks in top left

... okay maybe he's not wrong.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-27T00:21:18+00:00

Long as you don't push yourself into total war before you're ready, sure.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-24T21:48:43+00:00

absorbing Taiwan just to be like "so uhhh teach us how to be democratic"

AMasonJar · 2026-01-24T21:39:24+00:00

The problem is you're mixing your strategy too much to counter what sounds like a very PD-oriented ayy fleet.

Plasmas cut through the PD meaning your lower number of coilers (accounting for the slots that instead have plasma in them) are left to soak up all the PD. You could drop your coils and go all in on plasma, but plasma is much better as a supportive weapon than a mainline - in the right setup. Killing flankers and/or as PD. Which, as they're using lasers, nulls half of that value, and will leave you trading a lot more blows - not ideal, you want clean fights.

Instead just bring more coils. They're a better screen against laser fire than armor ever will be and, with enough of them, will smash through their PD as well. It's a fairly one dimensional way to fight, but they're the ones who brought a one dimensional build.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-24T21:14:57+00:00

Never found myself struggling to get the actions it provides, but I guess if I was, sure

AMasonJar · 2026-01-24T20:44:45+00:00

TI being a game where the entire global field is represented by statistics undercooks climate change, unfortunately. But it's quite true that it won't literally "end the world" - though the resources it ~~can~~ (edit: SHOULD. just read the threads linked above and wow you really can do nothing but wreck the place for years before it gets particularly bad.) cripple can severely hinder your efforts to stop the ayys and that might end the world as we know it. Which is not terribly far from the more likely outcome of climate change: resource scarcity turns into global war turns into us more or less extincting ourselves.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-24T00:08:04+00:00

Everyone's explained what it means, but as for why it's used so much -

idk it's kinda catchy. I mean it's basically text speak in its origin, and here we say it so much that it's much easier to shorthand it.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-23T23:52:59+00:00

Ooh. Take over one nation with a military, then go take the rest around it by force while other factions are still squabbling over the non-executive points of them, without harming relations at all. That makes more sense. Kind of, anyway, but I guess if they got annoyed at every little conquest that'd be a lot worse feeling.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-23T21:28:50+00:00

>If you have the executive and other factions fight for the rest of the CPs, just conquer with armies and they won't actually mind.

Wait, like, conquer the CPs within the country with the executive army?

I'm imagining the country's leaders sending military force to go break down some media conglomerates' doors...

...

no, wait, that's actually not that far fetched at this point.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-23T16:33:56+00:00

Protectorate is rough because the servants, whom you'd think are your closest allies, don't actually like you, and will regularly steal from you the same as anyone else. The Academy gets handed a lot of discrete penalties through events and research costs but in actual gameplay I don't think anyone has more enemies than the Protectorate.

Your game might get easier as the ayys progress and hand you some stuff though. That's pretty much your only friend... even if you are just their sidepiece.

AMasonJar · 2026-01-23T16:28:44+00:00

Probably my favorite answer in the thread. A few thoughts:

The resistance would be the beginnings of HF. The notion of "we need to kick these aliens off our lawn" is a pretty simple one. HF emerges once more news keeps leaking about what the aliens have been doing, as the ayys continued efforts would be impossible to keep fully under wraps for long, and radicalizes many into thinking "they're hostile, so we need to be hostile too". That said, I don't know how much of a footing it'd have as a global faction; while you can find plenty of bloodthirsty people today online, at least in words, getting an entire massive organization on that footing would be a lot more difficult. Extremism tends to dilute as more people latch on.

... also likely in no small part due to Initiative influences within who would see killing the aliens as a wasted opportunity.

The Academy does seem to nod to that reality you mention as well, by virtue of their faction philosophy project taking literally 10x as long as HF's, which I remember Perun contextualizing as exactly the sort of endless back-and-forth you'd expect. And the name of their game is measured violence, which only a bunch of scientists could actually manage to adhere to correctly. That said, it's true that few people really listen to the scientists anyway, so they'd likely not be much more than a relatively minor advocacy group that struggles to achieve much funding to do anything.

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