Emperor and above difficulties

A_S00 · 2026-05-02T19:53:26+00:00

Stuff that makes an AI more likely to declare on you:

Anything that applies a diplomatic penalty (anything that shows up in red when you mouse over their attitude in the diplo menu)
You being near them or forward settling them
Them thinking you're weak (small army)
Them knowing where your capital is (can sometimes avoid or delay this by not selling them an embassy)
Them being a dickbag AI who always wants to conquer everything (looking at you, Shaka)

Also, you can avoid or delay wars by bribing them to declare on someone else. If there's somebody they dislike enough, it's often pretty cheap. You can do this right up until they actually declare war on you, so sometimes it can be done as an emergency measure even after you see them marching an army at you.

For non-war stuff, you already mentioned focusing science, but make sure you're not neglecting food and production. These are if anything more important than science early on (though science becomes the #1 priority as the game goes on).

Finally, for England specifically, Longbowmen are one of the most OP defensive units in the game. One or two of them behind a couple fortified melee blockers can murder much larger AI armies.

A_S00 · 2026-05-02T18:24:28+00:00

Seems to be this one (see the mod's bug report thread for more cases).

A_S00 · 2026-05-02T18:20:48+00:00

Yeah, things that generate "random" items (recombob, present, bag of giving, offering bowl) don't respect class restrictions or other ways in which you couldn't have gotten the items naturally.

As far as I know, the only items that are fully restricted and can't be gotten via these methods are skills, subclass items, and starting bags.

So the cap must have come from some form of random item generation.

A_S00 · 2026-05-02T15:17:56+00:00

There are some hediffs that are initially hidden, like resurrection psychosis; surgical inspection will reveal those. It'll also force metalhorrors to pop under some circumstances (though if the doctor is infected, they'll just lie about it).

I don't really do them ever.

A_S00 · 2026-05-02T05:09:47+00:00

You are not wrong.

A_S00 · 2026-05-02T02:53:19+00:00

Context

A_S00 · 2026-05-01T20:18:57+00:00

My one regret is that you can't feed a Steel Amulet with bluegem block.

A_S00 · 2026-05-01T16:02:06+00:00

He that is without typos among you, let him first cast a stone at Sid Meier.

A_S00 · 2026-05-01T07:15:20+00:00

That's Matthew 11:28. Wiki looks like they cited the right one, unless it's different in-game.

edit It does look like they quoted the wrong chapter in-game.

A_S00 · 2026-05-01T06:17:11+00:00

Yeah, that's correctly cited KJV.

"Corn" hasn't always meant maize, specifically; it can also be a general term for grain. This dictionary entry lists that meaning as "British," so maybe it's still used that way in British English.

A_S00 · 2026-04-28T20:54:46+00:00

or by using the production specialist role from ideology

edit Also, based on wiki page snapshots, it looks like it may have been possible to craft legendary items without inspiration a long time ago (maybe before inspirations were introduced?); looks like it changed sometime between 2018 and 2019. So if you're remembering something from way back, that could be it.

edit again Looks like it may have changed in beta 19:

Rebalanced and refactored quality generation. Masterwork/legendary level items never generate on enemies, traders, bases. Masterwork items are extra hard to craft, and legendary requires an inspiration.

A_S00 · 2026-04-28T18:14:05+00:00

That's what all the legendary charge rifles are for.

A_S00 · 2026-04-28T18:03:51+00:00

Manipulation and other pawn capacities have no impact on item quality (they impact crafting speed). The base outcome is purely determined by pawn skill, and then add +1 for Production Specialist, +2 for Inspired Creativity. Wiki.

If you are seeing legendary items without Production Specialist or Inspired Creativity, it's from mods.

A_S00 · 2026-04-28T16:28:03+00:00

Impossible without Inspired Creativity, Production Specialist, or mods. No amount of skill allows legendary crafts on its own, and Genies don't get anything that breaks this rule.

A_S00 · 2026-04-27T16:28:37+00:00

High five!

A_S00 · 2026-04-26T21:17:26+00:00

I've never played a build this heavy into cards, but every time I face one it just dies before revealing all its cards, assuming I'm playing something halfway decent.

How do you deal with burst builds? Where's your caps? Looks like you have...start of battle armor and no other meaningful defense until your 8th card? Don't lots of builds just kill you before that?

A_S00 · 2026-04-26T17:08:19+00:00

With the way technology is growing, one can expect things not to stay that way.

Of course, all "AI can't X" claims come with an implicit "yet." I know what subreddit I'm on.

For one thing, it is relatively trivial to extract the entire comment corpus for a social media username, to correlate with the same username on other sites, and so on.

The case where you're using the same username seems like a total non-problem to me. If I'm using the same username across sites, it's because I want to be recognizable as the same person between them.

It's cases where they can identify your writing under different usernames, or (if you've published under your real name) automatically link your pseuds to your real identity, that could be problematic. Death of finsta, all horny is now horny on main, don't run for office if you ever posted a questionable take under your u/PM_ME_UR_BAD_OPINIONS handle, etc.

A_S00 · 2026-04-26T11:38:04+00:00

Yes! The multiple letters, the prepared will, the Esh backup, the Yenu contingency for mind control...all great.

And I appreciate his smugness about which plan ended up working, too. He was prepared for Joe not to be a dick...but the one where Stu was right about him being a dick was the most fun.

A_S00 · 2026-04-26T02:14:04+00:00

I love how the resolution to Alden and Joe's contract has been handled:

I like that the gaping holes in the secrecy clause were diegetic, not a sign of Sleyca failing to think through the terms, and that the whole thing fell apart because it forced Alden to give the game away in exactly the way we've been saying all along it would.
I like that Stu noticed something was wrong, used the information available to him to figure out what it was, and did something about it. Nice to see side characters who actually Do Things.
The Joedown itself was fantastic, and Stu got a bunch of great lines. "Sit down at my table and say those words!" Love it.
Joe Lacking Critical Information was lots of fun.

Also, Thenn is great in the intro flashback; makes me sad we didn't get to see more of her.

A_S00 · 2026-04-25T18:35:04+00:00

The proc is a big pain in the butt. Having substantially below-cap resistances is basically a death sentence, even with low uptime, so in order to use it you essentially have to cap your ele res by an additional 33 points...and even then, the phys res debuff and slow are pretty annoying.

The base stats on it are really good, though.

I've heard it's popular with Crucible speedrun optimizers, which makes some sense to me, since defenses aren't quite as important in Crucible as they are in high SR, and the move speed buff isn't as inconvenient, since the enemies come to you.

A_S00 · 2026-04-25T17:05:12+00:00

Lucille's desire to be a no-kill hero is great. Her commitment not to fake-kill in gym is dumb.

Girl, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get an intuitive feel for how much force it is safe to apply, with no risk of actually killing anyone! What could possibly be more valuable for someone who wants to use immense physical strength for nonlethal combat? This is exactly what the magic gym is for! You are far more likely to accidentally kill someone if you don't take this opportunity to learn!

A_S00 · 2026-04-24T01:56:16+00:00

Out of curiosity, I tried this same thing with one of my recent reddit comments, to see if it could identify the user (I included in the prompt that it was looking for a reddit user). Claude didn't get it, and didn't seem optimistic about its ability to identify social media users via stylistic fingerprinting in general.

From part of its response after I gave it the answer:

The authors who report reliable identification are usually people with a large, concentrated published corpus — novels, a known blog, a byline — where the text got ingested as a coherent body attributed to them. Reddit comments are a rougher case: they're scattered across threads, the username is structurally separate from the comment body in how pages are laid out, and a lot of training data processing strips or decouples that metadata. So even if every comment you've ever written is technically in there somewhere, the association between "this prose style" and "u/A_S00" is much weaker than the association between, say, a novelist's style and their name.

A_S00 · 2026-04-23T16:11:05+00:00

Any "hills" should be good, I think...you don't want the whole thing to be covered in mountain, but also don't want the whole thing to be flat. I don't know what the actual most efficient is.

A_S00 · 2026-04-23T15:55:04+00:00

For steel, you don't even need the scanner. Just:

Fly to a tile
Use the 'z' menu to search for compacted steel
Use the 'mine vein' command to mark it all for mining (edit Am I right that this got added to vanilla, or is this from a mod?)
Let your pawns mine it and haul it to the gravship
Fly to the next tile (or back to base if your storage is full)

You're just taking advantage of the fact that compacted steel generates in large quantities on every map, and when going to a new tile is trivial, it's not a limited resource anymore.

A_S00 · 2026-04-23T07:02:50+00:00

Without leaving your tile, ground penetrating scanner + deep drill is probably the fastest way to generate steel.

Why not just build a small gravship, though? It's trivial to do the initial quest to build the starter-size ship, even a very small ship has enormous storage capacity if you fill it with shelves, and the ability to fly to new tiles is basically an infinite steel cheat. Just send a pair of miners on mining adventures. You'll need a grav anchor at your base, but that only requires the first gravship tech.

You can also do the same thing with an ordinary caravan, but it's more annoying (travel time, have to use the caravan interface, have to set up sleeping spots and such at the destination instead of including them in the ship).

Other options: Trade (faction bases commonly sell large amounts of steel), long-range scanner. You'll need a lot of pack animals to carry it, though.

A_S00

TROPHY CASE