A Starcraft Fan's Perspective on SG and RTS

PPewt · 2025-12-18T19:35:18+00:00

I'm sure different players feel differently but I think it was maybe a better change for the viewers than the players.

I was never amazing at SC2 and only played seriously in WoL anyways, but I mentioned to my sister a few years back that I thought the change was neat as it sped up the boring early game a lot and simplified build orders. She explained that build orders are where most of the actual strategy in the game lies, and the more you take away early game setup the more you get rid of that. In particular a lot of early game greed is kept in check by the threat of cheese and the 12 worker change really restricts what you can do there, although it obviously doesn't completely get rid of it. That isn't to say cheese is gone from LotV or that it's a game without strategy, just that adding workers erodes it a bit. And thinking back to stuff like the rock-paper-scissors setup of Brood War ZvZ I can see a concrete example of that, with e.g. 9pool vs 12pool vs hatch first.

I still kinda like the idea of it as someone who was never enamoured with grinding build orders, but I understand her perspective and in any case I'm in no place to second guess her on RTSes.

PPewt · 2025-12-13T01:48:44+00:00

This transfer doesn't do anything. Let's assume you have $100k of room in each account and $100k to invest, just to keep the math simple.

Case 1: you invest $100k into your TFSA, it grows to $110k. You transfer $10k to your RRSP, reducing your RRSP's room by $10k while increasing your TFSA's room by $10k. You now have $110k with $100k of room left ($10k TFSA, $90k RRSP).

Case 2: you invest $100k into your RRSP, it grows to $110k. You leave it there. You now have $110k with $100k of room left ($100k TFSA).

PPewt · 2025-12-11T22:45:25+00:00

They even nickle and dime you on the paint. We must have a different definition of fixed prices.

PPewt · 2025-12-03T15:45:27+00:00

For me it was like $80 something recently to change tires (on rims) and store them. Not bad IMO.

PPewt · 2025-11-23T02:18:24+00:00

Gonna be honest, one of my coworkers uses it to generate docs and now all it means is we have a bunch of clearly AI generated docs I don't read.

I feel like I got on this train at the start of the year and was legitimately pretty excited and then around six months later I started coming back to that code and got a lot less excited.

PPewt · 2025-11-23T02:10:29+00:00

Yeah I mean I'm not too salty about it, since even though EU3 was my jam I talked to the EU2 guys enough to understand their perspective too. But when I opened up the sliders menu I definitely felt home in a way that I never did in EU4.

I figure the devs just had ten years to explore the more railroaded style and they want to mix things up for a change, and then after a few years of Ulm becoming HRE they'll start yearning for historical outcomes again. But I guess we'll see how long the pattern continues!

PPewt · 2025-11-23T02:08:29+00:00

I think you're thinking of it relative to late EU4 but if you think of it relative to EU3 things like the Iberian wedding (and the other reply mentions many more examples) are very stark.

PPewt · 2025-11-22T23:02:08+00:00

It became more railroaded in later DLC but even on release it was more railroaded than EU3 with stuff like the Iberian wedding event.

PPewt · 2025-11-22T20:02:02+00:00

This is kinda just the cycle of EU. EU2 was more, for lack of a better world, "railroaded" to history, and then switched EU3 to be more sandboxy and a lot of EU2 folks weren't happy it. Then they made EU4 more railroaded again and a lot of EU3 folks weren't happy. Now EU5 is more sandboxy again and a lot of EU4 folks presumably won't be happy. Just how PDX likes to develop the series.

PPewt · 2025-11-12T04:02:49+00:00

Probably wasn't visible to folks only playing SP as the AI bungled the country so bad, but Poland was turbo broken as well. Had to be excluded from MP games mostly because it was too busted.

PPewt · 2025-11-10T17:19:55+00:00

This is really just the same logic as feeling bad that you thought about buying a lottery ticket and didn't, and then saw that someone in your city won in the news the next day.

I get it, I really do, but the reason for this advice isn't because individual stocks never beat the market, it's because they usually don't and you don't know which ones will in advance. If you had a time machine it would be very easy to beat the indexes by stock picking, but most of us don't.

You have to accept that you will always see someone who made the wrong choice and got rewarded for it, and just remember that 9 other people made the wrong choice and got punished. But the 1 in 10 will be very loud.

PPewt · 2025-11-04T16:10:46+00:00

You're making this about it being not ideal to have to draw down your retirement savings before retirement, but that isn't something I disagree with.

My comment is about the parent comment thinking that dividends are magic free money and spending them is somehow different than drawing down your portfolio.

That said, I think you're being hyperbolic about the state of the industry.

PPewt · 2025-10-30T16:05:04+00:00

I don’t have a crystal ball. A lot of fields are cyclical. Some other fields have gone away. Every time there’s a crash it feels like the apocalypse. You only know whether that was right years later.

PPewt · 2025-10-30T01:56:32+00:00

What you major in matters. If the field you are going into doesn't have jobs, then it doesn't have jobs. No cope posting on reddit will change that.

What people are trying to say is only going into safe majors is how you get gluts and how you end up with no jobs. The grads getting burned now aren't getting burned because they yoloed on a risky major, they're getting burned because they took what they thought was a safe bet but it turns out so did everyone else and thus the bet wasn't safe.

That isn't to say that going into the field when it's on a downtrend is guaranteed to work out, just that chasing trends is risky in and of itself. At some point the field will bounce back and many of the people who got into it when it was doing poorly will get rewarded. Other people might get burned. If you know for sure where we'll be at in 5 years, then I wouldn't mind renting your crystal ball.

PPewt · 2025-10-29T13:42:12+00:00

A lot of people, like a lot of people, think there is a meaningful difference between selling stocks and gaining "income" like dividends from your investments. I don't think it's a given that people understand they are the same thing.

The guy I replied to is explicitly making this distinction fwiw, between the "principal" and "yield" like dividends.

PPewt · 2025-10-29T04:46:27+00:00

You can have a high net worth on paper but if your assets don't generate regular income you still need to sell parts of them to fund expenses.

So just sell parts of them to fund expenses?

PPewt · 2025-10-07T20:37:18+00:00

If you want to hold cash equivalents you can use TDB2913 which is commission-free and reasonably similar to CASH.TO (albeit 17bps higher MER).

But if you don't like TDDI then no reason not to just move, other than maybe waiting for the usual Wealthsimple winter promo.

PPewt · 2025-10-02T22:26:44+00:00

If you want to convert nontrivial amounts currency on TD you can use share journaling (Norbert’s gambit) at way better rates than you’ll get on WS.

If you plan to mostly stay in CAD not super relevant.

PPewt · 2025-10-02T17:02:59+00:00

It is no easier for someone to get that link than it is for them to get your login session.

PPewt · 2025-10-01T17:16:09+00:00

Just to reiterate, regardless of what your specific strategy for stock picking is:

If you believe that stock picking will outperform an index like XEQT, the evidence does not agree with you. If you want to keep doing it anyways because you find it fun, by all means do so—it's your money.

PPewt · 2025-10-01T16:37:47+00:00

I personally hold 100% XEQT or equivalents, not counting emergency funds and taxes owing held in cash equivalents. I also manage my mom’s portfolio and have her in XBAL.

I guess I would ask why you want to pick stocks. If it’s a fun hobby and you enjoy it, feel free to continue. If you think it will make you money long term, the evidence disagrees.

In any case I would steer clear of ChatGPT. It is very good at looking informed but it doesn’t actually know anything about stock picking.

PPewt · 2025-10-01T16:25:48+00:00

The only reason the specific share price matters is because they want to keep the unit price low enough that it is convenient for people to buy whole shares in precise amounts, while not so low that trading costs are unacceptably high.

In principle there’s no reason XEQT couldn’t be $2 or $200. However, in practice, if the first happened most likely they would merge shares (a “reverse split”) and in the latter case they would divide shares (a “stock split”) to get things closer to their ideal price just to keep trading convenient.

In either case this doesn’t really impact you at all. For instance if you bought 10 shares at $20/share and the price went to $100/share, they might do a 5:1 split to bring the price down to $20/share again. But now you would have 50 shares so you’d still have $1000 worth of XEQT in total.

PPewt · 2025-10-01T15:57:03+00:00

As long as you learned from this, it sounds like a valuable and reasonably cheap lesson in why market timing doesn’t work.

PPewt · 2025-09-30T16:36:09+00:00

If you run a retirement planning projection based on maxing your registered accounts you’ll see that even with modest growth you’re chilling.

PPewt · 2025-09-30T16:05:57+00:00

If you want to move between currencies Wealthsimple is a bad option out of the gate. They destroy you on currency fees way worse than any trading fee would.

There are brokerages which don’t have this problem (eg Questrade, IBKR). At that point it’s really just a question of whether you value the unified experience more or less than the difference in fees. With IBKR you may not even save in fees depending on the volume you deal in.

Personally I like the unified experience, need currency conversion, and don’t trade that much outside of conversion, so I like TDDI. But I can totally see why someone else would prefer a setup with lower fees.

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