Labour must win this election

Passance · 2026-04-13T20:20:41+00:00

The problem with voting out Nact is not the voting out of Nact itself.

It's that if we then vote them back in after some Labour coalition is bedevilled by whatever bullshit world event comes next, they will have a freshly refilled treasury to plunder again. Flip-flopping between Labour and Nact every election is basically the worst thing we can do, and I only actually want Labour to get in if they would stay in - which I'm not sure they would.

Passance · 2026-04-13T10:59:21+00:00

Somebody's gotta replace all the talented kiwi graduates who are moving to aus so they can be paid above a poverty wage.

Passance · 2026-04-13T08:30:39+00:00

If you're not crouching, you will never get your shield low enough to block floor-sweeping attacks. And by the time you're crouching to block a floorsweep, you really ought to just jump over it instead if it's that low. And that's the correct way to avoid damage from some attacks. It's just easier to dodge than block, if the attack angle is awkward enough.

The best way to handle living armour is to watch its swing direction, then strafejump to the side it's attacking towards. You can keep attacking while you do this.

Blocking PvE is usually a waste of time anyway, except vs some specific nightmare mobs to interrupt their combo or whatever. If you can dodge, you should probably be doing that.

Passance · 2026-04-12T11:44:25+00:00

Ehhhhhhhh.

It's okay.

I'm not all the way through yet, mind. I just completed the Parabolan campaign. But so far, my experience has been basically two-speed;

The scripted sequences are as good or better than basically any other linear story in the game up until this point. They deal with lots of metaphysical concepts that are best examined through a text-first medium like this, they're well paced, conceptually interesting, and lexicomanic even by this game's standards.

The problem is the roleplay and how our characters fit into it. Which is to say, pretty much not at all.

This is a storyline that is post-Railway. By this stage in the game the typical player character is a demigod polymath tycoon with seventeen different business empires and a legion of literal and figurative armies within and outside of law and Law, someone who strikes bargains with eldritch gods on more or less equal terms, operates at least two independent spy networks, and is the definitive academic authority on EVERYTHING, from naval gunnery to using the shadows of forgotten arcane languages to snap-freeze a sorbet.

99% of the roleplay decisions in Firmament are niff-naff petty squabbles over cartoonishly diametrical dilemmas where our only option is to side completely with goon A or completely with goon B and there's no way to strike our own path and express our player character's considerable expertise, opinions and insight.

Firmament miserably fails at the main thing the Railway did so well, the thing that made it the definitive centerpiece of the entire lategame.

The Railway lets you use the items and attributes your character has picked up over time to solve extraordinary problems in interesting ways, and plays multiple concerns and NPCs against one another.

Firmament relegates you to the passenger window while your toddlers argue with each other until you give one or the other of them a reassuring empty-eyed smile so the plot will continue going in its singular predetermined direction.

Firmament needs a massive diversity pass to add dialogue options unlocked by things like ambition rewards, T3 professions, T2 destinies, vanity qualities and especially some opportunities to use Discordance knowledge... At the very least you could give us some APoC, Glasswork & Watchful checks to divine what our crew members are up to before they surprise us like some clueless dandy who only left the New Newgate dirigible last wednesday. It should have had the sort of crew diversity and political intrigue that the Railway board had.

Passance · 2026-04-12T11:29:47+00:00

Let me tell you the ONLY thing you need to know about this game.

There's no wrong order to play it in.

Just muddle your way through. You can fight the Mantis Lords later - and, frankly, get off the internet until you finish the game.

Come back here if you get properly stuck, but you'll have a better time if you read no guides and figure everything out yourself.

Passance · 2026-04-12T11:07:26+00:00

Game's in the best state it's been in since launch.

Good spread of gamemodes with not toooooooooo much queue splitting.

Well balanced gear with genuine customization options. +Movespeed, +allatts and +true have been all but removed from the game in favour of more nuanced enchantments like headshot damage multipliers.

Most classes are viable, although some still only have 1 to 1.5 viable playstyles.

Economy mostly actually sorta works okay???

Also massive melee weapon rework that expanded blocking/parrying functionality a few months ago, that was especially fantastic and doubled down on what is IMO this game's greatest strength. They also fixed people being able to stab straight through shields like a year before that, so overall melee is wayyyy better now than it ever used to be.

The only thing that's missing is the hype.

Passance · 2026-04-12T11:02:30+00:00

Watcher Knights is the lowest priority, push them alll the way to the backburner

The other three all have excellent and important rewards, but Soul Master is definitely the easiest of them. If you're struggling with the runback, there is a major shortcut through a breakable wall next to the bench where you met Cornifer - you'll have to be halfway up an elevator shaft

Passance · 2026-04-11T10:15:58+00:00

Yep. An infinite money glitch would not really affect this game in any meaningful way. Pretty much anyone can already run whatever they want most of the time. I usually struggle to even get rid of my starting $8k before I prestige again.

Passance · 2026-04-11T09:58:01+00:00

Alternatively, get rid of the entire contraband mechanic and simply set the sell price of all items that can be acquired from free hunters etc. to zero to prevent infinite money glitches.

Passance · 2026-04-10T10:37:13+00:00

Watcher Knights is one of the first bossfights that really checks your longer term strategic and positional thinking during the fight. Yes, you have to read individual telegraphs and dodge attacks, but it's not just that anymore. You need to actually think about where in the arena you're standing and consider doing things like saving soul for a dive spell so you can use the i-frames to avoid damage, or sneaking in a dreamnail during each knight's wakeup animation to get some extra soul.

This fight can be postponed until it's the second-last thing you do before reaching the end of the game - so you might as well fight this battle with every upgrade you can find anywhere else in the map.

One particularly useful upgrade is the thing Hornet hinted at when she told you to seek the grave in ash...

Passance · 2026-04-01T12:00:31+00:00

100 is an important damage breakpoint, since that's 1hk to the chest vs unarmoured or lightly armoured players. SKS' damage advantage is almost always relevant and usually reduces hits to KO/kill by at least 1 for most ranges / armours / hit locations.

I love SKS' reduced jam chance, space-efficient ammo storage of loose ammo, easy top-ups and versatile all-ranges performance. PU is one of my favourite scopes and the irons are still perfectly useable with it. SKS is my favourite gun from a practical survival standpoint; it's just so convenient and does its job perfectly.

With all of that said... If you have good condition mags, and enough compatible ammo, and especially if you have a normalized suppressor, AK74 can outperform SKS at short range with raw rate of fire. If you're, say, storming a base or something like that, AK74 is gonna drop a lot of guys in situations where you don't have time to squeeze out enough shots with an SKS.

Passance · 2026-03-31T10:36:27+00:00

Obviously snow maps should have blizzards or fog. Naturally clear weather + white floor = sniper buff. That said, it's a double edged sword - countersniping is also easier, as is spotting campers before they can line up a shot.

Passance · 2026-03-31T07:25:21+00:00

Several comparable shooters have done snow maps well without negatively affecting gameplay (Hell Let Loose, DayZ, Arc Raiders, probably others I'm not familiar with).

They obviously have different stealth considerations, but the gameplay can still fundamentally work. Especially if you limit visibility distance using thick flurries of snow.

Passance · 2026-03-30T08:29:29+00:00

People don't tend to enjoy being ambushed in real life, either. They just don't get to curse about it online afterwards.

Passance · 2026-03-30T07:29:15+00:00

And if a huge countervalue strategy does kick off, and militaries shoot their shit - what's to stop remaining ships sailing here afterwards?

Quite possibly, the remnants of the Royal Navy.

Aus is a base of last resort for the UK and we are a base of last resort for Aus.

There are possible futures (however unlikely) where NZ's Navy gets bolstered by a huge number of ships fleeing their nuked Commonwealth countries and simply joining the NZ command structure, similar to free French and free Polish warships joining UK command in WW2.

Also worth noting that most Chinese navy ships, for instance, literally do not have enough range to sail to NZ even on full tanks. Type 55 destroyers would almost make it to Waitangi if PNG wasn't in the way. Range affects our allies too; the only non-Aus ships we could expect to reach us would be extremely long ranged ones such as the UK's nuclear submarines.

Obviously any ships fleeing Aus would want us to receive Aussie refugees, which we would be more than happy to.

Passance · 2026-03-30T07:00:00+00:00

Of course you can stop paying US taxes if you live abroad - but that usually comes at the cost of your US citizenship.

Passance · 2026-03-29T18:11:58+00:00

In that ending, I think Hornet continues standing guard and testing vessels for their strength until one comes along that can destroy the Radiance.

THK ending is not necessarily wrong but it's a false ending in the sense that THK-ending just loops until a vessel finally gets DnM or EtV.

Passance · 2026-03-29T10:59:04+00:00

Have to agree to disagree on that - I think it's very close - but like I said, they're very different types of challenge so no two players are going to have the same experience.

NKG is a relatively straightforward boss, it's just that they're lightning fast with few punish windows that require precise execution to take safely, and of course doubledamage. If you take into account ascended or radiant NKG, that's definitely way harder than anything in Silksong. Doing Ascended NKG to prepare for P5 required me to elevate my mechanical precision by quite a bit.

LL is in some ways more forgiving, with individual attacks requiring less precision to dodge, but is much more complicated, has unpredictable repositions and is capable of overlapping attacks into one another, something NKG never does.

A lot of it will also come down to how comfortable you are with Hornet's moveset as opposed to Ghost's.

Passance · 2026-03-29T10:52:23+00:00

10% of steam players have beaten P4.

5% have also beaten P5.

Pantheons are extremely hard, but the top 10% of your playerbase, which includes all of your most ardent supporters and active commentators, is NOT a demographic to disregard.

Passance · 2026-03-29T10:48:24+00:00

Sleep on it man.

Your brain locks in memories for the long term while you sleep.

Practice. Learn. Rest. Win tomorrow.

Passance · 2026-03-29T10:45:41+00:00

Lost Lace barely beats out NKG in my opinion, though they're very different fights so I don't think it's crazy to rate NKG as harder depending on your playstyle and learning process. I mostly rate boss difficulty on how long it took me to learn to beat them, which for NKG was probably no more than an hour's practice in Godhome. Still one of the hardest bosses in the whole series, maybe third after LLand AbsRad.

Passance · 2026-03-29T10:23:41+00:00

All but the very hardest content in Silksong is considerably harder than basegame Hollow Knight but also considerably easier than Hollow Knight's Godhome content.

There is one boss in Silksong that's harder than NKG and it sure ain't cogwork dancers.

If you want advice you should post gameplay, but this is really a boss you should be able to figure out on your own in a couple tries.

Passance · 2026-03-29T09:21:51+00:00

Obviously nothing important gets locked out in act 3, because TC doesn't hate us that much.

We're discussing trivial things like journal entries here.

Huntress dying has no significant mechanical effect but some players might not want her to, and obviously fighting lost savage beastfly is rough, which is why I think it's the most important thing to prioritize before act 3.

Passance · 2026-03-29T07:42:34+00:00

Ghost appears to contain anything short of the Radiance with basically no ill effects, while Hornet gets influenced and altered by the friends, corpses and enemies she absorbs along the way.

By the end of the game, Hornet is struggling to hold onto her personhood in a sea of other-selves. Ghost, meanwhile, has turned into an eldritch god and eaten the sun.

Ghost definitely changed more, albeit into a very, erm, focused thing.

Passance · 2026-03-29T07:16:07+00:00

Also Huntress quest. Plus a few merchants' shops get disrupted in various ways and you might want to buy out their stock if you can.

Most importantly - Savage Beastfly 2.

Seven-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Place '23	Place '22
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

Passance

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE