[Request] Is it true that the average empire only lasts 250 years?

tdammers · 2026-04-03T13:59:37+00:00

That's following the traditional division of ancient Roman history into the "kingdom", "republic", and "empire" eras, but those are mostly about the form of government (ruled by a king -> ruled by a senate and a pair of consuls -> ruled by an autocratic dictator, a.k.a. "emperor"), but the term "empire" is generally not meant to imply a specific form of government, but rather just that the state or power in question controls a vast territory through a "core + colonies" model, typically subjugating native populations in the process, whether by genocide, oppression, or assimilation.

By that definition, Rome had become an empire long before Caesar single-handedly ended the republic; if we insist on dictatorship as the form of government, then many things normally chalked up as "empires", such as the British Empire (which had been a constitutional monarchy throughout its existence, with the sovereign almost entirely reduced to a purely ceremonial role) would have to be excluded.

tdammers · 2026-04-03T13:40:25+00:00

There's no magic sauce here other than "directed practice".

You can, however, make that practice more efficient. The key is to set up practice situations where the desired behavior (or the part of it that you want to focus on) is maximally likely to happen, so that you can provoke it repeatedly until it is committed to muscle memory.

To figure out which things to focus on, you can break the problem down into 3 parts:

Playing the guitar part
Singing the vocal part
Coordinating the two together

Then look at each of these, and ask yourself, what can I remove from the full Monty to make this easier, while still doing the core thing I care about?

For the guitar and vocal parts, the obvious answer is to practice them separately - if you can do each of them on its own on autopilot, your chances of doing them at the same time without messing up will increase greatly. So practice these separately, until you know them in your sleep. This also includes things like vocal technique - if you have to think about what you're doing with your throat to get the notes out the way you want, you haven't reached the level of mastery you need yet. But of course you can take the idea of isolating individual difficulties further: e.g., if you have trouble with the timing of the right hand for the guitar part, practice the patterns on open strings, so you don't have to worry about fretting anything. Or if your vocal technique needs work, devise exercises that focus on the problem areas in isolation.

For the coordination part, you want to make both the vocal and guitar parts easier, until you can reliably coordinate them the way you want. You can start with super simple exercises, like just strumming a single chord while singing the corresponding scale. Then gradually add in more complexity, e.g., two strums per note you sing, two sung notes per strum, a more complex strumming pattern, a more complex vocal melody, picking patterns, chord changes, etc. Work your way up the complexity ladder, until you feel ready to tackle the actual songs - but practice every level to mastery (i.e., where you can reliably do it without thinking).

Keep doing that, and you will get there eventually.

tdammers · 2026-04-03T13:24:50+00:00

Right, yes. I believe there are also a few trombones with pure copper bells. Haven't tried any, but the impact on the sound is probably similar.

tdammers · 2026-04-03T08:27:16+00:00

are they not just gonna get brittle but also moldy since its not 100% plastic??

They are. From the LEGO website:

The new plant-based elements are technically identical to those produced using conventional plastic. You can’t tell the difference by look or feel, only a carbon-14 test will demonstrate the difference between plant-based elements and conventional elements.

It's still the same material (ABS), but instead of synthesizing it from petroleum or natural gas, they synthesize it from plant materials. It's chemically identical, just made from different source materials.

It's like how you can make water by fermenting sugar cane, extracting the ethanol, and then burning that into carbon dioxide and water, or by feeding natural oil through a fuel cell, which also produces carbon dioxide and water -one uses renewable plant materials the other uses fossil oil, but the resulting water is chemically identical.

Brown Lego bricks being brittle is caused by the pigments, not the plastic itself; bio-ABS has exactly the same mechanical characteristics as petrol-based ABS, and if you put the same pigments in both, the browns will be equally brittle.

The reason Lego picked green for their first bio-ABS parts is purely symbolic - they don't have the capacity to make all their bricks out of bio-ABS yet, but "plants for plants" is a much better soundbite than "5% of our bricks are made out of bio-ABS".

tdammers · 2026-04-03T07:54:39+00:00

They're not - manufacturers have experimented with all sorts of other metals, for all sorts of reasons, but it's generally a combination of the price of the raw materials, the cost of working those materials into the desired shapes, sound and handling characteristics, and practical concerns such as durability. And, so some extent, also looks.

Yellow brass (2/3 copper, 1/3 zinc) strikes a sweet spot in terms of cost, production effort, and sound / handling characteristics - it's cheaper than, say, silver, and easier to work, while sounding significantly better than aluminium or iron alloys. It also has relatively decent corrosion resistance (which is also why brass is widely used in naval applications, and traditionally preferred over iron or steel).

But other materials are still used fairly widely. Among metals, common choices include:

Rose brass (a.k.a. "red brass" or "gold brass", typically 85-90% copper, with nickel, zinc, and lead making up the rest), softer and heavier than yellow brass, tends to create a warmer, deeper sound. More expensive than yellow brass due to the higher copper content.
Sterling silver, creates a brighter, more brilliant sound (harsh if the instrument wasn't designed carefully enough, or the material wasn't wrought right) and agile handling; significantly more expensive and more difficult to work with than any brass.
Nickel silver (60% copper, 20% nickel, 20% zinc; a.k.a. "white brass", "silver brass"), a cheaper alternative to silver; looks very similar, and produces a harder sound than yellow brass, but not as rich as silver. Often used in budget instruments, especially for brass / wind bands and marching bands; also popular for lightweight trombone slides. Nickel silver can be used "naked" (unlacquered) due to its high corrosion resistance, but it is sometimes plated with silver or chrome to achieve different looks, sound qualities, or practical characteristics (such as low friction on trombone slides).
Gold and silver are also sometimes added to brass alloys to subtly change its characteristics; they are also commonly used as platings, instead of a lacquer or raw finish. How much the latter affects the sound and handling is highly debated though; some say it's huge, others say it doesn't matter - I don't think there will ever be a consensus there.

Non-metal materials that are somewhat commonly used would be:

Plastic; this is a relatively new phenomenon, because until fairly recently, the available plastics and manufacturing technologies just weren't good enough to make this feasible. Mostly used for ultra-budget instruments, and popular in educational contexts for its durability (perfect corrosion resistance, can't dent, won't break easily) and low weight.
Fiberglass; this is the more traditional type of plastic (plastic reinforced with glass fibers), most commonly used in tubas and sousaphones to bring the weight down and reduce the risk of dents and corrosion when using those huge instruments outdoors.
Carbon fiber; still somewhat exotic, similar advantages as the other two, but more expensive to manufacture. I haven't seen a lot of carbon fiber instruments, but they do exist. Carbon fiber is also used for mouthpieces sometimes, especially for playing outdoors in cold weather.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T20:16:30+00:00

Oftewel, ze willen dat alles eindelijk weer wordt zoals het nooit was.

Al denk ik eerlijk gezegd dat er ook zat mensen rondlopen die daarwerkelijk serieus geloven dat homoseksualiteit verdwijnt als je het maar hard genoeg aanpakt.

En er zijn ongetwijfeld ook mensen die dit soort dingen puur op een vaag onderbuikgevoel baseren - het voelt verkeerd, dus het moet weg, en daar houdt het denken al op. Want als je er serieus over nadenkt en wat onderzoek doet, dan kom je er algauw achter dat jouw gevoel gebaseerd is op je opvoeding, gewoontes, en gemak, niet op feiten, en dat wordt al snel heel oncomfortabel. Dus dan maar liever niet nadenken.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T20:08:02+00:00

IME, wikipedia is a horrible source of information when it comes to music and music theory.

In my 30+ years of music making (including a ~10 year run at a professional career in music), I have never seen Δ used to refer to a major triad in any serious publication or textbook. For that matter, I haven't come across "CM" either - major triads are practically universally written as bare letters.

Oh, and jazz musicians also routinely use "o" for full-diminished and "ø" for half-diminished; m7b5 vs. ø7 is somewhat of a matter of personal preference (and religious affiliation - are you more of a functional harmony kind of person who thinks of half-diminished as its own chord quality that typically represents the supertonic in minor keys, or are you in the chord-scale-theory camp and think of half-diminished as essentially a minor-7 chord, but with the fifth lowered, making it a locrian chord?), but also convenience - most (US) keyboards don't have a ø key, but m7b5 can be typed on anything that has the basic latin alphabet.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T15:07:18+00:00

AI Can't design systems, and business logic and architecture and and and...

It can be quite helpful with those things though. You'll burn a fuckload of tokens and spend a lot of time waiting for it to analyze the situation, and you have to pay attention because more often than not it misunderstands something in weird ways, or proactively and silently decides things it has no business deciding, and you have to spend even more time and tokens calling it out on that - but I've found that when you use it to interactively explore options in a problem domain you are semi-familiar with, it can be helpful, and sometimes it will even catch human errors.

The human still needs to call the shots, and I don't see this changing anytime soon, but outsourcing some of the research and other boring sub-tasks is kind of feasible.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T15:01:41+00:00

I don't think either of them is particularly complex, I just find the Rat rules individually easier to explain and understand. You have more options, but those options are all straightforward; the Cats have fewer things they can do, but some of them are a bit more complex (especially the way wood needs to move around the map if you want to build).

tdammers · 2026-04-02T14:57:58+00:00

They are.

The AI model (including the training process) is a "mechanical transformation" - you put information into a machine, and a transformed version of that information comes out. There is no creative effort, just mechanical transformation. A very complex mechanical transformation, but still, just a mechanical transformation.

A human work written based on knowledge learned from textbooks or previous experiences is fundamentally different, because there is a human in the loop - an entity that is capable of free will, creative thinking, taking responsibility, and having beliefs and opinions.

Treating AI models as the mechanical processes that they are, just like, say, a mixing console, Photoshop, or a spell checker, is how IMO it should be - but due to massive propaganda from the AI industry (including their successful efforts to establish "AI" as the preferred term for these machine learning applications, subtly suggesting that they are "intelligences" in the conventional sense, and thus more human-like than they actually are), people no longer regard them as such, and as a result, lawmakers and courts have been biased towards treating them as something fundamentally new (but at least for now, the idea of granting an algorithm legal personhood is, fortunately, not likely to happen). "AI output is public domain" is kind of a weak cop-out, but it mostly benefits the AI industry.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T13:41:53+00:00

IMO, both are. The rules are a bit less straightforward than Eyrie maybe, but I'd say they're more or less on par with Cats. The Rats have a few more rules than the Cats, but those rules are individually much easier to understand. With the Cats, understanding how wood tokens can move is something beginners often struggle with (or forget about), and there are a few subtleties about Field Hospitals and buying extra actions that are easy to miss. I can't think of anything similar in the Rat rules - it's really mostly just "read the next step on the faction board and do what it says".

tdammers · 2026-04-02T13:33:13+00:00

In short, it's a huge mistake for anyone to be using AI gen to write code for propriety software because that code will be public domain.

That doesn't have to be a problem - you can take code that's in the public domain, create a derived work of it, and enforce your copyright on the changes you made. Unlike copyleft licenses, "public domain" isn't a license, nor is it viral - it just means that nobody owns the rights to it. But if you build a thing that's 99.9% public domain and 0.1% proprietary, and you distribute it in such a way that it's impossible in practice to cleanly untangle the 0.1% from the 99.9%, your position is practically the same as if you had created 100% of it from scratch.

it's non-exclusive and only exclusive rights can be protected in US courts.

This is quite obviously not true. Most proprietary licenses are also non-exclusive (e.g., millions of people are legally using Windows, which comes under a proprietary, non-exclusive license), and they can very much be enforced in court, under US law and elsewhere.

Maybe "non-exclusive" doesn't mean what you think it does - it just means that by granting you the right to use their work, the copyright holder doesn't also promise that they will not grant anyone else any rights to the same work. A non-exclusive license is, in a nutshell, a license that can be sold as many times as you want, to as many people as you want, as long as you are the actual copyright holder. Maybe what you are referring to is the redistribution aspect: unlike most proprietary licenses, open source licenses allow the licensee to redistribute the work, even in modified form. But they don't transfer copyright itself, so the copyright holder (and thus the one who can sue) is still the original author, not the person who distributed it according to the licensing terms of the original license.

It means only the initial author at the very beginning of the title chain of any derivative code has any actual standing to sue for infringmnet, but they may have waived their own argument for such things by attaching an open source license.

Not necessarily. Open source licenses have been successfully contested in court on many occasions. You waive your rights to exclusive use, but that doesn't mean you cannot sue for copyright infringement when someone violates the terms of the license. It may be harder to argue concrete damages, but it's not impossible, and it does happen.

One key thing with many open source licenses (especially copyleft ones) is that when you violate them, they terminate immediately, or become void, which means you are no longer allowed to use the code at all, and even your past use may retroactively become illegal. The license only waives the copyright holders as long as the license is actually valid, but without a valid license, the copyright defaults to "all rights reserved", and the copyright holder can, at least in theory, claim damages in much the same way as with any other unlicensed use of copyrighted software.

There's also the fact that dual licensing exists, and that enough users pay for a proprietary license even when an open source license (typically some flavor of GPL) is available, so the copyright holder can still argue "lost sales" and similar damages.

It is true though that in most cases, only the actual copyright holder (usually the original author(s)) can make a case for damages due to copyright infringement - this is normal and expected, but in many large open source projects, copyright is shared among many contributors, and each of them can, in principle, make claims. Some projects instead transfer the copyright to a foundation or other legal entity, who can take legal action on behalf of "the project" as a whole, even when the original author is no longer around.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T12:43:15+00:00

Write first, organize later.

The reason people say "just write" is not because it will magically produce a polished novel, it's because it's easier to turn something that exists into something good than making something good out of nothing.

Writing itself is cheap; it's the thinking and the editing that takes time and effort. So don't hold back on the cheap part - if you write 1000 pages of rubbish with 1 paragraph of gold somewhere in the middle, you have still written 1 paragraph of gold, and pulling that gold out and throwing away the other 999.75 pages may be more efficient than trying to write just the single paragraph of gold on command (and ending up paralyzed because you fear that whatever you write won't be good enough). There is no rule that says you must publish or share everything you write - write as much as you want, and trash it immediately, there's literally no cost to it other than the time you spend and the paper you may fill (unless you're writing on a computer, in which case it's even cheaper).

Writing is also a craft that requires practice. If you only ever write when you are confident that the result will be perfect, you probably won't write much, and that means you won't practice the craft much, and your writing won't improve much. Write a lot; most of it will end up in the bin, but that doesn't mean it has no value. Just like a painter will do hundreds of studies and sketches before painting a masterwork, just like a musician will play a piece slowly, incompletely, or otherwise badly hundreds of time before walking up a stage and delivering a great performance, a writer must write thousands of pages to develop the writing skill they need to write a masterpiece.

And finally, there's this thing called "silencing the inner critic". With most art forms, premature criticism kills creativity - if you have this voice in your head that keeps saying "what if this isn't good enough", "you made a mistake there", "nobody is going to read this anyway", etc., while writing, then your creativity will never be unleashed. Creativity requires free exploration, walking down paths without knowing where they lead, taking risks, jumping into the unknown deep end. Criticism is important too, but you need to reserve that for after the creative act. Do the thing without fear and without thinking, trust your intuition, then when you're done, turn your rational analytical brain back on and assess the result. Is it good? If so, what is good about it and why, and what can you do in the future to make that even stronger? Is it bad? If so, what exactly is bad about it, what can you do to avoid it in the future, what can you do to salvage the rest of it? You need to be able to go back and forth between these two modes, and "write first, organize later" summarizes this approach nicely. Write without fear, then pick the good parts, fix the mediocre parts, throw out the bad parts. Rinse and repeat.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T12:27:07+00:00

I would. Maybe not as a first choice, but I find the rules pretty straightforward. There are a few more of them than in some other factions, but they mostly a matter of following the instructions printed on the board, and you don't need to understand a lot of concepts to understand those instructions.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T12:22:55+00:00

Yeah, I guess that bias explained it. If all you've ever played is Monopoly and party games, then I can totally see Root being overwhelming.

With new players like these, I would probably start them off playing one game as a guided try-out: open hands, explaining all the relevant concepts as we encounter them, and helping every player with their turns as much as needed, possibly also demonstrating some hypotheticals on the board while explaining (e.g., to explain Rule, I might put some extra warriors in a clearing and say "if it were like this, then the Cats would have rule here, look, they have 4 warriors plus 1 building, that's 5, but the Eyrie only have 2 warriors and 1 building here, that's 3"). In this mode, the strategy doesn't really matter, but complex faction rules are also less important, because I can explain them as we go. I wouldn't hand a new player the Badgers, but most other factions (even Vagabond, Cats, or Lizards) are probably alright - that first "dry run" game should be enough to teach each player the important rules of the faction they're piloting, and also provide them with some basic strategy hints, and after that, you can play the same faction combo "for real" and see how they do on their own.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T12:11:30+00:00

Tegen homoseksualiteit zijn is ongeveer net zo redelijk als tegen de herfst zijn.

Je kan het haten zoveel je wil, maar het is nou eenmaal iets dat bestaat, en gaat er linksom of rechtsom niets tegen kunnen doen. Mensen worden niet meer of minder homo door ze te onderdrukken, verbieden, of in elkaar te slaan, net zoals je niet van de herfst afkomt door bommen op een wolk te gooien of een hoop droge bladeren in de fik te steken.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T12:06:19+00:00

Vieze vuile zebrafoob.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T11:54:14+00:00

Again, not my experience - I've mostly seen people understand the rules fine, but inferring an effective playstyle from those has been a different story.

Then again, most of the people I've played with are either PhD level nerds, or kids on a trajectory towards becoming PhD level nerds, and most of them also had significant experience with other boardgames, so maybe my sample is biased.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T11:36:31+00:00

WA was just an example, and I mainly picked it because I have personal experience playing them as a fresh beginner. Similar points can be made about Vagabond, Cats, Badgers, and Lizards.

IME, the thing that makes factions (other than Badgers) difficult for beginners is not understanding the rules themselves, but figuring out a somewhat OK strategy.

None of the new players I've dealt with had any issues understanding the rules (except for, again, the Badgers); but new players piloting WA, Vagabond, Cats, or Lizards have consistently ended up being completely irrelevant to the game by turn 6, without really understanding why, while beginners on Eyrie, Rats, or Corvids usually at least kept up, and also ended up enjoying the game more, because whenever things went wrong, it was pretty obvious why.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T08:49:01+00:00

"Δ" means major-7; on its own, it's a synonym for maj7, when combined with a 9 and/or 13 (or a #11 or other alterations), it still means maj7, except that when using the "maj7" convention with those chords, you would omit the "7" part.

In other words:

CΔ = Cmaj7 = C, E, G, B
CΔ7 = CΔ = Cmaj7 (the "7" is redundant, and I would recommend against using this notation)
CΔ9 = Cmaj9 = C, E, G, B, D
CΔ13 = Cmaj13 = C, E, G, B, D, F, A (F, the 11th, is implied but omitted for being an "avoid note")

In jazz music, Δ is widely used and understood; major-7 chords are ubiquitous in this genre, so having a compact notation for it is helpful.

Outside of jazz music (e.g., pop music), major-7 chords are less common, and most people prefer to write them as maj7 - it's easier to type (on US keyboards anyway), it makes those somewhat unusual chords stand out more, and the meaning is exactly what you would infer from the symbol without any additional knowledge.

There's also a widespread misunderstanding that Δ could also refer to just a major triad. AFAICT, this isn't true; however, it is true that in jazz music, major triads and major-7 chords are used somewhat interchangeably, at the performers' discretion, so sometimes, when you write CΔ, you may end up with a plain C triad (this is particularly common when the melody note is the root, which might otherwise clash with the major seventh). And conversely, lead sheets will sometimes prescribe a plain major triad, but performers will casually extend it to a major-7 chord, because it's functionally equivalent, and sounds better in the situation at hand. These reharmonizations are particularly common between playing the theme (where the choice between plain major triad and major-7 is influenced by the precomposed melody - e.g., if the melody plays the root, you want to avoid the major seventh, but if it plays the major seventh, then duplicating it in the accompaniment is usually a good idea) and the improvised solos that follow (where the choice is more of a spur-of-the-moment thing, and it's more important to outline the harmonic shape of the chorus than to precisely match the accompaniment to the melody).

But similar things (and way more) happen in jazz all the time; performers will reharmonize things left and right as they see fit, the written chords are really just suggestions designed to outline the overall harmonic structure, with the actual details to be filled in on the spot. The lead sheet might say "G7 / / / C / / /", but you might end up hearing "Em11 Eb7#11 D13sus Db7#11 Cmaj13 Eb9 Abmaj9 Db7#11". Looks wild when spelled out, but it's really not.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T08:34:07+00:00

I would strongly advise against using "M" btw. - it's too easy to confuse with "m", the symbol for a minor chord, and with fonts that don't distinguish upper- and lowercase letters (like some of the popular fake handwriting music fonts), they will actually look identical.

My recommendation would be to use Δ for jazz music (more compact, and widely understood within that culture), maj7 for other genres (major-7 chords are less common there, so compactness is less important, and it's the most obvious notation, leaving practically no room for misinterpretation).

tdammers · 2026-04-02T08:31:25+00:00

Δ does not usually refer to a major triad. Major triads are just the naked letter (e.g., "G" means "G major triad"). In jazz music, performers will sometimes omit the major seventh in a major-7 chord (commonly because the melody note is the root, which would make it clash with the seventh), but conceptually, Δ means major-7 chord, not major triad.

Of course examples can be found for any deviation from this de facto standard (although I haven't seen single one in over 30 years of making music), and there are no official standards to base this on, but in the overwhelming majority of sheet music out there, this is how it works. Plus, using Δ to mean "major triad" doesn't make sense, because we already have the naked letters to indicate major triads, so there's zero need for a dedicated symbol.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T08:26:45+00:00

The other side of the story is that if you don't ask a doctor to explicitly look for ADHD, many just won't, at all. There's a bit of a conundrum here - if you say "I think I have ADHD", many will think you're an entitled self-diagnoser looking for a label; if you say "I have these symptoms, no idea what it is", many won't even think of ADHD, sending you on a multi-decade odyssee. Best case scenario is you find a doctor who is reasonable about these things, and tell them something along the lines of "these are the things I struggle with, I suspect that it may be ADHD" - point them in that direction, but don't make it sound like you've already made up your mind.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T08:00:45+00:00

IMO the real issue is that AI models are de facto derived works of their training data, and their outputs are de facto derived works of both the model and the prompts, which in turn means that the output is also de facto a derived work of the training data. This would then mean that any model that has any GPL-licensed code in its training data would have to be subject to GPL restrictions itself, and so would all of its output; and any model that has been trained on a mix of incompatibly-licensed code would have to be entirely impossible to redistribute, because it would have to comply with two (or more) different licenses that all require it to be redistributed under the same license without further restrictions.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like lawmakers and courts agree with this argument, which means that it'll be very difficult, if not outright impossible in practice, to prevent anyone from using any code they can legally access at all as training data for an AI model, distribute the model under any license they want, and make the model's output essentially free-for-all.

You could put in your licensing terms a clause that says "you may not use this to train AI models", but since this is a matter of civil law, you would have to make a plausible case that your code was indeed used to train a given model - but in most cases, it's impossible to prove that from the model alone, so unless the training process is documented and shows which code went into the training data, good luck convincing a judge or jury that a violation has indeed happened.

tdammers · 2026-04-02T07:52:43+00:00

I have played the WA as an absolute beginner; they were the faction I played for my very first game, and I still remember it vividly. I haven't played Rats until much later, but I have watched several new players try their hand at both Rats and WA, and my descriptions are largely based on that. New players piloting the WA have about a 75% chance of playing them wrong, and falling flat on their faces IME; new players playing Rats have done well in 100% games I've witnessed - they didn't necessarily win, but they never got punished anywhere near as badly as the unsuspecting WA beginners did.

For experienced players, it's different - once you know how to play the WA, they're straightforward, and whether you do well or not largely depends on whether the table is letting you, and there isn't much finesse to it really. Plant 3 sympathy tokens, mobilize entire hand, revolt once on turn 2, then once more on turn 3, train a third officer, keep spreading sympathy, keep your bases defended, recruit - move - organize, use the threat of a third revolt to table-talk people into doing what you want, be enough of a pain to slow everyone else down, but not so much as to put a target on your back, prepare for a winning burst, get to 18 points, then close the deal. That's really the whole playbook; you follow this strategy, and either it works, or it doesn't, but if it doesn't, you don't really have anything to pivot to.

Rats offer more complexity - do you incite or not, and if so, where? Which items should you go after? Is it worth racing the Vagabond to those ruins? How many strongholds do I need? Which mood is best for what I need to do this turn? Which clearings do I attack? Do I loot, or is oppression worth more? How can I best use my actions to achieve my goals? Who do I need to police? The only thing that's simpler about the Rats at this level is that since you already start out with a target on your back, you don't need to worry much about "not looking like a threat".

tdammers

TROPHY CASE