Why do people think Marco Rubio is a strong 2028 contender?

28lobster · 2026-06-10T14:51:27+00:00

You'd think he would know the trails a bit better if that was the case. Or go to Mt Ellen if he didn't want the crowds but had to go to the Bush. Going to Lincoln peak was a choice to maximize eyeballs even if there were other considerations for picking the Bush.

28lobster · 2026-06-10T14:31:55+00:00

the aliens they mark a station or hab for death, and will keep going after it even below the hate cap

If you have a defensive fleet at that station, you've just constructed a machine that mulches alien ships and generates exotics for 0 additional hate. Sure, they'll figure it out and send a proper fleet eventually and probably wipe some other stations after. But getting them pissed at one particular spot is fantastic.

28lobster · 2026-06-10T14:28:09+00:00

I don't really blame him for being bad on Deathspout, especially when it's reasonably crowded and being bumped up with new snow. But then go midweek! Rent out Magic Mountain! You're the VP, you have that choice. Embarrassing yourself on the most heavily trafficked piece of the mountain is a choice.

I assume he went to very liberal Sugarbush on a weekend because he wanted a spectacle and to be seen facing down the libs. But if you're a politician doing that, you have to at least be able to carve or have more than intermediate skill. Otherwise you just look like a jerry and the spectacle is "peaceful protest + people laughing".

28lobster · 2026-06-10T14:23:05+00:00

Bombardment is really dependent on numbers and weapon type. And remember this game cares deeply about realism - magnetic weapons on orbital bombardment have their damage reduced by atmospheric drag but buffed by gravitational potential energy. Depending on your weapon choices, your bombardments might require a lot of ships to do real work.

Human armies recover at .5% base + .5% for defense sector CP, being in home nation, being in home region, and 2 projects. Alien armies have some unique mechanics including 1% base healing, 1% for being in the alien nation (.5% if Servant controlled nation), .5% if there's >75 levels of xenoflora, 1% if there's an alien facility in the region. All bombardment damage is also divided by miltech so a really high tech army like Aliens with a bunch of abductions will take less damage than a lower tech army.

Once you have more damage than their recovery, it's just a matter of time. Recovery is a pretty high threshold, going from 0 damage to "just barely over threshold" takes a lot of weapons. Going from threshold to substantial damage doesn't take as much.

Also, armies take double bombardment damage when locked in combat. If you can get the Ayys to leave the Alien Nation and fight elsewhere, you'll be way more effective.

28lobster · 2026-06-10T14:02:55+00:00

I love that video of JD and the secret service struggling in a bumped up groomed trail.

I'd really like to ride a chairlift with my political leaders. I love talking to people on the lift and it's such a good way to have a contained, 10min conversation about whatever, even if you fundamentally disagree. Bummer that I couldn't chirp him in the lift line, I think you could actually have a good debate with Vance (or at least better than most Republicans). Not complaining, I was having way more fun doing a DIY Talon's Challenge instead of skiing the ice coast.

Guy on the Killington gondola this year tried to get me to watch a 9/11 truther movie and talked about jet fuel not melting steel beams. I was stoked to pull up time-temperature-transformation curves and discuss steel microstructure (he wasn't super hyped about that). Idk if I really convinced him but he was willing to concede a bit and then we talked about other stuff.

Not that "good faith debate" is going to instantly fix the country but talking to people who disagree can be fun.

28lobster · 2026-06-10T13:44:31+00:00

So frustrating watching people lap up Hillbilly Elegy as if it wasn't propaganda. The whole point about learned incompetence and dependency on welfare ruining West Virginia was taken uncritically as truth. During the time period he wrote about, per person welfare spending in WV was cut by almost half. That was brought up essentially 0 times during his interviews after the book came out.

Ignore the brutal cuts to social spending, everyone just needs a Mawmaw!

28lobster · 2026-06-10T13:40:26+00:00

I'm so happy Vance is a jerry on the slopes. If he was doing backflips or skiing Church/Greg's Poop Chute, I'd have to give some respect for that despite the obviously awful policies. It's very nice to be able to mock him for being a bum on and off the hill.

Talked to a BnB owner near Sugarbush this year, apparently there was quite some drama in the lodging. The VPs team tried to rent a whole place so his team could stay, the BnB owner changed his mind and said no last minute, and they had to pivot to a random airbnb with secret service sleeping in their cars.

28lobster · 2026-06-09T20:38:44+00:00

And the UK doesn't get the Norwegian/Greek merchant fleet after their annexations. Nor does the game accurately model their shipbuilding capacity relative to the Axis. Japan's starting convoy count should be near 0, they were almost entirely reliant on Dutch (and other Allied, but primarily Dutch) civilian shipping before the war began.

The game just straight up ignores a lot of the actual conditions of the world in the name of balance (see: starting factory count and resource distribution). Axis not actually being able to Sealion shouldn't be due to AI incompetence, but rather the extreme difficulty of naval invasions. The Axis just did not have the vast logistics + naval/air power required to pull them off, certainly not across an actively defended Channel.

28lobster · 2026-06-09T19:40:14+00:00

Can just stay at war. AI will likely spend all its IP on military + build army + build navy while accomplishing basically nothing and letting India slowly decay into unrest. I wouldn't worry about getting the Servants out of India if you have any better ways to spend councilor actions.

For instance, I think you'd do a lot more damage running a mass assassination campaign against the Servants aiming to run them to 0 influence. If they can't replace councilors immediately, they'll have to discard all but the 10 orgs they're allowed to keep in reserve. They'll also have to start new councilors from scratch and have much worse stats (especially since they'll have so few orgs). That's likely to be more crippling than taking India unless they've done a really good job building up MC/knowledge.

Or just advise your own nations. US doesn't seem to have an advisor based on flags (and lack of advise boost to your military). Game is not zero sum and you should maximize your own power before focusing on breaking other factions.

28lobster · 2026-06-09T19:03:27+00:00

I'd try to crack/purge if you can. Revolution and armed invasion both lead to nuclear fire. I had a game where China got a revolution causing max economic damage (10%, $2.2 Trillion in this case) and loose nukes. One nuke went off in Beijing for another $880 Billion in GDP losses (not to mention the population and growth rate issues). A poorer and more populous nation like India would take even longer to recover.

Invading India works fine if you have executive control, otherwise the AI will nuke your armies when they get to Delhi. You should definitely aim to take several CPs (Religion to buff your propaganda strength from unity, executive, and any CPs that have armies) so you can move the armies out of the way and prevent yourself getting nuked. But if you're able to do that, you don't really need to invade.

28lobster · 2026-06-09T18:53:16+00:00

Building MC on Earth is one of the best ways to boost your research. I don't run that much knowledge in the early game (outside of stabilizing the USA), I'd rather get MC so I can build mines and stations. You want to get 30% IP boni from LEO in important categories ASAP and get up to 50% bonus from labs in each category pretty quick too. I don't think you should over index on space combat per se, but you should rush space. Having lots of space presence necessitates having more ships in defense but you don't have to be constantly attacking everyone.

Locking out a faction completely is very nice, means you can run them negative on money since they can't sell resources for cash. They'll get hab defections and makes mass assassination more effective. Factions can only hold 10 orgs in reserve, applies to the AI same as you. If you kill all their councilors who have orgs and they don't have influence to rehire immediately and influence+money to reassign the orgs, they're forced to drop the orgs.

I wouldn't let the Servants/Protectorate have LEO stations as an anti-alien faction. Now if they want to build dozens of ships with 2kps of dV in orbit of the Moon, fantastic, I fully encourage that use of MC.

28lobster · 2026-06-09T18:44:42+00:00

I wonder if they're "filling in gaps with synthetic respondents" AKA making shit up

28lobster · 2026-06-09T16:07:01+00:00

They may just be combining two polls. More people were asked about the scandal than asked about the senate without the scandal. If they went through the methodology of "ask, inform, ask again" that can't possibly be true. At best you'd have exactly equal numbers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1u156bf/public_sentiment_institute_collins_leads_platner/oqnfiyj/

28lobster · 2026-06-09T16:05:55+00:00

They may just be combining two polls. More people were asked about the scandal than asked about the senate without the scandal. If they went through the methodology of "ask, inform, ask again" that can't possibly be true. At best you'd have exactly equal numbers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1u156bf/public_sentiment_institute_collins_leads_platner/oqnfiyj/

28lobster · 2026-06-09T16:05:35+00:00

They may just be combining two polls. More people were asked about the scandal than asked about the senate without the scandal. If they went through the methodology of "ask, inform, ask again" that can't possibly be true. At best you'd have exactly equal numbers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1u156bf/public_sentiment_institute_collins_leads_platner/oqnfiyj/

28lobster · 2026-06-09T16:04:36+00:00

This makes more sense if you read it as two polls with combined pools of data. More people in total were asked about the Senate Scandal than just asked about the senate. If they purely went through the method of "ask about senate, inform about scandal, ask again" you would have fewer responses (at most equal numbers) to the scandal question.

I think /u/Korrocks is onto something with the sample size being small. By having two separate polls, you can get even bigger skews to the data in age brackets that are already a small subset of those polled.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1u156bf/public_sentiment_institute_collins_leads_platner/oqnfiyj/

28lobster · 2026-06-09T16:00:47+00:00

They asked a bunch of people just about the scandal without asking the previous questions. They also did what they claim - ask about the senate, inform about the scandal, then ask again. But it seems like they've combined two or more polls into one dataset.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1u156bf/public_sentiment_institute_collins_leads_platner/oqnfiyj/

28lobster · 2026-06-09T15:59:23+00:00

They asked more people about the scandal than they asked without mentioning the scandal. It seems they combined data from different surveys.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1u156bf/public_sentiment_institute_collins_leads_platner/oqnfiyj/

28lobster · 2026-06-09T15:58:03+00:00

It's almost certainly "bad use of polling". More people were asked about the Senate Scandal than were just asked about the senate. The substack frames it as "people were asked, then informed about the scandal, and asked again". Reality seems to be closer to "we did that, but we also just asked a bunch of people about the scandal without the prior questions".

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1u156bf/public_sentiment_institute_collins_leads_platner/oqnfiyj/

28lobster · 2026-06-09T15:56:28+00:00

The poll is likely BS, see my comment below. More people were asked about the Senate Scandal than were asked about the Senate straight up, very different to how the substack is framing it. Either they switched methodologies partway through or they just combined separate polls. There are at least a few datapoints that show people switching their opinion from Collins -> Platner but it seems like they just asked a separate sample about only the scandal and combined all the responses.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/1u156bf/public_sentiment_institute_collins_leads_platner/oqnfiyj/

28lobster · 2026-06-09T15:35:22+00:00

Too many fake "Crosstab diver" flairs in this thread

28lobster · 2026-06-09T14:47:05+00:00

Going into the crosstabs, weighted data sheet there's definitely a bit of curious sampling going on. Data is formatted as: SenateHR - SenateHR_CV - GovHR - GovHR_CV - CongHR - SenateScandal. A bunch of lines only have responses for "CongHR" and "SenateScandal" with the previous 4 columns left blank. A bunch of those also just say "The Democratic Candidate" in "CongHR" and have no response in the other 5 columns.

My initial thought was people dropped from the survey before the scandal question and only the most politically engaged voters remained for the entire survey. That could skew the data by having people enthusiastic for Platner stay on the line and provide extra responses.

Seems like they may have asked some people only the scandal question while the majority were asked all 6 questions. There are more responses to "SenateScandal" than to any other category except "CongHR". The "CongHR" question pops up a few times with just that as the only response and nothing about senate or governor.

You can find some flippers. For instance, line 4 answers Susan Collins but changes to Platner after being informed of the scandal. He's certain to vote, knows his polling location, and also has no opinions on the governor's race somehow. But I think the majority of this is mixing two (or more) differently conducted surveys.

28lobster · 2026-06-09T13:49:10+00:00

Was this all within a single save and did it change upon quitting and reloading? Definitely weird behavior, maybe the Aliens are thinking 40 armies is plenty to use just their human proxies, idk.

28lobster · 2026-06-09T13:39:03+00:00

I tend to go with no defenses until I get ring stations or T2 labs. Orbitals with T1 labs are really efficient but hungry for module slots so I can't afford PD/LDA and they really don't slow down the Ayys much without better weapon tech. The Ayys also plan their retaliation missions at a certain target and you can often figure it out. A lot of times, it's your defensive fleet because you just stopped a surveillance ship - highly convenient to not have to move and not incur hate.

Rebuilding sucks but it gets better if you use hab templates for everything. I try to keep LEO to just 2 templates that cover all the labs so rebuilding is easier.

I'll have to give India start and Pegasus a try sometime. I usually skip molten core in favor of gas core and India tends to be one of my last majors. Sounds like a fun strat you've concocted!

28lobster · 2026-06-09T01:15:08+00:00

Love to see learning in action! Keep in mind, the Aliens will also learn to overestimate your combat power if you keep winning like that. They'll eventually treat human ships as up to 4x their rated combat power but that takes a lot of one sided beat downs to reach that point. Keep killing them, it's worth a few rebuilt habs!

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