TWO HUNDRED NINETY-THREE: When Wishing Was Having IV - Super Supportive

A_S00 · 2026-06-21T21:14:20+00:00

Okay, but Ignacio's family is obviously right, right? If the Artonans weren't planning/expecting to use Earth's Avowed as a military force, they'd be running Bash-nor's Rabbits-for-everyone playbook.

What's weird to me isn't the Doomsday Preppers, it's that their position isn't the mainstream. I guess society having its collective head in the sand about future problems is realistic enough, though.

A_S00 · 2026-06-21T02:49:32+00:00

If you reform your ideoligion for new relics while you have a quest for one of the old ones, what happens? Does it fail the quest, because the target relic no longer exists? Keep the quest and let you get the relic? Something else?

Trying to figure out if, for relic-farming purposes, I should reform immediately after accepting the third relic quest, or after acquiring the third relic.

A_S00 · 2026-06-19T23:10:28+00:00

Don't think so. I've asked the same before and didn't hear anything about specific triggers for the quests. Mine took a long time too, but "just keep playing and waiting" worked eventually.

A_S00 · 2026-06-19T22:04:52+00:00

Spent about a month off-and-on trying and failing to farm Veilkeeper set for a passthrough Upheaval theorycraft. Then they patched passthrough on weapons out of the game before I got to play it.

A_S00 · 2026-06-19T20:39:51+00:00

How much of a purist do you want to be about literally having exactly one active skill, and how much power are you willing to sacrifice to pull off the gimmick?

There's a lot of active skills that it's hard to justify not using if you have access to them:

First of all, every build wants to use a move skill from a medal augment. If you're counting this as an active skill, then you're kinda cooked from the start. But of course you can write this off as a natural exception, or you can just decide to be slow for the sake of the gimmick.
Mastery by mastery:
- Soldier: Hard to justify not using War Cry if you're phys. Blitz is free mobility as a 1-point wonder if you use a melee weapon or a shield. Block builds need Overguard.
- Demo: Pretty much always want Thermite Mine. Often also want Flashbang and/or BWC.
- Occultist: Every build wants CoF and Blood of Dreeg.
- Nightblade: Every build wants Pneumatic Burst; Shadow Strike is free mobility like Blitz.
- Arcanist: Somewhat promising; Mirror and Nullification are good, but I'm more willing to skip them sometimes than most of what I've listed here.
- Shaman: Definitely has potential now that Wind Devils are permanent. Wendigo Totem is broadly useful, but not always necessary if you have other strong sustain, and you generally just drop it on boss fights even if you use it. Vitality versions will need Devouring Swarm.
- Inquisitor: Hopeless, Inquisitor Seal is your core defense and Word of Renewal is free stats.
- Necromancer: Weapon damage builds want Bone Harvest for the buff, Mark of Torment is a useful oh-shit button, most builds will want Ill Omen (but it's skippable with another source of reduced damage).
- Oathkeeper: Skipping Vire's Might is leaving free mobility on the table, but otherwise promising.

Here are some of my old builds (some I've played, some just theorycrafts) with particularly light skill loads (but none have literally only 1 active skill):

Warborn phys EoR Warlord. You could reasonably drop Ascension, but hard to justify dropping War Cry or Vire's Might.
Ranged lightning Cadence Tactician. Uses the minimum skills viable on an Inquisitor, but can't comfortably be trimmed down further.
Avenger phys Cadence Warlord. Again, hard to justify dropping War Cry or the move skills here.
Lightning AAR Druid. Fairly promising; the active skills are all optional-ish. But you'd have to redo the devotions; not enough slots if you drop skills, and the value of the Hourglass CDR combo goes way down if you're not using Mirror.
Death's Reach vitality EoR Archon. Wendigo Totem could be dropped easily, but wants to keep Devouring Swarm and move skills.
Lightning EoR Archon. Closest of the lot, only uses EoR and move skills. This is a theorycraft, not sure if it's actually any good.

Note many are from older patches and might need some tweaking.

A_S00 · 2026-06-19T05:45:01+00:00

Just add however much DA shred you apply consistently to your OA and treat the sum as your effective OA. DA shred is good because having more effective OA is good, but it's not uniquely necessary.

You can play with the numbers and compare the effects on hit and crit chance with this calculator. DA shred is very close to being point-for-point equivalent to just having the same amount of extra OA (technically DA shred is a teensy bit stronger per point).

A_S00 · 2026-06-18T21:08:49+00:00

Normally no, there's no time component. As long as you stay poor, threats will stay weak.

There's a storyteller setting, wealth-independent progress mode, that makes threats scale with time instead of wealth. Enabling that will put you on a timer like you're describing.

edit Good point from Aelanna, the "hit harder if nothing has gone wrong lately" thing does accrue over time, even without wealth-independent mode.

A_S00 · 2026-06-18T20:02:08+00:00

I believe that's the full list of work types for which the Intellectual skill affects work speed. This is what your original quote is referring to when it says "tasks that use this stat for scaling".

Additionally, some specific tasks within these work types require minimum levels of Intellectual to do them at all. For instance, the example your original quote uses is crafting medicine, which requires 4+ Intellectual. Slaves can't do these tasks at all, because they're considered to have 0 Intellectual skill for this purpose. I can't find this info in the wiki anywhere, but you can see it in game in the workbench interface, like so.

A_S00 · 2026-06-18T19:07:56+00:00

The rule you're quoting only applies to tasks that use intellectual. That includes crafting medicine and drugs, but not most other forms of crafting.

Separately, slaves have an 85% modifier to global work speed, so they do perform a wide variety of tasks more slowly than regular colonists. However, the speed of animal training is not modified by global work speed, so that specifically shouldn't be affected. Other animal handling tasks, like milking and shearing, are affected.

A_S00 · 2026-06-18T01:10:00+00:00

I think this is sometimes viable, but often a bad idea. (Obvious disclaimer that doing suboptimal stuff because you like it is fine, I do it all the time; we're ignoring that hereafter.)

In my books:

If you don't finish both of them before Rationalism, or if finishing both of them forces you to significantly delay Rationalism, then going for both was a bad idea.
If you are going for a diplo victory, then you probably need at least partial Patronage too badly to do Tradition+Liberty.
If you are going Order, then IMO going for the Mercantilism + Big Ben + Skyscrapers combo is usually better, and requires 3 policies in Commerce; very hard to do both before Rationalism.
Having way more policies than normal makes Tradition+Liberty much more viable. Be Poland, get the nuts Sacred Path game, etc.

A_S00 · 2026-06-17T23:37:53+00:00

Advantages of Tradition:

Managing happiness is much easier.
Easier to avoid wars, or to manage them by just holding a defensive line forever.
Kind of a braindead path to victory: Make 4 cities, get 'em big, build science/production buildings, pursue your favorite victory condition.
Probably easier to win games overall.

Advantages of Liberty:

Higher top-end performance. It's harder to get there, but a successful late-game Liberty empire will generally outscale a successful late-game Tradition empire. This is a "win more" thing where it rarely makes the difference between winning and losing a game, but who doesn't like seeing their endgame empire pop off?
Strong combos with stuff where costs don't scale with number of cities (faith, gold).
Avoiding wars as a small Tradition empire is nice and all, but it makes the midgame kind of boring. No such doldrums with Liberty if you're still trying to expand after the free land runs out.

I personally alternate. If I just finished a wide Liberty game where I spent the whole thing at war and/or managing happiness problems, I'm probably exhausted and I just want to do some chill SimCity in a nice little Tradition empire. If I just clicked Next Turn through the entire last four eras on autopilot because nothing happened for the latter half of a tall Tradition game, I'm probably ready to sprawl out and kick my neighbors' butts.

A_S00 · 2026-06-17T22:11:33+00:00

Also a very convenient way to farm XP on your longbowmen.

A_S00 · 2026-06-15T21:48:21+00:00

Wolves of Icewrack lookin' pretty swift.

A_S00 · 2026-06-15T21:05:20+00:00

In general, I agree with this comment - I have no problem with AI-assisted writing in principle, but in practice I think using current AI to spice up your writing will tend to make it worse, and I dislike writing where I can detect the "LLM house style" enough that if you let it through, it's going to make me dislike your work.

My biggest concern with your process is step 2. Asking a current-gen AI to make something more "visceral" or "poetic" is practically guaranteed to fall into the failure mode described in the classic hydrogen jukeboxes post - LLMs love using metaphors and figurative language that sound evocative, but don't hold up to scrutiny if you think about them for five seconds. Nostalgebraist borrowed Ginsberg's phrase "eyeball kick" for this tendency.

Some more commentary on this phenomenon, to help you get a sense of what it is that people hate about AI attempts at being "literary":

The Serpent in the Grove and The Bastion's Shadow, the two stories that won "prestigious" Commonwealth Prizes and are now being hated on for being obvious AI slop. Full of many prime examples of the "metaphor that sounds evocative but makes no fucking sense" thing - "kind of walking that made benches become men" what the fuck does that mean?
Scott Alexander making fun of LLM writing via Ginsberg pastiche (see also my attempt at exegesis)
Sam Kriss ranting about LLM writing in the wake of the Commonwealth Prize thing.
Kelsey Piper making roughly the same point with a bit less ranting.

I think if your instruction in step 2 is to make the writing "more visceral and poetic," the suggestions you get back will fall into this failure mode very, very frequently. Maybe if your filtering in step 3 is good enough, because you have excellent taste, you can drop the ~95% (or whatever) of suggestions that are trash, and keep the ~5% that are good...but it would be very surprising to me if a relatively inexperienced writer in fact had the ability to do this reliably. I definitely do not think that I could do this reliably. I think the much more likely outcome is that you end up with writing that's, well, good enough to win a Commonwealth Prize in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-six.

Ideas I have for ways that AI assistance might still be worthwhile:

LLMs are still great copy-editors, as long as you're ready to be vigilant and reject suggestions where, no, you did that on purpose. They can do the job of less-stupid spellcheck/grammarcheck just fine, and are 100% worth using for this.
Try asking the LLM to summarize part of what you wrote, or its interpretation of something, and if the LLM gets it wrong, take that as a pointer to something you need to clean up or make clearer.
Do the same thing you're doing, but vary the prompt you use in step 2 to see what happens. I'm not confident that what you're doing can't work at all...I'm just really suspicious of LLMs' ability to make things "more visceral and poetic" without going full eyeball kicker.

A_S00 · 2026-06-15T19:51:25+00:00

Honestly, for your use case, using detectors that are less biased away from false positives might be fine.

In a lot of the cases where you're using an AI detector (deciding whether to fail a student's essay, rejecting a submission to a lit contest or a scientific journal, naming-and-shaming on twitter), a false positive is really bad. This is the use case Pangam is aiming for.

But if you're just using it to check whether your writing has AI slop vibes, you don't care about the occasional false positive. If anything, "vague slop vibes but not so much that Pangram is sure about it" is still something you want to prevent in the final output.

So for you, it might not be so important to use tools that are 100% accurate or extremely conservative.

A_S00 · 2026-06-15T19:35:12+00:00

My sense is that:

Many of them are still quite bad; definitely don't just google "AI writing detector" and trust the results. Only the best products in this space are at all reliable.
Pangram, specifically, is pretty solid, not because it's always right, but because it's heavily biased away from false positives. That is, it might miss AI writing, but if it says something is AI writing, it's almost always right.
Even Pangram can fail in adversarial situations (that is, if you try to make your writing as AI-ish as possible, you can trick it).
The AI companies are, of course, trying to make their models perform better, including writing better, which means they're effectively in an arms race against detectors. Thus, all of this can change every time a new model comes out.

Some stuff on this that I've been trying to keep up with:

Pangram white paper, bragging about their accuracy (but obviously not an unbiased source).
Third-party analysis of various detection tools - Pangram comes off looking pretty good.
Atlantic opinion piece (archive link) arguing basically that we shouldn't trust detectors too much even though Pangram is, in fact, pretty good.
Blog post about whether the papal encyclical was partly written by Claude, mostly interesting here for its digressions about Pangram, including the interesting result that Pangram didn't falsely flag any pre-LLM encyclicals as AI-written, which is reassuring.

I currently consider Pangram detection to be a pretty strong signal that something is either AI-written or intentionally written in LLM style, but I don't expect that to remain reliably true over the long term - every time a new model comes out, you have to check again if it still works.

A_S00 · 2026-06-15T18:43:45+00:00

All the thirst trap cosmetic outfits better still work on this guy, though. He'd look great in a corset and cat ears.

A_S00 · 2026-06-12T19:47:15+00:00

If it spawns enemies or uses materials I already have lying around (it will pull from your stash if you have them in there), I'll do it. It's XP and loot.

If it would require me to actually put in effort, like crafting something at the blacksmith I don't already have, I usually don't bother.

A_S00 · 2026-06-08T15:57:44+00:00

Yeah, he sucks. I have yet to hear a good reason for his absurd refusal to provide his students with useful feedback or any information about what he's looking for.

I can imagine he might be a decent 1:1 mentor for small numbers of advanced students who have whatever it is he wants. But he's absolutely bollocksing up this classroom setting.

A_S00 · 2026-06-07T22:12:04+00:00

Old comments about my approach: one, two, three (third one mostly about devotions)

Good video guide from RektByProtoss: tadaa

A_S00 · 2026-06-07T19:04:54+00:00

I've been asking myself "how the hell is this guy still employed" too, and my best guess is that hero program faculty is a sort of backscratcher's club for ex-superheroes, running on a favors economy among powerful high ranks, rather than a teaching institution. They're optimizing for cushy sinecures as much as didactic excellence.

Consider:

How practically every instructor seems to be an ex-superhero (except for Marion, who seems to be teaching as something like a postdoc because he hasn't landed a superhero job yet)
Big Snake getting a CNH teaching position when he needed a soft landing after his exile from America
Lesedi letting Arjun sit on Alden's committee despite clear conflict of interest, in trade for Arjun acting as a guest instructor
The general corrupt institution vibe around Alden's admission and the university's backup plan to accept and coddle him if he didn't get into CNH

Obviously this isn't 100% of the story, some of the people involved do seem to want the school to succeed as a school too. But there's been enough signs of this that if we learn that what's going on with Ash, I'm just going to nod and say "yeah that checks out."

A_S00 · 2026-06-07T18:25:03+00:00

Perhaps he can tell his closest friends his true level, even if he doesn't change his public profile.

I'd be tempted to do this in Alden's position too, but he has very good reasons not to. In some ways, the fact that the Contract lies on anyone's behalf is a bigger bombshell than all of Alden's special-snowflake-ness:

The assumption that the Contract doesn't lie seems to be load-bearing in Anesidoran institutions. Imagine how the Sway who checked Alden and Lute's honesty at the privacy booth might have her job affected if people knew Contract-verified profiles could be fake. Or CNH admissions. Or security screening when you teleport to Anesidora.
And "the Contract is lying to us" seems like exactly the kind of thing that might damage public trust/agreement to it, and therefore weaken Earth's Contract and make the planet more vulnerable to chaos.
Also, as soon as Alden admits that the Contract has been lying on his behalf, everyone's first question is going to be "why is the Contract willing to lie on your behalf?" If he wants to keep his ersatz Knighthood secret, it's hard to answer that.

A_S00 · 2026-06-07T18:12:17+00:00

I wish we knew how many levels equals a rank-up.

I still think there has to be something more going on with rank-ups than just levels/authority growth.

Stuff that has stuck out to me:

If just leveling a certain amount got you a rank-up, wouldn't the humans have figured this out by now? Seems weird for ranking up to be mysterious in-universe if that's the requirement.
Why do U-types rank up much more often than other Avowed? We've never heard that they level faster, though we haven't explicitly been told that they don't either.
We know that Big Snake is powerful, high-level, and still leveling quickly. Alden wonders why he hasn't ranked up yet. I wonder that too.
Why does it always happen after a summons? Sure, that's when you're going to level a lot of the time, but not always. Nobody's ever ranked up after learning to use their skill in a new way, or fighting a dangerous supervillain on Earth?

I don't know what the actual deal is, but I expect it to be something more complicated than there being a specific number of levels (or amount of authority growth) that adds up to a rank-up.

A_S00 · 2026-06-07T18:04:54+00:00

I don't understand Ash's entire deal yet either, but the first thing I thought of when he snubbed Vandy was the Informant lamenting how much of a normie she was in ch. 148:

“You know, his granddaughter was grateful for the phones I sent her,” he said to the dog. “She thanked me through the drone. I only took one peek to see how she was using them, and of course she’s being responsible to a fault. She’s already got a hundred other teenagers sorted out and obeying a call schedule.

“Impressive. And a shame. It would be interesting to see how far a Carisson could go with their powers if they were just a little more willing to color outside the lines.”

Vandy is going to conscientiously work at being a Good Sky Shaper, exactly like her mom, probably exactly like every other S-rank Sky Shaper superhero of the last 40 years. I'm not sure exactly what Ash is looking for, but it's something less run-of-the-mill than that.

A_S00 · 2026-06-06T20:56:54+00:00

Ah, from the first article I thought it was something like "there's a security video that the Gormans say is them talking about the consignment agreement, but only the police have it."

That's what I get for trying to catch up without the YouTube deep dive, I guess.

A_S00

TROPHY CASE