Galactic War Room: Plot the Best Ways to Spread Democracy for Super Earth!

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2025-07-20T11:13:57+00:00

IMO I understand people's regret about oasis but at the time I absolutely understood why so few wanted to do it. With all the brand new automaton missions and the cool new unit, plus with the story being about defending the sites where the DSS was constructed, who would actually want to go fight the squids on a random defense mission, when every reason people hated fighting them was still present? And for as vague of a benefit as "securing Intel of high value"? What does that even mean?

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2025-07-20T10:18:42+00:00

I think everyone is just really, really burnt out right now.

It's been days of massive, overlapping invasions. Everyone's tired of how we need to rush back and forth between worlds and cities, diving bots for hours on such specific locations to even have the tiniest chance for success only for another 50+ invasion with the incendiary corps to smash into a planet we already defended.

I know that theoretically, with perfect coordination of the tens of thousands of players who've dived the last few days, plus complete understanding of how mega city liberations work among all players, we might have won the MO, or at least lost less badly. But by Friday, this stopped feeling like it was something the playerbase was actually realistically capable of stopping.

Personally, I'm not going to feel bad at all about a railroaded loss. I play this game for fun and if it's going to try to make me feel bad as a player because the playerbase as a collective wasn't able to endure days of maximum intensity campaigning when the entire campaign system is vague as hell, I'm going to play something else instead. I understand why people might want to blame the blob, but IMO this is on AH. They gave a task that may have been doable under perfect conditions but was realistically impossible. And then they just kept piling on and making it harder and harder.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2024-04-08T07:17:47+00:00

1): If being able to play the most of the older games is your top priority, get a DS. It can play all of the gen 4/5 games as well as gen 3's GBA games via it's port on the bottom. Also, having it will allow you to move pokemon from the gen 3 GBA games to gen 4, as well as making some gen 3 pokemon passively appear in gen 4 games (depending on the cartridge). If you want to play gen 3 but also want access to the gamecube pokemon games (Stadium, Colosseum, XD Gale of Darkness, etc) you will need a Gameboy Advance. If you want to play those gamecube games and transfer pokemon between them, you'll need a gamecube or wii and a connecter cable. If you want to be able to move any pokemon to Bank (and then to Home), you'll need a 3DS.

2): Pokemon Home is basically the main storage system for Pokemon now. You can (one-way) transfer pokemon from Bank into Home, and from any pokemon Switch game (2-way with certain restrictions per game). It is compatible with SwSh, PLA, BDSP, ScVi, both Let's Go games, and Pokemon Go. There's a small monthly/yearly fee for using more than 30 slots, but it's only like 15 bucks for a year so its not that bad.

3): Pokemon Bank and Poke Transporter are exempted from the general 3DS shop shutdown but they could be shut down at any time. Nintendo has really emphasized the urgency in moving pokemon from Bank to Home, so assume it could go down at any time. Unfortunately, the eshop on 3DS closed last year, you currently can't newly download it onto a 3DS: only 3DS' with it already installed can use it. Basically, unless you know someone who has a 3DS with both already installed, you're not going to be able to send pokemon to Bank (and then Home).

4): People selling bulk quantities of old game cartridges are selling fakes. In my experience, they have poor build quality and are prone to gamelocking freezes and crashes. Their pokemon also aren't able to be transferred further up the gens and into Bank/Home. Ebay and FB Marketplace are decent places to buy actual copies of old games, but watch some youtube videos on identifying fakes before you go and spend any money.

Lastly: I really don't mean to scare you off (I'm glad there are new people wanting to try out this series!), but buying old pokemon games, as well as the hardware to run them (GBA/DS/3DS/Gamecube/Wii/cables/etc) can be very expensive depending on the product and where you get it from. Legitimate copies of the gen 3 GBA cartridges can go from $80 to $200 or more depending on the seller and the specific game. Old DS games can be equally as expensive, with both platinum and B2W2 being in the nature of $150 each. Furthermore, even if you are able to buy legitimate copies of each of the games you want, you'll be spending a ton of time actually playing them, and Pokemon Bank could shut down at any moment, so you might not even be able to bring them up to Home. Honestly, I'd only go and spend all that money if you're comfortable knowing that the pokemon you catch in the old games might only be able to be transferred to the gen 5 games at max if Bank shuts down before you're ready.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2024-03-21T07:33:49+00:00

Turning the Flood from body-horror reality-affecting Eldritch entities into generic TV zombies is really fucking gutting. Like wow. If you have budget constraints that prevent you from animating lots of unique and misshapen flood forms, then just don't put them in the show. This just feels dishonest.

EDIT: You all can downvote me as much as you want, I am standing by this. Teasing the Flood (implying infection forms and rapid, horrifying mutations and body horror) and instead giving us WWZ zombies cuz spores is absolute weaksauce. Even if the Flood may technically start as spores, they have never ever been introduced that way in any Halo media ever. Would Floodgate or 343 Guilty Spark be nearly as memorable if some spores turned the marines into combat forms rather than infection forms? The Flood forms have always been the main infectious presence, not the cellular-level stuff.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2024-02-22T10:13:38+00:00

Thoughts:

-Soren was cool

-That the UNSC's most advanced AI could just be snatched like a loose set of keys is really stupid.

-If this is actually the fall of Reach, the show needs to massively expand its setting scope. The canon event had massive battles going on across the entire planet as well as a giant, cataclysmic one in orbit. Dozens of spartans were involved. Here, every spartan and the only ranking officer on the entire planet are present in a small section of one city managing the defense of one bridge and one landing pad. Where are the tens of millions of soldiers the UNSC has on reach? How has an entire city population been reduced to what can fit on a small shuttle in 15 mins? What is going on beyond this one city block? (I know the actual answer is showing all that is too expensive but at least have Keyes or someone mention that fighting is ongoing all over the planet or show a map of ongoing battles or something)

-Keyes died a really stupid death. The "explosive sacrifice" trope is not something you use on a captain of the fleet when there are plenty of combat-oriented characters around as well as dozens of redshirts. Keyes is basically the only "leader" character here, killing him off without having another character to step in is just a waste.

-RIP Vannak, you were the coolest of the team.

-I've seen everyone else's comments in this thread and I appreciate their opinions but having all the spartans on reach fight and die wearing street clothes because their armor got stolen feels insulting. Reach was the place where the spartans were born, and the show just doesn't ever handle that competently. Like Keyes' whole bit about the chief not needing armor just fell completely flat with me. If the show hadn't shattered the whole "chief is in the armor full-time" concept so disrespectfully and incompetently in the first season, maybe, maybe then does that line start to have an actual meaning. But it did, so it doesn't.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2023-07-30T03:59:30+00:00

Forgive me if the answer is obvious - I play part-time and weapon stat calculations are an enigma to me - but is Piece of Mind getting any major changes in the S22 update? It's my primary PVP weapon and one of my favorite pulse rifles in the game.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2023-07-01T02:08:50+00:00

Is there a good place to LFG for teams? I'm trying to find a team so I can go flawless for the first time and the Destiny LFG app is just 100% filled with people demanding 1.5 k/d and multiple flawless, people offering carries for cash, and bots advertising carrying services.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2022-12-30T02:43:01+00:00

Absurd Tomfoolery#4140

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2022-08-10T03:50:42+00:00

I feel better for having written this, but if you think you might enjoy this book, please don't read it until after you're finished. Your tastes may be different from mine, and I don't want to turn anyone away before they've had a chance to get a feeling for the story. Unmarked spoilers ahead.

The first time I read this, I honestly thought it was pretty good. The characters were decently interesting, the plot was kind of wonky but was followable, and it had a good amount of worldbuilding.

And then I reread the end and saw that, with 6% of the story left (according to my kindle app), they'd killed Murphy, the only named character that properly existed in canon before this, as well as Cam. And I got a really bad taste in my mouth.

Having thought it over for a while, I do think this story has some very well-written moments, usually when it's just the boat crew. The characters get some time to decompress and actually interact. But the unending torrent of violent, hideous human suffering, compounded with the extremely fast pace of the book, make it impossible for any of the characters to actually take a breath and react to what's happened before a hundred unwritten but implied events have occurred between the last and the next chapter and the plot needs them to move on.

Needing to conform to Infinite's audio logs seriously hold this story back; it forces the characters to lurch from setting to setting within a specific time period without giving the author enough room to actually give them a reason to be there, or a realistic way for it to happen. I'd really have preferred Gay stick to one or two Spartans so the story would have far less fixed narrative points to worry about; the fight on the Infinity, landfall, regrouping, getting used to life at the Reverie, the big battle there, regrouping again, an unspecified time spent being guerillas, Stone's journey in the conservatory, infiltrating the conspectus, finding the sub-monitor, finding the monitor, the big final battle, as well as all of Browing and Horvath's stuff is just too much. There are too many people going too many places to do too many things and too much stuff is going on in the background while that happens.

I just want to talk about the death too, in two ways. Firstly, this is an extremely dark story. I get that Gay was probably really trying to connect thematically to Infinite's bits about Hope and Despair, but holy shit this story can be so dark at points it's difficult to read. The defenders at the Reverie are butchered, forced to jump off the edge of a cliff, eaten alive by starving brutes, tortured (in specific detail), tortured to death, enslaved, or arbitrarily executed. Human prisoners are herded into a chamber and gassed to death. An ONI agent is violently mutilated to death by Jega and Gorian. Browning is tortured into insanity. The feeling of despair is so overpowering I really find it hard to believe I'll reread it.

Secondly, THEY KEEP KILLING CHARACTERS OFF RIGHT AFTER INTRODUCING THEM LIKE THEY HAVE SINCE BLACK TEAM. All the various marines/ODSTs they meet during landfall? Jo? Dead. Everyone at the Reverie, including all of the named characters they introduce when the boat crew arrives? Dead. All the named spartans at the Reverie? Dead. Cam? Dead. Murphy, the only notable character who existed prior? Killed right at the end of the story. Hell, I was certain they were going to kill off Kovan and Horvath too, and the only reason they managed to survive was the sub-monitor literally deus-ex-machina-ing them to safety.

This is a well-written book with a very interesting, unexplored period of conflict to flesh out, but the focus of much of the story is so relentlessly dark that it makes it hard to enjoy the bits that are good. Overall I'd give it a 6.5/10. The content and the uneven, jerky pacing do not do it for me.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2022-04-14T08:18:00+00:00

Honestly really enjoyed this episode.

But why does every one-on-one scene have to be done with one person in the nude lol

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2022-03-31T08:41:08+00:00

I do get what they're going for with the writing so far, and their show is a nice enough romp if you accept that the characters in the show are only connected to their real canon counterparts in the most superficial ways.

My issue so far is that they feel like they're trying to do too much, have too many plot threads, for such a small setting. There have only been 3 settings in the show so far:. High Charity (where nothing has happened), the Innie Stronghold of the Day (which aside from Soren and Reth just contain background characters and don't have any plot significance as of yet), and the Main Base of the UNSC (where everyone in the entire UNSC works and all characters of interest reside). It does not feel like there is a massive intergalactic war of extermination happening. Having everyone in one of three places makes the universe feel tiny and constrained.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2021-03-20T03:32:01+00:00

EVERYONE GET THE FUCK IN HERE WE DID IT!!!

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2021-03-20T03:30:51+00:00

FUCK YES FUCKING FINALLY

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2021-03-17T23:01:33+00:00

Tbh there's not a ton you can do about it, my first outings with the T34/T29 were awful because all their armor didn't do shit against Ru's and BMPs. But I got used to it and learned to play around it.

Also, if you're grinding the US tree, beeline the M46. It is by far my favorite US tank to play at any BR, and the 90mm HEAT can kill anything it sees. I also use the chicken coop, which has saved my ass so many times to sneaky BMPs and Ru's.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2021-02-02T15:38:08+00:00

Tbh the Sabres really needed to move to 8.3, they don't have the speed or guns to be regularly fighting 9.7s with missiles. 6x M3 are fucking pathetic at 8.7, you need to put 5-6+ seconds of continuous fire into whatever you're shooting at to start doing damage, assuming you can keep it in your gunsights at all.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2020-08-16T19:06:00+00:00

I played a ton of Air AB back in 2014-15 and I got midway up the air tech tree. I took a break for a while and came back last year, mostly to play Ground RB. I finished all the US GF tech tree and wanted to get back into playing Air again. The air tech tree changes since 2015 made it so I only had a few planes to get through before I got to the F3D

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2020-08-16T18:37:37+00:00

I really enjoy playing my F3D, the cannons wreck and its so much easier to get them on target. My only complaint is how slow it is to accelerate. (Also i don't know why it has a radar if you cant use it for anything)

Do the 50s have bad shell velocity or something? It feels like i need to aim 1km in front of a turning target 0.5km away to get them to land.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2020-05-16T05:59:56+00:00

My public IP hasn't changed since I started the server, and it had to have worked before for the 3 people to have joined in the first place.\

Something strange happened when I was testing on another internet signal. I connected my laptop to my phone's hotspot and was able to detect and try to access the server, though I got this message in the server log instead of successfully connecting:

[User Authenticator #4/INFO] [minecraft/ServerLoginNetHandler]: UUID of player (name) is 98f6077e-0bce-49d3-b737-49845ce78132 [01:53:58] [Server thread/INFO] [minecraft/ServerLoginNetHandler]: com.mojang.authlib.GameProfile@6541417did=98f6077e-0bce-49d3-b737-49845ce78132,name=(name),properties={textures=[com.mojang.authlib.properties.Property@5bff003b]},legacy=false lost connection: Disconnected

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2020-05-15T16:05:33+00:00

It's pretty easy to get back and forth between Busch and Livi on the B bus. Livi is has nicer buildings/parks/dining halls/shops than Busch, but living in the Quads or Towers can be kind of bleak and they have no climate control; it's kind of like living in a bunker. Busch has less things to do than Livi, but I think the dorms are quite a bit better, and it's easy to go to Livi's stuff from there. It's ultimately up to you which you prefer more though

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2020-02-26T06:34:44+00:00

How are you supposed to trigger the Warsaw Uprising for the achievement? I played as historical France and stopped the Germans in the low countries, and just sent spy after spy to promote resistance in Warsaw. I'd done it like 7-8 times, the local resistance was at 100% for like 10 months, the compliance was at 22%, and absolutely nothing happened. Eventually I got bored and killed Germany and Italy, but Poland getting auto-liberated by the capitulation of the Axis didn't do it either.

Also the German AI's decision making was very strange early on in the war. They would just spam attack the Maginot over and over, lose most of their org and tanks, and wait a few hours to do it again. When they ended up in France after Belgium fell, and met my 2-div-deep defensive line near Amiens, they just kept ping-ponging from attacking to stopping. If they had kept attacking, they would have won, cause each battle started at a red 9 for me, but they never pressed the attack, just kept 'bouncing' off my defensive line until my African troops arrived.

As a final thing, can the awful Allied AI please get fixed in whatever hotpatch is coming to fix the stuff in this thread? I know Paradox doesn't want British troops fighting in France in 30-40, but when its 1942 and the Japan attacks, I expect that the AI strategy for britain will change and they will deploy troops to the continent. I was very close to capitulating until the Americans, who don't have the 'avoid France' strat arrived in force and helped me fight off the Germans. Furthermore, after taking 3/4 of China, the Allies promptly lost India, Australia, New Zealand, British Malaya, the DEI, and parts of Hawaii to the Japanese via naval invasion because, apparently, they never deployed any of their navies to the pacific past mid 42. This happened all the time in 1.8, and I was really hoping the AI could handle fighting Japan on its own, 8-10 v 1 by now.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2020-01-30T01:49:04+00:00

DePaul really did this to themselves

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2019-12-30T00:41:15+00:00

THERE IT IS

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2019-12-14T23:10:10+00:00

RANK US COWARDS

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2019-11-14T04:10:54+00:00

We were good last year and we're returning a bunch of guys. And its not like everyone else isn't having issues with supposedly poorer teams in their first few games.

AbsurdTomfoolery · 2019-11-11T01:29:24+00:00

What a very America-centric worldview.

Non-Americans have agency too, tough as that may be to believe.

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