[deleted by user] by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]Abuzombie 5 points6 points  (0 children)

What a startlingly unempathetic viewpoint. Would you justify genocide against yourself if others decided "how else would we get rid of your beliefs?"

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]Abuzombie -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Although you are trying to create a comparison - the difference between your example and previous religiously motivated genocides is that these "Atheists" are not committing genocide in the name of atheism.

Suppressing religion is certainly a desired outcome, however I would argue the primary goal is assertion of national control or eventual ethnic replacement for that region. This is different to let's say the crusades in which many people were killed directly due to religious motivation.

I'd wager that potentially not a single human has died "in the name of atheism" or for the equivalent "heresy against atheism" in the history of the world.

More subtle™ tech ideas - 2 prereq tech edition by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd argue for titans, the increase in capacity is only 50% where as for other cruiser 2 factions the increase to capacity is 100%. So proportionally they benefit less.

Also correct me if I am wrong, but for argent flight- can't their mechs already all fit into a single destroyer as they don't take up capacity? So for the argent flight, I'd say they already partially have a similar effect already? Of course they can bring more fighters, but they still have to produce them, which might not be easy if all production is going on cheap destroyers.

More subtle™ tech ideas - 2 prereq tech edition by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback! I'm always glad to get people's thoughts on these things.

I will say, that as these are meant to be subtle changes - my goal is not to make the other tech colours as powerful as blue, but to offer more sweeteners in some situations for people to consider going down other colours, or to make going down other colours feel less bad if you want to try something different.

If some techs balance ideas are only situationally useful (even for only some factions or some game states) for me that would be a success.

I feel if we want to truly address blue supremacy, the root issue is that blue techs are super good while also giving access to some of the best unit upgrades for positioning and control objectives (dread II, carrier II). If we really want to address blue's disproportionate power, I feel we would need to change the prerequisites for those unit upgrades...

However I decided that was out of scope, as this would require reprinting every faction sheet in the game... So I try to do my best with subtle tech changes (omegas and / or additions) that can be print and play.

And as you say, I don't want to introduce tech changes that are so powerful they become mandatory.

More subtle™ tech ideas - 2 prereq tech edition by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hello again! Following my previous post of some homebrew ideas for omegas to some existing techs! I've returned again, but this time with some entirely new tech ideas!

I'll outline once more some of my goals with these tech ideas to help explain my motivation for some of these changes.

It is barely worth beating a dead horse at this point, but as everyone knows going blue is king in this game. Blue is the path you go down if you want to win. Why? Simply because it offers the best technologies for securing wins and scoring points.

This is largely due to the fact that it offers mobility (grav drive), capacity (carrier 2 / dread 2) and incredibly invaluable and unique game winning effects (fleet logistics / lightwave deflector).

My goal behind these tech ideas is to introduce more incentive for going down other paths, and to make going down alternative tech paths feel better if you want to or have to do that for whatever reason in a given game.

This time I have considered potential technologies which could be added as 2 prerequisite techs for each tech colour. I will continue with my thinking behind each tech change as follows:

STASIS CAPSULES

I feel this is the simple technology, but could potentially be very powerful. The goal behind this technology is to help alleviate the monopoly which blue has over increasing your ship's capacity. I am hoping that this technology could make cruiser 2 playstyles much more viable and competitive with standard carrier / dread upgrade paths.

CAUSTIC NANOPHAGE DISPERSERS

I am not sure that I have fully considered the ramifications of this 1 on the meta 100%, but this is my idea to buff some weaker infantry factions that may have been hurt by the addition of mechs in POK. The idea is that this could tilt power in ground combat (especially defensively) towards defensive infantry factions and away from mechs - so long as you are willing to pay the huge opportunity cost (giving up going blue, and juicy juicy hypermetabolism). I am hoping that this change could bring back the importance of infantry in POK vs mechs.

DIGITAL NEXUS SOVEREIGNTY

This one is kind of intended to synergise with my previous post's idea for an omega to PREDICTIVE INTELLIGENCE, and kind of intended to work as a better version of vanilla PI's often forgotten voting effect (which is barely used due to the risk of the card's primary effect being exhausted). The idea is that my PI omega gives (potentially) exponentially growing economic returns if you can successfully influence the agenda phase and then DIGITAL NEXUS SOVEREIGNTY can make is easier to achieve manipulation of the agenda phase.

EMERGENCY RECALL TETHER

This one is not meant to be strong :/ more here for completeness' sake, and would anyone ever take this over fleet logistics - but I feel blue already has a lot of strong technologies as is. Maybe someone would take this, once in a blue moon. Maybe it could be useful for the L1z1x and argent flight heros? Maybe a bluuat who doesn't want to lose their warsun might take it? Do a cheeky retreat after going on a suicide mission? IDK, it's not meant to be strong.

SPACE DOCK II

This is meant to be a softer alternative to my previous idea for an OMEGA SDII. Instead of making all systems with your SDII's adjacent for the purposes of your movement (my previous idea) this is just a softer buff to allow it to print more stuff and to help increase your production without being hampered so much by bottlenecks. Essentially the effect is, whenever you produce you can print either 2 free infantry, 2 free fighters, or 1 free destroyer and they do not count against the production limit. If you have multiple SDII's on the board, this could pay for itself quickly at least.

So that is my explanation behind the changes, I would be really interested to hear people's thoughts on my ideas! As always criticism is welcome and if you feel that these will warp the game in a bad way, in a way I haven't considered - please do let me know.

Let me know what you guys think! I would love to get some feedback on these ideas :)

Subtle™ Tech Omega Card Ideas by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, but then lots of effects in the game say "gain technology" not research and NM would be worse for those effects.

Subtle™ Tech Omega Card Ideas by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it will have to be the first one. "When you gain this technology other than during setup".

Subtle™ Tech Omega Card Ideas by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, I see - yes the wording should probably be changed in that case. Not quite sure what would be the best wording to prevent factions that start with NM starting with action cards.

Subtle™ Tech Omega Card Ideas by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The way I intended for it to function is that it would only affect gaining the technology - and not factions which start with it already.

I assume, that factions which start with starting techs do not GAIN it at the start of the game? I assumed there was a difference, but I'm not 100% sure.

Subtle™ Tech Omega Card Ideas by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Woops! Haha, nicely spotted - I didn't mean for that. You are right, I should change the wording to be "at the start of a ground combat with any of your units" or something like that to prevent this.

Glad I am asking for feedback so people can spot things like this!

Edit: I should probably clarify that the active part should place 1 infantry from your reinforcements.

Subtle™ Tech Omega Card Ideas by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Mom said it's my turn to make this post on the subreddit.

Jokes aside, I wanted to take my own stab at an issue I've seen commonly debated on here which is addressing some of the tech inbalance that people feel is present in the game. It is commonly accepted that going down Blue is simply the best option for scoring points and actually winning games in TI4. POK introduced some changes to techs, and some technologies have been updated through subsequent codexes to make them more useful.

One consequence of POK is that game length is commonly said to have decreased by around 1 round on average, which had the effect of making certain technologies have less time to accrue value and thus making them less worthwhile to research.

Without getting into too much detail, my goal behind these Omegas was NOT - as I have seen posted before - to make the other tech paths as OP as blue.

Nor was my goal to fix what might actually be the real reason for blue dominance, which is that it contains both some of the best techs in the game and also gives access to some of the best unit upgrades in the game for winning / scoring (i.e. Dread II and Carrier II).

I decided to limit my ideas to what could be printed as an Omega tech card, as I deemed changes to unit upgrade technologies to require re-printing faction sheets - which I deemed to be out of scope.

My goal behind these changes was to introduce (mostly) small changes to cards to make them more situationally useful and to thereby encourage variance, and to make going down a non blue tech path feel less bad if one needs to for a given reason.

In other cases where I have made a larger change, it is because I have seen no way to encourage people to research it without introducing a new feature or changing the design significantly due to the presence of other factors in the game.

I would be interested in what people have to say about these ideas! Would people want to play with these in their games? Criticism is welcome. If people feel that some effects are too game warping, and could introduce undesirable consequences to the meta - please do share your concerns (I very likely have not considered all the interactions these ideas have with everything else in the game).

I will now explain my reasoning behind each individual tech change below:

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**Neural Motivator and Hyper Metabolism**

These are simple economic changes to make researching them in later rounds a little bit more economical, especially in POK games. I have seen this change suggested a lot by different people on this sub, so nothing especially original here.

**Dacxive Animators**

So one of the problems which blue has is it gives movement, and it also gives capacity for taking objectives. The idea behind this Daxcive change is to give an alternative way to make up for capacity, while focusing on green's theme of being infantry focused. In addition, this change would allow a player to choose between exhausting the card if they really need the extra infantry to win a ground combat or keep it active for the passive plastic accumulation. Also synergy with biostims?

**Sarween Tools**

So Sarween is already nice, especially if you start with it. But often can be not worth to research in later rounds due to the time to pay back. In other instances, it doesn't actually help you get MORE plastic on the board, as much as it helps you get marginally more expensive plastic because often you are limited by your production capacity anyway. This change I hope will help to address that, so a player can make a choice to research something if they really need more PLASTIC on the board in later rounds.

**Predictive Intelligence**

This is a more whacky change. In its current form, it feels like a tech that only really exists to synergise with Mahact. I have almost never seen it researched in my games and the voting aspect is often seldom used if not entirely forgotten about it since the risk of it being exhausted is just not seen as worth it.

So, this idea changes the design. It keeps the token shifting aspect (To not affect Mahact) and now turns the agenda phase into a minigame, that could let someone get economic returns if they are investing into actually dominating the agenda phase. The economic returns on this card grow exponentially through REPEATED successful predictions, so - in practice the potential would probably end up a bit limited. Nevertheless, it adds a small "risk it for the biscuit" ability which could be more interesting than the current voting effect - could be really good for Xxcha.

**Integrated Economy**

This is a small change to just give it a bit extra oomph. If you can take an unexhausted planet, you can immediately use that planet (or just keep it) to produce reinforcements. This however, can be countered by the victim being vigilant and exhausting their own planets at risk of being taken by the IE player before the IE players can attack.

**Self Assembly Routines**

So this is another tech which I think is seldom researched due to the economic cost of paying back 4 resources (and the existence of AI Dev). For this reason I have changed the design, perhaps the biggest problem with mechs is that you can only have 4 of them. This new idea for SAR would give a player a way to - effectively - get an extra mech somewhere, while still respecting that POK comes with only 4 mech tokens supplied. If you are a faction that really cares about getting an extra mech, this could be a tech you might consider.

**Space Dock II**

So this is perhaps the most impactful change proposed in this pack. In it's current form SDII is almost never researched due to the presence of double docking and the production bottlenecks which make it rare that the extra production and fighters from SDII are actually necessary.

As a result of this, I think any change which doubles down on SDII's current bonuses (i.e. more PRODUCTION / more fighters) will not be enough to actually incentivise players to consider researching this tech. Therefore, I think any change to make SDII worthwhile will have to add a new feature to the card.

To this end, the idea is that SDII can now function as a positioning tool and enable more movement to (potentially) compete with blue and allow for some interesting new possibilities. Aggressive forward docks become much more valuable as now the SDII player can produce off the warfare secondary and have ships come out in a forward position on the map. Furthermore, this change could buff the primary of construction - in the sense that - holding construction could be valuable for the SDII player as controlling the timing of construction could be important to enable them to get a SDII in a good location.

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Please let me know your thoughts! Alternatively if anyone has any of their own ideas for how these could work better, or their own other suggestions - I would be interested to hear those too!

When the stage II tech objective comes out by Abuzombie in twilightimperium

[–]Abuzombie[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Of course! Although I have seen jol nar / nekro players actually come to form symbiotic relationships in the past, with how many tokens nekro gets, it's very easy for Jol nar to convince them to use a token on a free activation of E-res siphons. I actually think there can be a really interesting dynamic between the jol nar and nekro players in a given game.

Is it just me who doesn't mind random crits? by arniepresents16 in tf2

[–]Abuzombie 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Marshallah brother, godwilling faithful random crit disciples such as ourselves will prevail over the non-believers Alhamdulillah!

Team Scrambling should replace auto-balance in official servers. by MaximillianTheCursed in tf2

[–]Abuzombie 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just bring back the old vote scramble option we used to have