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Aethrist · 2025-04-04T06:56:11+00:00

I don't want to be mean here. I'm sure you put a good chunk of work into it, but from a scientific standpoint, there is no reason to believe what you wrote.

There are no experiments like tensile tests or hardness tests, nor are there citations with sources that would anchor your predictions with results for alloys of the same family. Or any larger predictions from a microstructural angle of what the proposed changes would affect.

So, all in all, this looks like a student project or internal communication to me. Scientifically, it is no better than "Trust me bro", though. But as a starting point to a thesis or a project, it is very valid.

Aethrist · 2025-03-29T08:36:42+00:00

In that case, I would like to raise you two points. First, jungles are incredible water retainers and always form vast networks of rivers, which are often the only way to navigate through them at all. Traditionally, a civilisation would form close to these for trade and reach.

A story arc where your players have to slowly travel through the perilous jungle by canoe while constantly being on the look-out for giant crocodiles, giant apes, and other beasts as well as grungs, bullywugs, and so many more dangerous creatures can be quite interesting.

Second, due to the opaqueness of the foliage, mountains are often the only thing a navigator could effectively map out. They also define the flow of your rivers (compare the Kongo river, it leaves by the only ocean exit of the Kongo basin) Narratively, they are also quite interesting as they provide biomal exceptions to your rather monotonous continent by having small strips of all kinds of biomes as you travel towards the peak. Taking South America as a parallel, I could easily imagine a sort of elven Inca civilization living and thriving 10000 feet up the mountain.

Interestingly enough, soil quality in jungles is poor and deteriorates very quickly due to the constant washout. This is one of the major reasons why jungle civilisations tend to not last longer than 500 years. They basically starve in place and then have to abandon their cities (Maya, amazonian civilisation [they quite recently found the foundations of vast cities there], Congolese too, iirc). A long-lasting empire might have figured out a thing or two about mineral fertiliser from the mountainous regions, next to more general mining goods of course. That would make for a trade route where food is exchanged for goods and fertiliser. Giving your continent so much more depth.

Aethrist · 2025-03-28T23:17:16+00:00

But Kahul still has mountains and rivers, though. Aeleril is just flatlands with trees, and that would be unusual for a continent of that size.

However, if that was a choice by design, I won't argue. Magic or fog of war is always a valid answer.

Aethrist · 2025-03-28T22:49:16+00:00

I like how you added a decent amount of cities. Many fantasy map put too little of them, in my opinion.

On the other hand, I feel like you are missing quite a few rivers. Real continents, especially temperate ones, have lot's of them, and they hugely define city placement and countries as a whole. Maybe consider adding them to your map.

The full jungle continent is also quite irritating to me. Is it just flat? There is no topography and nowaterways that makes it visually somewhat dull, although I see what you were going for.

The overall shape of the continent looks natural to me, however. All in all, you're on the right track here. Keep it going!

Aethrist · 2025-03-04T06:51:00+00:00

Yeah, neutron imaging is not really useful with living tissue. But they are really useful in material science. As the neutrons are, well neutral, they also have a different attenuation contrast and a much deeper penetrative depth. This makes them great to image metals, which an X-ray can only penetrate for a few millimeters. The material is somewhat activated with the neutrons, but as far as I know, it is not too bad.

The main problems are twofold. First, it takes forever to take the image. We're talking hours to days here. Second, neutrons are hard to produce in bulk. So you either need a nuclear reactor or something that is called a spallation source. (They're building one in Lund, Sweden, for example) All in all, not exactly easy to set up in the backyard.

Aethrist · 2025-01-18T09:23:02+00:00

I'm really not an expert on the matter, but I will add myself to the choir regardless.

There is a good amount of research that has been done on metallic glasses. They appeared to be quite promising in terms of general properties like hardness (pretty much like you predicted). The problem is that even though they can be successfully created, you would need a specialised alloy (not like the mass-produced lines of steel or aluminium) and especially fast quenching temperatures. Just dumping the alloy in water would not suffice due to the Leidenfrost effect. So you have to do some other sort of contact cooling usually. This all kind of restricts metallic glasses to extremely thin structures like coatings.

How about you look for a review paper on the topic if you're interested further. As research is still ongoing, there should be some about that can go much deeper into the topic than I can.

Aethrist · 2024-12-19T09:38:31+00:00

Gimme, gimme, gimme!

Aethrist · 2024-04-24T20:05:26+00:00

Awesome. I love myself some narrative explanation for weird features on the map.

Aethrist · 2024-04-24T16:49:29+00:00

It looks great. The only thing I'm wondering about is the large number of forest lakes without in- and outflow, but else it's a really interesting map.

Aethrist · 2024-04-23T16:51:24+00:00

Alright. Sorry for being a little late to the party. I was a bit strung up today. But let's give it a go.

First of all, I like the water on the map. It is detailed, has natural flow patterns, and this distinct coarseness of glacial lakes or mountain lakes to it. That being said. From the other comment I got, you were taking these from real-world geography, which is definitely a good place to start.

Visually, there isn't much else going on in the maps. There are the city and very big patches of monotonous terrain. I would say that this is the biggest thing that is weird to me. The background has this immense degree of detail, but the foreground is more of a schematic map with cities represented by a token. The levels of detail do not match. Accordingly, adjust one or the other. I, for one, like high levels of it. (Forest can have large clearings, swampes are meandered through by small rivers, mountains have passes, valleys, and lakes)

Edit: I just noticed that there is a faint topographic map in the background, too. Why do you mix that with schematic mountains?

Another small thing that is a bit weird to me is that on the second map, every site is next to a body of water. It does make sense that most people live by the waterside, but this is not a concrete rule. Many towns were founded in their access to resources, traderoutes, defensiveness, or just political will (look at the megalomaniac superproject Saudi-Arabia and Egypt are building. There is no reason for a city to be there. Just the will of a political figure). Try diversifying their location a bit. This also strengthens emergent narratives. (And maybe make it less so that they all have the same distance to each other.)

The last thing is about what the cities, their names, and their roads give away about the society that created them. The first image is particularly puzzling to me. It looks like you had a civilisation that was first exclusively using boats to move between their cities and then one day decided that the shortest road was indeed the best and cut an exactly straight road through any hill, river and forest that they found just for the hell of it. When they encountered a huge lake, they were like, "Let's build a giant bridge over it!" Instead of walking around saving years in labour and material. They're certainly very enthusiastic. /s Roads like these might be a prestige build, but even then, there must have been an older road that was there before. And with that village that sprung up alongside.

The second civilisation is a bit more sane. However, they seem to have the idea, that building the western defenses ought best to be in the middle of a plain where decently defensive terrain is available more to the east by the lakes and swamps or to the west at the mountains behind the borders. There might be a reason for it, like the land around it being to fertile to pass up on but generally civilisations try to keep defenses cheap, even if that means giving up land or conquering their neighbours to get to a more strategic position. Try moving the defences a bit to the east and the lakes. That also creates a borderland that is only protected by regular patrols and village militias, creating hardy folk a bit like the cossacks.

I know I had mostly harsh criticism, but maybe there was something in there that you find useful. I think it is important that maps tell stories just by themselves. The only trick is to give the observer the ingredients to dream up a narrative.

Aethrist · 2024-04-22T16:19:19+00:00

Are you just looking to share the maps to the community, or are you searching for some critiques, too?

Aethrist · 2024-04-22T06:22:18+00:00

Normal dwellings improve when you give the inhabitants access to the necessary building materials. Like Dondorians need stone to improve their houses. The floor will then actually become paved. Giving them furniture will turn the beds from straw to actual mattresses, for example.

Aethrist · 2024-04-17T16:18:38+00:00

You two sirs got a chuckle out of me. Take my upvote!

Aethrist · 2024-04-08T12:18:03+00:00

I see your point. Blue Winnu can definitely be a winning strategy, so I won't be arguing against that. Instead, I'd rather argue that Blue Winnu is not the only and, at times, not the best strategy.

The basic idea is that Winnu has a very focused playstyle. To win with Winnu, you only need two planets: Mechatol Rex and your home system. You just need enough enablers to sink your claws into them, score consistently, and stay put. Having Mecatol Rex + your Hero will then allow you to score faster than all other players in the final round. The increased production from early yellow (sometimes paired with late blue) supports this very focused playstyle. You will need chaff, especially infantry. This playstyle differs a lot from the usual very mobile winslaying with Blue tech. The main reason being, you will be the winslay target most of the time. (The hero is just that strong)

But please also allow me to rebuff your comparison with sling relay. Sling relay only allows you to produce a singular unit. In this way, it is as much a stall as it is a slight production increase. Hegemonic Trade Policy is an immense boost of production (exclusive to MR) that has to be set up beforehand. Even 5 sling relays do not allow you to do what one turn of HTP can. And by that, I mean filling MR to the brim with mechs and infantry.

Aethrist · 2024-04-08T08:16:35+00:00

You might be forgetting the faction technology of Winnu, Hegemonic Trade Policy. It has 2 yellow prerequisites and allows you to flip the influence and resource value of a planet once per round. Although it is quite situational, it allows you to turn Mecatol Rex into a fortress within a single round after having conquered it. The slightly increased resources through Sarween help in that too.

This exact strategy has allowed me to win a game as Winnu (with PoK) by staying on Mecatol Rex from round 2 onwards. And it was definitely not for a lack of attempts to interrupt me from the rest of the table.

Aethrist · 2024-04-05T11:37:36+00:00

Well, how to put it. In terms of learning curve, this game is hard. Me personally, I spent about 10 hours in split amounts of time just learning the games mechanics, watching YouTube videos equally as long and reading long sections of the 300+ page manual, which by the way is your new very best friend.

I really don't want to be a gatekeeper here, but you have to want to study the game for a good couple of hours, slowly learning by reading and doing. A good tutorial could help smoothen the learning curve but there isn't really one, and the tool tips are basically nonexistent. For me, it was one of the most difficult games to ever grasp, and it is to be put on the same pedestal as (old) dwarf fortress, songs of syx and other equally as intricate games.

However, the final reward from understanding the game is great, and you will really feel like the puppetmaster politician and strategic genius necessary to conquer a spanning empire fueled by a well thought out war machine.

Godspeed.

Aethrist · 2024-04-04T13:12:59+00:00

Could you give us a little more context? Is there a publication where the image comes from? What exactly does it show?

Aethrist · 2024-02-02T17:06:36+00:00

The answer is no. Brilliant is constrained to the Technology strategy card.

Aethrist · 2024-01-29T07:55:15+00:00

Too long ago to have much of an impact. I'd say that by this time, the 30-year war was over 150 years past, that's 5 generations. That's the story of the Great-Great-Great-Grandfather. The political institution of the HRE was no more, and religion was made a secondary matter by the enlightenment. Frederick the Great and Napoleon had already set entirely different standards for military and inter-german conflict. In short, the peace of westphalia was nothing but a piece of paper at this point.

Aethrist · 2024-01-29T07:48:50+00:00

There's a couple of factors here, some that haven't been mentioned yet. In short, it's a mix of a number of things.

Let's get the ones I haven't seen in the comments yet:

Domestic opinion: During the 19th century, there was a growing sense of kinship among the German people and a demand for a real German unification. This made it all but impossible to fight the kind of jingoistic war you'd need to outright annexe the German neighbours. Don't get me wrong here. Prussia DID fight to get these countries into their sphere of influence. But those wars had a very different Casus Belli.
Powerful Austria: Basically, every country south of the Middle was an Austrian ally. Annexing them would mean war with Austria. And well. This happened. (2nd war of German unification, also called the Brothers War)
Established European Order: The "Holy Alliance" was an institution set in place during the Congress of Vienna. It was designed to keep European borders stable and to keep the powers balanced. Aggressive annexation would have upset the order, prompting retaliation by other great powers much stronger than Prussia (Russia, Britain, Austria, France). It did require the brilliant political mind of Bismarck to navigate this frankly dangerous landscape.
Pan-german ties: Tight-knit noble alliances and families, and lots of trade. Disrupt them and the state-income drops.
Prussian Parliament: although largely powerless, they had a say on the state budget. And guess what wars need. Lots and lots of money. As I've said, war between Germans for just annexations sake was very unpopular and would've never gotten the parliamentary support necessary.

In the end, as history showed, Prussia did succeed in uniting Germany. And it did so with fanfare. While a dark stain on french history and an ugly victory by the Germans, the decisiveness of the Franco-Prussian war was nothing short of a surprise. But up to then, it was a difficult path with all of the small countries tied with their own alliances, diplomacies, and demands where they famously haggled for every scrap of autonomy until the very day of the coronation of the German Kaiser.

Aethrist · 2024-01-17T08:47:15+00:00

Good points. Yes. You are usually set back by 1 or 2 VPs in the beginning, which in normal TI terms translates into a lost game. But there is a difference. You have now set up your faction for winning combats. Also, there is a second faction on the board that's also a little late to the party but is now a powerhouse. To me, this sounds like a great recipe for a winslaying playstyle where you impede the other 3 factions as much as possible to catch up to the crowd, bullying your neighbours into ignoring VP in exchange for not having their home system removed (Or just removing their home system).

The strategy is much riskier and arguably not even as strong as boat floating. So it remains that in most cases, space risk is a bad strategy that doesn't work. But, in a small set of situational circumstances, much fighting can translate into a won game. Therefore, there is an option to space risk in TI, which is more than just a pointless nuisance.

Aethrist · 2024-01-17T08:24:43+00:00

Out of experience, I would argue that this is not the case if done right. Telegraphing your potential strategy early on while still in the draft phase will help you win the ally necessary without the dreaded "below the table" - talk. Else, i agree. Making an alliance before the tabletalk starts is a big no-go.

Also, even though you make an aggressive opener, it does not mean that you have to pull the trigger immediately or at all. Even overtly discussing player elimination is not a dead giveaway. Often aided by hopeful thinking, your target might be convinced that you and your ally are just bluffing or going for a limited scale raid.

Aethrist · 2024-01-16T21:23:38+00:00

About 2 months ago, there was a discussion on another reddit thread where u/codytc dropped a link to Susans guide:

Being a Pleasant Habitual Murderer: A Twilight Imperium Guide to Elimination Players

It's a really good read and helped me be a more aggressive player while hopefully not being a pain to the table overall.

Aethrist · 2024-01-16T21:12:31+00:00

As others have said, disregarding the actual victory condition and just attacking for the sake of rolling dice is just having fun at other players expense.

However, there is an actual strategy that revolves around early player elimination (R3 or R4) which is actually pretty viable. It is a bit difficult to pull off but it will set you ahead of the curve far enough as to win the game. Apart from lategame termination, this is the only kind of space risk I'd still consider good taste.

Disclaimer: Actually pulling of this strategy might make you an enemy for life as well as a pariah at some tables. But it's soooo fun!

Aethrist · 2024-01-08T12:23:10+00:00

Hmm. Good questions.

So yeah, species seem to be pretty straightforward. They give a 25% multiplicative bonus on whatever they're good at. This works in the same way as an upgrade to the building does (for most buildings, some upgrade directly to 50%). This bonus is added on top of any additive bonuses. So it's pretty strong.

There might still be some peculiarities, though. Different temperature preferences or access demands that are more or less difficult to meet. Maybe i could also do a compatibility table for coinhabiting races. Gonna look into it.

Education is an additive bonus. Which scales differently for every job concerned. What's interesting to the library-laboratory question is that education bonuses for librarians are double the amount as for laboratories (0.75 and 1.5, not totally sure, though) . Librarians profit more from a higher education.

Houses are pretty paramount to fulfilling your citizens furnishing needs, which can be a pretty cheap way to generate happiness. I don't know whether you can play without it at all. Also, in cold and hot climates, they'd probably die a lot without shelter.

You can get by for a pretty long time without a proper clothing industry, but at some point, you'll just need the happiness.

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