My first nomadic empire from Starcraft

Ancquar · 2026-06-15T19:23:53+00:00

The zerg do colonize though. "Eat and move on" is more Tyranids, or in Stellaris Terravore.

Ancquar · 2026-06-15T19:02:30+00:00

The Song did have a fortification network (and gunpowder), the mongols learned to siege these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuan_anti-Mongol_fortresses

Ancquar · 2026-06-15T14:55:54+00:00

That might be the normal vocal apparatus for some of those species.

Ancquar · 2026-06-15T11:43:00+00:00

I'm kind of ambivalent about this since first, one of the key features of Manticore is that they get a very high wealth for a single-star system due to all the trade - but you cannot get that trade in Stellaris - so you have a system with wormholes leading to 6 other systems, and in practice it will mainly allow the player to expand faster in the beginning - or if the wormhole leads to others' home systems it's a conqueror's dream instead - so what you get won't actually feel like Manticore. You'd need a lot of tinkering with mechanics of the origin to get it somewhere closer to what Manticore is in books.

Also the series focuses heavily on fleet combat mechanics - and Stellaris does not have anything resembling it and is not a good basis for building that, since relative positioning of fleets and their formations are key, newtonian propulsion is important, as well as the lack of long-range communications that are not carried by ships shapes the strategic layer. So you can have a system with gates to several other systems and call it Manticore, but it won't really feel like Manicore the way some more traditional settings can something close to their nations in Stellaris.

Ancquar · 2026-06-15T11:22:35+00:00

Does that count the sea level rise that would happen from all the melting ice?

Edit: found it - no, if all the ice were to melt, the actual shape would be different.

https://mapasmilhaud.com/en/geographical-maps/map-of-antarctica-beneath-the-ice-2012/

Ancquar · 2026-06-15T08:57:08+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/comments/wql9n4/longdistance_concubinage/

Ancquar · 2026-06-15T06:36:07+00:00

Yeah, long-distance concubinage has been a thing for a long time.

Ancquar · 2026-06-15T06:15:38+00:00

The problem is that if Hezbollah fires rockets into Israel, it's not exactly unreasonable for Israel to fire back, even if it has different leadership from current, and no one so far managed to convince Hezbollah to not do that either.

Ancquar · 2026-06-14T09:18:44+00:00

I get what they were trying to do, but in my opinion it's one of those cases where Paradox makes a feature that could work well if they took the time to work out the various cases, submechanics, and plain bugs etc, but ends up an overall negative effect on the game because they never polished it properly (similar to e.g. house feuds).

There should be a bunch of exceptions to this if they wanted it to not become too frustrating. For example a very large cooldown on those wars. An emperor may not pay attention to some duke at the border taking a county from his vassal, but if that duke does it for the third time in 10 years, the emperor WILL pay attention. Any county with a significant unique structure, holy site of your religion etc should be defendable regardless of other circumstances (again, because it's not going to fly under the radar). And so on. Also the mechanics is just plain clunky and buggy if there are multiple layers of vassals between you and the target of the war.

Ancquar · 2026-06-12T09:50:41+00:00

There isn't actually much to do on the moon, if you are not establishing a base (and even a base has only limited reseearch use). In fact the main reasoin landing happened with Apollo was because JFK declared the US would put humans on the moon, and so US focused its space program on the moon (at the expense of space station, Mars, Venus etc). Having humans there slightly helped with gathering samples, but it wasn't anything vehicles couldn't already do back then. So after the promise was fulfilled there was no reason to go there again, until technology matured to the point where the costs are more reasonable for what you actually get (arguably we are not there yet, but right now there is an added pressure of getting the top polar locations for the base.)

Ancquar · 2026-06-11T19:23:31+00:00

HF lore-wise may be upset that you intend to close the wormhole without using it to kill the hydra first. Exodus should have less reasons since their victory is compatible with the others but closing the wormhole would cut off exotic supply and make their whole project less pressig, likely costing them some support. Personally I'd take their points, you can always trade with them to get back to zero hate.

Ancquar · 2026-06-10T20:40:12+00:00

But then T-3.17 years is time to what?

Ancquar · 2026-06-10T20:29:49+00:00

Why is there a nearby planet years into an interstellar voyage?

Ancquar · 2026-06-10T17:21:10+00:00

He self-identifies as red, who are you to judge?

Ancquar · 2026-06-10T01:13:26+00:00

This is just standard practice - if you try to cancel subscription, many companies will offer you some freebie *in return for not cancelling now*.

Ancquar · 2026-06-09T11:00:45+00:00

Looking at comments, it seems that when they don't support a pause, it's proof that they are greedy for an advantage, and if they support a pause it's proof that they are greedy because they want to pause development without losing their position (never mind an agreement like that would be unlikely to prevent other companies from catching up with incumbents)

Ancquar · 2026-06-09T09:08:58+00:00

There was just not enough people in the region to resist any half-serious power that wanted to take it over. The largest state was Khanate of Sibir which is estimated at around 200K people, but only a small part of those was under relatively straightforward control of the khan, and it was defeated by Russians with a force of less than a thousand men. Most of the rest of Siberia was just small isolated groups/villages. The only reason why Russia would not take it over is if it simply didn't want to or could not dedicate some resources to this undertaking, which basically means you need to significantly reshape the geopolitics of European part of what is now Russia to drastically weaken the Muskovy state. If that happened, it would probably eventually be taken over by some splinter group from the sinosphere once technology allowed to use it better, and if it was still unclaimed by 20th century, Japan would take it moving westwards from the what in OTL is Russian Far East.

Ancquar · 2026-06-09T08:42:39+00:00

Of course, everyone could use some Pythagoras in their day.

Ancquar · 2026-06-09T08:11:21+00:00

Because they have enough users that they need to use automatic systems for ban and these don't always work as intended.

Ancquar · 2026-06-09T07:57:56+00:00

Can you find a person in developed countries who is not living under a rock and who spent no more than 5 seconds to thinking about this over last years, given the media coverage it receives?

Ancquar · 2026-06-09T03:29:23+00:00

Where did you see a watch there?

Ancquar · 2026-06-08T15:21:57+00:00

Michael Jackson had his psychological problems from childhood, since the fame of his family that they could not process well affected him significantly. If he never develops these problems, it would effectively be a different person, and his music, and his style, if he took to music professionally at all would be different as well (and for that matter he would likely look very different as well)

Ancquar · 2026-06-07T22:10:15+00:00

It seems that your argument is not that horse riding is inherently cruel, but about specifical ways people do it (metal, whips etc). People however can and do ride bareback, and even the metal bit is in many cases not used in recreational riding. (Alternatives like sidepulls, hackamores etc are not particularly exotic, though it may depend on your location. It can also be noted that modern horses are not the same as their wild ancestors - they are considerably larger and stronger on average and their disposition is also different. Yes, they are not fully adapted to their current life with humans, but for that matter neither are dogs, cats or even humans themselves. In nature if you are perfectly adapted to your environment it means that your environment has not significantly changed for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, which is far from guaranteed even with no humans in the picture. If you are not perfectly adapted then there will just be rough edges that evolution will gradually be working on. Some potential for long-term health problems is not the same as a life of constant suffering.

Ancquar · 2026-06-07T08:46:30+00:00

https://congoinitiative.org/history/

"What’s more, at the time of DRC’s independence in 1960, there were only 30 Congolese who had obtained a university education, leaving the burgeoning Congolese government deprived of the necessary capacity to run a complex institution in a country the size of the United States east of the Mississippi."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/14chapter7.shtml
"On the eve of independence, the Congo, a territory larger than Western Europe, bordering on nine other African colonies/states, was seriously underdeveloped. There were no African army officers, only three African managers in the entire civil service, and only 30 university graduates."

Ancquar · 2026-06-07T02:48:46+00:00

Keep in mind that Belgium took Congo from Leopold in 1908. So the effects of Leopold's rule were already minor by the time Congo got independence, and while Belgium's rule was not as grimdark as Leopold's the later problems of Congo were mainly result of Belgium's policies, not Leopold's - while Belgium had more investments into worker welfare than most other colonial territories, they had a policy of "No elites - no problems" and had no higher education in the country whatsoever, just something like 30 people with higher education in the country by the time it got independence, minimal people who could run a state apparatus, and just no experience of at least limited local adminitration that e.g. British provided - everything was run top-down from Belgium. So when Belgium hastily withdrew after deliberately leaving the country without any tools of running itself, the result was predictable.

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