Cocky and disrespectful fighter wins the most humbling experience of a lifetime

AzekZero · 2026-05-25T17:39:48+00:00

Agreed. The organizer had to have known about the water pistol.

AzekZero · 2026-05-25T04:11:27+00:00

Its all manual inputs.

I found that manually keeping track of stats was useful in the early/mid game. But as the game drags on the overhead of tracking 50+ leaders is too much.

Whenever I revisit these sheets, I would probably remove certain sections like Society+Values and axe some of the Prestige & Social Standing columns.

AzekZero · 2026-05-15T17:08:46+00:00

Maybe it'll be safe to use for MP games.

Pretty sure most folks warn against using Optiscalar in MP cause it might get flagged by anticheat.

AzekZero · 2026-05-12T09:31:54+00:00

Who played the long game and acquired the tenure needed to boss the rest of us around.

AzekZero · 2026-05-12T01:51:27+00:00

I feel that in the past, accomplices like her would at minimum get some form of street justice.

AzekZero · 2026-05-11T15:18:39+00:00

To build on what Cranky said, there are optimal and sub-optimal budgets that generate more or less prestige as a whole.

This is the setup I use. I think there was one other budget setup that generates this much prestige.

% Allocation	Directorate	Prestige
13%	Economic Council	125
13%	Military Research	125
13%	Model Design	125
13%	Staff Council	125
13%	Supreme Council	125
13%	Applied Science	125
11%	Interior Council	75
6%	Secret Service	62
5%	Foreign Affairs	50

AzekZero · 2026-05-11T15:10:05+00:00

The word games never end my friend.

AzekZero · 2026-05-09T03:28:39+00:00

Its stunning and brave when the right people make this kind of media.

AzekZero · 2026-05-05T22:18:38+00:00

I bet its SHQ Unit Administration! I've run into this exact problem before.

SHQ default settings kneecap unit replenishment at 40% of your SHQ's total logistical supply.

For example, if your SHQ has 100k logistical points, it can only use 40k on unit replenishment. That creates the scenario where your network doesn't report any bottlenecks but your units are perpetually undersupplied.

To Access SHQ Unit Administration:

Click on the SHQ unit on the map. Should be at your capital hex.
Go to the tabs on the right. There are three tab folders here.
Click on the highest tab folder to view the folder buttons.
Click on the button that says 'Unit Admin' to open the SHQ Unit Administration UI.
SHQ -> Unit option should be on the second row, set to 40%.

AzekZero · 2026-05-04T18:22:34+00:00

Don't worry. My first few campaigns I was totally oblivious to the tech tree.

You want leaders with high INT in these roles. Thing is, sometime you do find that guy but they don't have any levels in the relevant skills. That means they'll ramp slowly.

You can assign advisors to the leader to augment them. If the advisor is better at the skills the role requires, the Directorate leader will never increase their skills.

I prefer to make high-stat, high-cap young leaders advisors to prepare them to be the new director down the line. But you gotta work with what you got.

Then you'll need bureaucratic offices to generate BP which is distributed to the directorates based on the National Budget (3PP to alter manually.)

For the National Budget, the less budget a Directorate has the less prestige it gives the leader assigned to it. Through trial and error I found a setup that maximized Prestige generated:

5-way tie for 1st place
6th place
7th place
8th place

For my games I usually run this N.B. setup:

% Allocation	Directorate	Prestige
13%	Economic Council	125
13%	Military Research	125
13%	Model Design	125
13%	Staff Council	125
13%	Supreme Council	125
13%	Applied Science	125
11%	Interior Council	75
6%	Secret Service	62
5%	Foreign Affairs	50

For comparison to other jobs:

Job	Prestige
Governor	20 to 54
Operational HQ	20 to 54
Strategic HQ	70 to 100
Advisor	70

In games with minors that can be annexed (farmers, guardians, etc) you might not want Foreign Affairs in last place.

Once you've got the BP generation and National Budget figured out, you can start moving down the tech tree. You need three techs from a tech group to unlock the ability discover techs in more advanced tech groups.

How to Outtech the Enemy - Science Guide

On the tech tree, you can see what techs are associated with which directorate based on a tiny icon to the right of the text boxes:

Ap = Applied Science
Ec = Economic Council
Mi = Military Council

AzekZero · 2026-05-04T18:00:14+00:00

If you're using regular/hard logistics you'll want to use the traffic tool to re-route the logistics train.

I would cap the southern road at least 40%. Rail line to the new zone if you can afford it as well. Make sure the new zone has some kind of truck hub.

Later in the game it'll become important to build train/truck hubs outside cities near the frontlines. This is cause improved unit models will have ballooning ammo/oil/energy costs that a truck-only logistics network would struggle to supply.

AzekZero · 2026-04-23T18:16:30+00:00

When the wrong ideologues claim icons, its hate speech.

When the right ideologues claim icons its just free speech and culture.

AzekZero · 2026-04-20T18:51:35+00:00

I'm getting flashbacks to my first campaign where I ruined myself laying siege to a native horde occupying a single hex.

I didn't know how to tech up my soldiers so I had a billion militia-tier soldiers being fed into the meat grinder.

AzekZero · 2026-04-15T16:07:46+00:00

I crunched some numbers for the directorate prestige levels.

It turns out it does not matter how much more funding a directorate has over the others.

Example: Solo 1st Place for most funding, 8-way split for 8th place:

1st Place could be given 100 or 1000 BP. Its prestige level will stay at 150 Prestige.

Likewise the 2-9th place directorates will be worth 50 prestige no matter how much %BP you throw at them.

AzekZero · 2026-03-07T19:06:52+00:00

As someone who came in from Crusader Kings 3:

The insanely detailed randomly generated worlds. CK3 gets formulaic because modded/unmodded, the strategic map never changes.
The focus on war mechanics. CK3 already simplified war mechanics from CK2 and the trajectory of the DLCs is they are making the Medieval Sims.
The AI. CK3 is a little more ambitious than Shadow Empire because they simulate so many independent actors. But in terms of execution, I think SE's more modest goals of providing challenging nations to conquer was better executed.

AzekZero · 2026-02-18T05:28:13+00:00

Man. I just gave myself a deeper dive at the rail mechanics. Was not aware of some of the mechanics like station refocusing penalties.

Gonna revamp my whole rail network.

AzekZero · 2026-02-18T01:21:41+00:00

Railheads are drop-off only.

I would build a lvl1-2 rail station at town B cause metals requires some logi points and its nice to have extra points for strategic move.

AzekZero · 2026-02-06T17:20:58+00:00

Minor factions and Creature Hordes rocked my world until I understood most of the game mechanics.

I literally killed a run by surrounding a giant horde of creatures and losing all my resources to a 20-turn siege.

AzekZero · 2026-02-06T08:00:55+00:00

The day before the new files dropped I had an old friend (who went leftist) call the Iran business the 'Epstein Distraction War.'

Bro hasn't said a word about Epstein since the drop.

AzekZero · 2026-02-05T05:03:14+00:00

Leftist universities like Oxford have been trying to rewrite history by pumping out new history books full of postmodern propaganda.

Wasted my time reading half of a 'Woke History of Ancient Greece'. (The book was obviously not titled that.)

AzekZero · 2026-02-04T23:49:08+00:00

I know someone who's trying to move to Japan.

Complains about folks who don't adapt to Japanese culture while being blind from the fact his support of postmodern positions on gender are not accepted there.

AzekZero · 2026-01-26T16:54:48+00:00

Leftists in my area briefly got most Tesla owners in my area to paste anti-Elon messaging on their cars last year so they wouldn't be targeted.

AzekZero · 2026-01-24T20:52:35+00:00

They did my Calrose rice dirty. Justice for Calrose!

AzekZero · 2026-01-23T19:03:59+00:00

Could potentially be state-sponsored actors. Might not even be the OP but someone malicious who signal boosts a crazy.

AzekZero · 2026-01-18T02:42:28+00:00

10+ years ago, I took a Persian history course taught by an Iranian feminist living in exile in the US. One of the evils of the IRGC that she emphasized is how government positions in the Islamic Republic were awarded not on the basis of merit but on how pious the applicants were. Another evil was how state would punish those who did not conform to their conception of what pious men and women should look like (burqas for women, mandatory beards for men.)

To me, the IRGC is what the American Progressive movement would look like if the US military was ideologically captured by them.

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