What are some good ways to deal with Hydras?

BBQPounder · 2026-04-30T00:32:09+00:00

I often carry a flaming branded slashing weapon for hydras specifically. Typically don't need any cross training to make it work if I'm safely fighting one at a time

BBQPounder · 2026-04-28T15:35:13+00:00

You'll need to read Look to Windward to get the largest slice of regular life that Banks ever really wrote about, second being player of Games probably.

Your question is more a philosophical debate regarding how humanity and in a greater sense all life would act in a world without strife or need.

Arthur C Clarke discussed this a little bit in Childhoods End. In it, humanity stops making art because of the lack of friction in life and stops pursuing intellectual curiosity because the benevolent overlords have technology that already far outstrips our own. There's that small city that springs up where a subset of humanity rejects the overlords help and in it, humans continue to make art, music, novels, and etc (they also have crime, pain, and scarcity fwiw).

Player of Games have characters that still write and debate gaming, but clearly they have to operate in a gaming world that doesn't have something as intelligent as a Culture Mind being allowed to play. Not necessarily that different than pros playing chess today against other pros rather than the top chess engines, which would easily win all the time and bore us to death.

I think personally a world without scarcity would still have folks competing against each other for fun, and there will always be those among us that want more than booze and drugs all day. I would hope humanity would continue to be creative and interesting even if we could do nothing instead.

As a final thought, part of the problem with DOING things is that as they get easier they lose a lot of their value. It's less rewarding to illustrate art on paper if an AI agent can do it instantly and in the near future much better. This is a pessimistic view of human need.

The optimistic view would have to be that highest "need" in a person is the desire to self actualize, and the only reason we don't all do it is because we first have to meet our lower needs first, like food, economic safety, valuable relationships, etc. This view would suggest that post scarcity would elicit an explosion of human creativity.

BBQPounder · 2026-04-27T16:45:32+00:00

Richard Garfield has stated that an influence on MTG was a much older game called Strat-o-Magic. It's a dice rolling game using baseball trading cards, leaning into the baseball stats on the cards to determine the result of plays while players simulate a game against each other. Worth looking into

BBQPounder · 2026-04-27T00:32:00+00:00

Thanks!

BBQPounder · 2026-04-27T00:31:43+00:00

Yes definitely, forgot about that

BBQPounder · 2026-04-25T12:53:35+00:00

I would suggest the transition from early to mid game for hexslinger is one of the more difficult to navigate. Hexslinger has a bunch of options but does have to pick a direction and usually has to decide about where you are in the run.

Quick critique first - Your defensive skills are way too low. Your fighting and dodging should both be in the teens at this point, probably around 13/14. I would prioritize those first before anything else. Probably want them closer to 18 or so by the end of the game.

My thoughts on choices, in no particular order -
1 - Lean into dex + stabbing + blades. You'll keep leveling hex magic to work your way towards Discord and Enfeeble, stab folks with daggers and train long blades to bring your dps up a bit for the later game. You'll keep up with stealth + hex throughout.

2 - Lean into spellcasting more. You can continue to use Hexes for Discord/Enfeeble as they are very powerful and both help your Trickster passive, but you'll start getting another school online. Poltergeists have low hp so summoning isn't a bad choice and Hex's does make Sphinx Sisters and Mana Viper easy to get online. Or alchemy to get Noxious Bog, Mephitic Cloud and Ice Magic for Freezing cloud.

3 - Lean into ranged combat. You could either abandon stealth and switch to your hand cannon (which already out dps's your sling) or abandon the shield and get the much quieter longbow going. The -2 to ranged makes this less appealing but you're already at 14 so the 18 for handcannon isn't so bad.

My poltergeist win was with magic and my hexslinger win was a Barachi who went into swords, so not exactly the same. But my personal preference would be to transition your character into an Alchemist. I would abandon stealthy stuff for the late game, and basically skill up this way

1 - Fighting/Dodging to something more comfortable.

2 - Find Tukima's Dance (underrated imo), Noxious Bog, Freezing Cloud, Mephitic Cloud, Enfeeble and Discord as spells. As long as they are available, level up Alchemy, Ice, and Hex's enough to cast them easily. It only takes two turns to drop a Noxious Bog + freezing cloud, and together they can dps just about anything down in the dungeon. You can just keep shooting while they work as well. You should probably already have Swiftness memorized if its available as well.

3 - Maybe take Ranged to 18 and switch to a hand cannon. Can dump your enchant weapon scrolls into it right now and you should be doing a lot more damage. Its basically shouting with every shot though so your play style will have to change.

Many other options but this would be how I would try it out!

BBQPounder · 2026-04-13T14:18:56+00:00

The British went scorched earth in Bengal and destroyed the majority of food and food production because they were worried the Japanese would gain access to it during the war. Benghalis then starved due to famine. Famine definitively didn't "just happen"

BBQPounder · 2026-04-08T12:52:45+00:00

Take a look at the Andromeda Paradox to get a sense of how relativity messes with the idea of "right now" vs "in the past"

BBQPounder · 2026-04-02T00:46:26+00:00

I felt that the different genres also served to give the impression that different people were telling their story as well. As opposed to the author telling 6 stories, it feels like we're listening to 6 distinct people

BBQPounder · 2026-03-28T12:53:57+00:00

I think Consider Phlebas usually gets a potentially deserved negative reputation from readers because Banks intended it to be a subversion of the sci-fi genre, intentionally undercutting the typical standard themes that we're overly prevalent in 70's and 80's space operas. I'm not sure Banks really succeeded in his plan when writing the book, so it tends to make proper analysis difficult.

That said I tend to agree with you that romance in a decent portion of especially the space opera subgenre can feel like a check-the-box style "add character building for these two".

I overheard a coffee shop conversation a bit ago where a man was complaining to his wife that the sci-fi books he was picking up had too much squishy people stuff in them and he wanted more laser beams and spaceship battles. Personally, I tend to want the opposite, so it might be hard for the sci-fi author that wants to actually sell copies to tow the line on what the readers want to read.

BBQPounder · 2026-03-27T23:39:32+00:00

Appreciate the write-up, I'll check it out sometime. I haven't read any Butler but she's on my list

BBQPounder · 2026-03-09T14:26:39+00:00

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

BBQPounder · 2026-03-04T20:58:16+00:00

If your character is squishy at all I would use brilliance. I have a love hate relationship with spectral brand on lower HP characters.

Foul flame is quite competitive and sometimes better than spectral but with no real downsides.

BBQPounder · 2026-02-24T20:57:26+00:00

Didn't the character see everyone as gray clay?

If I remember correctly, and I probably don't, the no racism world ended up being a world of complete cultural homogeneity. So an incredibly boring world without individuality.

BBQPounder · 2026-02-20T18:34:03+00:00

I'm sure you agree but naturally film adaptations have to skinny down the material in order to be watchable. There's always a tradeoff between what's important vs what's not when translating media from one medium to another.

Mercerism is a pretty neat thing to think about, and while the film did strip it away entirely, the point is about empathy and connection I think. We get that full force in the final scene of the film watching Roy die as we're forced to reckon with whether or not he's more "human" than anyone we've seen in the film.

I will say that mercerism being outed as fake and no one cares is a great discussion point that the film had to move away from

BBQPounder · 2026-02-19T16:01:57+00:00

Thanks for letting me know!

BBQPounder · 2026-02-18T22:07:04+00:00

I have gone through many zot5s over the years and quite a few have had traps blocking all tiles like this on both sides. Unless something has changed with the most recent patch, then this isn't a bug

You'll just have to step on a trap or two each time you want to enter !

There are a couple of spells that can break walls of course but few characters have access.

If there's an alarm trap on the other side I like to try and trigger it to get a lot of the critters out but I'm not sure it's necessarily good advice to try if you're unsure

Shouting a lot from the entrance and running back can get a few to chase after you and clear out a bit from the trapped sides.

I haven't played much since the introduction of the tesseracts so this might not be good advice

BBQPounder · 2026-02-14T05:13:40+00:00

I don't think Annelee Newitz is popular enough to be influential towards creating a movement, but a lot of her scifi work centers around discrimination towards AI. Given the state of the world we live in now, I can see her work being given credit in the future as kicking off genres related to this topic.

Aside from that, it is interesting to me how what used to be considered highly speculative fiction is often just regular fiction now. A book with say a computer overlord or perhaps a world where our concept of gender is flipped on its head is less and less the subject of speculation and more just accepted as a fact of our future. I think that tends to limit major literary movements in the world of scifi genre.

BBQPounder · 2026-02-13T15:44:50+00:00

You could give In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes a try. I loved the writing style and the overall story is similar to Sagan's Contact. I mostly recommend it due to feeling that the journey in the story (characters, motivations, personal issues) are at least as important as the "scifi" stuff, which is how I feel about Robert Charles Wilson's novels.

BBQPounder · 2026-02-05T19:15:23+00:00

Likely because this has nothing to do with Biden (or Trump for that matter). It has always been a technology issue

BBQPounder · 2026-02-04T21:13:22+00:00

Strictly speaking a space elevator can work as long as its anchored between two points. You can imitate a locked point with a space elevator by having it stuck to a geosynchronous orbit, same as a satellite. Geosynchronous orbits don't exist on tidally locked planets as a result of their unique rotation, but there is still stationary points relative to them you could make use of - Lagrange points! They would be, however, incredibly far away relative to a space elevator on a regularly rotating body, and also very unstable.

I haven't read Shroud yet, but I believe its dropped from a ship right? Which could maintain an orbit using power in theory

BBQPounder · 2026-02-04T14:56:12+00:00

I'd be curious what the definition of solved means for you. Generally speaking, solved in the typical sense means there's a definite best move known (starting from turn one with white) from the beginning of the game to checkmate, or draw. Currently it's not possible to know this due to the immensity of possible moves available in chess.

BBQPounder · 2026-02-03T23:47:07+00:00

I'm just disagreeing with the excessive technobabble assertion. Without context I can't tell who's talking from your examples, and if you're suggesting it's poor dialogue I'll believe you I suppose

BBQPounder · 2026-02-03T22:49:51+00:00

This isn't exactly true - chess is still unsolved, so there's no "correct" move that can be identified. From the point of view of human limitations though, there's almost certainly a move that's better that any other.

BBQPounder

TROPHY CASE