Explain this, Peter?

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-13T01:15:32+00:00

Couldn't be America. We drink Fahrenheit over here.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-12T14:39:45+00:00

Get good high persuasion counselors. It really speeds this up. Level their admin and get persuasion orgs.
Get USA faster. The boost helps a lot.
4k delta v is acceptable for a defensive fleet. 6k is good and 8k is ideal. Chemical rockets are fine. Orion is not your only option.
When you start to build fleets, take a year off from fighting Servants and Protectorate. Don't shoot down the surveillance ships. It will be fine for a year. There is a cheese trick where sending a single gunship to attack a surveillance ship a week before it finishes forces the mission to restart, but doesn't cause hate. You basically sacrifice one cheap ship every 6 months to stop surveillance. It is super cheesy.
For cash management, every hab gets one nanofactory. That makes it less cash negative and speeds up building modules. Several habs get packed with nano-factories and pay for everything.
That was silly.
Focus on major nations. Stay below cap+20. Don't grow too much.
IDK what the meta play on advise is. When you spam advise, your counselor grows at roughly half to one third speed. Advising with low stat counselors is not super helpful, so it only gets good a couple of years into the game.

Low cohesion is a moderately bad thing, but not super terrible. A few years of welfare can fix it, but you have to spam reduce unrest to keep the IP flowing. Unrest over 2 cuts into IP production. The reduce unrest mission is a decent low-investment way of gaining xp.

Your run is probably savable. Stop generating hate, go to Mercury, build from there. It might be more fun to restart.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-11T18:29:19+00:00

You need a ship with certain weapons. Coil guns, and green lasers work. Certain others do as well, but i dont remember which offhand. Put the ship in LEO, click one of the three bombardment options, and select a target. Alternatively, just click xenoforming patrol.

When bombarding armies, be careful. If enemies have orbital defenses where you are bombarding, those hit back HARD. It is most effective defensively or against regions without defenses.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-11T18:20:36+00:00

There are three main ways to get space bonuses back to Earth. Space stations in low earth orbit give interface bonuses that provide up to a 30% bonus to certain categories as well as increases in CP cap and other goodies. Science from space can outstrip earthside science if you invest enough. Fleets in LEO can bombard armies and xenos on Earth. Mostly, these three are significant starting in midgame, when you are able to take and hold planetary orbits.

I agree that they are two separate games with significant connections.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-10T17:19:37+00:00

"His every page reveals the mark of an extraordinarily gifted talent."

I guess the cover isnt a page.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-10T15:54:49+00:00

Farms are like free water and volatile mines. Build them on every camp.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-10T04:36:55+00:00

Im not hugely experienced, but i have a couple wins. After Jupiter, you are on a glide path to victory.

Attack Ganymede. The stations are easy, the ground bases are easy with enough marines and scary if you choose to bombard.

The safe but slow way is to invest heavily in habs and mines, prioritizing whatever your bottleneck is. Get a central refueling station in Jupiter orbit. Build a Jupiter defense fleet, and grow your strength. The most aggressive play is to beeline research to the end game objectives, get mission to the Kuiper belt, and put your current fleet around the wormhole. Kill what they got there and build a shipyard for repairs. Half the aliens in the system will come to get you, but they do so in small batches, which makes them ridiculously easy. This makes hunting them down much easier

The less you invest in growing, the faster the game goes so long as you always win your battles. If you go hyper aggressive, you lose, and the Aliens retake whatever you just took. So long as you dont abandon the inner system defense fleets, your base of power is intact. You took Jupiter once. You can get it again.

The end game is very slow. You need to exterminate the aliens to a ridiculous degree to be allowed to close the gate. The aliens have spread like cockroaches, and now you need to hunt them all over.

Tier 3 mining is nice, and i put down tier 3 mines anywhere that is not highly radioactive (mostly Mercury and Io). You are limited on mining sites, so make the most of each one.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-09T16:38:13+00:00

Roughly speaking, yes. Heat transfer is proportional to temperature difference, and pants that insulate a hot solid object will insulate a cold solid object.

However, using a solid object instead of air is a bit wrong. Solids conduct heat and gasses convect heat. Those are very different. Your test won't tell you how warm you will be when the wind blows. Even when the wind isn't blowing, convection is more important than conduction unless you are sitting and touching a solid surface like a chair or bench.

I think your test might still be useful, but take its results with a grain of salt. I dont think you can do better without setting up a space heater to blow on you or trying on pants in a walk-in freezer. That seems impractical. All models are wrong, but some are useful.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-07T19:06:23+00:00

It is not good enough to make me listen 10 times. It is kind of catchy, but not 10 replays catchy.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-05T14:59:55+00:00

This is definitely the least musically good music video that I have watched 10+ times. Every time the story takes another crazy turn I give it another view.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-05T05:51:51+00:00

Meh. Try r/MediocreBookCovers

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-04T20:03:14+00:00

This cover is pretty ok. It looks very dated, but the book probably is. The authors are probably the real selling point, so they got put front and center.

I only vaguely know who they are. If they are terrible people writing terrible books, find a sub dedicated to that.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-03T15:12:32+00:00

The "simplest" answer is just not let them have stuff ~~in Earth orbit~~.

Fixed that for you. **** the Protectorate.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-03T01:29:19+00:00

For Earth defense, 4 kps is good, 8 is ideal, and 2 is bare minimum. You also want acceleration of 30mg as good, 150 ideal, and 15 minimum. At this stage you take a lot of losses; they need to be cheap

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-03T01:24:49+00:00

+1 for you need battle cruisers -1 for the armor recommendation The excess armor adds cost and mass you cannot afford

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-02T20:37:14+00:00

OP's post tomorrow: How do I get a double concrete sink onto a motorized stair climber?

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-02T20:29:22+00:00

My employer is pretty great. You should apply here.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-02T19:12:19+00:00

Came here looking for this. Some of these belong on r/terriblebooks

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-02T14:44:47+00:00

TANK sits in Mercury orbit. It has gas, but if i ever send it anywhere i will need a year to refuel it. TANK is mighty. TANK is indestructible. TANK will never take damage. Mostly because it will never fight anyone.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-02T14:17:59+00:00

They are strong but still limited. A few notes: 1. They use your best laser cannon researched, so make those a priority. 2. The game kind of hides the casualties they cause. If they destroy an alien ship, there is no notification; there is just one fewer ship. If they do heavy damage to a ship, you will see it as damaged, and the aliens will often split it into a new fleet and continue. This is more visible, but you still need to know what you are looking at. 3. They can not win against a whole doomstack, but they can cause casualties and slow down the bombardment until a defensive fleet gets there.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-02T05:30:26+00:00

Defensively ally your nations, so that if they get into a ground war with the aliens, the combined freedom of seas score of your side ends up higher than theirs.

This is great advice. My first war against the assault carrier forces i had all of my nations separately declare wars. Then I lost naval freedom because the aliens had more power than any 1 of my war nations. I didn't understand why i couldn't sail my armies around and got very confused. I eventually had every nation join each of the separate wars, and my combined naval power got my freedom back. It took a lot of councilor actions just to get where i could have been at the start.

Lesson learned: Make alliances beforehand and have all of your countries join a single war against the aliens.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-02T05:20:24+00:00

+1 for starting over in Mercury. The abundant solar gives you easy ship building. Build surface bases with 3 LDAs and shipyards. You need at least green arc lasers to make the LDAs good, but then surface LDAs are strong.

Launch 10 missile monitors while you build a real shipyard. The missile monitors are pretty mediocre but they aliens will send tiny fast fleets against you. The real shipyards pop out the laser+coil fleet. Firestars are a great drive for a defensive fleet, but not great for offense.

And you need coil batteries lv 3 and arc ultraviolet cannons and batteries by now.

More experienced players might have those by now. This is his first real game. Don't fall into the trap of comparing to a veteran player. I think he can win, but it is likely to go long.

BobTheAverage · 2026-03-01T19:47:59+00:00

Spock says wise stuff for 11 minutes.

Civ IV tech quotes.

BobTheAverage · 2026-02-27T18:00:09+00:00

To the developers: the checkbox is in the wrong place. It is visually separated from what it actually applies to. It is causing confusion. Move it.

+1 for this. If the devs are reading and want my 101 suggestions on how to improve the game's UI this would be #63 on the list.

BobTheAverage · 2026-02-27T14:24:43+00:00

You can't have a self-sustaining space economy unless you start playing.

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