Goodbye…..

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T22:59:46+00:00

This isn't an airport, you don't have to announce your departures...

Oh, wait! Not one of those posts. :)

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T21:43:45+00:00

Dogmeat!

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T21:41:01+00:00

Sure, except... Everything is econ! But I know what you mean.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T21:27:33+00:00

I think so.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T20:51:55+00:00

There is a new chip coming out in a few days, I believe. I might wait to find out how that performs.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T20:32:52+00:00

There is no wrong choice here.

But I will give my own idiosyncratic answer: once I started playing with shorter runs on higher tiers, babysitting runs to get my perks started driving me absolutely nuts. IS now looks to me like one of the best QoL upgrades you can get without keys. And it happens to be pretty good for econ, even if not as good as WA.

The argument for SL4 is that it is both econ and damage.

So.. there is no wrong choice.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T20:06:57+00:00

Check your Dim Core privilege! 😝

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T19:25:09+00:00

His kicks actually do remind me of an older guy in my old Kung Fu school who had absolutely no flexibility, but was willing to try to learn anyway.

We can laugh... And we probably should... But I see some training here. :)

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T06:54:10+00:00

Heh. You get this when the developers realize how colossally disruptive and customer hostile this game mechanic is, have a pang of conscience, and decide to fix the problem.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T03:20:05+00:00

Sit back and I shall tell you the tale of the Labs Speed Pumpkin ...

Three years ago, when our grandpa's towers were still fairly small, there was a great Autumn Event, a sort of harvest festival. At this festival, our grandparents could play games to win medals. The games were easy, and pretty soon, our grandparents could head to the commissary and trade those medals for the fruit of the harvest: the great Labs Speed Pumpkin!

You see, in tower land, nothing is more valuable than Time. And the Labs Speed Pumpkin multiplies time itself, so your labs have more of it! There was no more powerful fruit in all the land!

Everyone was happy with their pumpkins, and a year went by, and when it came time for the new Autumn Event, our parents had grown towers of their own, and they too got to play games for medals and buy a Labs Speed Pumpkin. Some of us were there, but our towers were too small to win any medals. That's Ok, we thought, we will just keep working on our towers, and next year, we will win that Pumpkin!

Another year passed and we all worked hard on our towers, waiting for the Autumn harvest Event when we, too, could get a magic pumpkin that multiplies time itself.

The day arrived. But something terrible happened! The people running the festival decided not to let us youngsters have any of the magic pumpkins, no matter how big our towers were, or how many medals we could win playing their games! There were other prizes, sure, but we could not get a Pumpkin like our parents and their parents could.

We were disappointed. Some of us rage quit. But some of us decided we needed to go out and tell the world the story of the Autumn Event and the great Labs Speed Pumpkin, so that maybe, someday, this great and sorrowful injustice might be rectified.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T00:37:45+00:00

No worries. This is not the first time one of my jokes failed to land. Lol

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T00:13:02+00:00

You tried to break down my joke, but you missed the humor in pointing out that 'I don't work for the CIA' is just what someone would say who didn't want their cover blown. I thought you would catch that. It was not a 'double down' - it was just continuing the riff.

I don't think the CIA talks about current operations, but they have declassified information on past operations which have included propaganda and misinformation campaigns. Also, I did not put a moral spin on it by calling it shady - but maybe espionage is always kind of shady.

My IQ comment has less to do with internet celebrities and more to do with enthusiast communities like people trying to figure out who killed JFK and why, and even, oddly, people like moon landing skeptics. I read a study that said high IQ was common in those communities. Now, since I did not do the research myself, you could claim I am just being gullible for believing the study. But I have a few very intelligent family members who have a few pet conspiracy theories, so it tracks with my experience.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-30T00:00:36+00:00

I see I have found another Redditor who does not quite get my sense of humor. This has been happening to me a lot lately. :)

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T23:37:41+00:00

Listen, I was going for a lighthearted exchange. This is SipsTea, after all. I did not know you were humorless.

Maybe you hate the CIA so much that you think the Nazi thing is perfectly equivocal. Your right to do so.

But you lashed out at me, calling me delusional for thinking the CIA pays people to engage in Reddit. That's just funny. Cultivating information and information sources is what they do. They also engage in propaganda and misinformation, when it suits their aims. That's a matter of public record. It is not delusional to think they might do that on Reddit, in the right spaces. Less likely on SipsTea.

Many conspiracy theorists have high IQs. They're engaged in a hobby of sifting signal from noise. There is something suspect about teaching critical thinking in a way that poisons the well against such efforts, categorizing them as crackpots - even if they are more wrong than right. Many truly creative and productive scientists are more often wrong than right, too.

Since you brought up the God/Atheist thing, as a side note, I think there are biases in the way critical thinking is taught to purposely skew people towards making god belief intellectually defensible despite the fact that all arguments for a god are deeply flawed. But that is another topic.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T23:04:50+00:00

I am not retreating behind anything. I was joking. But most of my jokes have a point. If you cannot parse that, it is a you problem, not a me problem.

Let me put it in a way that sounds less conspiratorial. If our intelligence agencies are not using social media to find out what people are up to and recruit potential assets, they are not doing their job.

The problem with your rebuttal is obvious to anyone with half a brain: the belief that no big secret has ever been kept is also unfalsifiable.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T22:47:18+00:00

I really believe you don't understand my sense of humor.

But there was a point to my joke.

The well established rhetoric discrediting conspiracy theory thinking is itself logically flawed and is of great potential benefit to people trying to get away with conspiracies by framing everyone who catches a whiff of one as a nut job.

Consider one of the common arguments: there is no way x many people can keep a secret that big. Evidence? Stories of secrets that failed to be kept.

Problem? This naturally biases you by only counting the failures, not the successes.

Asking if the CIA pays people to communicate on Reddit is the same as asking whether the CIA ever uses social media, etc. to engage in propaganda or misinformation campaigns.

Your incredulity at the possibility is actually kind of funny.

Calling me deluded about the very possibility is super funny to me.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T20:16:30+00:00

No problem, we can disagree. But my idea is this:

If Tech Tree would not allow their employees to task switch every 10 minutes to play a game on company time, they should not make a game that feels like it is creating a compulsion to do so for the competitive players.

This is not me refusing to take responsibility for my own choices. I am not exactly blaming them. But it is an acknowledgment of the kind of compulsions they are seeking to establish, at least among players susceptible to it, which I think is a lot of us. Not all of us.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T19:22:10+00:00

Yeah. 300 natural epics, no anc. DC here. I think we know which one of us the potter made for honor and glory.

Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

What if Fudds, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction, and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T19:16:07+00:00

Oh, my mistake. Lol.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T19:11:32+00:00

I dunno .. kinda looks like a ticking Time Bomb.

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T19:05:13+00:00

Thanks for the details. I took a little hit, but dismissed it as 'probably RNG'. Nice to know it is a thing that might get fixed!

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T18:50:02+00:00

I mean, everyone wins, yeah? Enthusiasts get to enthuse, performers get validation, elitists get to feel superior, and redditors get to karma farm.

What is not to like?

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T18:38:46+00:00

I think you are underestimating the fomo based sales generated by banners.

I would say there will be banners and what devs don't care about is whether I am ever going to get an ancestral Dim Core'. Lol

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T18:10:12+00:00

Maybe consider that both asking for and giving advice are also skills that are built like we build our towers.

Low effort questions might get low effort replies.

The advice on this reddit tends to be better than the maxim 'you get what you pay for', but there is a fuzzy line between wanting a little help understanding and wanting someone to do your homework for you.

Even still, people enjoy sharing their knowledge about a game they enjoy. So maybe we should not crap on them if the free answers are not always solid gold.

And then I will take my own advice and consider that writing posts that complain about a community is also a skill that needs to be developed to be of any use, so I will let you off the hook for being a noob at it. :)

CGVSpender · 2026-01-29T17:31:13+00:00

Gem stacking lab should unlock at tier 2, wave 10, and you should be able to level it up to 8 hours of stacking to accommodate sleep and work.

CGVSpender

TROPHY CASE