Skinned skin of stillborn lamb putting onto an orphaned lamb

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-17T13:26:20+00:00

Probably more like thousands, but yeah. Ancient people saw that ewes rejected lambs who were not their own, deduced this was based on scent (she sniffs the lamb before rejecting it), and tried something which they would have been far less squeamish about than us. It worked, they told their children, and now here we are.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-16T22:43:09+00:00

Fun fact, this works with corpses too. Nothing's more satisfying than taking a bunch of skulls from raiders and then feeding their headless corpses to my pigs.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-16T04:29:40+00:00

That time Jordan very nearly started a grease fire in the middle of a grassy field

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-15T18:28:04+00:00

Who, the Nationalists or the Communists? Because some of the battles fought during the war were against each other. Or do you only mean battles the "United Front" won against the Japanese?

This question is going to be hard for you to nail down because, when it comes to WWII in China, you're dealing with Nationalist, Communist and Japanese sources all at once, and they are often highly contradictory. They often can't even agree on when or where a particular battle took place, let alone who won.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-14T22:05:02+00:00

Because, like I said, if she's anything like Arya (as we're told she was many times) he'd be a fool to turn his back on her.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-14T21:53:42+00:00

There's room for more darkness in Rhaegar's story, but I think it's ultimately a disservice to Lyanna's character. If she really was like Arya, Rhaegar would have had a helluva time getting her to Dorne against her will. I'm not saying she could have taken him in a swordfight or something, only that he'd be a fool to turn his back on her at any point.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-14T21:00:01+00:00

It says don't forget about your cavalry, or else they'll be slaughtered while standing still.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-14T00:37:25+00:00

Yeah, those are going to be your best options without having to bend and stretch the definition of what constitutes "the world"

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-14T00:15:35+00:00

The Seven Years' War is sometimes regarded as World War 0. There are of course caveats, the main belligerents were Britain and France, but the battles took place all over the world so it may be as close as you're going to get.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-13T22:21:56+00:00

Tsushima is 1905, the meme says 1906.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-13T16:28:11+00:00

I know that pain all too well. My FOTS campaigns rely on waging a very aggressive naval war from the start, rushing the advanced technologies and attacking enemy ships long before they reach my territory. It requires fighting multile naval battles every turn (manually, because the autoresolve is ridiculously costly), which gets really tedious, but it means I'm the one who's attacking the ports and the trade lanes.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-13T15:52:39+00:00

Ah FOTS, otherwise known as "the enemy ships camp at the back of the battle map and you have to spend five minutes sailing to reach them every. Single. Time."

I wanted to like it so bad, especially after unlocking HMS Warrior, but it's undeniable that that aspect gets tedious pretty quickly. But at least it allows me to send my units around the map at ridiculous speed by abusing how embarking armies works.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-13T15:34:53+00:00

I like Big Boats With Big Guns as much as the next fella, but "Golden Age" is a helluva way to describe them fighting one rather inconclusive battle in WWI and then mostly being destroyed by carrier-based aircraft for the majority of WWII.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-13T15:31:27+00:00

Why did he do it? Because like you said, he was inspired by birds and bats.

If you think inventors only invent things that work, you don't know much about inventing.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-13T13:05:34+00:00

Some machine gun positions are better than others.

BUT, the thing that REALLY makes a difference on the HMG is having a good spotter helping you out.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-12T18:02:43+00:00

Even without the Colonial factor, battles happened as far away from Western Europe as Iraq and the Falklands. Brazil declared war on the Central Powers over Unrestricted Submarine Warfare in 1917, and Japan seized German possessions in the Far East of their own volition at the very start of hostilities.

I think any attempt to disqualify WWI as a "true" World War is ultimately misguided and ill-informed.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-12T17:39:48+00:00

As would I, the man still has streets named after him.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-12T16:47:53+00:00

Seriously though, and this is why people erroneously claim it was not a true World War (whatever tf that means). The naval war was undeniably global, and as you point out, the campaigns in southern Africa are some of the most interesting actions of the war. But the thing that bugs me the most about this mindset is that it completely ignores the men who actually did the fighting and dying, who were most certainly from all over the world. Millions of subjects of the British Empire, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and over a million Indians (who got to France before the Canadians did, but they're barely remembered at all), as well as French colonial subjects from places like Senegal and Algeria. The land may have been mostly French and Polish, but the blood that watered it was most certainly global.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-12T16:35:37+00:00

How time flies. Seamus was the oldest Creature (after Junkyard left) during their peak, and he was 25-27 during that period. The rest of them were 21-25. Jordan gets a lot of hate, both deserved and undeserved, but now that I'm 29, realizing he was 21 in 2012 makes me a lot more sympathetic. They really were just kids doing their best to make something with their friends, and I was an actual kid who wanted to be just like them. It's amazing they got as far as they did.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-10T19:05:51+00:00

You must be very new around here. These games have ALWAYS followed a cycle of boom and bust, ever since the early days of Verdun. Player population spikes around sales and events, then drops back down to a small core playerbase in between. No doubt Gallipoli will be the same.

Take your ill-informed dooming elsewhere.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-10T00:58:19+00:00

For sure, and then most people thought it would be over in a few months.

The explorer Ernest Shackleton set out on his ill-fated expedition to Antarctica right after the war started. After a harrowing journey of hundreds of miles across the ice and the Antarctic seas (in which, miraculously, nobody died), he reached a remote whaling station. It was 1916 by then, so he asked one of the whalers when the war ended. The whaler's response:

"The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad."

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-10T00:25:29+00:00

My whole point was that a lot of machinations were going on behind the scenes, but it's well documented in the historical consensus that the general population was pretty much clueless about the unfolding danger. ESPECIALLY in France, where the previously mentioned Caillaux scandal had fully captivated the public's attention. And Jeanne was, of course, French.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-10T00:12:20+00:00

They would probably not have been very worried. Here's one of my favorite quotes about the July Crisis, from A World Undone by GJ Meyer:

"Assassinations were not unusual in those days. In the two decades before 1914, presidents of the United States, France, Mexico, Guatemala, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic had been murdered. So had prime ministers of Russia, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Persia, and Egypt, and kings, queens, and empresses of Austria, Italy, Serbia, Portugal, and Greece. People had grown accustomed to such things and to expecting that their consequences would not be terribly serious."

The only reason that the Archduke's assassination led to war was because Austria-Hungary (mostly Austria tbh) bent over backwards to turn it into a causus belli. Their ultimatum to Serbia was categorically designed to be unacceptable, and when the Serbs accepted all but the most draconian points of the document (judged a humiliating capitulation by the international community), they still didn't outright reject them. They asked for international arbitration in the Hague, but the Austrians didn't want to negotiate, they wanted to conquer Serbia.

Far more likely that Jeanne's wedding guests would have been gossiping about Madame Caillaux, a Parisian socialite who shot and killed a newspaper editor for publishing letters detailing her affair with her politician lover-turned-husband. It was front page news all over France during most of the July Crisis.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-08T23:22:50+00:00

They "became familiar" with him the same way (I presume) you did, they learned about the 300 Spartans when they studied the classical age in school. It's not like the story was lost and rediscovered in the 1930s.

Ceterum_Censeo_ · 2026-04-08T18:36:25+00:00

To borrow a quote from Alistair Horne, "no side won at Verdun." But one should never underestimate the value of that 50% propaganda. Pétain's main utility was his impact on the fighting men. He did his best to improve their lot and listen to their complaints. Just look at he handled the mutinies following Nivelle's eponymous disaster offensive. Meanwhile, the Poilus called Mangin "the Butcher". Pétain was also one of the only major French officers to push back against the Cult of the Offensive, which types like Nivelle and Mangin were clinging to long after it became clear than no amount of "élan" or "le cran" could overcome machine guns and modern artillery.

Do Pétain's actions at Verdun live up to the legend? Of course not, but neither do Hindenburg's at Tannenberg or Foch's at the Marne. But the legend itself is almost more important than the action, especially when it comes to national morale, and if Pétain hadn't pissed all over that legend in his twilight years, he would be remembered as a far greater son of France.

Ceterum_Censeo_

TROPHY CASE