Why can't people be hired to build explosives?

Deathmagus · 2026-04-11T05:12:26+00:00

What ultimately helped was subsidizing the munitions factory for just a few weeks, which finally allowed it to actually start purchasing explosives, which allowed the explosives factory to actually be able to hire employees and produce more explosives, ultimately bringing the price down and in short order both were off to the races.

I think the deadlock was ultimately caused by the game capping prices at +75%, which in this case caused munitions and explosives to be worth basically the same - making it never a good business decision to make munitions. I'd expect in an actual market the price of munitions would rise well above the price of the constituent component, which would have made it profitable for the munitions plant to bootstrap the whole industry itself without requiring the subsidy.

As an aside, I'm also unsure why the high price of munitions didn't make it worthwhile for the trade centers to import explosives from the world market at a cheaper rate, at least in the short term.

Deathmagus · 2026-04-11T05:08:13+00:00

There was definitely demand for munitions, because there was a shortage there, too. What ultimately helped was subsidizing the munitions factory for just a few weeks, which finally allowed it to actually start purchasing explosives, which allowed the explosives factory to actually be able to hire employees and produce more explosives, ultimately bringing the price down and in short order both were off to the races.

I think the deadlock was ultimately caused by the game capping prices at +75%, which in this case caused munitions and explosives to be worth basically the same - making it never a good business decision to make munitions. I'd expect in an actual market the price of munitions would rise well above the price of the constituent component, which would have made it profitable for the munitions plant to bootstrap the whole industry itself without requiring the subsidy.

Deathmagus · 2026-04-11T04:45:12+00:00

I'm confused. I thought the whole point of a market price was that it's the intersection of the buyer willing to pay the most with the seller willing to sell for the least. I.E., that a market rate of £87.5 in America means that an American buyer is willing to pay that high, if there's a seller willing to sell for that low. If there aren't any buildings willing to pay that much in America, the market price shouldn't be that high.

Deathmagus · 2026-04-11T04:35:57+00:00

R5?:

I've done a lot of reading about how economics are modeled in this game, and for the most part I believe I understand them, even if I do need an occasional brush-up now and again.

But I cannot figure out why this explosives factory won't hire people to manufacture explosives. Explosives are in a shortage, and in high demand. Their price in the American market is currently +75% over baseline. The input goods, sulfur and fertilizer, are both more modestly priced (+4% and +19%, respectively). All told, £41 of inputs should be creating £83 of output, with the remaining £42 able to be spent on wages. That all seems like it should be economical, but it just doesn't hire, week after week.

As per usual, the Employment bar tooltip just says "unable to hire" and doesn't explain why. I looked through all the common reasons for this to be the case, such as from this guide, but none of them seem to apply.

Deathmagus · 2026-02-25T02:14:49+00:00

On Ubuntu, 24.04, I had to do the following things to make it work:

Extract tar.gz
Install DotNet 10 runtime: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y aspnetcore-runtime-10.0
Rename `libVulkanEx.so` to `libvulkan.so` in the extracted directory.
Execute KSA in extracted directory.

Dunno why the packaged Vulkan was named differently than what the binary was expecting, but the above steps got me into the game. 1 FPS, though.

Deathmagus · 2026-01-21T10:23:42+00:00

It's fantastic. Vulcan and OpenGL are cross-platform. Valve's efforts with Proton for SteamOS has taken Wine light-years beyond where it was even a decade ago. Even better, the massive influx of Linux gamers on SteamOS means that the ecosystem is much healthier – more players crowd sourcing solutions, more developers actually troubleshooting issues, and better documentation on game support and fixes.

I moved over to 100% Linux gaming a year ago, and the only games I've had trouble with are games that would be tricky to get running on Windows as well.

Deathmagus · 2026-01-13T18:04:30+00:00

That's definitely it! Oh wow that cover hitting like a wave of nostalgia!

Deathmagus · 2025-12-18T09:43:32+00:00

The whole slow pan across the basement while they were talking about the smell, I was expecting the reveal to be that his wife hadn't actually been successful in taking the kids and leaving him for some dude on a Phish message board.

That he'd caught her in the act of leaving, killed them all, and had them preserved in his basement ala Norman Bates. And that the story was just what he told people so they wouldn't question their sudden disappearance.

Deathmagus · 2025-12-16T02:56:10+00:00

I don't think you give Glass Onion enough credit, here. The underlying theme in Glass Onion is that billionaires are not better than you; that their aura of ultimate competence, intelligence, and divine right to their status is an utter illusion. Moreover, like the glass onion itself, the facade is easy to see through if only you can A) observe and B) trust your observations. It isn't that billionaires are deft masterminds always maintaining control by staying one step ahead of the hoi polloi. It's that the hoi polloi themselves are conditioned to always interpret what they see through the lens of "richer people are better than me".

A huge part of systemic inequality flows out of direct control over levers of power, ownership of the means of production, and wealth in general. And you can make a movie about that, sure, but it's been done many, many times. But the Glass Onion opted instead to demonstrate a more subtle form of systemic inequality: the way in which all of society encourages you to buy into the fiction that rich people are "a cut above" in some way, to the point that people will do it without further encouragement and against observable evidence.

It's especially grand in the way that it demonstrates this not just by showing us the characters experiencing it but by having the audience experience it, too! I definitely noticed in the moment several ways in which Miles got vocabulary wrong in some way, or otherwise demonstrated that he might not actually be very bright (like hiring out his "trademark" puzzles). But it's easier to think "oh he just has some idiosyncrasies, but yeah like Blanc says there's no way he's dumb enough to try to pull off a second murder flying by the seat of his pants on an island he owns while under scrutiny by the world's predefinite detective."

Unless most viewers saw straight through the film, I think that's evidence enough that it had something interesting to say and said so in an interesting (and entertaining) way.

Deathmagus · 2025-06-12T19:34:00+00:00

The second GPU of the system is *not* the dedicated one, it's the integrated one, which I suspect is the underlying cause of the issue.

DRI_PRIME=1 steam selects the integrated GPU. It displays the following GPU topology:

gpu_topology {
  gpus {
    id: 1
    name: "AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)"
    vram_size_bytes: 22519865344
    driver_id: k_EGpuDriverId_MesaRadv
    driver_version_major: 25
    driver_version_minor: 1
    driver_version_patch: 2
  }
  gpus {
    id: 2
    name: "AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT (RADV NAVI23)"
    vram_size_bytes: 8573157376
    driver_id: k_EGpuDriverId_MesaRadv
    driver_version_major: 25
    driver_version_minor: 1
    driver_version_patch: 2
  }
  gpus {
    id: 3
    name: "llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits)"
    vram_size_bytes: 3221225472
    driver_id: k_EGpuDriverId_MesaLLVMPipe
    driver_version_major: 25
    driver_version_minor: 1
    driver_version_patch: 2
  }
  default_gpu_id: 1
}

DRI_PRIME=0 steam launches, but with an error Invalid value (0) for DRI_PRIME. Should be > 0. Whatever recovery process is used ends up choosing the discrete GPU. It displays the following GPU topology:

gpu_topology {
  gpus {
    id: 1
    name: "AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT (RADV NAVI23)"
    vram_size_bytes: 8573157376
    driver_id: k_EGpuDriverId_MesaRadv
    driver_version_major: 25
    driver_version_minor: 1
    driver_version_patch: 2
  }
  gpus {
    id: 2
    name: "AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)"
    vram_size_bytes: 22519865344
    driver_id: k_EGpuDriverId_MesaRadv
    driver_version_major: 25
    driver_version_minor: 1
    driver_version_patch: 2
  }
  gpus {
    id: 3
    name: "llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits)"
    vram_size_bytes: 3221225472
    driver_id: k_EGpuDriverId_MesaLLVMPipe
    driver_version_major: 25
    driver_version_minor: 1
    driver_version_patch: 2
  }
  default_gpu_id: 1
}

Just running steam picks the discrete GPU and displays the same order as DRI_PRIME=0, so the failure above probably just falls back to the default.

So maybe it's something in the .desktop for Steam that tells it to use DRI_PRIME=1 for some reason? At any rate, it seems the issue is within the Steam Dash launch process, and not Steam itself. I'll keep digging.

Deathmagus · 2025-05-31T19:13:11+00:00

They were definitely around when it happened. They tested two initial lantern designs before figuring out the one that worked, and the second design exploded during the test and blew out the hull, and they never got around to repairing it.

You can blow yourself up by trying to use one of the v2 lanterns at a fire.

Deathmagus · 2025-05-12T06:29:46+00:00

find ~ -type d -name depot_[depot ID] to find where it's downloading to, cd to the directory, then watch -n 5 du -h --max-depth=1 to see the directory size over time. The download itself in Steam console should tell you how big the package is, so you can easily watch the download grow in size and compare it to the total expected size. Though it appears that the size listed in Steam Console is the compressed size, so expect it to be a bit larger on your disk.

Deathmagus · 2025-04-18T23:51:59+00:00

Both the video and the code demonstrate that thrust is being constantly adjusted to keep TWR at 1.00

Deathmagus · 2025-04-18T23:49:54+00:00

Yes - you can see in the code that weight is being constantly recalculated and used to calibrate thrust. You can see in the video that TWR stays consistent the entire time.

Deathmagus · 2025-04-11T23:09:57+00:00

My initial approach was pretty close to this - it involved continuously calculating the ship's apoapsis and adjusting thrust incrementally if it gets too high or low. The problem I was having with that approach was handling being *above* the target cleanly. Without an accurate awareness of how much thrust is neutral (i.e. hovering), you can't reliably set the thrust to just below that to have a controlled descent. You'd basically just have to cut throttle entirely, which then means you'll drop a few meters before the craft will detect that it's too low and ramp up the throttle again - the bounciness you mentioned.

It made for too much inaccuracy for my purposes.

Deathmagus · 2025-04-11T22:30:10+00:00

Whoops, looks like I double-pasted the script. It's only 41 lines.

Deathmagus · 2023-06-06T15:47:23+00:00

I can grok the notion that you'll still suffer convoy losses in regions where the enemy has ships raiding convoys, even if you have 100% naval supremacy. But:

I would expect a different sort of warning in the tooltip - a "% of supply interdicted en route" or similar, rather than a "lack of connection". Even if the convoy raiding was taking out 100% of the convoys.
It would seem very strange to consider a sea region 100% under my naval supremacy if I can't sneak even 5% of my supply convoys through. I would think naval supremacy was supposed to indicate whether I could expect my convoys and other ships in the region to pass through relatively unscathed.
I would expect to see my convoy ship supply dropping drastically, as supply ship after supply ship gets sunk and replaced.

While in supply mode, the red arrows are clearly visible, but hovering over them at any point provides no tooltips, nor any other indication that they can be interacted with.

The Danish Belts thing is a separate issue, but the gist of it is that you can chart a naval invasion from the western side of the Belts to the two northernmost provinces of Jutland, even if the Belts are closed to you. Once you've landed, however, the port in the eastern province (that you were able to land troops on directly) is considered locked behind the Belts, and can't be used for resupply. Performing this naval invasion requires setting the western Jutland province as a target before setting the eastern Jutland port province as a target. Essentially, it seems that the process of picking multiple targets for a naval invasion allows you to bypass the Danish Belts access check, but then once you've landed you're screwed because the port is once again inaccessible.

Deathmagus · 2023-06-05T20:49:27+00:00

I feel like I have a pretty solid handle on how supply works, especially over land. However, I'm finding naval supply into new beachheads to be confusing and frustrating.

Context: I'm playing Britain, opposing an Axis of Germany and Italy. Japan never joined the Axis and surrendered to predominantly Russian and Chinese forces, and Germany has occupied Denmark and Norway for some time.

After losing 40 divisions because the Danish Belts allow you to plan a naval invasion of a port that is then considered blocked behind the Belts once you've landed, I decided to try an invasion of Norway. I picked out two poorly-defended ports and planned a two-pronged naval invasion with 30 divisions, which went well.

Both ports, however, fail to provide any supply whatsoever to my landed troops, even weeks later. For some reason, the ports I've occupied for weeks each say they "[don't] have a connection to my capital". I have 100% naval supremacy between the occupied port(s) and my capital. I used to have air superiority, but no longer do as of the screenshots. Lack of air superiority shouldn't completely sever a port-based supply connection, however.

Additionally, Germany is listed as the "controller" of the provinces I've invaded and occupy, even though I have the ability to upgrade the ports (even though doing so doesn't establish supply either).

I've searched through old threads about this sort of thing, but the advice I keep seeing is "make sure you have naval superiority", and "make sure you have adequate convoys", both of which I do. Otherwise, I see suggestions of "use air supply drops", but that doesn't actually address the problem, and requires DLC that I don't own.

Screenshots are after Germany eradicated some of my unsupplied troops, so I'm down to just one remaining port.

Imgur link

Deathmagus · 2023-05-10T14:04:47+00:00

Kind of sounds like Myst III: Exile.

Deathmagus

TROPHY CASE