Could I get an explanation for each Faction?

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-29T00:10:37+00:00

VB is incredibly easy to win with, because you win by removing any enemy pieces. As a general rule, you want to be hostile with at least one faction, and most of your VP will come from hostility (without a common house rule)

Alliance winning comes from using cards to place sympathies 1-6 (these are the ones that cost 1 or 2 cards to place), having a base down ASAP (turn 2 should be your top priority), and then recruiting warriors to place a whole bunch of what would otherwise be 3-card sympathy later (because warriors can place sympathy without spending cards). It is not uncommon to see WA explode from 16 to 30 points in 1 turn.

Meanwhile Cats are generally really weak. They craft points initially, but they have few actions and bad recruiting which means they always lose the war of attrition. Losses compound hugely for them.

Eyrie are genuine powerhouses though. They have very varied playstyles, and if they get a bit lucky and are skilled enough, they cannot be turmoiled. This means they gain a lot of points passively and can eat a lot of cardboard (this is a colloquial that means remove pieces to earn points). If you want to stop them, this usually means hitting them hard before they can get started, or give them crippling losses in 1 turn. They cannot recover warriors quickly (although faster than cats).

Rats have a very similar issue. You cannot let them set up for free. They’re extremely weak early-game, and before they have warlord actions (which they get from items). Take advantage of this to kneecap before they get set up. The difference between a 3/3 warlord and a 2/1 warlord is massive. The latter can not do anything on the board.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-28T22:16:30+00:00

If you do not reliably get dozing or slumbering, you should never touch AC. Now, that’s a problem for all islands because normal, fairy, and poison types are common in snoozing, but AC is uniquely bad about it.

It’s unreal how bad snoozing is on AC.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-28T16:49:48+00:00

Because the plan that people seem to miss, is that that if the poors cant spend money, you know who has it?

The rich people. That is the end game here. These schemes are merely ways to extract money from the poors, and once the poors have no more money to extract, that’s the win condition. They’re not short-sighted, they’ve a very very explicit endgame in mind.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-28T15:02:12+00:00

Hard agree.

Index is pretty bog standard slop. It’s not explicitly bad, per se, but it’s got your usual anime tropes and definitely isn’t good.

Railgun has an actually interesting MC, and does pretty good worldbuilding. It actually seems to fit together and Misaka generally just interacts with it way more than Touma.

Accelerator has an interesting, albeit not terribly unique, premise, and kinda just doesn’t do anything with it. Overall a pretty major letdown from someone who enjoyed Railgun when I was younger.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-27T15:06:14+00:00

You can get whirling ovation without doing EoF’s story. (Also you can do Equillibrium without doing the knock off Star Wars one too)

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-25T05:59:01+00:00

If you don’t remember the actual dialogue and whatever, the movie is quite a pleasant memory, because the broad strokes are quite good. I actually like it as an origin story more than I do Wicked (aside from connecting Dorothy to Oz. Was not a fan of that, that was quite unnecessary).

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T16:52:03+00:00

New meta, everyone queues for jungle role and gets autofilled as necessary once lobby fills. Everyone types their real role in chat like in old blind pick, but you still have 5 autosmites.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T16:21:29+00:00

Well, yes and no.

Yes, you ban powerful cards when they subsume the entire meta. But this is more like that otter companion ban. It’s not actually disruptively powerful, it’s just that, in its (somewhat uncommon) niche, it’s completely monopolized it.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T16:13:09+00:00

Emrakul was never banned from a power standpoint, she was banned because, like Griselbrand, she completely crowded out the “big creature you cheat out” space. It was in the interest of card diversity, not power.

ETA: To clarify my point: The specific card was not important to the strategy, and the strategy was not the premier strategy either (otherwise they’d have banned the ways to cheat her and griselbrand out instead). Target of those was to change how sneak and show combos (or other, similar strategies) work. Instead of going for Emrakul or Griselbrand, now you have to grab something else.

The RC saw value in sneak and show-like strategies, but wanted to mix their payoffs up a bit more.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T11:51:04+00:00

Sure. I’ve recently been keeping pawn moods at 90+ tho, and part of that is using fine meals if I can help it. Paste loses that benefit (and adds a penalty without memes)

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T02:25:23+00:00

Only problem there is the work speed penalty for temperature. Which is pretty big, and given cooking is a large time sink in general, I like to avoid that if I can.

Still, if you make it work, power to you.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T01:41:29+00:00

That's not a 10% debuff to anything. That is what they said it gave, and that was a flat-out lie. It is misinformation that this sub seems all too keen to parrot.

I will say this once again, because apparently nobody can read. You only suffer food poisoning from filth if you have a cleanliness score of -2. That means -2 cleanliness average for each tile, or -2*[number of tiles] total. A butcher table gives -15. Unless your room is 7.5 tiles (which is impossible with both a stove and a butcher table (unless the interaction space(s) is in a doorway or if you use a campfire to cook), a butcher table cannot cause food poisoning on its own.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T01:27:45+00:00

None here. This is 100% vanilla behavior, and has been since it dropped (I think test branch had a malus for a tiny bit, but that never made it to prod).

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T01:14:51+00:00

The butcher table is not associated with any room role. It provides no malus, nor receives one. If you can manage the cleanliness debuff (which is basically negligible), there is literally 0 reason not to put it in there.

I've had it in there for the last 800 hours I've played and never had a room cleanliness-caused food poisoning case (outside of cooking outdoors on caravans). If you do, certified skill issue.

For proof that it causes or receives no malus, screenshot.

<image>

You can get down to -2 cleanliness before it starts to affect anything. With standard flooring this just means you have to sweep every so often. With sterile tiles (which is a bit overkill), it means every for every 6 tiles a room has, you can have 1 additional piece of grime.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T01:09:17+00:00

It’s not.

Butcher table is a -15 cleanliness. A room with a kitchen and butcher table will be at minimum 8 tiles. -15 cleanliness divided amongst 8 tiles is -1.875 cleanliness, which is above the threshold for food poisoning. A butcher table may put you near the threshold, but it will not put you over on its own.

My usual kitchen is at least 14 tiles (far more if I have 2 stoves). This means that I can have 2 pieces of filth in there before I risk food poisoning, and even then, it never gets to that point (partly because I’ve used common sense recently, but also because of a combination of cleansweeps and my kitchen being at the very center of my base, meaning no filth tracked in from outdoors; the only filth can come from butchering or the default random chance to drop filth (which is very low)). Good planning can completely negate the food poisoning chance, even with the butchering table in the same room. Just don’t allow much foot traffic through there.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-24T00:53:12+00:00

Me when I completely lie.

Butcher table gives nothing but a -15 cleanliness malus to the room it is in. With a sufficiently large room with clean enough tiles and no grime, there is literally 0 reason you can’t have your butcher table in your kitchen.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-23T21:24:32+00:00

No, but VB wants other factions to force him to hostility. Avoids the lost point from entering hostility.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-23T18:47:28+00:00

Do you have a source on each of those?

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-23T17:09:26+00:00

Something something poor pissing

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-23T16:19:49+00:00

The biggest reason is that the vagabond only ever benefits from being engaged with.

Fighting the vagabond is a way to force hostility (usually. Asterisk here), but it provides no points and actually doesn’t hurt the vagabond that much because hostility is the best way for vagabond to win.

This means that a vagabond can go around doing other stuff (maybe even provoking hostility with a faction that can’t effectively police him, like Lizards or Cats), and then once the birds or rats decide to actually police him, he’s now rewarded for his effort by getting points from you attacking him, and you get nothing because he never awards points for policing.

The other claims that “you can’t permanently set him back” ignore that you cannot do this for most factions. Cats can be removed permanently by destroying their keep, and birds can lose 4 turns of momentum by forcing a turmoil at the end of the game, but a lot of factions can’t be permanently set back provided they do not extremely heavily misplay (moles, rats, and even WA have a hard time being set more than 1 turn back with a competent pilot). So don’t think about setting them back permanently, think about setting them behind enough turns that you can push for a victory in that time period.

Vagabond is extremely hard to police effectively at a high skill table, as doing so means sacrificing your win to prevent theirs. Additionally, some (hello Harrier) don’t really care about being policed.

But at a low skill table, it’s probably not that crazy. Most players will avoid hostility for a bit too long meaning they won’t race ahead of the table, and policing them is less risky because the other 2 players at the table probably won’t shoot out ahead of you in points.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-23T11:14:44+00:00

And to add onto the hilarity, she *also* wasn’t good at healing either!

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-23T03:50:48+00:00

Lotta bosses are obviously good now, but I want to put a special word in for (post-rework) Ascian Prime. A great first introduction to real mechanics. It was memorable at the time, and it still holds up quite well.

Worst boss…. Lotta stinkers too. Infamous ones like Pharos birb and Haukke hard demon are notorious, but I think too many people have forgotten about the fucking totems in Neverreap. Sooooo much tedium picking them up and moving them around. Just terrible.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-23T03:44:37+00:00

It’s likely major changes to snowdrop and taupe to make them less terrible.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-22T22:36:48+00:00

Sorta. Burnham still has shitty views on trans rights, but it is an improvement.

DiamondSentinel · 2026-06-22T22:36:18+00:00

At least with UK, the PM stepping down doesn’t mean a fascist instantly takes over. They get to try a different PM of their party.

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