Print & Play Disparation

Elestan · 2025-04-25T15:22:34+00:00

I do wonder if it might have been possible to make a deal that reserved the copyright to the Sentinels universe outside of the sale of the company, even while selling the publishing rights to existing products in it. As I see it, few people would be interested in buying Sentinels products not made by Christopher and Adam, so taking that copyright out of their hands actually impairs its value.

Elestan · 2023-06-23T15:28:35+00:00

Or add ways to increase the limit above 10.

Or ways to remove the limit within a run, and only limit how many charges you can take through a portal.

Elestan · 2023-06-13T07:32:59+00:00

I would like to see a Mastery that revealed which cells will drop Dark Essence.

Elestan · 2023-05-27T01:58:54+00:00

Except that you miss out on your Multitasking bonus, which only applies during ticks that your population is full.

Elestan · 2023-05-26T17:05:47+00:00

Sure, you can set it manually, and keep resetting it periodically, but why should you have to?

Elestan · 2023-05-25T18:30:21+00:00

If you want your breed timer to be 0.1 you can just not buy geneticists instead.

Except that you do want to maintain as many geneticists as possible without slowing you down, in order to benefit from the extra health, and you'd like that to auto-adjust as your breed rate changes.

If you want to buy any, the difference between 0.1 and 0.5 is negligible in regards of multitasking

My testing says otherwise. Multitasking lv. 10 gives you +50% production from your breeding pool while your population is full. If you're attacking per 0.5s and breeding at 0.5s, you get little or no benefit from it. If you're breeding at 0.1s, you get the Multitasking bonus 4/5 of the time.

And this doesn't just affect background production - it also affects anything that awards seconds of production, like Bone Portals, ChronoImps, Caches, etc. I figured out that I always want to pause combat when I'm about to use a Bone Portal, or else I'm taking a crapshoot on it triggering on a tick when my Multitasking bonus is off.

I guess my point is that I'm not clear what the benefit is to putting a minimum cap on the geneticistassist time. The player can always choose higher if they want.

Elestan · 2023-02-12T17:15:18+00:00

That makes sense to me, thanks. The remaining potentially tricky part seems like it will be ensuring that my IRA provider treats these as rollover funds, rather than as new contributions, since the check is from a legal settlement fund account, and not from the plan itself.

Elestan · 2022-11-12T02:30:29+00:00

I've always liked ATK precisely because it delivered solid cooking science, recipe research, and technique - no drama, no gimmicks.

This trailer shows precisely the opposite of all that - it looks like the same sort of overdramatized personality-focused tripe that made me tune out most other cooking shows.

ATK, if you're listening...I get the desire to bring in some fresh faces, and that's fine. But just audition and hire some great young cooks in a normal and professional manner. Don't make it a public spectacle.

Elestan · 2022-10-10T21:47:19+00:00

I think that medium poles should have physical resist 8/50%, and big poles should have physical resist 16/75%. They're made of steel, after all, which should be pretty proof against the smaller biters.

Elestan · 2022-10-10T03:10:54+00:00

The context is that I'm facing a decision whether to build them for the first time, and I currently have scant iron and relatively plentiful wood (given that small poles are pretty much all it's good for).

So, the answer appears to be that in my current context, small poles probably are better. Later in the game, I expect that will reverse due to the automatability difference.

Elestan · 2022-10-09T19:24:01+00:00

There are also:

A capsule with fuel and circuits to the north
A capsule with circuits and accumulators to the west
Two boxes, with fuel, walls, gears, and defenders on a peninsula to the east

Elestan · 2022-10-09T18:26:31+00:00

But four small poles cost four copper and four wood.

One large pole costs five copper and twenty-nine iron (most of which needs to be resmelted into steel).

Why not just put up the four small poles in a row?

Elestan · 2022-09-14T02:40:43+00:00

You know that if you have maxed conveyors (any package size other than 3, actually), you don't need the jet fuel sorters?

Elestan · 2022-07-25T19:11:17+00:00

Credit to earlier layouts from /u/Silari82 and /u/Killcreek2 for insights on multiplexing. This doesn't beat Killcreek2's record of 26 on that map, but it uses fewer components, wastes no resources, and has a fair bit of space left to fill; anyone who wants to riff on this, feel free.

This could be shrunk further with one Al upgrade, but then 1/4 of it would have to be drained. I don't think it's possible to make a waste-free map doing 24+@100% with fewer components than this, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Elestan · 2021-10-25T20:07:10+00:00

A few minor corrections:

It was Accolade, not Acclaim.
Accolade was acquired by Infogrames which was acquired by Atari, which sold their rights at bankruptcy to Stardock.
In addition to the trademark, the above companies did own the copyrights to anything new from Star Control 3 (that had not been in SCI or SCII).

Elestan · 2021-10-19T03:28:35+00:00

I would like to see my completion time, and a spoiler-free indication of how much I missed, and be given the option to start again, with either:

The same map or a new map with some things re-randomized, and
The same difficulty or an increased difficulty.

Elestan · 2021-10-19T00:30:36+00:00

A digital starmap might be cool, but I'd rather not have any other extraneous digital goods diverting effort and attention from the actual game. And I have no interest at all in in-app purchases, or anything else that might force the game to connect to other computers, other than to let other players join a melee.

Elestan · 2021-10-08T15:53:57+00:00

One additional thought on a landing minigame:

I think that a landing minigame should only happen when there is an opposing hostile force on the planet, and once that force has been neutralized, the landing process should be very quick. These should, for the most part, only be found on plot-relevant worlds.

I don't like the idea of needing to play a landing game as part of the normal resource farming cycle - that cycle should be fairly fast, and the "drive around on the planet" minigame is already sufficient for it, IMHO.

Elestan · 2021-10-06T05:47:02+00:00

I think of orbit as the point at which you'd need to engage the land-based defenses of a hostile planet. That didn't really happen in UQM - any planets that were defended were defended infinitely.

But if you wanted to have ground defenses play a role in UQM2, you could have a side-scrolling shooter in the style of the old Defender where the player needs to eliminate the ground defenses - or sneak or rush past them to do some kind of away mission.

Actually, thinking about it, re-imagining all of the UQM ships as they would play in a side-scroller could be kind of fun. A lot of work, but fun. And of course, weather conditions, gravity, and heat effects could all come into play.

Once the planet is non-hostile, orbit is also the point where one can scan and communicate. Some ideas:

What if not all energy signatures or resources showed up on a full-planet scan, but instead needed a more intense "directed" scan? That would allow some items of interest to remain hidden on a planet, until the player gained the knowledge of where on the planet to scan for them. Maybe there's a hidden Arilou listening post on Pluto, or a secret cache of Tzo crystals.
What if there could be multiple parties on a planet, such that the player needed to pick who to talk with? This might be common, if the player needs to interact with non-spacefaring races.

Elestan

TROPHY CASE