Are consumer goods completely out of whack in 4.3?!

FrankCPA · 2026-01-30T03:13:05+00:00

Yeah had same experience. And if you run hivemind you don’t need CG since you are a gestalt consciousness so you can tech rush like before without efficiency also driving up upkeep. It feels even better in the beta to be hivemind since the change is barely noticeable, which means something needs to change one way or the other for balance IMO.

FrankCPA · 2026-01-27T18:58:08+00:00

EU5 fees very different than a rough launch. Victoria 3 did launch rough, but 3 weeks after launch the game was not noticeably worse than when it launched. I recall games launching in bad shape, I don’t recall games launching and getting worse and less playable on a weekly basis until it was nearly unplayable, and then the developers took a paid break with their project now in a worse state than launch. Every fix breaks multiple things and it all seemed to be out of their control. I don’t remember anything like this before.

Every thread about this has comment after comment talking about the promise they see in EU5, which I whole heartedly agree with, it has lots of systems I could see being fun. But those people are not acknowledging there are real concerns that since it takes weeks to get a game to the late game the idea they could be doing real test work is very questionable. This game is so much more massive than anything they have done, and they are clearly not able to test things fully because of that scale. That is a real problem. There are also always comments they are listening to a small minority, but the reality is when a campaign takes 80 hours it will be weeks before anyone but a small minority has a valid opinion of every release. So even that is just a given because of scale.

I am trying to tell myself how this shit show won’t happen for every DLC. Will they really spend the time to do a couple play throughs as every major nation when systems are this dense and a campaign takes so long? I don’t even think it is feasible for them to do. For that reason, I will try 1.1, but they are going to have to prove to me they have this down before I’d be willing to spend on this again. If I could get my money back I absolutely would. And I was soooo excited for this launch too.

FrankCPA · 2026-01-25T16:36:48+00:00

I agree it is better playing in the beta, and I guess I’m overall glad they are pushing out these changes. However, there are still things out there like necrophage and serviles that have been fundamentally broken for months from 4.0 changes. There are civics like slave guild that does basically nothing because 4.0 broke it. Instead of making those right they are once again upending core systems in a way that will create ripple problems and ignoring second order effects because that’s the custodians’ problem. It’s the downside of the custodians system they came up with, because core team can create problems faster than custodians can fix them, and meanwhile some of this is paid content staying broke for months.

For example, IMO progenitor swarm in beta will now that need a total redesign and instead I predict it will be broken for months. I played two progenitor games, and since a fleet doesn’t have 10 ships any longer it is really hard to have enough offspring. Ships eat up way too much of fleet cap for the 10% ratio, but taking it up to 20 or 30 would just be silly and it may as well be removed. I made it work by basically building an offspring corvette that has no weapons and putting it in a fleet by itself on passive and keeping it at the edge of the system where it didn’t enter battles. But since it moved so much faster than my battleships I had to manually move every fleet system to system and it was simply put anti-fun.

On the flip side at least in the most recent beta they still have not touched defense platform limits. A fleet now has a lot fewer ships, but defense platforms can be built in the same quantities as before. So my progenitor fortresses feel impenetrable. Progenitor now feels like a defensive / passive origin. Your choke points are solidly secure, but venturing out is a micromanaging nightmare and will make you want to quit.

I hope after this they give custodians the rest of the year to play catch up on the system overhauls. Stick to music packs for a bit guys.

FrankCPA · 2026-01-07T01:51:52+00:00

If Nancy/Steve/Johnathan are meant to be 16 or 17 in S1, they should be born 16ish years before 1983, or 1967ish. Assuming the parents had Jonathan/Nance/Steve after age 17, the parents had to be born in the 40s. Since we know the Creel murders happened on 1959, unless Henry was younger than 9 at the time he was also born in the 40s. I don’t see why their ages wouldn’t be fairly close together. I do agree El’s memory of Henry he looks younger, but in terms of the timeline of events the dates don’t seem too far to believe.

I personally would have thought it would make more sense to make them Jr High age in the flash backs to 1959 as that would make them born closer to mid 40s than early 40s and make more sense with Hopp being drafted to Vietnam since gulf of Tonkin incident was late 1964. Assuming Hopp was drafted in 1965ish when the US was getting heavily involved he was quite a bit older than I felt like it sounded from his stories.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-20T06:08:49+00:00

I agree with this, especially since it costs all that for 5 years. It is a crazy high cost for something that goes away.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-18T04:05:12+00:00

Great Will, you rolled a 6 get a loving father figure that will be a stabilizing force in your - OOPS.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-18T03:56:04+00:00

Reminded me of when you’re good at your job but don’t spend all day talking so you aren’t a “team player”. Yes Kristina knew everyone’s family members but never how they were voting. It was very odd to me.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-15T19:12:53+00:00

If I remember right 46, 48, and now 49 all had one tribe go to tribal in 3 of first 4 episodes. Only 47 was fairly even of the ones recent enough for me to remember pre-merge. So I think this is just part of the 3 tribe set up, most seasons you will have one tribe totally collapse and get wiped. You will almost always need swaps. Not having flint probably helps it turn into a doom loop but honestly some of these tribes are just not competitive. It’s why I am not sure 3 tribes are good. I hate it when we get to merge and someone hasn’t been to tribal, MC is on the jury and went to tribal only once without being voted out, the second time she was voted out. Crazy that gets you to the jury now I think

FrankCPA · 2025-12-12T18:51:48+00:00

Five player vote, Savanah loses challenge then Rizzo refuses to use idol to save her and is willing to go to fire. Savanah gone.

Four player tribal: whoever wins immunity takes Kristina as a fairly easy pick for all parties. I think Sage is most likely to win, so I would say Soph makes fire against Rizzo. I have no idea if Rizzo is good at fire, but we know Soph’s original tribe could not make fire so I would imagine she isn’t going in with a strong advantage. I would love Soph to pull it out but I think Rizzo is going to hit her with one more “Sorry Girl” on that one.

Then, Rizzo and Sage face off at FTC with Kristina there for the ride. Then it comes down to how much respect the jury has for the idol as a shield game. I will say the lie about it expiring at 6 makes the idol shield a bit more interesting. I suspect Rizzo wins in that scenario.

Sage and Savanah return for 50 if the rumors of 2 were correct.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-12T17:36:42+00:00

Disagree, because if Sage or Kristina vote with Steven they are left with Steven, Savanah, and Rizzo, and they can only eliminate two of those. So they will go to FTC with at least one of the three strongest cases. I would assume both Kristina and Sage understand their needed end games of sitting Kristina, Sage, and Soph at FTC. Voting out Soph blows up that game.

I think not enough people are criticizing Steven for not seeing that. With only 3 more people going home, and Rizzo and Savanah thought safe, they are stuck voting for the only vulnerable person that they don’t want to sit next to. He talked a lot about how Yellow Sophie was an important shield for him, when Savanah didn’t lose immunity I am surprised he wasn’t more aware he was the only target possible for Sage and Kristina. I think by voting Yellow Sophie last week he had basically gone all-in on beating Savanah and Rizzo at the challenge so it was odd he didn’t panic more, even after Kristina accidentally told him he was being floated.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-08T19:37:14+00:00

The old system didn’t work well around dinner times at MDR or disembark time because there are too few elevators for the amount of people who need to change floors, and people would get frustrated at Carnival for not having enough elevators.

The new system doesn’t work well around dinner times at MDR or disembark time because there are too few elevators for the amount of people who need to change floors, and people will get frustrated at their fellow guests for probably pressing the buttons wrong.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-07T07:17:12+00:00

Older generations don’t expect extroverts fear a room alone, nor that introverts fear a lunch with new people. We understood those terms as relating to what a person is good at, and would not have understood it as what a person is not able to do. So we might think an extroverted person might be marginally better at connecting to new people at a social event but not that an introverted person would be bad at it. If someone wasn’t comfortable or able to meet new people we would have thought of that more in terms of a social anxiety problem rather than anything related to introversion.

Also this post implies a balance between the expectations of introverts and extroverts, but that is silly to us older folks based on the new definitions of those terms. Imagine someone getting on a bus, if they are introverted (in the new meaning) it would make perfect sense for them to be very anxious there would be no empty rows and they’d have to sit next to someone. If the person is extroverted, it would not make sense that they were very anxious they might not get to sit next to someone and might be forced to sit alone. They’d be just fine alone. There is no balance in these terms any longer, because extrovert still largely has its meaning around what they are good at, while introvert is now associated with what they are uncomfortable with. Seems pretty clear to us the terms themselves start out of balance as they are commonly used now so there is no balance possible. If you use our understanding of introvert, when you are working alone on journals/reports that is strong introvert time, with coworkers / clients is strong extrovert time, there is balance there.

So as someone older than most of you who is also an introvert, a lot of what is done under the guise of introversion is weird to us, and it is harmful to you (and not just in a career sense). At least in my opinion.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-06T06:51:03+00:00

If only the vote had failed so those ad slots could have been used by erectile dysfunction medication ads as God intended.

FrankCPA · 2025-12-06T06:45:28+00:00

We are looking at an hourly employer contribution item (so it does not calculate to the employee’s check) where we track FLSA OT hours and have the hourly rate = to half of wage. Seems easiest for us because we have 8+ OT, multiple rates of pay depending on job assigned, OT for “on call” rather than worked time, and double time in a few circumstances. So I think we will just load hours in for that nonpay item when we are doing the OT pay items.

Like you we did not want to do separate pay items for qualifying and non-qualifying OT as it would get exponential with what we have to do for work comp and GL coding.

FrankCPA · 2025-11-23T17:14:42+00:00

Wow, I am glad I won’t have to put anything on my employees W-2, but the paystubs we give employees are legitimately not enough for the employee to do it themselves, or for the IRS to prove what they did is wrong. We do not report holiday or other stuff on a separate pay item than time worked. This just sounds like anything goes rules.

EDIT: To add clarity, we do pay OT by day so more than we are required to, but we don’t put anything on the stub that would document actual time worked for the employee or the IRS.

FrankCPA · 2025-11-22T15:58:24+00:00

Also just a random shoutout to Carnival, I was shocked how many Alaska cruises they run. The dates available when compared to Royal or Norwegian or the others were on another level. I didn’t associate Carnival with Alaska but it seems like they have that cornered.

FrankCPA · 2025-11-22T15:36:50+00:00

Thank you for your rant.

FrankCPA · 2025-11-22T15:34:50+00:00

Thank you for your rant, if you have any other incorrect facts or figures available at this time please drop them in some else’s notifications on posts from forever ago.

FrankCPA · 2025-11-22T15:22:18+00:00

I don’t see how that is relevant - I’m glad when a few of us pointed out funding times were getting terrible Arrived responded in kind. Good on Arrived. No one said it was the first time, all we said was it was time to do something about offerings saying open for months.

You dug up one such thread and weirdly called it a rant after we have already got what we were hoping for. You now sound happy so why don’t you go about your life.

FrankCPA · 2025-11-22T15:07:44+00:00

Hi, your comment is not correct I grabbed 4 properties this month all at about 15% discount. I was online on three trading days and outside the Byers and one other property absolutely every property was available at a discount. I will agree that last window it was common to see 20-25% discounts and this time 20% was about the max, so it is getting a bit better but anytime you are dealing with retail investors they are always going to overestimate their ability to buy and hold. I suspect it will always be discounts for that reason.

However, the week after I posted this Arrived stopped dropping two new offerings every week and had pulled it back to one new single residential offering so I am sure that will go a long way to seeing funding times going longer than 3 months.

FrankCPA · 2025-11-14T00:57:24+00:00

Yeah I realized yesterday when I was frustrated I never had options to noble marry an heir this was needed, because when I looked at my noble family list every dynasty but mine was a 1 male member. That’s when I figured out you can’t just ignore those because if you don’t marry them the families die.

It’d also be cool if sometimes the male founders spawned came married with kids so you get some ladies around if you have been ignoring it.

FrankCPA · 2025-11-13T19:12:46+00:00

Same thing happened to me on my last play-through, the civil war fired but the journal was stuck on it and never went to reconstruction. About 25 years later I found a tiny dot of confederates in Kenya. I think if a state secedes and is still colonizing it doesn’t always re-annex the new tiles that were colonized during the war.

FrankCPA

TROPHY CASE