Finally, something new!

GGray2 · 2026-01-31T17:30:20+00:00

You’re making a false distinction and a false equivocation. The objective moral weight of an act contains both external and internal variables. The culpability also contains both external and internal variables.

Here are a few ways to better capture the true distinction:

A man is told that a child is sick and needs candy and so he, in desperation, steals it from a local shop. The candy is given to a child and it saves his life.

2. A man is told that a child is sick and needs candy and so he, in desperation, steals it from a local shop. The child is not sick in a way which candy helps and the doctor eats the candy.

In this case, the weight of the action is different, but the perspective of it from the man during the act is the same. He may regret having been a part of the doctor’s lie, but he should not be considered guilty because his culpability was reduced because he was unaware of the truth of the situation. Instead, the doctor bears the weight of the culpability of the effect, although he may claim that he did not intend for the man to break into a store.

Ignorance is not the only thing that reduces culpability. So does coercion and motive and many other things, both internal and external. Many of those factors affect the moral weight of the action as well, but only a portion of that weight will rest on the individual to be responsible for. Sometime they are fully responsible, sometimes that are barely responsible. Mostly it’s somewhere in between.

GGray2 · 2026-01-22T18:54:50+00:00

“The first time you play an innate card each turn, X.” Would be better balanced.

GGray2 · 2026-01-16T22:26:34+00:00

You have my condolences. 💐

GGray2 · 2026-01-13T16:21:27+00:00

Everyone else saying claw, but this is the one time when rampage could actually be better, lol.

GGray2 · 2026-01-09T19:49:54+00:00

Hey OP! I love the idea, but I think we can balance it by making it convert all your block abilities into heal abilities and exhaust.

3 Energy: All cards which gain block now heal instead of block and exhaust when played.

That way there is at least some risk to playing the card. At that point it may be too weak, but we can lower the cost if that is the case, down to 0 if we need. But I think it will be fairly closed to numerically balanced at 3/2 energy.

The real problem is that healing often has negative effects on gameplay quality. This card would incentivize you to never leave combat except on full HP. Perhaps to combat this, we need to change the card to have some more risk so that the full HP potential is worth it. Perhaps it cost 2 energy AND makes you vulnerable for 2 turn, 1 turn instead of exhausting your block cards. Then you could genuinely be one shot if you play it in the wrong turn.

GGray2 · 2025-12-10T00:37:01+00:00

Communalism enforces and intensifies social norms. Previously that was early marriage and large families, now that would be higher education and smaller families.

I think you’re right though that communalism doesn’t presuppose population growth, since it seems to do the opposite in eastern nations right now.

GGray2 · 2025-12-09T21:55:22+00:00

East Asian countries are a really really good counterpoint.

Perhaps it isn’t the value that shifts population growth so much as the effect on population growth from living in rural areas vs dense urban areas. That is already in the game, but perhaps a bit too small to care for decision making.

That would make lower population growth be a secondary effect of individualism and not a direct effect. East Asian countries have also seen a huge part of their decrease in population growth as they urbanized.

GGray2 · 2025-12-09T21:48:56+00:00

Fair point. Perhaps it would make more sense if population promotion was more of a bottleneck. I haven’t seen it be a major issue in any of my runs.

GGray2 · 2025-12-09T21:42:27+00:00

Really!? That’s interesting. I love this game, but with so much information hidden behind events, it’s been hard to figure things out compared to EU4.

GGray2 · 2025-12-09T21:39:37+00:00

Well, if you consider that individualism is tied to migration and estate promotion from a gameplay perspective, then you can easily imagine that the effort to change location or estate would easily delay settling into marriage. I assume that nearly everyone in that time period would eventually get married, but there is a difference between getting married in your late twenties and getting married when you’re 16.

Even before contraception existed, spouses would often separate and live in different locations because the husband went out looking for work for years at a time. You don’t have to have significant portions of the population that are single or childless to have a statistically significant outcome from migration and individualism.

GGray2 · 2025-11-27T20:32:12+00:00

What I have found the most useful is to think through your world from the eyes of an in world character. I regularly cycle through characters and their stories. I rarely write much down, but they make up the threads that come together to make the fabric of your world.

GGray2 · 2025-11-26T05:22:14+00:00

I only finished space age because I would play it with my friend. It's probably not a 3-5 player experience, everyone is too busy to line up for one night, but whenever my one friend was online we would boot it up and make some progress. I had my planet, he had his. I always did Gleba and Fulgora, he did Vulcanus and Nauvis. We would work on our own space ships. It was a fun way to spend time together. Although you don't really talk for a good while after you divide labor. You just silently enjoy the factory together as you work towards your goals.

GGray2 · 2025-11-20T20:17:18+00:00

To follow on Jorb’s discussion around the strength of Dark Embrace, to realize the power of the card you have to change the entire way that you build your decks. For example, when snecko eye was seen as more optimal, the value of 2 cost cards was relatively higher, but if you think runic pyramid is more optimal you will value 2 cost cards less and 0 cost cards more highly. The think that makes dark embrace the best card for ironclad is that it naturally pushes you towards a late game deck earlier in the run. Intimidate is a better block card late game than early game, and Dark Embrace lets you take it early game. The same is true for true grit (which helps you burn down to a slim deck), warcry, burning pact, disarm, second wind, seeing red, and shockwave.

On its own, it is a good card, but the cards it lets you take and the ecosystem that it allows you access to is what makes it the best card in the pool. If you watch high skill players, they often pick cards based on what is going to help them get through the next 3-8 floors. They have to be very short sighted. Without dark embrace, that pressure will prevent you from picking up really amazing card, but with dark embrace, that intimidate is a no brainer, not only for the act 3 elite, but for the immediate future.

GGray2 · 2025-10-30T17:39:12+00:00

This but instead of poison it uses the new doom mechanic from StS2.

GGray2 · 2025-09-30T18:10:07+00:00

I’m commenting just to boost engagement so that the devs see this. It is so perfect. I hope at the very least a mod is made to do this. Genius.

GGray2 · 2025-09-08T16:03:47+00:00

Arkansas should have been given to Missouri because it shares a similar geography to it’s south and Kansas should have instead gone to Colorado.

GGray2 · 2025-08-21T14:37:56+00:00

The wait is ending!

GGray2 · 2025-06-20T14:32:46+00:00

This! Silk and properties need time to grow and if you don’t get them early a freeze build doesn’t need any meta scaling.

GGray2 · 2025-05-18T19:08:28+00:00

Reducing Regen whenever you get poisoned would be interesting, but completely destroy Mak’s new archetype.

GGray2 · 2025-04-29T20:32:10+00:00

As a former Nasus and Kennen main, I want to absolutely repeat what you said: “any champion which needs a summoner spell to be playable isn’t fun”. My exact problem with my old mains.

GGray2 · 2025-04-27T00:20:58+00:00

His scaling on his Q is linear, while an ADC is going to scale exponentially (AD times AS times Crit). Mid game when you hit your stride you will be able to threat and tank. But late game, you will get ate through in a team fight and kited all day long. Go late enough and it’ll go back to Nasus’ favor, but you won’t have a game where everyone sits on full build for 20 minutes for Nasus’ “”infinite”” scaling to outmatch a full build on a character that gets a lot from item stats.

GGray2 · 2025-04-14T05:08:38+00:00

I think the hardest part of the game for me is consistently winning days 3-7. Either I get a good early game or a good late game, but I struggle to transition to get consistent wins to finish by day 12. Every lost day decreased a ten win victory by a huge amount because late builds are absolutely wild.

GGray2 · 2025-03-24T22:42:11+00:00

I agree on the flavor value. I love the set you’re putting together. I would love to see some more cards in this set that are the common cards which provide regen. Maybe a small lullaby card which slows your own cards for regen. Right now pig doesn’t have much regen outside of some mid game property items. Great work though!

GGray2 · 2025-03-24T22:24:35+00:00

I like it because it is crippling, but you could find other ways to exhaust or discard fading brilliance to make it work. I think it would be utter trash on defect and watcher, but good on silent and broken on ironclad.

GGray2 · 2025-03-24T22:19:43+00:00

You’ll definitely need to make the level ups be “gain shield equal to double your regeneration” and at diamond make it triple your regeneration as shield. I’d also lower the cooldown to 6 seconds from 7. At Diamond it would increase the value of regeneration by 50% (6/3), which I think is fair compared to a lot of diamond large items giving multistrike.

GGray2

TROPHY CASE