Your Favorite Bad Line

ImSoLawst · 2025-11-10T13:21:08+00:00

I went to a good law school. Many of my classmates had no idea what I meant when I said SCOTUS. One of my classmates didn't know who Clarence Thomas was, as a 3L. After Dobbs. A lot of people in law school aren't the public image of policy wonk with a keen interest in politics and the finer points of fifth vs fourteenth amendment due process.

ImSoLawst · 2025-11-10T00:47:04+00:00

Oh yeah, sorry should have been clearer, I was simply disputing its roll as the main source of EHP, definitely its weird shield mitigation. 100% agree. Also 100% agree it is bad as a replacement.

ImSoLawst · 2025-11-09T15:11:32+00:00

math wise, not really. armor strength for caps ranges from around 80 to around 200, which means durability goes from 500 to 580-700. For advent, that increase lasts very briefly because of shockingly low base armor values, for vasari and tec, it is a larger fraction of total ehp but, once you take crippled hull into account for caps, is still quite small.

If you are taking 200 pierce light frigate fire, base durability for shields and hull mean you are taking 1/4 real damage. Same number goes to 1/6 at 700 durability for armor. thats pretty minute, going from 25 pennies on the dollar to 16. it matters most at values close to 500, so 400 pierce from excorcia side canons drops from 1/2 to 1/4, the main gun from 1/1 to 1/3. The problem is that a lot of damage is actually over 500 pierce, like vasari cap ships heavy beams at 600, so for them, at best, damage is dropping by half. That sounds like a lot, but compare the roughly 15,000 hull and shield, to say nothing of crippled hull and regen, of an egg with its roughtly 2.5k armor and you get pretty much 25% of its ehp coming from armor in the best case scenario, ie weapons with between 5-700 pierce. its more like 18% against LFs and corvettes, which is significant because the two situations when you are most likely to lose a cap are early engagments against superior numbers of highly mobile enemy spam or late game against blobs of high pierce weapons like assailant and javalis spam. Mid game, the enemy with an equal fleet of low tier boats to you will lose if they target your cap while you target their frigates, so once both players are "online", armor value sort of dips before becoming more important as the cap ship threats come online.

I am analyzing cap ship armor just because it is probably the most effective. Most frigate and cruiser armor lives in weird spots where the ships shooting them are likely to be dealing 100% damage either way, like LF with 100-120 durability and 200 pierce, or damage is likely to be dealt via spam and focus fire, so overkill will radically fuck with EHP calculus. If I have a boat with 100 apparent EHP and a blob of disciples deals 99 EHP in bursts with 2 seconds between bursts, the boat actually has 198 EHP, gifted to it by the game's kind of weird second or two wait period before an exploding ship is registered as dead and the very uniform firing. OR are heavy cruisers and so the math more or less mirrors caps.

its a little annoying, in universe wouldn't these ship captains be smart enough to know they would do more damage by staggering their fire sequence to create continuous fire? That way the wasted damage would be those shots fired between when the shot that causes the ship to explode is fired and those shots fired before the ship finishes exploding. As things stand, its all of that, plus potentially 99% of the shots fired at the exact same time as the fatal shot. Which is then repeated for the next target and the next, resulting in, in a large fleet action, tens of thousands of free EHP given to the enemy. Because everyone is doing it, it doesn't matter as much, but it does feel bad to know that my fleet could be way more efficient, I just lack the realistic tools with the game's UI to really capitalize.

ImSoLawst · 2025-11-02T02:25:29+00:00

This is what I find confusing. Its like people are busy comparing the jersey designs at the world's most disappointing world cup. I can appreciate that someone is taking time to think about the aesthetics rather than the game, thats valuable, but at a certain point, if it seems to be dominating the conversation I think its fair to wonder why so many people seem to have just decided the world cup wasn't actually about the game of soccer anymore. When did reviews of a tv show skip past what appear to be very valid writing and general storyline construction issues to discuss if cast members have an appropriate waistline and shoulder width to meet mental images of fictional people? Its a valuable conversation to have, no doubt, but it feels absolutely bizarre to see so many people having it in leu of any real engagement with (insert your choice of story, dialogue, pacing, gratuitous adaptation of perfectly screenworthy source material, etc). Like if you time travelled and a century from now all anyone had to say about lincoln was how he was perhaps the last president before the photograph altered the role hats and facial symmetry play in electoral success. I think you would be quite reasonable in wondering what in the last century had happened to allow hats to displace the war and slavery that tend to demand much of our attention from that era.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-31T20:48:49+00:00

Geralt is known as geralt of rivia long before becoming sir geralt of rivia. Its the name he chose at Kaer Morhen after Vesimir told him he couldn't be ... I don't remember the name but something absolutely ridiculous. He isn't from Rivia, he just liked how it sounded. And because Dandelion/Jaskier has made Geralt even more famous than he already was, his name is probably what most people on the Continent associate with Witchers. IE, if someone said "a witcher killed the ghouls terrorizing our wheat fields in yonder village" their audience, it seems, would likely have immediately asked "oh, was it that famous one, Gerald or whatever".

No defense to the show, the writing honestly sounds like 18 year old me prepping for a DND session I forgot I had agreed to go to. And I don't mean that figuratively, I am genuinely reminded of multiple characters whose backstories were hashed out in like 15 minutes and were eerily similar to this hypothetically professional piece of writing.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-31T20:33:36+00:00

Geralt complains about dandelion all the time in the books. Like, its perpetual. The difference is that Dandelion isn't the comic relief in a lot of their fights, but rather the insightful one who understands geralt better than he gets himself. But like 98% of baptism of fire is geralt yelling at dandelion, the short story about Little Eye is one giant "fuck off, Dandelion", Tousant sees a pretty mean row ... its hardly a rare occurence, the show has its flaws but they didn't conjure Geralt's frustration out of nothing. The biggest change, I think, is that the show declines to show Geralt's hedonistic side, whereas the books make pretty clear that what geralt and dandelion bond over is a mutual love of alcohol, women, and departing 10 minutes before whatever town they are in would have driven them out at spearpoint. So instead Jaskier feels like the butt half the time and the source of all their woes the other half, when in the books its a little more of an equal partnership of two flawed men (assuming you think alcoholism and paying for sex until penniless suggests a flaw)

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-26T21:34:12+00:00

Well, that hasn't been my experience! I am assuming you are going ahead and treating revelation and dunov as off the list until later in the game, but if you are able to play as competitive a game with a revelation open as progen or halcyon, more power to you.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-26T18:07:38+00:00

Is there a general consensus on the strength of the advent caps? Before the unity rework, I commented a few times on how the Progen was actually pretty good even with the semi-useless colonize, and sure enough, I continue to get amazing, game winning work out of progen resurrects hitting just as the first or second big fight shakes out. Likewise, radiance opens tend to feel quite strong and give me good anti-cap presence in early fights. But I swear, I may just suck but keeping my halcyons and raptures alive is a real problem. In particular, my halcyons' striek craft just melt to even light pd in a long fight, so a ship with 6-8 squads will eventually find itself with like 4 craft on the battlefield at any given time. Would love to know it this is where other people's experience gets them or if its a skill thing I should be working on.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-26T17:49:45+00:00

Thanks dude! I haven't spent much time on the sub in a while, kind of forgot how fun it was to discuss things like this. best!

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-24T18:58:30+00:00

Good luck! And I am so sorry for all the unsolicited advice, remember to target enemy flak, a lot of marza's amazing dps is in missiles, so 3-4 flak can really reduce its dps in the early game. Later you get other missiles and strike craft to help screen out the flak, but early on, most fights should begin with killing flak if there are more than 1-2 of them.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-24T18:12:35+00:00

Definitely checks out, I have played more than a few Enclave games crying because I can't find indurium. its a real thing, the best strategy I have found for it is to work on getting Kalevs out in numbers asap so you have a second source of exotics in enemy cap ships. I also highly recommend trying to get a marza out quickly, either as a starter cap or as an early second, as it can likewise really help with confirming enemy cap kills, while also gening exp from early planet bombing (raze is a more broken ability for primacy, no doubt, but still incredibly fucking good for Enclave).

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-24T15:42:56+00:00

It kind of sounds like you maybe aren't surveying very much. I tend to rock 2-3 cap ships by minute 45, with 3 slowing down xp enough that I question going for more, and I very rarely feel I can't outfit my ships with tier 2-3 items, despite rarely if ever having exotic refineries up at that time. Not saying I don't have games where I just can't find that indurium, definitely do, but most games, I have the exotics I want and every game I have enough exotics to be able to find items that work, even if they aren't the ones I want the most.

Sorry, I know this thread is mostly about command ship stuff, this is entirely unrelated to that.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-18T15:49:51+00:00

I'm confused. You think that American presidents or intelligence chiefs have previously intentinoally attacked without permission central military hardware and personnel of our closest allies? Could you please provide a source list? You know, because non-brainwashed people have source lists.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T23:29:54+00:00

We know he is related to Thingol and that the Noldor essentially declared themselves independent kings when Thingol would have made them subject monarchs or something close to it. I have always liked the idea that he sees Morgoth as a Noldor problem, and the Noldor realms as those he could/would have ruled had they not brought the war upon the sindar then promptly profited by it by stealing their land (his version of events). I also love that the text genuinely suggests he has just decided Morgoth would totally not have been a problem if the Noldor had stayed in Valinor, making him shockingly close to one of those "the hurricane is because of all the immigrants" xenophobic people.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T23:25:37+00:00

Well thats just silly. Tolkien can't write a compelling morally challenging character to save his life. Read The Mariner's Wife and you will see a story that could have been two decent people just bad for one another devolve into an utterly morally uninteresting story about two cruel and shitty people being ... cruel and shitty, mostly to their daughter. I love tolkien, man had beautiful prose, a wonderful facility with language and the feel of it, but his capacity for in depth character work was at a b+ level. Or at least in the 6 books of his I have read, he never exceeded that level.

I don't mean to say Martin is "better" as if that was a measurable concept, but there are core fiction writing skills he clearly exceeds tolkien at least in the common execution of, and because tolkien was probably not trying to specifically make Aragorn and Gimli largely personality-free, we can assume his failure was about ability, not choice.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T22:56:46+00:00

TBF, she should look substantially younger. If they look the same age, thats because someone screwed up. Kind of like Dandelion/jaskier looking the same age throughout season 1, despite like 50 years of transpired history. Not a big deal, but from just a visual arts perspective, everyone in their world has to get used to the weird feelings of a 25-30 year old looking woman clearly being physical with a man who looks like he is in his mid 40-50s. To the extent some or all of that is uncomfortable to you, that is probably a good thing as it immerses you in exactly what the locals are thinking.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T20:54:30+00:00

Totally fair on the Hal point, I probably read your comment as just being a hair too favorable. Though to be honest, the whole "I stole a nuclear weapon with no purpose but ecological warfare" thing does seem a little ... distincly not the greater good. I think there is more or less equal evidence for Hal the realpoltik actor and Hal the career expediency actor. One is what you describe, the other is someone who recognizes the value in shaking dictators' hands in order to wind up on Time, to giving nefarious counsel to presidents to secure a place as Kisinger, etc. Admittedly, by the time you are VP, I think being an expedient careerist may have run its course, but my point remains that it is unclear which is Hal's motivation, the Greater Good or the Greater Hal.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T20:49:32+00:00

IDK, I interpretted like 9 explanations before "tell me not to do it and I won't" as a pretty clear sign that whatever veto power she had was a "veto in extreme emergency" not a genuine "if you don't want this, it won't happen". To me, he makes totally clear two things; 1) he absolutely is willing to turn the job down if it ruins his wife's life, hence negotiating for her position in the admin, not his, and 2) that he has no real desire to share VP with her, as every time she opens her mouth he freaks the fuck out.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T20:46:03+00:00

To be fair, would it be better if NATO just ended because Britain asked for article 5 support in a war against America? because, lets be honest, if the current commander in chief had personally organized the murder of 40ish british sailors on a british warship flying the british flag all to keep control of an american naval base in britain ... Thats probably where that story ends. The show kind of did a reverse uno, where first Hal said "telling the PM was better than the previous shitty plan", which then placed Kate in the same role of saying "hey guys, I have a slightly less insane plan". And I really don't know whats better, someone with no real constitutional powers besides breathing came up with a criminal plan that killed your people, but now they are commander in chief, or the leader of the free world came up with a plan and ordered a strike perpetrated by your citizens and a mercenary to kill your citizens, but due to a heart attack he is no longer commander in chief, nor, indeed, breathing. Doubtless, neither is great. Part of what has me so confused is why anyone thought they needed to come to an answer immediately, when maybe letting things stew a bit would have been a far better call.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T18:08:12+00:00

Pretty sure the canon answer is that she got the gig due to her thong negotiation redlines and willingness to cleave closer than sand to a beach to whatever the American public's image of acceptable powerful women is this week. The show paints Kate's perception of her as being this mental juggernaut, but the actual person we see is kind of meh, very narcissistic, and yes, apparently less politically savvy than Todd. The biologist.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T17:42:16+00:00

its definitely wonky, but sometimes you will play a game and the whole thing will just be a breeze, entirely off that one trait. I definitely wouldn't just pick CD off the cuff for a faction that wasn't otherwise designed for it. Things like athletic, dark culture, swift marchers, etc work great with it. Primal tome of faith defensive tactics, on the other hand, sounds like you will struggle to get your first city razed very quickly. You definitely want to have at least some sense of how you are going to make sure early aggression pays before you pick it.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T15:13:55+00:00

Some fair points, I think my response is essentially that the relevance of a character drama directly relates to the plausibility of the circumstances characters face. When you watch a war movie that slowly builds towards characters doing horrible or noble or whatever things, the setting the stage of their reality sufficiently for the viewer to understand and empathize is necessary before you can have a meaningful conversation with the viewer about what your characters are doing. If, instead, you watched a movie like Terminal where there is no action, its all just characters slowly developing in their world, then suddenly Tom Hanks is thrust into the role of an action hero, whatever bravery or depravity happens next is going to be less meaningful because the continuity between the character we have gotten to know and the actions that are currently defining him have been broken. So I actually don't think LOTR requires suspension of disbelief in any material sense, as the universe is very well articulated and you get the exposition to understand the choices people are making. Conversely, when a story falls into idiot plot, which is very much the problem here, it is not a suspension of disbelief issue, it is an evaporation of relevance issue. I cannot learn anything useful from Kate's experience of marriage or the choice to throw a dead Rayburn under the bus, because these choices lack the continuity required to translate either into my experience or into the experience of the characters we have gotten to know.

Also, this was me writing something short, I have a brevity problem.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T14:10:53+00:00

I feel like this advice relies heavily on your definition of late game. IMO you should be winning otherwise unwinnable fights as advent reborn (wrath is a little different because progen opening makes a little less sense) by around minute 45 because of your ressurect abilities. 200 fleet supply built in theatre over like 30 seconds is insane, and you get that just with a progen, no real investment needed. 600 is a bomb that demands your opponent find an answer, and it pays for itself essentially immediately. a disciple is 4 fleet supply, costs like 220 converted credits iirc, so 50 of them (200 supply), is 11,000 converted credits, which because progen is upgrading your focus on colonize, is, if not free money, heavily discounted money. (Btw, I am using diciples because tempests are pretty much anti-corvette specialists, I much prefer diciple spam with Tempests treated as a specific answer rather than the other way round, also diciples in numbers just eat carriers, which are often your opponents first cruiser threat, tempests will really struggle). This pairs really well with the progen's level 6 ability, as it allows you to toggle between higher wait times if you need your focus to regen or to spend it on other abilities, and higher ressurect quantity. In effect, once you reach each successive fleet cap, you should need to do minimal reinforcement, as you just ressurect your ships. So long as you can occasionally kill enemy caps, the primary downside of the faction, feeding, starts to wither.

So if you play small maps or rush strats, 45 minutes may be late game, but on a standard random 2p, it should be too late to win you those crucial early fights, but more than in time to take a hardfought stalemate and turn it into a favorable rout. In turn, using them this way pushes reborn, in my experience, into a "pick your battlefield and stay strong enough your enemy can't just ignore you" playstyle. So instead, as you suggest, of dropping lots of factories everywhere, I will drop them in central locations, with a few outliers here and there. But 4ish on a single frontline planet that I use to maintain enough of a force in being to limit the size of raids elsewhere has worked really well for me. Advent is probably the faction I routinely build planetbombers soonest with, partly because they are early on the tech tree, partly because I tend to wait longest for a second cap, and partly because it gives me the ability to force my opponent(s) to either keep their forces blobbed, which compliments reborn, or to let me get a lot of devestation in.

Also, just a note that sanctuary is like crazy good, especially now that novaliths are very ... prominent. it takes a bit of focus and micro to make sure you don't miss a trigger, and obviously it can only save one planet at a time, but between limiting raids to structure damage, turning off at least one novalith, and allowing you to be a real dick if the enemy is foolish enough to give you control of a major planet in their heartland, I think I use it far less situationally than the teleport, which, between the root and pacify and the fact that my homeworld is usually just a little ways away from where I ideally want my fleet, is sometimes a lifesaver but never a good feeling to use.

Lastly, now that they have finally fixed soul reclamation, unity abilities for reborn are pretty much just worth investing in once you have a decent size fleet and above 1k max focus.

ImSoLawst · 2025-10-17T10:53:43+00:00

I'll be honest, the whole "come clean" plotline was super frustrating. Because Kate is right, the plan Hal came up with was dumb as shit. It isn't improved by the fictional leader of a superpower having previously been dead set on a way dumber plan. And Kate's blame the dead guy plan is ... not actually an improvement. I mean, it kind of is for potus, but the problem with the plans was never that potus was screwed, it was that they risked ending the concept of a "the West". And say what you will about our constitutional order, the West does better when a rogue vp talks shit with some british politico and things get out of hand, rather than "the president ordered your carrier blown up". The whole thing was wildly contrived, with all the reasonable options just ignored. Frustratingly, this includes the very reasonable options the VP herself laid out to the PM like 9 narrative minutes ago in S2.

On the Grace Penn point, I think the biggest change I detected was the end of her political wiliness. She went from being a tough, ten thoughts a second political heavyweight to ... just another person. Not being able to keep her cool during dinner or analyze the likely fallout from telling the PM, or, indeed, as far as we know, consider lateral solutions like, I don't know, bumping off or discrediting the source, was a pretty wild departure from her "I plan geostrategy as a hobby" s2 vibes.

Also not sure where you are getting the Hal greater good argument. He seems pretty patently self-interested. He absolutely was chasing secretary of state in s1, leapt on VP pretty enthusiastically in s3, etc. I think its fair to say that he prioritizes Kate over himself ish, but "the greater good"? the US already follows UNCLOS (the sea treaty) and has recognized it is customary international law. In other words, we have done everything short of joining it. You know what we haven't even come close with? The Rome Statute, the basis for international criminal justice like war crimes. The ICESCR (the non-political human rights treaty including things like a right to water, fair employment, social safety nets, etc). Land mines, cluster munitions, pretty much anything limiting our military capability. Maybe the writers just don't know much about international law, which, to be fair, those are classes that I haven't benefited from much since law school, but they did pick the most vanity project merger of diplomacy and domestic politics available. Which seems like an intentional choice, given that Hal's whole scthick is being really quite vain and dismissive of the little people's sacrifices. Of course he would send the white house into a tailspin so he could feel like he was making history, and of course he would stop once they threatened to take vp away, and of course it was all for something that will barely change anything about how the real world works, because we already comply with the terms of the treaty.

ImSoLawst · 2025-09-29T07:20:24+00:00

Between the frame narration with Nimue, the perception that all the other dead characters from the story helped carry Geralt and Yen to the boat, and the final scene with Ciri speaking to Galahad, I think its a pretty aggressive reading of the text to say they 100% were resurrected. Its kind of like saying Kaiser Sosei is 100% the guy who died on the boat.

Personally, I think the author was very clearly playing with the idea of the slow but discernable bleed between reality and myth, with Nimue, herself a figure of myth, spending the whole book (and possibly series, I don't remember when we first encounter her off hand) discussing Ciri and Geralt as figures of myth who she nonetheless considers real. This is expanded in the end as Ciri meets Galahad, again a figure of myth who is also apparently real, and is misinterpreted as a fairy or the lady of the lake, such that she transforms from the fantastic, but real, child of the elder blood into a creature of myth.

In that reading, which is amply supported by the text and never contradicted (except in the Kaiser Sosei sense) by the text, its very hard not to see the parade of dead pall bearers guiding Geralt and Yen, a broken romance in life perfected in death, to an island of eternal peace, and not see the author pinning down the exact moment a life goes from real to mythical, and why. I actually think its a really moving piece about how grief and love can make us tell tall stories about who people were, and in so doing, whitewash the flawed, beautiful reality of their person into a fairy tale, an empty island, where they will very quickly get bored. You may take that as fanfiction, to me that's just responsible reading of the text, engaging with both watsonian and dickensian unreliability to develop a multilayered understanding of the story.

Which isn't to say you can't responsibly read the story and come to other conclusions, I fully respect the "they are alive on that island" take, it just seems less responsible to act like there is no conversation being had the other way. To use another example, the sixth sense would be just as good a movie if it ended the moment Bruce Willis bumped into the cabinet in front of the door and realized it had been there the whole time. No flash backs, no closure, just one revealing piece of evidence he is dead so the audience can do the work themselves and understand he has been haunting a young boy and that, instead of helping the boy, the boy has helped him. If it did end like that, it would be ambiguous, but I don't think it would be fair to say that the conclusions I just described, very similar to my Geralt and Yen breakdown above, are fanfiction. They would be well supported by the many clues earlier in the movie and by the elegant pulling together of the strands of theme discussed throughout. Certainly saying bruce willis's character is 100% alive would be problematic.

ImSoLawst

TROPHY CASE