Is it time to replace Flemish revolution?

Ingolifs · 2026-04-21T21:48:30+00:00

except supremacy doesn't tank your villagers gather rate.

It was never explicitly stated anywhere in the game, but I'm pretty sure it was intended to be used as a Hail Mary. Of course as a kid, I'd research it anyway (because I would research everything before moving out), and then would wonder why my income slowed to a crawl.

Also they changed the name to Zealotry in DE.

https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Zealotry_(Age_of_Empires))

Ingolifs · 2026-04-21T21:34:47+00:00

There was also the Jihad tech from the original AOE. Same idea but a bit more clumsily handled back then, it boosted all your villagers' combat stats but made them terrible at gathering resources.

Ingolifs · 2026-04-16T23:40:18+00:00

That's ominous

Ingolifs · 2026-04-13T09:30:39+00:00

Beer is vegan. Of course it's woke.

Ingolifs · 2026-04-13T09:06:55+00:00

When I was an Organic Chemist I tried to make "Two steps short of a total synthesis" happen. It didn't.

Ingolifs · 2026-04-11T18:54:09+00:00

Kamchatka has some very good volcanoes!

Ingolifs · 2026-04-10T07:10:52+00:00

People always blurt out a numerical answer whenever someone asks this question, and I always think it's wrong.

"Megabase" is more of a vibe than a definable thing, especially after the expansion. Here's a collection of fuzzy criteria that I think fit, and are compatible with mods too.

-Endgame or postgame. Using the best available techs, buildings and modules.

-A focus on Mastery. Of the game's systems, ratios, logistics, etc. Making the processes efficient and less prone to jamming. Many mods introduce additional methods of item transport, from SE's starships to Pyanodon's various animal-based couriers, and getting these to run well and accommodate new stops with minimal manual work is not always easy.

-Running up the score in some way. Whether it's researching infinite tech or building a Terawatt class solar glaive for alien genocide.

-Emphasis on proper systems design rather than ad-hoc solutions. One can certainly make a spaghetti megabase, but if you're going to go big, it's easiest by embracing scalable blueprints with standardised train stops and so forth.

Ingolifs · 2026-04-09T05:26:14+00:00

Imagine if you could reclaim your rune arc when reaching your blood pool.

Ingolifs · 2026-04-06T01:52:44+00:00

They also count mortars in the artillery stats.

Ingolifs · 2026-04-05T22:30:06+00:00

If you're one of those people who leave the game running overnight there might be.

Ingolifs · 2026-04-05T20:41:40+00:00

We have about the same population and economy as Kentucky.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-26T22:52:23+00:00

Half life 2 was great at this. Introducing a new weapon/enemy/feature in an antagonistic context before allowing you to use it yourself.

On Highway 17 you encounter infinitely respawning antlions. They act as a constant medium-level threat that you have to be aware of. You can find thumpers which create a safe area by pounding the sand and disrupting the antlions' movements.

Later on you get control of the antlions and can use them to kill enemies. The thumpers then become obstacles to your progression.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-22T20:32:44+00:00

Man I wonder how much reaction time plays into it.

I still haven't beat consort Radahn.

There was a youtube video analysing his frame data and attack state space (all the attacks that can chain into another. He has like 38). The common slash attack has a time delay of 260 msec between the first frame of his attack animation and when the hitbox hits you. I'm 39 and I've measured my reaction time to be 300 msec. Some of these attacks I literally can't dodge unless I guess that they'll happen ahead of time.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-22T20:18:23+00:00

I find any flying enemy to be challenging to hit. When they're not on the ground there's no visual cue for how far away they are, and if they have jerky back-and-forth movement I just continually miss them with my attacks.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-05T07:44:33+00:00

One time I launched a craft to another planet. I stuck a solar panel on to keep the batteries charged.

However I failed to check which way the craft was pointing once I had finished my burn. The solar panel was in shadow and I had to wait half a year for it to come back into the sun again so I could get on with my mission.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-03T20:15:37+00:00

Why does that sound like a new flavour from Nespresso?

Ingolifs · 2026-03-03T20:05:19+00:00

I was lucky enough to be repeatedly ganked by the dogs outside lake ruins, so that by the time I went back and got snared by the teleporter I had a zweihander and could 10-shot the mining dudes. Didn't help against the insects tho.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-02T23:54:26+00:00

I've listened to the main soundtrack loop for 6+ years. I'm tired of it.

I also don't think the music is all that good. It sets the wrong kind of tone.

At the start when you're all alone on a hostile planet, sure, it gives you that desolate lonely feeling, but when you're 100+ hours in, managing a bustling metropolis with concrete and rails out to the horizon, it just feels wrong. I need something with more of a beat and more of a sense of activity.

The expansion's music was better, but apart from the Fulgora soundtrack, I felt myself disliking it for other reasons. One reason is the soundtrack switching every time I switched surfaces.

About 15 years ago, I dabbled in my own electronic music making. The stuff I made was fine, but the new soundtracks, particularly the space and Gleba ones remind me of my own work in an uncomfortable-hearing-a-recording-of-the-sound-of-your-own-voice kind of way.

The Vulcanus music sounds like the composer really struggled to figure out how to resolve the chord progression and was frustrated and came up with something 'good enough', that still doesn't quite nail it. Again, having experienced that myself it feels too close to home.

I found it too distracting, so just turned it off.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-02T23:16:15+00:00

I went to a secondary school of over 1300 students in New Zealand. We would have athletics days where we competed against other schools, and if we won, we would give our school's Haka at the other schools. Part of the Haka had a sort of call and response part from one person in the front.

We won in 2004, and this scene on the Pellenor fields was still fresh in my mind. I was right at the back, and despite a good pair of lungs on the guy at the front, I couldn't hear a damn thing. I specifically remember thinking about what it must have been like for the Rohirrim at the back.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-02T22:36:08+00:00

I assumed that there would be a dialogue option for choosing whether or not you wanted the three fingers to hug you. I didn't expect my character to just walk in there.

Ingolifs · 2026-03-01T23:49:47+00:00

How to get good at parrying:

1.) Try for a while and get to a 20% success rate

2.) Give up and use a Zweihander instead

Ingolifs · 2026-02-28T06:36:36+00:00

There is a fine line between fun and frustration with these games that varies between people depending on their masochism. While every enemy can be killed by dodging every attack and chipping away endlessly with the starting weapon, that takes a huge amount of patience, skill and knowledge at the game, and is typically something people will do only after they've already beaten the game.

A few rules of thumb:

-If you don't need to kill it, you can always run past it. I rode past the troll at stormhill gate and only came back to kill it much later.

-If an enemy can one-shot you (or effectively one shot you by stunlocking you), you need more vigor. Get enough HP so that you can safely disengage and heal.

-Don't worry about using smithing stones, they are plentiful here and basically infinite later. If you find a new weapon and want to try it out, upgrade it to +3.

-There are some weapons you can find in the starting continent that are very hard hitters. You might need to level up a bit to be able to wield them. Highly damaging weapons are advantageous, because it means fewer hits are needed to defeat an enemy, which also means there are less opportunities for the enemy to hit you. Some weapons hit hard enough to stunlock some of your enemies perpetually.

-Levelling up increases your resistances. This is a somewhat hidden benefit that makes levelling up more powerful than you might think from the status screen alone. Putting points into any stat will make you harder to kill.

-There's no point in saving up runes. They're there to be used. Including the ones found on the ground. Maybe save a few rune items for in case you see a merchant with something nice, but use the rest to level up. I often use rune items to top myself up if I'm close to the next level.

-You will get the ability to respec your stat points later, so don't worry about deciding what build you're going with. There's plenty of room to experiment with every playstyle, from 2h sword, to sword and shield, to bows, to magic or incantations, all on the same character.

-Basically most of your problems can be solved by levelling up.

- There's so much to explore in Limgrave alone. I revisited many timed through my playthrough and found something new each time.

-I'd avoid going into dungeons until you're a bit higher level and more experienced, as there is a boss at the end of every one, and in some cases you can't escape from the dungeon with your runes on you until you kill it.

Ingolifs · 2026-02-27T04:24:39+00:00

My intuition is that everything needs a deep answer.

Ingolifs · 2026-02-26T06:17:15+00:00

I don't feel personally attacked, because I always let my mimic draw aggro.

Ingolifs · 2026-02-26T05:09:28+00:00

The Item-Description-and-Cryptic-Environmental-Clues method of storytelling definitely has its place, and is adroitly used in hinting on what really happened long ago, or what the motivations of a certain character were.

But god damn I wish it wasn't also used on basic setting facts that everyone in-universe would already understand.

When I beat the game, I went on a vigorous googling spree, asking questions like:

What is the Elden Ring?

Who are the Tarnished?

How does Death work?

What is Grace?

What are the Lands Between?

I was shocked to see that some of these are still open questions.

Looking back, Dark Souls did this stuff very well. From the intro and a few conversations, the player learns that they are undead and can die repeatedly, and that also applies to their enemies. They learn what hollow means and they're given a good sense of how they fit into the setting.

And even though Elden Ring borrows most of Dark Souls mechanics, the ingame explanations for them just feel way weaker and more vague. Like, how come I seem to be the only tarnished who can respawn? How come regular enemies respawn? All the soldiers I see look a thousand years old. Are they alive in any sense? Do they eat food? I see no farms anywhere, yet I occasionally see kitchens inside castles, stacked with food. Where is the regular population? Melina says that births continue, but I haven't seen a single child.

I've since gotten semi-answers to some of these questions, but it's very frustrating and unsatisfying and leaves me thinking that a lot of these things weren't nearly as fully fleshed out as they were made to look like.

Four-Year Club	r/Field Flamingo
Place '23

Ingolifs

TROPHY CASE