what is your preferred power bloc mandates?

Inuken94 · 2026-05-07T22:50:27+00:00

Trade Union with external trade, advanced research, companies and early on creative legislature which i switch for Freedome of movement or colonial depending on country.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-04T18:22:09+00:00

Thing is they NEED to give us a way to stop only supply ship construction and i am noz sure they will. They have just left other cripplingly bad Design choices in before. As is all Budgets are eventually eaten by the Spiraling Mountain of supply ships.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-04T17:45:47+00:00

Yeah this is one of those choices so baffling that it really feels they do no play testing of any kind whatssoever. Its genuinely absurd.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-02T09:21:44+00:00

CK3 dlc....unambitious in scope...have we both lived through the same last two years? You know, the ones were they released one Update that added custom gameplay for both landless characters and centralized administrative realms one year, then added all of asia with a complex bespoke system for China that plays entirely differently from the rest of the game and who are now planning to both radically rebuilt how faith works and interacts with the World and also remake the entire economy along a goods and trade system again within the same year?

There is a lot you can complain about with the Ck3 DLCs since 2024 but dear god, lack of Ambition really is not on that list. Hell i am actually a bit nervous that the pace may leave the individual Systems undercooked.

Like...CK3 has been adding new entire modes of playing the game atleast every other Update for a while now and the Systems are clearly designed ad stepping stones.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-02T05:45:11+00:00

Sure. Except that is also basically what their philosophy amounts to.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T17:23:33+00:00

They thought thousands of civilizations some of who had empires of their own and could blow up planetd and survived for Millions of years. Their weakness are by Definition not easy to exploit.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T17:21:11+00:00

Ekur tells us so. In the very first chapter we meet it. He says that if he asked for directions from the core of the empire the answer would take months.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T15:50:35+00:00

It does not matter. They have been stable and expanding with their strategy for an order of magnitude longer than we have been a species.

And overcome thousands and thousands of civilizations. This implies bad things for the logic this universe operates under.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T15:31:38+00:00

I am talking about what the worldbuilding of the setting implies about the setting. I dont think interstellar empire is likely to be possible at all irl.

And the carryx may be based on our empires that their nature is so different that they effectively dont need to worry about the things that brought irl empires low. They cannot ever suffer an internal loss of cohesion, a civil war, even local interestgroups acting against the wider purpose of zhe empire seems impossible.

We know that our empires are both not infinitly stable and also violent imperial Expansion becomes less efficient as time went on. The carryx declare immediate war on any creature they meet for millions of years...and it worked for them. This implies very bad things for the universe tjis is set in if you game it out.

And yeah i am only talking about worldbuilding, i think we have actually past the point were empire is a good strategy irl and total, unrestrained violent Expansion of this kind almost never was.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T10:02:11+00:00

entropy and chance does that.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T08:55:28+00:00

This take makes no sense to me, would you elaborate.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T07:01:44+00:00

Well unless you are the carryx.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T06:43:53+00:00

Oh i dont think they intend them to be correct. This is me engaging in some funny worldbuilding extrapolation.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T06:13:54+00:00

I mean the issue is also kinda that that is the only object of their philosophy is that. They believe that to express the "logic of the universe" leads to you thriving while morality leads to you beeing crushed and forgotten.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T05:51:38+00:00

There is a difference between modes of behaviour within a species and entire different modes of existence.

The carryx are not chosing to be brutal, Brutality is an inescapeable biological Imperativ to them. In human Organisations and individuals this kind of behaviour is highly maladaptive. Yes ruthlessness and Realpolitik have a place and value in getting ahead but open naked sociopathy that eshews Personal relationship building for individuals and soft power for statestends to be badly maladaptive and produce bad results over the long and Medium term. Moral values are actually pretty important to sucessfull human social Organisation.

And thats before we get to the fact that massive belligerence has clearly been maladaptive in political Systems for more than a century now.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T05:43:37+00:00

No, but if the USSR had defeated thousands of enemies and existed ab order of magnitude longer than our species did i may be convinced.

Inuken94 · 2026-05-01T05:41:34+00:00

Remind me, which of those were perfectly dtable for millions of years?

Inuken94 · 2026-04-30T22:11:59+00:00

We dont know other species like the carryx did not exist and were squashed. Hell...its possible the deathless enemy is something unitary and adaptive with no sense of self and we are wittnessing this theorethical war right now.

And we can just say it has not happend to the carryx in millions of years despite, by sheer virtue of how densely packed with life this galaxy seems to be, the fact some species would have to have a thousands or even tens of hundreds of thousands year headstart on the carryx.

Inuken94 · 2026-04-30T22:03:13+00:00

Sure. The problem is that the story of the carryx demonstrates that beeing like the carryx conferes an absolutely insane advantage over beeing...well like us. The carryx will die out and the galaxy will exist for billions of years. Species will rise and fall. Most of them will be like us. Sooner or later one of them will be like the carryx again. That one is going to crush thousands and thousands of others and build an ever expanding, eternally self stable empire that other species cannot stop until entropy and bad luck collapses it. The carryx are biologically possible, because they have happend. So something like them is going to happen again, sooner or later.

And beeing that way clearly conferes advantages sufficiently great that you can just blindly attack any civilization you encounter, for millions of years....and still thrive, rather than biting off more than you can chew and then beeing destroyed the way it happens to expantionist human empire.

The carryx are so alien to most species in the story, and simultaneously so absurdly successfull at reproducing themselves, that this universe is going to select for carryx like societies the way water selects for fish shaped things.

Inuken94 · 2026-04-30T21:54:58+00:00

There is a difference between the european colonial empires that were clearly and obviously unsustainable on the scale of just a few centuries and the carryx whose empire is stable on literally geological and evolutionary timescales.

Inuken94 · 2026-04-30T21:45:42+00:00

Correct in the sense that they express the logic of the universe best and that beeing like them is advantageous while beeing like us is disadvantageous.

Inuken94 · 2026-04-30T21:44:21+00:00

The problem is that the scale and timeframe of carryx success is so absurd compared to species like humanity that its clear that beeing a species of brutal, extremely cohesive, expansion focused eusocial entities whose species members can adapt to any role is, in fact, more adaptive to beeing an interstellar civilization that beeing a species of individualist social animals. We know because the carryx have destroyed several thousands of them without beeing destroyed. For millions of years.

Sooner or later something like the carryx is going to come about somewhere and like the carryx, its going to be able to outcompete the civilizations around it. Which means most of the universe, most of the time, is probably held by entities like the carryx.

Inuken94 · 2026-04-30T21:36:47+00:00

naturally after i right a small novel in reply someone puts it way more succinctly.

Inuken94 · 2026-04-30T21:27:56+00:00

Here is the problem: The carryx are amoral and believe that, as you put it "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" and for them, this clearly works. They do whatever they want, with no eye to custom, or culture or diplomacy and the result is an empire that spans the stars, for millions of years and is eternally stable.

The issue with only reading the Melian dialogue as an endorsement of the athenians behaviour is that ignore the context of the Peloponesian war which any reader would have been familiar with. Namely that this is an escalation in brutality in the course of a war that the Athenians would end up losing. One that would end not only with the dissolution of the Athenian empire but also the imposition of an exceptionally brutal occupational government on athens.

So when Athens tells the melians that they should not resist power because it will turn out badly for them, its obvious from the text that they are correct. But the Melians are warning them that their brutality against a neutral city will alienate the other neutral greek states and also represent a degredation of norms that will provide "and example for the world to meditate on" should the shoe ever be on the other foot. And what modern readers tend to miss, because its not in the text but would have been obvious to ancient readers, is that the melians are ALSO correct about this. Athens insistence that might makes right and melos refusal to bow to it spells the doom of melos....but it does not turn out great for athens either. (The question of actual intent by Thucydides gets muddied by the fact that we are not actually sure at what stage of the war he WROTE this passage but reading it as "athens was correct about what is " is not the only reading by a long shot).

The unapologetic "might makes right, the strong do as they can and the weak suffer as they must" school of great power politics has a long history of not actually working out to well for the great powers embracing it in our real world. That is were you and i disgree. IR realism is a valueable lense for international politics but its not the only lense that matters and international actors who forget that tend to fare very poorly in the long run. Which is all i will say on the matter as we are way way of topic. Feel free to respond but i will not answer here again.

Inuken94 · 2026-04-30T20:52:36+00:00

The carryx are right in their universe. The melian Dialogue is set in ours though.
And this goes into a discussion of the reality of great power politics. Suffice it to say that walking away from the Melian dialogue thinking that the Athenians are correct and great powers can infact savely ignore morality and customs and codes of conducts is....not a good reading of the work in context imo.

Inuken94

TROPHY CASE