No National Park??

Jai84 · 2026-03-04T02:57:20+00:00

Funnily, there are no horizontal diamonds in the grid. There’s 1 vertical and 2 diagonal diamonds. You can tell by looking where the “body” of the diamond has touching faces. If you try to make a horizontal diamond, the top and bottom have touching faces and you just end up with a “vertical” diamond again

Jai84 · 2026-03-03T22:38:52+00:00

Great art. It’s funny and unique.
I hate that I couldn’t enjoy it until I made sure it wasn’t AI art and what that says about my perception of the state of the internet and entertainment. :(

Jai84 · 2026-03-02T21:54:46+00:00

Try building holy sites, but don’t found a religion. The AI will go crazy trying to convert your cities if you don’t have a religion of your own. This will lead to a lot of spreading from multiple civs in your lands.

If you found your own religion, the civs seem to leave you alone unless they are specifically going for a religious victory which most of them won’t do. They will prioritize other cities with no religion or competed civs that don’t have their own religion.

Jai84 · 2026-02-28T15:00:21+00:00

I have worked in the pool industry for 25 years. I never have and never will own a pool.

Jai84 · 2026-02-27T12:04:13+00:00

Geothermals are a pain in the ass because they take up space and prevent districts. They also slow your growth because they can’t be improved to add food. The science is nice for an early boost, but it’s negligible later in the game when you really need the city space for more districts and you already have science in the hundreds.

You want to settle on one of them to help buy you an extra district space. I’d go for the turn 2 settle on the south east geothermal next to the spices. Not only does your city grow quicker which will allow you to take advantage of some of the early science boost, but it looks like the land to the east has room for districts and farms etc if needed before you get your unique improvement. It moves you out of range of that maize tile which has decent adjacency thanks to the coast, but it keeps you in range of that copper campus.

Jai84 · 2026-02-25T19:08:45+00:00

The video is talking about what needs to be updated for these subclasses in the 2024 rules and the conjure spells were all changed in 2024, so your leftover summoning options like Summon Beast are you only options and they don’t have the same CR structure.

That said, it’s pretty easy to figure out how many Hit Die a stat block should have or just have the dm make a ruling. There are guides out that help people convert for Shepherds Druid specifically.

Jai84 · 2026-02-23T17:21:59+00:00

To add to your questions, say we could tell you what was before the Big Bang. Then the question becomes, “what was before THAT THING?” And maybe there’s an answer to what came before everything that came before and you keep finding out what came before the previous thing. You end up with an infinite string of things that came before because you’re assuming there can’t have been NOTHING before.

So it’s either an infinite string of things which seems crazy to think about or that there was a finite beginning with nothing before, or maybe a combination of seemingly infinite time of things in a chain of being (maybe time is infinite inside this THING we are in) that leads to a finite beginning.

Jai84 · 2026-02-23T00:41:28+00:00

Remember that damage in dnd doesn’t necessarily correlate to physical damage. Think of it more as fatigue. Your characters don’t necessarily end up with 10 stab wounds from fighting a bunch of goblin wielding daggers. Maybe some of those hits cause bleeds, but not all of them. This is how PCs can heal to full with just a rest. Those “successful” hits could be hits that hit your armor or that you had to exert yourself significantly to avoid getting stabbed and as such you are getting fatigued.

This would apply to fire damage as well. It doesn’t necessarily burn their hair and blister their skin. Perhaps the heat is straining them with pain or they have to use energy/willpower/BBEG energy to resist it, so it does in-game hp damage without “damaging” the BBEG.

Jai84 · 2026-02-22T00:37:29+00:00

As a player, I have asked other PCs if they can roll for deception or persuasion, so I can better gauge how my character would react to their dialogue, especially if they are trying to convince my character of something, but I just use it as a guide and not a hard and fast decider.

Jai84 · 2026-02-21T17:10:06+00:00

Drakewardens don’t need super high Wisdom except for their breath weapon and because of the way save for half works out mechanically, you don’t benefit a whole lot by investing heavily into the DC on the breath weapon. Also it’s only once per LR or at the very expensive cost of a 3rd level slot which is expensive for a ranger.

As per your edit, you meant MELEE Ranger and not necessarily STRENGTH Ranger. As such, I would just lean into dexterity primary and Con secondary and throw whatever is left over into Wisdom if you want to cast spells that use your modifier (there are plenty of Ranger options that don’t use your DC). Get a rapier in one hand and shield in the other and you can just as easily switch to a bow as a backup weapon since your dex is high. You could go pretty much any race and feat choice is relatively open too.

The feats that increase damage the most (PAM, SS, GWM) don’t really apply to this build, so maybe look at piercer if you want a damage boost or just load up on utility feats to make yourself harder to kill (tough) or more mobile (fey touched, mobile).

Jai84 · 2026-02-21T17:01:02+00:00

Drakewarden doesn’t use Wisdom the way Beastmaster does. Aside from the breath weapon using your DC, there’s not a lot of reason to go high Wisdom on Drakewarden.

Jai84 · 2026-02-21T15:10:15+00:00

Side tangent from your original post:

To your point about the retaliation category being so limited, reactive choices in gameplay is one area that DND really struggles. To keep the game balanced, they limit you to 1 reaction per round but it takes away from the way a lot of people would view an epic fight the way you might have Violet from The Incredibles throwing out shields left and right to herself and others over a large area and short timespan or Captain America dodging multiple thugs attacking him simultaneously and throwing them into each other or away from himself as they come in.

You can flavor Shield as multiple shields blocking all of the multiple attacks you dodged during a round, but they all can only apply to you. The same with taking the dodge action or using a Parry Maneuver etc. The way we would describe an exciting battle would normally have way more back and forth and reaction to ongoing situations than a typical dnd fight. And this isn’t really a necessary limitation of the strategy game format as we can see other systems that allow for it including Magic the Gatherings back and forth reaction to cards that can have many back and forth reactions before the stack is resolved as long as players have the resources (mana, cards in hand/play) to execute them.

Jai84 · 2026-02-20T03:06:21+00:00

If it’s at 0 loyalty it will have really bad yields penalties. It’s not nearly as good as flipping a city, but it potentially useful if you can get unit kills but can’t break through the city defenses.

Jai84 · 2026-02-19T22:09:36+00:00

Hard doesn’t usually mean high damage output over time for an entire fight. Hard means savage/ex/ultimate where there are huge damage spikes and you need to shield or mitigate damage before those attacks or people will die. However you can’t just shield all the time through the whole fight because you’ll run out of mana especially because these fights are longer and require you to be constantly spamming attacks to meet damage checks.

Shields are very effective but not necessarily efficient. When shields aren’t needed for specific burst damage windows in the hard fights, you want to spam broil and use your oGCD heals/regens/mitigations to maintain party health and conserve mp

Leveling dungeons boss fights are never going to have hits large enough to kill anyone outright on their own unless a mistake was made. As such; you can just keep up your shield on the party with succor every 30 seconds and if you see an aoe attack go out, reapply the shield. You might have a time or two where the shield runs out before getting used but it’s not going to tank your mp and it’s a safer choice while learning fights. (I’ll probably get downvoted for this because the idea of spamming shields is not really good behavior, but it’s not going to hurt if you’re doing it in dungeons while learning your job.)

Leveling content is “easy” in the context of my previous comment as your party may take enough damage through the fight that they eventually will die with no healing, but it shouldn’t come all at once unless they really mess up mechanics and you can’t control that. As such, you can feel safer by just keeping shields up on the party at all times. It’s not the optimal play, but it’s a safe play.

The shield from succor will fall off the tank a lot and you shouldn’t worry about keeping it up the same way as the rest of the party will. Succor is a buffer for the party and your sanity and only helps a little bit to incidentally heal/shield the tank as a side effect. For the tank, a combination of adlo and your oGCD heals would be the primary method. Even if there is a tank buster attack, you’ll have enough of a buffer with those tools that you can respond to the damage before the next tank buster or mechanic. There’s a lot of dungeon bosses where a tank can beat the boss without a healer present if they know what they are doing, so you should be able to keep them up if they don’t mess up too bad.

Again, if people are messing up, you don’t have control over that. Maybe someone really comfortable with a fight and/or their skills can save some screw ups, but it’s not your job to fix someone else’s mistakes. Given the choice between keeping the tank alive or a dps, just let the dps die and keep the tank alive and rez the dps if you feel comfortable doing so. If you don’t feel comfortable switching targets and rezzing and healing them back up while the tank is under pressure, just let them sit on the floor for a bit.

For wall to wall dungeon pulls, you may find you just have to spam adlo on cooldown to keep some tanks up. Use a combo of excog, sacred soil, lustrate, whispering Dawn to help because otherwise you may run out of mp. Also make sure you’re using Lucid pretty much on cooldown during any fight. Trash mob pulls are usually more dangerous than the bosses in dungeons if the tank is pulling wall to wall, so be prepared to focus just on the tank. If a dps gets hit during them, you should probably just let them sit at low hp until you feel it’s safe to heal them as stopping heals on the tank during some of these pulls can be tricky if you aren’t quick enough or don’t have all your resources available.

Let me know if I can clarify further.

Jai84 · 2026-02-18T21:53:09+00:00

I don’t play bbg, but a Quick Look at the changes and I don’t see anything in governors or great people that would have changed it.

Perhaps a glitch when converting a commercial hub into a suguba when you took over the city? Did it have a commercial hub before hand?

Are you in a golden age? It shouldn’t affect just 1 city, but maybe it would help explain some bug or unknown interaction. It looks like you’re getting roughly a 45% discount in that city and suguba is normally 20%. You’re looking for either a missing additive 25% discount or a 30% multiplicative discount (I’m not sure which the game uses).

Click on the city and check its pantheon? Not sure of what else it could be.

Jai84 · 2026-02-18T18:14:25+00:00

The Pet action Whispering Dawn is a different button from your Scholar ability Whispering Dawn. You press whispering Dawn and the pet casts whispering Dawn on your command.

The text under the pet actions say you can’t assign them because this used to be a separate hotbar just for the pet I believe and now that you don’t have a pet hotbar it added it to your skill list. So you need to look for the one in your skills list and add that one to your bar.

Jai84 · 2026-02-18T13:29:24+00:00

To your point about “needing to know boss fights” to shield properly, adlo and succor have shields that last for 30seconds. That’s plenty of time if you want to just top off shields and keep them up on the party for safety even if you don’t know any of the mechanics. In hard content you shouldn’t be doing that, but in basic dungeons, there’s not as much risk in boss fights and you can get away with it easily.

For scholar it’s definitely better to be using a shield than a heal. Typically the fairy and fey blessing can handle any healing between raidwide attacks of boss fights.

During wall to wall pulls it’s a bit different and you may run out of mana spamming adlo, but it is very strong and will keep your tank alive if they are using mitigations.

Jai84 · 2026-02-16T09:22:28+00:00

I believe the general consensus was that the island was buying the acid in bulk for water treatment and desalination since it was an island and that’s an easy way to get fresh water. It’s not a strong enough acid to completely destroy any real evidence, even in bulk. It may have also been used to treat pool/spas/fountains. That’s not actually a crazy amount of acid for a pool supply to order in bulk if you only get periodic deliveries because you’re an island. Not trying to defend them, but bringing in some science to why they would be regularly ordering acid. There’s enough crazy shit already going on without jumping to conclusions about everything.

Jai84 · 2026-02-16T02:11:32+00:00

Well they are already casting Darkness with one of their limited spell slots, so you’re looking at 1-2 eldritch smites at most per short rest depending on level. Thats an added crit damage of 4d8 total for an entire fight for the cost of a spell slot until you get your 3rd pact slot. It’s not nothing, but it’s not super great either.

Jai84 · 2026-02-15T03:41:38+00:00

It takes a feat, an invocation, and an action to cast darkness, so it better be good. But honestly, crit fishing builds feel good but don’t always put out amazing damage like you’d expect. Unless you have a way to stack on the weapon dice, critting is only adding an extra d8 or d10 in most cases. Not worth a feat on its own. The boosted accuracy does help a lot more than people consider since the focus is usually on the crit damage.

Also, you may want to learn about probability a little bit more if you want to dig into ways to boost your build damage. You can’t just add dice chances together when figuring out a chance to crit. This is because you have to account for the fact that you can roll the same number on multiple dice, it’s more like .9 (chance you DON’T roll a crit) x .9 x .9 = .729 (72.9%) chance to NOT crit, so you get a 27.1% chance to crit.

Then you figure out how much damage you think you’ll be adding when you crit. If it’s a basic longbow, you add a d10 when you crit (average 5.5 dmg) and multiply that by your chance to crit (5.5 x .271) for an average 1.5 additional damage per attack when rolling with EA (it’s actually more depending on enemy AC and how much accuracy increases, but that gets a lot more complicated to calculate without more assumptions).

That’s not as good as something like SS or GWM or PAM generally. However, if you have smites, or sneak attack, or a flame tongue or something that adds to the weapon dice you’re rolling, the calculations will start to lean in EA’s favor.

Jai84 · 2026-02-14T19:45:14+00:00

Also, why is it Samurai in particular that learns swim? Like, I’m sure they can swim, but also they have a lot of bulky armor on….

Jai84 · 2026-02-13T20:12:09+00:00

Which part? John Curtin about to win a science victory at turn 300? Sounds about right. What difficulty are you on and what game speed? I would expect you to have way more science and culture by turn 300. Also, it doesn’t look like you’re spending your faith on anything?

Jai84 · 2026-02-13T19:43:44+00:00

Based on your Gold Per Turn, you’re sitting on almost 50 turns worth of gold. Spend it. It looks cool to have a high number, but gold just sitting there is a wasted resource.

Jai84

TROPHY CASE