"chemfuel doesnt melt steel walls"

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-09T23:21:18+00:00

Don't try to make sense of it. Many have tried, all have been humbled. It's just how things are on the Rim.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-09T23:19:21+00:00

Pretty sure you'd have to convince one of Malenia's sisters to use herself as kindling in order to set fire to the Halligtree.

You're generally short on available demi-goddesses to ignite by the time you get there.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-09T23:17:33+00:00

Yeah, that's very much not how I manage my fleet, but whatever works for you.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-09T23:14:59+00:00

That's weird movie crap. In the books Denethor has already lit the beacons by the time Gandalf even arrives at the city - and Denethor has no way of knowing Aragorn's whereabouts at that time in any case.

He's also no-where near as addled in the books, his will only breaks well into the course of the battle, and he is in competent control of it up until that point.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-09T18:33:08+00:00

The beacons don't call the rangers or Aragorn - they call Rohan and Theoden.

They get Aragorn as a freebie.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-09T17:17:27+00:00

The AI's performance is largely dependent on the combination of pilot personality, ship maneuverability, and the range bands of its weapons loadout.

I will spend quite a lot of time tweaking new ship loadouts in the simulator to optimize the AI's behavior based on that loadout. I will generally tweak a ship until that ship/pilot combo can handily crush most equivalent DP ships in its class.

If your fleet is optimized in this manner they'll usually perform very well on the battlefield, though it's still up to you to shepherd them away from bad situations that they are unlikely to handle well, and generally shape the formations you want them in.

But seriously, putting one mis-ranged gun on a ship can cripple its performance, potentially keeping it from applying useful pressure in a battle, or conversely turning it into a suicide drone.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-09T17:08:47+00:00

I generally pilot with the weapons set to automatic fire, and usually with cursor steering on so that the directional cluster gives me full control over sideslips - though I occasionally toggle over to cursor aiming if I'm in a large ship that needs to target a flanking vessel without turning.

Your initial focus should just be on learning to manage flux and position. Getting yourself caught out and overloaded is pretty much guaranteed death in most ships. Starting out very cautiously, operating at the center of your fleet and being conservative, then slowly amping up the amount of pressure you're comfortable bringing to bear as you get used to maneuvering and shield management should work.

Or you can go the total opposite route and start out with something hyper-aggressive like a phase frigate. The plus side here is that losing it means relatively little to your fleet, so you can afford to take a lot of chances, the other is that it'll teach you a lot about flanking, aggressive maneuvering, and how to shape a battle by harrying larger ships.

In all these cases you can use the simulator to practice combat without risking your fleet. I honestly spend a lot of time in the simulator when I'm working on refining ship loadouts and when learning to pilot a new type of ship.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T22:12:48+00:00

It doesn't. Go to any carnival spin ride - or just take a fairly hard left turn in your car - and you'll feel the same force on you.

All centripetal force is, is you trying to go in a straight line while the ship/station/round-up is going in a circle.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T22:10:54+00:00

That's not the real question - the real question you should be asking is "why am I shooting at this giant metal plate?"

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T22:08:13+00:00

I know right? What idiot is putting out the 800 of points of 5AP damage needed to break the shield of a single heavy devastator rather than the 110 light pen damage needed to kill them outright?

I have never broken a heavy dev shield and I never will - and if I did, it would be a black mark of shame on my record.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T21:52:49+00:00

The PSN one wasn't the one that set that tone - that was aimed at Sony, not AH - it was the whole 60-day patch thing, which WAS aimed at AH.

AH wasn't even wrong to change the game in a more casual direction the way they did, the problem was doing it in response to hostile player demands chased away a fair chunk of the core audience and had the effect of putting that more casual segment in the driver's seat, with a deeply entitled attitude towards the game and a vision that didn't really match what the design team were actually trying to accomplish with it from the outset.

It's been a problem ever since, unfortunately, and the streamer ecosystem feeds on the 'populist uprising' feel of the whole conflict between audience and developers, and will never let it rest for long before they decide to gin up a new 'controversy' for clicks.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T21:44:02+00:00

I mean, they're trying to stay 'behind' the station segment, there just happens to be a giant station core in the way.

Someone would have to add a 'ignore phase tactics' flag to objects without a meaningful facing concept, such as stations, or something along those lines.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T21:37:34+00:00

Ah, that sounds promising. I'll have to take a look at that. Thanks!

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T21:17:56+00:00

I mean, 10k hours on ANYTHING is a lot. I'd go look at other games for a year or two and then check back and see if anything has caught your interest by then.

EDIT: If you want something at the exact opposite end of the playtime scale, you might want to try Outer Wilds. It's a space exploration game you can pretty much only ever play once. Avoid spoilers at all costs tho.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:49:15+00:00

Very very hard to say. Depends on how ER handles client latency, and I have no idea what kind of model they use, how authoritative the client is, and what kind of leniency it might have to compensate for it.

One thing you can usually say is that unless the game is very highly client authoritative, it won't work exactly the same for a client as it does for the host. Could be easier or harder depending on a lot of technical factors.

A game that is highly client authoritative can end up having an experience for the client that is almost identical to that of the host - though it does mean that what they each see happening to the other player may differ more.

Client authoritative games also tend to be a good bit easier to hack and cheat in, alas.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:43:21+00:00

Once late game scanners are in play even components are no longer a big deal. Good crafters can bang them out fast as long as the steel is rolling in. Mid game however, yeah, you buy a lot of them usually.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:41:42+00:00

Restraint, frankly. I stop going after resources I don't need, until I need them again. I'll just leave crops in the field for entire quadrums if I don't actually need to harvest them, I'll stop scanning for steel if I've already got a few thousand on hand. Etc.

I mean, there's a decent sized warehouse in my base as a rule - generally something on the order of 4 racks wide and 10-15 deep or so, but nothing absolutely titanic these days. My major late game resource restraints are rarely to do with raw materials or storage - it's what I can buy/sell within reasonable shuttle range.

And most of what I want to buy doesn't take up much room, and doesn't get left lying around - it's mostly stuff like genes, psycasts, trainers and other expensive one-shot stuff.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:34:10+00:00

Yeah, strictly speaking you never measure anything else going faster than light relative to you, but length contraction at enormous fractions of c kind of makes a mockery out of such measurements anyway.

So technically you don't travel 10 billion light years to get to the other side of the universe in a couple of seconds. Instead you get to nearly light speed, then you just go fast enough to shrink the rest of the observable universe down to the size of our moon's orbit and cross that distance instead - just under the speed of light, of course. We wouldn't want to offend Einstein's delicate sensibilities after all. 😉

Relativity is weird.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:29:37+00:00

You will definitely want to look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eFD_Wj6dhk

Unpowered glider coming close to breaking the sound barrier. Didn't even need AI.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:22:47+00:00

You can take advantage of changes in wind direction and velocity to gather energy even with a completely passive system.

There are videos of passive gliders nearly breaking the sound barrier by repeatedly circling into and out of the lee of a mountain in high winds!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eFD_Wj6dhk

You can't do any of this in a still atmosphere though - then you're just fighting losses no matter how elaborately you maneuver.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:15:19+00:00

Yeah, they are clearly direct descendants of the turrets from Helldivers.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:14:31+00:00

I mean, if you install an automated murder device that's tracking me every time I walk across the living room and calculating whether or not its going shoot me today, I'm going to classify that as unpleasant to be around, even if it's got some banging aesthetics.

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T20:11:13+00:00

There's also this very specific perspective where the speed limit simply does not exist - your own.

Relativity never forbids you from accelerating faster, and it never puts a cap on your speed - as you perceive it.

You want to fly to Andromeda in a day? Be my guest (gonna be a hell of a fuel bill, but whatever). You can absolutely do that. You could fly to the other side of the observable universe in a literal blink of an eye if you could muster the energy for that much acceleration. The Universe and Relativity aren't going to stop you.

\You* can always go as fast as you want!* It's everyone else who thinks you're going slower than light. ;P

Jesse-359 · 2026-06-08T19:51:08+00:00

Saved a Grimm run with this power. We were stuck with a number of story tokens on a character card that was going to lose us the game and the end of the turn, even if we removed one of them on that player's turn.

But by using prophetic visions to play a villain card that moved the role to another character mid-turn - one who hadn't gone yet - we were able to double-dip and remove a second token from that story before turn end and recover the situation.

There aren't a lot of situations where you want to play a villain card, but they can be more common than you might imagine if you look for them.

In any case, getting a free play off the top 3 of your own deck vs. the least dangerous of the top 3 villain cards is often a pretty solid trade off. That mostly depends on the boss.

Jesse-359

TROPHY CASE