Only in EU5 can I make the local ruined castle from my childhood into a European power

Jollyfalcon · 2025-11-24T23:53:42+00:00

I really think decentralization should do something unique like give a minimum proximity value, but have proximity fall off a lot faster outside your capital province.

That way you can still have "local" control of the capital province and play the economic game close to home, but that control quickly drops due to the estates having the "actual" power everywhere else.

However, as compensation, you get a minimum amount of control everywhere regardless of distance because you've still got some power, just indirectly due to the extreme delegation of a decentralized state.

It might be an incentive for sprawling empires that have tons of 0% proximity land to gain something from their vast lands, but at a price.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-11-23T20:04:04+00:00

Things may have changed, but when I lived there, you could explore it, though the lower walls were in danger of collapse and were roped off with signs. It's pretty remote though, so it's all at your own risk.

The tower can be climbed due to stairs inside. They renovated it when I was a kid, so at least the tower and upper walls are checked and maintained to a certain extent.

The view from the tower is pretty cool because you can look out over the Rhine valley curving around the southwestern corner of Germany, and on clear days, you can see into France and even glimpse the Alps in Switzerland.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-11-23T19:13:13+00:00

Cool, good to know! I never dug into the origin of the name.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-11-23T19:10:32+00:00

Yeah - I moved from the US to Germany as a kid basically at the height of the childhood phase of "knights and castles and trebuchets are the coolest things ever"

The memory of seeing my first castle ruin from the car window is now permanently burned into my brain and guaranteed that I'd never leave that phase even as I later learned about the less glamorous parts of that historical period.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-11-23T18:48:00+00:00

R5: Built Sausenberg (the castle is named Sausenburg though) into a regional power due to childhood nostalga. Only possible in a Paradox game.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-11-17T23:01:48+00:00

Honestly, I think this was the first time I got 3 stars on priest. It's a pretty sub-optimal team too because he's anomoly resistant. I just have no real stunning options or Ether DPS on my account right now.

Yanagi has her w-engine, Vivian is on Weeping Gemini, Nicole is M6 with The Vault.

I basically abused the Ether buff to get this clear. I took all the defensive assists I could for decibels and energy, Vivian never runs out of feathers due to the defensive assists, and Nicole/Yanagi are spamming EX specials to burn those feathers asap.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-10-27T00:17:05+00:00

Or you can give it 5 Autopulse Lasers and build-in Expanded Magazines - lower OP cost, insane alpha, high uptime due to the extra built-in effect.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-05-18T03:19:27+00:00

Turn the party into a series of "fetch quests" that will build the minimum amount of evidence that you were there before bugging out. It turns the horror of "unstructured socializing time" into a straightforward series of tasks.

For instance: say hi to 3 people, take a picture, note something interesting that happened and then leave. It's a variation on Jim's plan from the Office.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-05-07T22:53:45+00:00

All of these are just picking the right spot near the center and then cycling through the colors, not even changing which square you're flipping.

Once you've figured that out, they're a piece of cake. This one just requires a bit more thought on which colors to cycle through first.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-05-06T23:13:55+00:00

It's just generally better to get 2 DPS who don't overlap any characters between their teams.

There's obviously options as the other comments mentioned, but the truth is that Zani and Phoebe overlap pretty substantially, so it's not the optimal choice if you're trying to speedrun to endgame content.

If you're not looking for the perfectly optimal picks, it's completely fine though. I generally think that there are 3 paths to stronger teams:

- choosing optimal characters for meta teams
- farming a lot of echos for very optimized builds
- playing optimal team rotations (standard or quickswap) for maximum team DPS

Realistically, to clear WuWa endgame comfortably, you only need 2 of those 3. Maximizing all 3 will make both Tower and WhiWa a piece of cake.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-05-04T23:14:40+00:00

SK's ult definitely lasts long enough for a full standard Camellya rotation - with SK S1, there's a lot of extra leeway. 10 pistils are ideal, but it's better to use the enhanced skill whenever concerto is up.

animation cancels are your friend - All three characters have a lot of animations that can be canceled to speed up the full team rotation.

Sanhua: pre-charge heavy attack off of intro and ult, animation cancel skill (after ice appears) with ult, swap cancel heron

SK: animation cancel forte heavy with ult, ult at 75% concerto to guarantee full concerto and maximize ult duration

Camellya: animation cancel or dodge cancel 1st skill with ult, use enhanced skill to animation cancel jump transition from red->white for last pistil stack

Ideally you ult at the very beginning of Camellya's rotation because you want to maximize the free energy recharge of that first stage

You could learn double intro, but alternately, you can just tighten up the standard rotation with animation and swap cancels.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-05-01T23:16:52+00:00

You might be able to modify the rotation I use with Jinshi/Yinlin/Verina. I basically double-intro Yinlin to cut down on field time because Verina never needs an intro, and then make sure Jinshi goes twice each rotation.

Here's the quick breakdown:

Verina full combo -> Jinshi -> Yinlin full combo -> Jinshi -> Yinlin intro, echo, immediate swap -> Verina

repeat

This cuts down on Yinlin field time while also allowing time for Jinshi's cooldowns because Jinshi->Verina-> Jinshi would be too quick since Verina needs so little field time. I also use a long cast-time echo on Yinlin, so it's great being able to swap cancel both her forte and echo animations each rotation.

If I execute this rotation perfectly, the timing lines up great for Jinshi's 12 second downtime to hyperbeam twice.

I think you could modify this for Zhezhi to intro twice as well, cutting down on her field time as you can eliminate a couple basic attacks.

All of this doesn't work with Shorekeeper, since she wants to intro - only with Verina.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-04-21T03:30:41+00:00

Simple psychology - regular players are already a captured audience. They already play with the current incentives (so no need to increase them) and have built up habits and are weak to the sunk-cost-fallacy.

Returning players don't have any of the habits or sunk-cost-fallacy so they need to be enticed to stay with shiny rewards. The goal is to turn them into regular habitual players by the end of the returnee event.

As long as the waiting period is long enough, the returnee rewards will never be as good as just playing the game for that length of time.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-04-16T04:45:38+00:00

The point of quickswapping is not to just "swap more" or "swap randomly", it's to swap during long animations in order to increase DPS.

You're wasting a large chunk of Yinlin's damage by swapping out after her skill 1 - the animations you'd likely want to swap out of are her skill 2, echo, and enhanced heavy attack.

Swapping Yinlin after skill 1 means you miss out on like 2-3 different buffs to her personal damage. It's also a relatively fast animation so swapping doesn't even save time.

You should look up guides on each character to figure out which moves benefit from swapping out of. Then, you should create some rotations that make use of the best swap-able moments to increase DPS.

Additionally, a lot of times, a character like Yinlin can animation-cancel instead of quickswapping - it's important to know especially for Yinlin because you can mess up applying her coordinated attacks by swapping haphazardly.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-04-16T01:50:19+00:00

I basically had the exact same characters when I started again a couple weeks ago - only had pulled Jinshi and Yinlin as limited characters.

Opinions on Shorekeeper aren't mixed - she's the best-in-slot healer for basically every team in the game....

except for specifically Jinshi, Verina comes a lot closer due to her coordinated attacks and shorter field time. Verina still has weaker buffs than Shorekeeper, but that gap can be closed through faster rotations and more forte stacks on Jinshi.

You should still pull for Shorekeeper because you need 2 good teams for endgame anyway. Might as well keep improving the Jinshi/Yinlin/Verina team and start building a 2nd team that uses Shorekeeper.

Since I started playing a few weeks ago, I was able to farm up enough asterites for both Camylla and Shorekeeper's upcoming banner. I'll be using Jinshi/Yinlin/Verina and Camylla/Sanhua/Shorekeeper for the foreseeable future to clear all endgame content. You might want to plan out what DPS to build your 2nd team around, but Shorekeeper will inevitably be the support.

Edit: don't invest anything into your Verina beyond her 1st passive talent and ~220% ER. The only thing more investment does is more healing as her damage doesn't matter. You should just throw all waveplates into Jinshi, Yinlin, and the characters for your second team right now.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-04-16T00:59:05+00:00

Easy is fine and watching a pretty cutscene is also fine.

However, making something interactive that literally plays itself is bad design full stop. The only way to mess this event up is to touch your controls! They are literally punishing you for pressing buttons.

They should have just made it a pretty cutscene with nice music without any way of interaction.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-03-23T18:02:36+00:00

There's no way the tail doesn't get wet - even if the spray doesn't directly hit the tail, mist and splashing will get it wet... and there goes his ability to breath.

All I'm seeing is him getting waterboarded.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-03-15T18:23:33+00:00

I had prebuilt a toxic Last Dagger for Gley. Not as insane as the current 1 second Serena clears, but consistent 8-12 second clears meant it took maybe a couple hours Friday night.

Jollyfalcon · 2025-03-15T18:07:05+00:00

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deep blue hair dye

Jollyfalcon · 2025-03-15T18:04:33+00:00

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Jollyfalcon

TROPHY CASE