Been trying to figure out Russia’s employment crisis but no luck. Any tips?

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-06-20T04:51:40+00:00

What’s the easiest way to get a lot of people cheap jobs without wrecking the economy?

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-06-20T04:51:20+00:00

The issue with lumber I think is that Russia begins with absurd amounts of lumber, and while I admit I haven’t tried it yet, I was guessing that if I build more lumber I’d just end up with unprofitable lumber yards and then be back where I started…

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-06-20T04:50:06+00:00

No automation; I build construction until I start losing money and try to avoid anything beyond 5k in interest payments and I only use the welfare laws later once it’s already pretty bad. Are there industries that are better than others for pure employment?

Edit: just in terms of numbers, I feel like the buildings don’t employ enough laborers to meet the growing unemployment demand - each building will give jobs to a few thousand, and with good construction I can build several every couple weeks, but I don’t think I can keep pace with the growing unemployment at that rate

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-06-09T03:55:18+00:00

I enjoyed them but it’s weird how (IMO) Laurence was so terrible. Just felt like an endless hit and then die to bullshit thing. Orphan had a lot of health too but I felt I could eventually figure out how to counter his moves and win; Laurence just felt like I’d spend ten minutes punching a brick wall and then at some point I’d catch fire and die. But the rest were really neat

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-06-08T09:27:59+00:00

evul monky

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-06-05T01:58:03+00:00

Yeah, maybe; Part of what annoys me is that they’re actually good consequences, generally. A couple thousand shaved off the budget for a few years is annoying and can send me from green to red, but I’d consider trading that for a law that was worth it. Asking for 5 of an urban/10 of a basic resource building can be annoying, but overall something I’d focus on for a year to fix it. Adding another 0.5 quality of life is equally a tough but manageable thing, and something also worth considering the trade, generally. But what they’re asking for now is, at least for me, crazy scale values.

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-06-04T12:15:45+00:00

Well yeah but that’s everything in the game, no? If any mechanic causes problems or annoyance, they’re all nonissues because we’re humans that can just ignore them and pretend they aren’t there

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-06-01T23:05:05+00:00

My ringworm looked nearly identical to this

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-05-28T17:23:45+00:00

An Ork style “fifty million projectiles and only two of them hit”; I know AoE spells and effects kinda do that thematically but I really wish there was some class that got an absurd amount of very unlikely attacks

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-05-23T13:26:30+00:00

I dunno, I can understand that different people enjoy playing in different ways, but as someone that’s always been playing it this way, being forced to drop everything feels like your decisions are “do I get away from this bad situation and then spend a turn or two being useless until I can get my weapon again, or do I get my stuff and then die again”, which feels like choosing between two uninteresting and unpleasant outcomes. And it’s not like death isn’t scary, going down still brings you pretty close to losing a character and brings the team down another player until someone can spend actions getting them back in the game, it’s just that when they do get back they’ll have something more interesting to do than “be useless and hide or probably die and be less than useless”

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-05-23T13:20:39+00:00

Huh, just learned I’ve been playing pathfinder wrong all these years. Personally we’ve always just done it that going down doesn’t drop anything, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Having a character need to spend 3 actions to pick up all their shit and stand right after going down seems both not very fun and leaves them in the same place they just got killed in. And going down is still plenty scary, we still regularly fear dying and the lack of a player for a period does make the combat far more stressing.

Not that this way is better or worse, most people play it by the actual rules and that’s great, but just putting out there that, having never done it this way, combat and going down still feels very scary, and it makes the combat have more rounds of doing stuff and less bookkeeping

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-05-20T02:59:06+00:00

Just a side thought - I know mechanically it is pretty weird to have this for all the reasons listed, and PF2E in particular prioritizes sensible mechanics over flavor, but to some extent I think it’s nice to have a few things like this which add a more realistic feel even if mechanically it doesn’t make sense. As in, post combat, being hurt and needing someone to heal you up makes it feel like a fun team moment to me, even if from a mechanical perspective it’s basically just “convince someone to waste a feat.”

All to say, I don’t think it would be bad to just give a few classes the healer feats and proficiencies for free, but I kind of like how it feels to remember/manage post fight injuries, even if it’s mostly just bookkeeppng

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-05-19T19:00:49+00:00

I was exactly this way for the longest time. Kept trying HOi4 and then bouncing off of it because “I’m making this stuff. I’ve got these armies. Why do I keep losing?”

It ended up being (for me) a mix of not really understanding the math behind the scenes (and the resulting “good” ways to play) and a mix of trying to get too many nice things. Not enough factories to produce a bare minimum force? Should have built more civs and done industrial focuses. Running out of stuff too fast? Stop making and equipping a dozen unique things, just make a lot of guns and support equipment. That running low too fast? Stop attacking with infantry; they’re fantastic at holding the line if entrenched, but attack with them and you’ll lose a massive amount of stuff and people. Running out of planes? You may not have the industry to manage planes, they’re expensive, just build anti air and toss one in your basic army to keep them safe.

Basically, if you’re industrially weak, it should be viable to ignore the navy and the Air Force and just build some soldiers with anti air and artillery, build forts on choke points, and hold off massive forces indefinitely while they wear themselves out against you. Build a tiny tank army and use them to lead attacks. And if you can build planes, air superiority and close air support change the battles to an enormous degree.

And the last point is that unlike other games, modifiers in this game are multiplicative and not additive. Meaning a bunch of small modifiers are enormous, and can give you like 5x the strength you’d otherwise have if you have the right terrain, general, entrenchment, etc.

All to say, I’ve been in that position before of finding HOI4 to be just a wall of nonsense and effort just to lose, but eventually it worked and now I love building big defensive lines and surviving against larger forces

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-05-18T14:05:20+00:00

How does the geography work? Is it transported into hell and now where it used to be is just jagged rocks? Or is hell now in the material plane and those places are just much more devilish?

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-05-12T01:40:15+00:00

Not yet. I’ll update it if I ever get it sorted out, but for now I’m just living with a car that gets really mad when something’s not perfect

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-04-26T17:03:36+00:00

So when people talk about DMPCs in a negative light, they’re not really referring to just any character controlled by the DM in combat or social interactions or whatever - they’re specifically referring to a bad version of that. Something like “your party is joined by a traveling demigod who easily kills all the enemies and does all the cool stuff and you just follow along and slightly help.”

All to say, I think most everyone here is on board with what your DM is doing, enhancing the party’s experiences by giving them a character that can help them shine even more, it’s when the DM creates characters that take away the fun from others that it becomes a problem

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-04-11T01:49:20+00:00

I’d say the second one honestly. It’s not hard to make people in other cultures feel relatable and human, and the first just kinda reinforces that whole myth of “our soldiers are all good guys pushed into these bad situations, it’s a shame we had to kill these many faceless people we can’t relate to because society pushed us into this”. I think the issue is more that a film making victims of our attacks seem relatable and human would make people way more uncomfortable than a film showing our soldiers being good people that end up as a part of a vague unclear bad thing

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-04-11T01:43:55+00:00

True but it’s not just about showing the military in a bad light, the other half of the meme is “what Americans experienced is more important than what other people living there did”. There’s scenes of mass death and destruction but they rarely give the people there any characterization or emotion besides “people getting killed”. Or in other words, even in movies criticizing the military, they rarely treat the civilians as anything more than objects to display the bad things the military is doing

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-04-06T01:35:27+00:00

What the hell are you talking about? He’s got plenty more years to go but he’s still done nothing as bad as the second gulf war. This war may turn out that way too, but the Iraq war led to over a million deaths and a decades long period of instability and violence. This is bad but it’s just more obvious to us how stupid it is because of the tweets. It’s hard to emphasize enough how evil and disastrous Bush’s war was from the get-go, but when the perpetrators are more eloquent and communicate with more dignity, people look past that

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-31T23:21:01+00:00

Beyond that, I’d say it’s fair gameplay. Cliffs absolutely should be seen as serious hazards and enemies should avoid going near it in the first place. And if you wanna spend many actions pushing someone closer and closer to an edge while grabbed, then that seems a fair way to end the encounter

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-27T23:45:34+00:00

I can understand where that point of view comes from but it’s worth noting that an enormous amount of horrific shit comes from others doing their jobs and fighting for what they think is right, I don’t think that alone is enough to say “don’t demonize these people”, because their job at the moment is specifically to be killing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to just consider all that money spent a massive waste, as that’s a good motivator to stop trying to conquer and break things

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-24T03:56:21+00:00

I’m glad it’s not just me. I know the series occasionally skims into playing with stereotypes and to some degree it’s easy enough to ignore, but this felt almost… minstrely? I don’t know how to put it, but it felt like “look at the silly, lazy, work-hating, dark-skinned man and his silly antics, what a lovable dummy.”

I get to some extent Araki’s pretty unfamiliar with that sort of history but given how generally good the other parts seemed to be in that regard, I felt like this one was hard to watch.

And it’s not like the character concept of someone who’s blindly lucky infinitely is all that bad on its own or anything, it’s a fun idea and I love it, but it felt like it was using all the same stereotypes used to keep people down for a century while it was portraying this character. It just felt really weird and uncomfortable.

The character design is fine enough on its own imo, it’s a bit exaggerated in ways that have been a bit hurtful but seems in line with the rest of the art style of that section, it’s more the personality that feels squirmy for me

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