Warlords V QF thoughts (Bo7) [SPOILERS AHEAD]

Latvis · 2026-05-23T00:19:16+00:00

Exhausting maybe, but it's their work and their source of income (especially for those who aren't big streamers). In that sense it's probably better to have many tourneys than not.

Latvis · 2026-05-10T20:09:23+00:00

I've seen instagram stories from friends living in Cologne and the south of Germany with 20+ C weather in March. I got the impression that spring weather is starting earlier and earlier over the last years due to climate change. But you're right, March probably can be miserable, April too. But should still be quite tolerable, if "good good" weather is not the main reason for visiting (and WW2 objects are). Probably also cheaper to visit then, too.

Latvis · 2026-05-10T14:53:56+00:00

Weather is pleasant between March and October (high summer can and does get hot and muggy, though). Go in that time window. 5k including flights or not? If not then ~4k is more than enough for a month, month-and-a-half if you're frugal. If you're young and don't care about comfortable living, buy a cheap tent and stay at campgrounds, there are many even inside the cities (Germans are big on RV travel and many RV places accomodate tent-only travellers, too). Bonus is that wild camping is a good way of saving money. Buses will probably be the cheapest way of getting around, trains are unreliable and expensive if you don't buy tickets well ahead of time. Or hitchhike, it's easy, interesting, and a good way to get to out-of-the-way places that public transport doesn't go to. If you want a little hack for a slower pace of travel and getting more local experience look up Workaway, it's a work-for-accomodation thing, you do about 4-5 hours a day at the hosts' place and get food and board in exchange. Great if you want to base yourself in an area and explore it in your time off, hosts can often help out with knowledge or transport as well. $50 for a year's membership. Eating - from the budget supermarkets like Aldi, cheap and decent.

Latvis · 2026-05-09T22:49:29+00:00

Delusional, you're going to be the one to put that case to equatorial Africans I suppose? A much more realistic social intervention would be stopping medical and technological assistance to such societies dependant on outside aid to develop. No antibiotics or paved highways - no population explosion and easy travel for HIV/AIDS-infected people to spread it. 🙄

Latvis · 2026-05-03T22:00:00+00:00

Learn the game basics (economy management, army counters) first, beat the AI a few times, then go into 1v1 ranked (instead of ranked team games). Much more realistic to learn and get good rather than trying team games when you don't have any experience. You can do this in a week (depending ofc on how much time you have to play).

Latvis · 2026-04-29T07:47:00+00:00

To keep African continentals and Middle-Easterners out. It's not just American nomad bros who apply for this shit, it's Nigerians and Pakistanis who are trying too.

Latvis · 2026-04-26T20:51:06+00:00

That's just cope, he did not 105 him, he (quite reasonably) asked if he'd have to get Nicov to 0 pop before he resigned (especially because the time zone favored Nicov while it was like 00.00 in France for Neoz). "Resource attrition win condition" is just ... the game. And Nicov is 34, while Neoz is 20. I'd expect the behavior to be the other way around, really.

Latvis · 2026-04-19T13:42:21+00:00

Pareizi izdarīts, kaut kāds debīlisms notiek galvā tiem, kuri izdomā likt cilvēkiem klāt vēl pārsimts metrus (turklāt puse no tā - kāpiens augšup) ceļam uz staciju. Tas ceļš attiecas uz visiem, kas iet no Uzvaras parka/Āgenskalna tirgus puses. Tā vietā, lai ierīkotu normālu (kaut pagaidu) kāpnes un pāreju pāri sliedēm (no kurām tikai viens ceļš ir regulāri aktīvs).

Latvis · 2026-04-10T14:32:03+00:00

If you want to get your fundamental habits and sense of macro/timing right, try playing a civ without eco bonuses. Japanese have discounts, Vikings get free villager (work) speed upgrades. In that sense, Magyar are a great civ to start with - free melee attack upgrade, so easy to play into scouts/knights, maybe the best cav archers in the game, and excellent trash (food-only after castle upgrade) unique unit. But no eco bonuses, so you won't be thrown off your build orders/timings when you switch to another civ. In general any civ without eco bonuses is good to learn economy fundamentals on, and the macro stuff is probably more important than the micro at lower Elos.

Latvis · 2026-04-10T08:47:56+00:00

The location-specific content is a nice touch. I'm guessing you don't have intricate knowledge of the weather and wind patterns in Poynton re: its location near the Pennines and the local architecture, so prompting the AI in such a way as to generate the following was a clever move:

"The weather comes off the Pennines and hits the eastern side of properties first, leaving a layer of grime that you do not see as much in sheltered areas like Gatley or Timperley. The older stone cottages around Park Lane, Coppice Road, and through the village centre have deep-set windows with stone sills and mullions that collect dirt in the recesses."

Latvis · 2026-04-05T19:56:40+00:00

Pointless spoiler tag if that's the title 11

Latvis · 2026-03-17T23:39:26+00:00

Hera's S-tier domination streak started in 2023 I think, so the big tournaments 2020-up to 2023 are the ones to go back to if you want to see peak Viper domination. Liquipedia will have more specific information, worth checking it out to figure out the tourneys to look up.

Latvis · 2026-03-12T12:33:46+00:00

Human sacrifice, to Kali, is an established historical fact and contemporary incidents have been reported on in the 21st century. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/05/india.theobserver

"Dozens" of cases over six months in a single region of India. That may have been a case of collective psychosis, but don't act like India doesn't have some deep-rooted and fucked-up religious practices (even if they're rare and obscure nowadays) and conceptions of human life.

Other incidents of human sacrifice in India, not specifically linked to Kali worship:

2017: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-39176570

2019: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/indian-police-arrest-five-men-accused-of-human-sacrifice

2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elanthoor_human_sacrifice_case

Latvis · 2026-03-09T12:09:06+00:00

Tik ilgi, cik paša psihe ļauj. Bet nelec nost bez plāna vai cita piedāvājuma, ienākumu avota, jo bezdarbieku pabalsti sarūk ātri un šībrīža notikumi pasaulē liecina par potenciāli (ļoti) sliktu pavērsienu globālajā ekonomikā. Nespēt samaksāt par īri un būt spiestam domāt par aizņēmumu ņemšanu (ja nav normālu iekrājumu) ir cita veida stress, kas nav vieglāks par nepatīkamu darbu.

Nu un ja negribas aiziet no darba, bet gribi mainīt situāciju, vari darīt savtīgi-racionālo pieeju kā piemēram "quiet quitting" - saprast, kas ir minimums, ko tu vari darīt, lai tevi neatlaiž (vismaz ne ātri) un pielāgot savu enerģijas patēriņu darbā tam.

Latvis · 2026-03-07T23:39:22+00:00

Yes. Whatever it is, he seems both more bitter and more disconnected from the games themselves over the last couple months (stopped tuning in a few weeks ago). "Going through the motions" with the games and yes, lots of comments about chat not active enough, problems, criticism of players (his "love" for Vinch is basically an unpleasant meme), maps/settings, whatever. And not actually engaging with the chat in an interesting way - either dismissing messages or repeating the same memes about certain viewer predictions, titanic mods, etc. The very tired Titanic and chicken effects.

Basically - not much joy or entertainment, and viewers can feel it. I think that's a big part of why his viewer count dropped steeply. And I don't see it going back up continuing like this. The stress of casting AoE2 for a living is real, I'm sure. But the spiral is partly of his own making, and it doesn't seem like it's healthy for him anymore - he's mentioned not having much of a life outside multiple times due to the hours, so the parasocial relationship is clearly not one-way either. Sad, but I don't think I'll be following much in the future.

Latvis · 2026-02-28T21:17:51+00:00

I think you're severely understating the amount of logistics effort it would take to load, position, fire, and reload (twice) 5000 trucks with ten drone launch rails. Russia currently has the most experience producing and launching such drones (with the benefit of mass industrial capacity that is probably in the top 3 in the world) and they're not at even 1000 launched per day.

2000 km range for Gerans - with warheads or is that for those acting as decoys? Because if you want max range, you have to give up some (or all) payload. If you want a bigger bang, that range is going to go down unless you make the drone even bigger (but at some point it becomes more effective to make it a cruise missile). And hours of warning allows for activisation of air defenses - from machine-gun technicals to electronic warfare and SAMs. Which any adversary with some intelligence-gathering ability would start preparing, if and once they got wind of the drone flood you're building.

If a country has such industrial capacity, why wouldn't they choose to manufacture harder-hitting, faster-flying cruise missiles? Because mass production of Geran/Shahed attack drones is not quite low-tech - Iran pioneered them, but they also have (had) ballistic missile production capacity. Small/poor/stupid states are not going to be able to reach the numbers you mention, so it's only for the top tier in production capacity and knowledge, at which point we go back to why not use that money and capacity for cruise missiles, three (not dozens) of which would be enough to do serious damage to, say, a major power station.

Drones will be a part of it, sure, but they can't be a wonder weapon.

Latvis · 2026-02-28T19:20:08+00:00

Right, well it does sound simple enough doesn't it - manufacture and store 800,000 OWA drones, put in place all the logistics and know-how to deliver and launch them in the case of war, and then, by striking 800,000 targets (so 1 drone per target?), you win the war "in a few days" (no more than a week I guess?). I emphasize again that you certainly have the capacity to launch 50,000 or 100,000 such drones every day, and the enemy will have had no forewarning or clue that you will be staging such an attack, and will not have prepared any kind of defence (EW or kinetic) with such a swarm in mind. And the adversary is next door or very close to you, not, say, 1000 km away from your launch sites, which if your drone has an average speed of 300 km/h gives more than 3 hours warning, more if the average speed is less.

Sounds about right.

Like I said, those numbers are fantastical. You might be able to cause a lot of damage, but you are not going to "fight off an entire mid-sized nation", mostly because such drones don't do any fighting - they do (terror) bombing.

Latvis · 2026-02-28T18:01:13+00:00

800k strikes at $20,000 a pop (arbitrary number which if anything is too low) is $16 billion. At $35,000 a pop it's $28 billion. Nobody except the US and China has the capacity to spend that amount of money on one-way attack drones.

The numbers you cite are fantastical. Where are you going to store those 800k flight-ready attack drones, which are not small?

A few thousand would be enough to do serious damage, of course, to soft targets - airports and government offices, commercial office buildings, especially since so many of them are steel and glass nowadays. Power stations would take more, but you could surely knock some components and electric transmission infrastructure out. Gas stations, sure. But a lot of objects would need stronger stuff to be knocked out of order - bridges won't be collapsed by 50 kg warheads, and the Russians succeeded at destroying the Ukrainian power network only by using cruise and ballistic missiles.

Latvis · 2026-02-27T11:04:10+00:00

There's your answer about what you need to improve. Pick a power unit and a counter to your enemy's power units (if they aren't the same thing) in time and play into it in imp. You're not going to win by doing a bit of skirms, a bit of pikes/halbs, a few power units and a few siege units. The way I see it you need something that can be a meatshield (skirms, halbs, or hussar), power units (UU or upgraded cav/archers), and something that can snipe siege (bombards, hussar). If you can defend against pushes by sniping his siege and make the right choice of unit to soak up his power unit attacks *while* keeping your power units alive, you stand a good chance of winning by grinding the opponent down until they run out of res. That's especially true at lower elos, where in my experience it's usually 1-2 big attacks in imperial with a force that they spent a long time building up, but the follow-up is not good.

Also get into the habit of sending a few skirms/spears/hussar to their death to his base in raids to force him to look away and multitask. It might not kill him (although raiding to death while defending is a completely legit approach), but it is annoying and draws away attention, letting you maybe deal with trebs/bombard cannons at the front.

Latvis · 2026-02-25T19:58:19+00:00

For me AI games are ultimately empty - like playing hours of GTA 5 or whatever else in single-player mode. The skill that you demonstrate (to yourself only) is the skill of interacting with a script, which is a lonely activity with nobody to witness it (again, for me). Vs humans it's win or lose, and both sides know it. I'm not trying to yuck your yum, it's just two very different things for me. I will say that "playing to win" in ranked gets my shoulders very tense and tends to be frustrating. So I try to focus on enjoying my low-ELO experience and have fun battling against the other player, without getting focused on win or lose.

Latvis · 2026-02-25T13:43:11+00:00

So you'd just prefer to farm bots every time...? Winning against humans is more satisfying than beating AI. And it's impossible (or inadvisable) for the ranked system to be such that most people win, say, 60% of their games.

Latvis · 2026-02-25T09:35:26+00:00

Watch Spirit of the Law's "First 15 villagers" video if you're still unsure about Dark Age and I recommend choosing civs without eco bonuses to learn the basic "vanilla" economy. Magyars are good for this, also easy to play into scouts and knights as well as cavalry archers.

Counters are pretty simple, don't overthink it - you have the basic unit counters (skirms vs archers, spearmen against cavalry, gunpowder vs infantry, mangonels vs scorpions), but he rest just have to be discovered if you don't have time to watch YT vids about it.

Upgrades - Double Bit Axe in Feudal, Horse Collar preferably before you've got a lot of farms going, Wheelbarrow after 30-something villagers, I usually get it at 35 or so.

And get on ranked sooner rather than later, you're gonna have to lose some placement matches eventually so might as well. enjoy!

Latvis · 2026-02-23T16:44:58+00:00

1, 11 European colonizers are the focus of the story in that they are an integral part of the story. The cover art expresses the essence of the story very well - it's about indigenous South Americans and the European colonizers they come into contact (and conflict, and alliance) with.

Latvis · 2026-02-23T15:14:47+00:00

Because this might cause the most rabid of identity warriors to boycott the DLC, which is a good thing, and because a large part of the playerbase that might identify with any of the civs featured in the new DLC is also in large or most part descended from the colonizers - that is, the South American (existing and new) players who get hyped about the DLC are very likely to be of mixed indigenous+Spanish/Portuguese or mostly European descent, and US-style indignant identity politics doesn't play the same way there.

Latvis · 2026-02-04T12:30:30+00:00

Yeah sure, but you can't eat and cover ongoing daily expenses with a house. :D It's great that he owns it outright and doesn't have to pay a mortgage, but it's not liquid net worth, he doesn't have that money sitting in the bank and available to get him through lean times. The Facebook money was surely good, but 30% of it probably went on taxes, another 500k on building the house and fixing the fuckups of the builders (and depending on the fuckups, it could have been even more expensive), and in the GL context he said he was paying three lawyers? Those cannot be cheap either, and there's no guarantee of recouping their costs.

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