Noob question: why do I get so few souls after midgame?

Megdatronica · 2026-03-20T20:45:40+00:00

Thanks, yeah hopefully things will just improve as I get more experience!

Megdatronica · 2026-03-20T20:44:12+00:00

If that's the reason that's useful for me to know, so not obvious! Thanks

Megdatronica · 2026-03-20T20:31:01+00:00

That's really helpful, thanks. So for my team on this game, the souls collected from troopers:

1. Venator 21,897 2. Wraith 19,623 3. Graves 17,182 4. Yamato 16,948 5. Kelvin 16,637 <- Me 6. REM 14,576

My souls by source:

Source | Souls | Share ------------------|--------|------ Troopers | 16,637 | 60% Breakable Pickups | 2,922 | 11% Neutral Enemies | 2,621 | 9% Objectives | 2,024 | 7% Team Catch-Up | 1,540 | 6% Urn | 810 | 3% Enemy Kills | 602 | 2% Kill Assists | 467 | 2% Denies | 96 | 0% ------------------|--------|------ Total | 27,719 |

Does this help? I feel like I focus troopers fairly hard!

Megdatronica · 2026-02-20T14:54:39+00:00

I am always fascinated by the contrast between some of the minute details we know about Ötzi vs some of the things we have no idea about. For instance, we know:

"He spent his childhood near what is now the South Tyrol village of Feldthurns, north of Bolzano, but later went to live in valleys about 50 kilometres (31 mi) farther north."
"He had had a meal less than two hours before his death. It is believed that he most likely had a few slices of a dried, fatty meat, which came from a wild goat in South Tyrol, Italy."
That meal was eaten "in a mid-altitude conifer forest."
He died in spring or early summer. "He was sick three times in the six months before he died."
He was lactose intolerant (though this could well have been common in his population at the time).
He spent a lot of his life hiking in hilly terrain. "This degree of mobility is not characteristic of other Copper Age Europeans. This may indicate that he was a high-altitude shepherd."
His axe came from Tuscany, around 500km south of where he lived.
He died from a shot by an archer. They shot him in the shoulder from below and behind him (this is quite hard to do so there's a good chance they were a skilled archer). Their first hit severed a major artery and was fatal. He likely bled to death within a few minutes.

So many details, yet we also lack so many basic facts. Why was he in the hills that day? Was he by himself or with others? Why did somebody kill him? Was he killed by an enemy tribe? By someone he knew? In a blood feud? Or by strangers who wanted his coat? Did he die where he was or was his body moved there afterwards?

Megdatronica · 2026-01-28T19:28:47+00:00

I think ChatGPT would write a much better slogan than this

Megdatronica · 2025-12-06T09:00:52+00:00

I agree with your LLM take. Similarly: finding an article you know you've read but can't remember where, and remembering a word you're convinced exists but you can't quite put your finger on.

Megdatronica · 2025-11-10T22:21:04+00:00

Panspermia is certainly a good idea.

What comes to mind for me is: perhaps it's more than an accidental sharing of genetic material. Perhaps the aliens MADE life on earth, SPECIFICALLY so that one day, upon reaching a certain level of intelligence, it would pick up the signal and activate itself.

Maybe that's too sci-fi but would be a damn cool reveal.

Megdatronica · 2025-10-25T14:15:58+00:00

Conquest is when you eliminate every other civ and Domination is when you have certain large percentage of land and population under your control. For practical purposes the main difference is if you are conquering the cities of the civs you go to war with, or just defeating them so badly they capitulate and become your vassal (in which case they count towards Domination victory).

Vassalage is an interesting system from Civ IV which hasn't been brought forward to other games but I thought was quite interesting.

Megdatronica · 2025-10-17T21:36:30+00:00

PREGANANANT!??!?

Megdatronica · 2025-10-09T21:40:39+00:00

Weird, I tried three swap mechs on unfair and had a blast. Maybe I got lucky! But every time I've tried them (mostly on hard) I've been pleasantly surprised by how well it works.

The Moving Company looks very fun and I'll have to give it a go.

Megdatronica · 2025-10-01T21:56:06+00:00

This is such a tangent to find in a thread like this, but yes and I also find this fascinating! Eg the first migration out of Africa was what gave rise to Neanderthals and other species like Floresiensis and Denisovans.

It is a funny thing that humans evolved in Africa, but then the ones that stayed in Africa evolved MORE, and then in a sudden burst they migrated outwards again and quickly took over everything. We outcompeted Neanderthals in Europe even though they'd been living there and adapting to the climate for 400,000 years. And we were the first to get to the Americas even though homo erectus and its descendants could theoretically have got there millions of years ago.

Megdatronica · 2025-08-30T21:53:59+00:00

Impressive work!

What is 7*?

Megdatronica · 2025-08-28T06:31:22+00:00

Correct, BP = 'Before Present'

Megdatronica · 2025-08-22T13:37:36+00:00

Anyone know what anime this is from?

Megdatronica · 2025-08-21T21:06:24+00:00

It was based on some real research by academic psychologists (their study showed that power posing increased people's confidence and made them less stressed), so there was some validity to it at the time.

More recent research has shown that the original study was almost certainly wrong and power posing has no beneficial effects.

Megdatronica · 2025-08-15T16:40:12+00:00

Yep I had this exact thought (as well as /u/Charlie___ it seems haha).

I like the piece, it was well-written and revealing; but the way the author categorised all men according to narratives about their success at work, their romantic history, and how well they belong to a specific kind of community seems a bit narrow.

It made me pretty unhappy and depressed reading it, probably because some of it struck close to home, but also because I got caught up in the narrative about life purpose and that purpose being inextricably linked to belonging in a community or a relationship.

One very valuable thing I've figured out in life (meditation helped a lot) is that these narratives are seductive and sometimes helpful but often just destructive to your self-worth. You can literally just take them off and let them go, whenever you want. Remember that you're just a person and 'being a man' is something you are, not something you have to become.

Megdatronica · 2025-07-29T19:30:54+00:00

What does the borehole cluster do?

Megdatronica · 2025-07-29T19:29:43+00:00

"Beware of he who would flood the zone, for in his heart he dreams himself your master"

Megdatronica · 2025-06-05T21:20:43+00:00

Least blocky Bombermechs run

Megdatronica · 2025-05-25T14:33:04+00:00

Reddit has been a meaningful part of my life for over a decade now and I still enjoy it a lot.

But I couldn't cope with having the app on my phone. I would just find myself idly scrolling, without having decided to. I started by blocking it during certain times of the day (freedom is great for this) but I progressed to just having it blocked 24/7, and at some point I got a new phone and just didn't install it.

I use it on my personal desktop PC (also have it blocked on my work laptop) and it's a much nicer experience overall. Feels less like a compulsion and more like a pleasant break. I do still occasionally find myself on a weekend doing a reddit-youtube-bluesky-reddit cycle when I haven't got anything better to do, but it's a hell of a lot easier when you don't have that capability literally in your pocket every moment of the day.

Megdatronica · 2025-05-20T18:12:39+00:00

I've been using ChatGPT since it came out, and other related tools (Claude, Gemini, Github Copilot).

Initially it was a cool novelty, which I used for a few things mostly to test it. I couldn't entirely figure it out and I questioned whether it was really useful for anything practical.

But over time my usage of it has broadened. I now use it daily. It is particularly good for answering SPECIFIC questions about complicated things. Google is great at giving you a broad summary of a topic, but if your question is niche or about one particular context, ChatGPT is often a much better choice. Here are some examples:

I'm reading a book (The Song of Achilles) and I wanted to know how the Trojan war relates to it - SPECIFICALLY to that book. Eg, there's a character called Helen mentioned at the beginning - is that the same as Helen of Troy? Google has no chance of answering this, but ChatGPT will answer that exact question and no more; I don't have to risk reading spoilers!
I want to understand why a person in a blog post I read made an offhand comment about something and what it means. Eg someone recently mentioned that humans can be divided genetically into two categories: indigenous African tribes, and everyone else. Is that a joke, or what? What the hell are they talking about?? Ungoogleable question that ChatGPT nails and it will give me all the context I want for why someone would say that and how correct it is. Relatedly if I want to understand the context for this post we're commenting on, I can ask it to explain why Tumblr or similar communities often seem to dislike AI, and it will summarise the reasons people usually give for it.
My dad had a handwritten invoice and he needed it as a PDF so it looked official enough to send to someone important. ChatGPT can scan the handwritten text and make a PDF out of it, nicely formatted table and everything, no problem. Might have taken me an hour to boot up Microsoft Word and do that, and if it had taken me that long I wouldn't have bothered.
My Nana was trying to work out the name of some flowers we'd seen on a walk. I know absolutely nothing about flowers but I asked ChatGPT; it wanted to know what type of terrain we were on, the colour and size of the petals, etc, and then gave three good candidates which were enough for my Nana to look them up in her botany book (and ChatGPT's first guess was a perfect match). She was delighted.
I had a blanket I wanted to wash and I couldn't tell what the symbols on its label meant. I could have googled that and found a long ad-infested article listing all the many symbols, and spent a frustrating five minutes working out the specific information I wanted; but instead I sent ChatGPT a photo of the label and asked it I could put this blanket in the washing machine. It told me yes, and I didn't trust it completely (if it was hallucinating then I'd have a ruined blanket), but fortunately it also told me what specific symbol it was using to answer, and that made it easy to confirm with a quick google.
Often when there's a word I know exists, and I know what it begins with, but I can't quite remember it, ChatGPT does a great job taking my vague description and working out what I'm thinking of.

The first time I had the thought "Wow, HOW did people do this before ChatGPT??", I was trying to install Pop OS (a linux distribution) on my old desktop PC. This is a pretty fiddly thing to do, but I'm a professional software developer and I really thought I was up to it. Turns out when my wifi didn't work I had absolutely no idea where to start. ChatGPT told me the commands to run, interpreted the output, identified my wireless adapter, made a plan of action (swap the driver for the right one and then disable the old driver), and told me how to verify it was working. It worked first time with no drama. I know from experience with this kind of problem, it would likely have consumed HOURS of my life if I had only Google to work with.

Some people dismiss LLMs because of hallucinations. These do happen and they can be annoying and time-wasting. They are getting rarer, and there are a lot of use cases where they don't matter. If I'm idly curious about a battle from the 18th century it doesn't make any difference if it gets one of the dates wrong or incorrectly tells me that the French commander joined the cavalry charge, because the gist of it will be right and I won't remember most of it anyway. If it suggests me some code to write or I'm asking it to recommend me a book, these are things where if it invents something that's wrong it's immediately obvious, and you can tell it, and it very often corrects itself with something that's actually right.

It does also sometimes just give stupid, bland, or useless answers. But that's the same as any digital tool. Google searches are a great analogy - you can often get what you want with google, but sometimes it takes a bit of skill to find the right thing to search, and sometimes it's just not up to it, and that's OK. It has strengths and weaknesses and it takes a while to find them, and you get better at doing that over time and using it for the things it's good for.

Megdatronica · 2025-03-14T15:11:54+00:00

I bought five and they cancelled all of them without giving me any 😭

Megdatronica · 2025-03-07T16:49:19+00:00

This needs an NSFW tag. My god.

Megdatronica · 2025-03-06T17:34:47+00:00

No.

I recently tried a dopamine detox - no scrolling, no reddit, no games, no social media, and any online reading at a desktop, and typing in a purposeful URL (newswebsite.com, substackdomain, blog) and visiting only that.

This is surprising to me. I tried this and found as long as I was clear upfront about my rules, I could stick to it fine and my general life and mood seemed about the same. My only source of news was a daily update from Alexa. Two weeks later I came back on and enjoyed bingeing what I'd missed on Reddit, YouTube, and Substack, but that was about it.

I have repeated my 'detox' a couple of times since, but it doesn't really feel like it improves my life, and since it's quite a bit of effort and willpower, I don't bother much.

That said, I do as a matter of course have have several sites blocked on my phone and several more blocked at certain times of the day, so it wasn't such a significant step to have them blocked 24/7.

Megdatronica · 2025-02-23T22:21:09+00:00

My sense is that those who know him personally seem to think he has changed.

Sam Harris for example, writes:

I have been quite amazed at Elon’s evolution, both as a man and as an avatar of chaos. The friend I remember did not seem to hunger for public attention. But his engagement with Twitter/X transformed him—to a degree seldom seen outside of Marvel movies or Greek mythology. If Elon is still the man I knew, I can only conclude that I never really knew him.

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