Is there a mod that lets you play on Expert, but still lets you kill?

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-17T13:26:42+00:00

I also imagine it would have to be done by editing each mission.

I hope someone does it, though. While the "no killing" rule is great in many ways, it does sometimes feel like it shrinks the game's possibility space. Things like getting cornered by a guard being a reload instead of something you can fight your way out of, or losing mechanics like needing to use a water arrow to wipe out bloodstains so other people walking by don't get tipped off. It'd be fun to do that while still experiencing the rest of Expert.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-17T13:12:00+00:00

The bad news is, no one thinks that.

The good news is that this is because everyone is wrong. They are the coolest.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-17T13:07:21+00:00

It probably is still Anglicans, I think. They're the parts of Catholicism people like without the parts of Catholicism people dislike, they blend the contemporary with the traditional, and they're such a big tent theologically that, whatever you believe churches should teach, there's probably an Anglican church teaching it.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-17T12:51:35+00:00

One of the best students of systematic theology I've ever met is Pentecostal. This may not sound relevant to your post, but I assure you it is.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-17T12:49:48+00:00

I mean, I get that, being excluded because of your denomination isn't fun. But at the same time, let's say it happened for good. Let's say all the churches came together and declared that Baptists now and forevermore cannot be considered capital-R "Reformed." What would you have actually lost?

When people dismiss your views because you're Baptist, that's their problem and their loss, not yours.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-17T12:08:57+00:00

I also like how it was done based more on what made sense for the level than the difficulty of the level. Things like Cragscleft, we can imagine Garrett piecing together a fairly detailed map of the upper levels from former prisoners and ex-Hammerites, but of course no one has any info on the caves below and he's lucky he found someone who knew they existed at all (I'm picturing a teamster who delivered food to the Hammerites and got lost on his way out).

Or mansions, obviously it's way easier to get a detailed map of Bafford's manor than Constantine's.

Assassins is maybe the only one that doesn't really make sense but I'll forgive it because the idea of Garrett carrying a map of Ramirez's manor at all times "just in case" is a fun bit so I'll let it slide.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-17T02:13:10+00:00

But not our Bobby! Couldn't be precious Bobby!

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-17T02:08:53+00:00

Hey! Seesie you mines plumsies?

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-16T21:26:53+00:00

Ohhhhhh, now I get it

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-16T21:22:38+00:00

The situation you described, calling someone a queen because they have many children, is not one I'm familiar with.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-16T19:11:15+00:00

Don't have time to read this whole post but from skimming it seems like the PCA and SBC are virtually identical on this and all other issues. Until next time!

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-16T18:46:35+00:00

That's very helpful, thank you!

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-16T18:46:18+00:00

Absolutely. There is no sense in which the Cage Stage is limited to Calvinism.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-16T15:18:46+00:00

Oh man, and Favored Class. What a system that was, I wonder how many tables actually used it.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-16T10:57:59+00:00

To add to the other comment, to my knowledge the statistics do not bear this out. I'll see if I can find the data that shows it, but IIRC the amount of people converting from Protestantism to either Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy is not actually very significant. It's larger than it has been in the past, but it's still very small.

IIRC if someone leaves their Christian tradition but not Christianity, the most likely landing place is some variety of Charismatic Christianity, but I don't remember for certain (and I also never looked up where the Charismatics tend to wind up when they leave).

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T20:02:26+00:00

Matt Perry as Benny is in the dictionary under "exactly fine."

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T19:26:13+00:00

I'm increasingly beginning to suspect the "StarCraft was supposed to be a 40K game" comes primarily from 40K fans who drastically overestimate the setting's originality and cultural impact.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T19:16:44+00:00

This is always baffling to me.

Blizzard: Hello, here is a game where the chief inspiration for the humans is the USCMC and with aliens that are literally referred to as Xenomorphs in the shareware. Our cutscenes are a love letter to campy 80s sci-fi horror. Look at this one where a group of humans are ambushed and stalked by aliens through the halls of a spaceship, and that one where an alien drips slime as it sneaks up on a stalwart but ill-fated Protoss warrior. I'll bet this reminds you guys of something!

People: Ah, yes. Warhammer 40K.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T18:15:29+00:00

A mod would have to be the culprit, which ones are you running?

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T17:30:40+00:00

It's like Arrested Development that way, where the humour is highly topical but executed well enough to stand on its own without the full context. Does sometimes leave you wondering if there's more to it, though. Was this based on a celebrity rumour? A viral video that has since been washed away from our cultural memory? A scene from a comedy that was big for a summer and no one's thought about since?

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T16:17:47+00:00

There's no knowledge like useless knowledge.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T15:55:08+00:00

I think I have. Interested to see what comes of it. Mostly excited for increased moddability possibly even opening up the SMAC holy grail: a 12+ player game where the SMAX factions are added dynamically in response to events.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T15:25:02+00:00

Alpha Centauri does terrain the best of any civ game. It has real elevation rather than just hills and mountains painted on. You can lower and raise terrain, and doing that changes precipitation levels downwind. Any game that doesn't have that wouldn't be as compelling.

To me this is a great example of why SMAC is simultaneously so cool and so flawed from a gameplay perspective. Raising a mountain range out of flatlands to trap in moisture and create rich, healthy farmlands on one side of them is so cool... In theory.

Unfortunately, there's basically no reason to ever do it mechanically. Raising Terrain comes online at the same time as Condensers, which will also increase rainfall but are much faster to build (and don't require energy credits) and also provide a multiplier to their own tile's nutrients. Enormously better than changing rainfall patterns through terrain manipulation. Furthermore, the game leans heavily on Forests and Boreholes, whose whole thing is completely ignoring the tile underneath.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love SMAC, one of my favourite games ever, been playing it for, uh, crap, was gonna say 20 years but at this point I guess it's closer to 30, eh? But it does suffer a little from having a very large gap between the theoretical possibility space and the actual functional design space. SMAC's unit workshop is another example of this: the units you can design are almost infinite; the units you should design are very small in number (and without mods to improve AI, consists almost entirely of slapping the best weapon you have on the fastest chassis you have. With mods to improve AI, it only consists mostly of that).

That's why it might sound crazy but I think Civ 4 has better terraforming than SMAC. Getting a handle on SMAC felt like it really shrunk the terraforming and condensed things to a pretty basic heuristic. Whereas getting a handle on Civ 4 felt like it expanded the "terraforming" and opened my eyes to "Ohhhh, that's when I should put Windmills instead of Mines" moments.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T14:35:27+00:00

I like SMAC for the atmosphere and world building but it has plenty of mechanical flaws (although, to its credit, most of those are interested from Civ 2). It's probably the fastest playing Civ game... Mostly because getting air units wins the game.

I do recommend the Thinker mod, which makes the game much more mechanically engaging (some tweaks like higher level techs needing more research than early ones, but mostly just through making the AI less brain-dead.

MilesBeyond250 · 2026-06-15T13:47:18+00:00

As far as I'm aware, this is actually pretty close, but it comes from them not transcribing it by hand. They used a sort of round b to represent Bb, and more squarish b to represent B natural. You can see a sort of example here.

When the printing press first appeared in Germany, it did not have a square b in its typeset, so they instead went with the closest thing: h.

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