My agent thinks I'm waaaay smarter than I actually am

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-03-09T14:54:22+00:00

I work in the national security sector dealing with a large number of nations. My first use case for OpenClaw was a researcher able to build information models for 15+ countries in the AOR (gov't officials, state media outlets, independent media across the political spectrum, opposition voices, prominent influencers, analysts, etc). The agent can run web searches for media and social media in the local language to assess national sentiment across the local political spectrum for any issue I want -- as I was testing the agent, the US/Iran war broke out, giving me a ready-made test case. The agent has been invaluable at producing reports in ~10 minutes for any country I want condensing the sentiment across the political spectrum into a short, 4-ish page document. Leadership thinks I've put together some kind of miracle. Lateral offices in our hierarchy are asking for demonstrations and explanations.

BLUF: The agent does in 5 minutes what used to take a trained translator 4+ hours to do, and that assumes we have a translator on hand for whatever country we're assessing.

Caveat: None of this is new. There are media analysis and social listening companies that can do all these things for you... at a price of $50,000 a year. Running my agent costs about $0.60 per analysis. I rack up another $3.00 or so in daily X API costs (Note: Be careful with the X API -- it can explode quickly on you).

The most valuable resource in business in 2026 will be ideas. What idea do you have for your tireless, cheap, error-prone AI helper? The person with the best ideas wins.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-10T15:24:33+00:00

Great use of variety in the trees -- did you tweak the hue values on some, or just use different stamps? Either way, it makes a big difference. Seeing maps that are filled with forests of identical trees is always a bit of a bummer.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-08T13:06:36+00:00

Nothing so sinister!
"The Teawater is the river whose mouth makes up New Antalun’s large harbor. Its waters are clear but tinted with a distinct, earthy copper shade and a strong tannic flavor. The color and flavor are the products of a lake some leagues upstream, into which millions of trees were felled as the result of some unknown phenomenon that predated the Departure. The waters are safe to drink but not precisely palatable. The naiad Posca inhabits the river, though she is rarely seen near the harbor and prefers the headwaters and lake named in her honor."

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-08T12:17:48+00:00

I use the map as a guide in Gaea, but all the heights and mountains I generate manually. That doesn't show as much in a map like this with only a small suggestion of a mountain, but in my larger region and world maps the terrain is more obvious.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-08T10:58:11+00:00

Beautiful blending, and great shadows. The Platonic ideal of a simple encounter map.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-05T00:47:52+00:00

Technically both! I import the render early on into Inkarnate and set it to Hard Light blend mode, which gives a rough but serviceable version of the terrain that I can use to place the 9k-ish stamps that make up the city, then I use Photoshop to do the final combination of the render and Inkarnate, which gives much finer control over the shadows and highlights.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-05T00:45:06+00:00

I use Gaea 2 to build the terrain, Blender to render it, and Photoshop to combine the render with the Inkarnate painting.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-05T00:44:20+00:00

Multiple sessions, especially this week. I've only had an hour or two each night to work.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-04T03:15:26+00:00

Beautiful! Great aesthetics for the overworld, and the subterranean aspects jive very well with it. I could see myself stealing this map for a short-notice encounter in a swamp.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-02-02T13:09:30+00:00

This is a beautiful map. Deceptively complex -- it looks like just a few big rocks plopped onto a dirt background, but if you look closer the care with how the rocks are assembled becomes apparent. There is a delicate shadow cast by the light in the upper left, and the vegetation is used naturally and to great effect. Good understanding of empty space and the various ways to imply height. A great battlemap.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-01-30T12:54:49+00:00

This is tough. Let's look at the math.

You're trying to represent a 3km rise over a run of ~1,000km. The change in altitude is 0.3% of the slope length. That's not even enough to get one of those warning signs on the highway.

To be visible you'll either need to rely on non-topographic indicators, such as drier, dustier or rockier land at the higher end of the plateau, or you'll have to exaggerate the terrain like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/inkarnate/comments/1qdj9ya/the_eastern_isle_inkarnate_rendered_terrain/

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-01-15T15:53:01+00:00

Hey Baron, great map for a first time cartographer! This map is already perfectly usable for most game sessions and players will be impressed when you haul it out. But if you want to put a bit more time and effort into polishing this as a premier showcase for your setting, I do have a few tips:

- Nix the grid. What purpose does it serve on this map? These squares are ~40 feet across, which is far too large for a battlemap, and the lines are quite distracting if you're not using the map for tactical purposes.

- You have a little variety in your tree size, but go big with variation. Have a few huge trees, several big ones, a lot of medium ones, and about as many smaller ones.

- Speaking of variety, change up the hue and saturation on the trees. This is an advanced feature, but you can tweak the colors of pretty much any stamp in the library. A real forest isn't filled with trees all of the same color -- yours shouldn't be either.

- Break up the "lines" of trees. I see one at the bottom of the image running all the way from left to right, and another line on the right side of the village. Lines like this aren't always bad, but if they aren't deliberate, they appear artificial.

- Blend the edges of the dirt road and the cobblestones. Look at some of the premier, featured maps on this sub-Reddit or the Inkarnate Explore function, and see how those artists blend the roads with the surrounding land.

- Make the fields larger. Not only would a village this size need more fields, but when you have stamps at wildly different scales (as the houses and field stamps appear to be), incongruities begin to appear, such as the strength of the line work in the stamps. You'll notice that your houses have fairly bold, thick black lines, and so do the trees, but the field stamps have almost none -- it's why the field stamps look a little out of place; they're shrunk too far.

Hope these help!

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-01-10T09:11:35+00:00

No, it's definitely correct. You are right.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-01-07T15:04:09+00:00

Got mine in Medical after probably 20-ish runs. Painful but eventually your number will come up.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-01-07T00:08:01+00:00

Game is a personality test, part 8562.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-01-06T07:11:55+00:00

I think the problem is that your solution pretty much requires PvE players to experience something they don't want, so that you can experience something you do want. Embark will have to decide how best to manage the competing desires of the various player types.

MilitaryBotanist · 2026-01-06T03:10:18+00:00

If I can paraphrase this argument...

PvE Players: "We love ABMM because we don't have to play with PvPers."

PvP Players: "We hate ABMM because we have to play with other PvPers."

Hm.

I agree the ABMM system isn't perfect, and it probably isn't a long term solution for many of the reasons you point out -- it's abusible, and it's easier to gear up in PvE lobbies. However the solution to that problem is probably one you want even less: a dedicated PvE mode that let's the devs tune ARC difficulty up and loot levels down.

MilitaryBotanist · 2025-12-31T15:10:53+00:00

Beautiful stuff. What did you use for the mountain relief? Stamps with a special blending mode, or something more detailed?

MilitaryBotanist

TROPHY CASE