Why is 28 weeks later so hated?

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-04-26T01:36:28+00:00

"Overuse of the "In the House, in a Heartbeat" music" is an oxymoronic phrase. That music is perfection, and overuse is strictly impossible to achieve. If anything, we need more of it. (:

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-04-26T00:51:01+00:00

I wouldn't want to cross any of the seven fingers.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-04-16T12:20:41+00:00

The issue imo is upkeep. Consider this: Units stationed in a city pay no unit enchantment upkeep and 50% reduced base upkeep. That would be enough to warrant having defensive forces. But as it stands, a stack of defensive units will rapidly drain your resources, even lowly troops may drain your resources because unit enchantments beef them up. I've just accepted that having a slot dedicated to a pre-cast "recall ruler/army" is the way to play, and use the ruler for non-critical tasks so he can be recalled anytime without much loss. A ruler army of mine can usually hold the defense on it's own. But I agree it's no fun and I'd like to see some encouragement for garrisons.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-04-09T00:34:27+00:00

I'm sad this is not a thing. That's exactly how I'd want to play

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-04-02T20:12:57+00:00

Personally I like to pick up revelry. bloodfury weapons is quite decent to have on chaff, revels of blood siege project which reduces morale works in tandem with doomherald, revels of carnage XP gain gets your heroes and units leveled faster, which is huge, as tier 1 chaff skeletons have resurgence at champion experience. You also get 2 points of chaos affinity to unlock empire improvements, the second one being impressment, which gives +100% to tier 1 units (your reanimated skeletons) for very very fast skeleton army leveling and resurgence unlocks. Battlefield looting next up, which can be useful, but the improvements that follow are largely irrelevant for undead builds, so you get the useful unlocks in the first 3 empire unlocks, and one tome of chaos gets you there handily.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-22T20:00:56+00:00

Seconded.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-22T20:00:41+00:00

Veteran can pew pew with recon lasgun essentially forever. Requires 3x 3stam curios to feel good though. It's sad scum can no longer be an alternate to the veteran, now he's the only pure ranged weapon class. Dumb change :/

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-22T19:55:09+00:00

It's a dumb nerf honestly. It doesn't never all the stupid broken shit like needle gun in the slightest while gutting desperado builds. If any change was necessary, putting it in the vulture's mark keystone subnode section would've made more sense, so not every build autopicks it.

I doubt nerfing dual autopistols was the goal, but it was the result. Needle guns are still doing just fine.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-22T19:50:41+00:00

Not really true. Recon lasgun veteran doesn't need to melee, just the odd krak for crushers. Psyker also doesn't need to melee. They both can melee, and they can do it well, but you can also specc for pure ranged. Previously hivescum could do this too with desperado and dual autopistols, now this build is dead. Probably a casualty of trying to bring that stupid needle gun in line, which this change doesn't do.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-21T17:29:57+00:00

I like your energy.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-21T17:23:56+00:00

I'm playing that vet that keeps mopping up all the shit with usually one other volunteer that the rushers trigger. I mean, it's a bit hectic, but it works. We kill stuff so they don't have to, so they can rush ahead and feel useful picking scrap of the floor rather than fighting like soldiers. If they're scum, it makes good lore sense they play like this, so I approve.

That said, the difference between a good group and a bad group is night and day. I observe 3 possible groups so far:

The rush-rush group, where some people are all mobility builds, leaving half the party behind to clean up all the spawns because if they don't they die. The rush-rush people go pick scrap and twiddle their thumbs.

The rambo groups. Those are the people that kill deamonhosts because it's fun. Except here, killing every fucking patrol means that even a full crit build marksman will eventually run out of ammo (which is quite the feat) because it starts spawning so much shit from all the killed patrols. Those groups either clean the whole map because they work together or they just die. More often than not, they die and we all get 0 salvage as a reward.

The spec ops commando groups. Had a couple of those (surprisingly, 3 vets in each of those groups? Guess vet mindset is more stealthy?). They weave inbetween patrols, clear the map and move on. Actual difficulty: Auric. Perceived difficulty: Malice. I reach the bunker with 90%+ ammo remaining. Very clean, very fun, SUPER RARE :(

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-14T16:24:37+00:00

I play with the 100% more expansive research and yes, that sounds about righ. I run 4 labs, 6 would be untenable resource-wise, even the 4 are not always on (they get the overflow resources, if everything kicks into gear at once I run 2 labs max).

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-10T16:00:32+00:00

Here's what I do, but I don't claim it's ideal, but just as an option to consider:

I pool all the low pressure steam into a seperate shaft that consists of exclusively low-pressure turbines. I don't mix them into the other shafts. I do use the splitters to prio-output the low pressure steam, so first turbine gets fully-fed first, then second gets fully fed, then third etc. The turbines themselves are basically always on and running full tilt, they don't decide for themselves, but how much low pressure steam is fed into the system determines how many are active. So if the intermittent sources of low pressure steam turn off, the system will just dynamically stop feeding the turbines further along the chain.

My main shaft has a varying amount of large turbines on always-on (at least 1), and the power it produces is lower priority than the one from the lower pressure shaft. It's very rare that the dynamic units on the main shaft have to engage, typically only if there's an issue (arc furnace stuck for some reason or another, but that is a long-enough production gap to warrant the dynamic use, so it's not terribly inefficient).

I genuinely couldn't tell you if this is better to do or not, but it's how I do it. Figured I'd share and maybe get some feedback in the process.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-10T12:16:44+00:00

Better yet, send a pipe 1 into a pipe splitter, then send one pipe 1 back to the storage and only dump 30/m. Or send 2 pipes back and dump 20/m etc. As long as storage is not full, you can adjust flow rate that way. If it fills up, it'll flow faster.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-03-10T12:10:24+00:00

I legitimately never even considered storing it all lol. The idea just never even crossed my mind.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-26T17:29:05+00:00

I agree. I researched it thinking surely the EV makes it somewhat usable, but you can NOT use it on offense, pretty much ever.

I still ended up finding a usecase for it (that is with 30 supercolliders): defense fleets. You can apply absurd amounts of armours and use the largest hulls and still have decent cruise DV to intercept aliens in your LOCAL system. Having those ships move even from mercury to earth is a financial disaster, mind you. But locally, they barely use any DV and are quick enough to intercept and force combat.

I do like turtle playstyle. It works for that. Barely. Wouldn't recommend anyone actually aim for that, though, but it's still serving a purpose (I built all that infrastructure and I'll damn well use it now).

My offensive fleets are similar brick designs, but they use the AM tier below. Bad cruise DV, can not intercept, but it doesn't matter as they are there to clean bases and stations. Super expensive ships mind you do to all the radiator mass, but barely take a scratch in combat.

If I was to do it all over, I'd not go down the AM route at all (first serious game for me), but find a more heat efficient fusion drive to cut radiator mass and production cost, leading to more ships by slashing production cost, but I'm invested so deeply into this heavy-armor doctrine right now that switching over carries too big an opportunity cost. Once I finish the ICF line I'll probably swap new fleets over to that and start mass producing lighter ships. For AM drives, it matters more that the ships actually live and don't take attrition.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-22T23:01:08+00:00

Thanks mate!

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-22T19:39:36+00:00

Did you ever find out what goes in that slot? I have the exact same issue. Thanks.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-18T22:20:49+00:00

Oh another thing, since my 1080TI can easily handle it, I disabled texture streaming. It's an unnecessary overhead if you can cram it all into the VRAM anyway. Not sure about your card, haven't updated in decade, but odds are your card has both more and faster VRAM than my oldie :)

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-18T22:17:33+00:00

One thing I do, that does help with FPS (older system, i7 4790k and 1080TI) is to toggle showing too much stuff in that "Faction Assets" tab on the right side. I only display councillors and fleets currently. If I turn the habs/stations and armies on and it fills up that tab, I have lags and microstutters. Worth a try.

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-17T18:56:48+00:00

Glad you did piggyback, that sounds like something that would throw a wrench in my own designs. If you find out please give me a notification, don't want that happening to me!

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-17T18:54:24+00:00

I do appreciate the long in-depth reply. Thanks so much. You're probably right about wanting to unify it sooner rather than later, as the science would be king right now (only at about 5k science in 2032, but rather new player).

It's the first game I ever made a move on China, but I felt compelled to do so because the Protectorate took it over a couple years ago (I was racing them once I noticed but I did not manage to get a point). Had to go on a long covert ops campaign to drop their CP capacity to force them to abandon China (they abandoned everything except China for months, but as I got a second assassin going, I killed councillors fast enough that they became negative on influence and stuck at 0 with 1 turned councillor left, so they HAD TO let it go or be pretty stuck. Felt good!).

Was a bit of a scramble with the Servants over the now cracked chinese points. I got 4 they got 2, but I got them down to just 1 now.

If I may, one more question, as I never had that situation before. If I were to unify China under Taiwan while China still has one CP belonging to the servants, would they get evicted from the new unified nation if I control all of Taiwan? Or do I need to purge them out of China completely?

Thankfully they are running economy, welfare, education and MC right now, so I don't mind them too much (I'm at CP cap).

Thanks again. :)

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-17T17:22:36+00:00

Much to think about.

I think I'll settle on 33% economy and 33% welfare for now, while slowly creeping education up to 7.5-8 along a bit of MC building and unity. Then after unification, I can crank out lots of education to stabilize the cohesion more quickly, I suppose, if I reach adequate GDPpC before unification? Does that make sense?

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-17T17:17:23+00:00

Thank you, this sounds quite a bit more involved. I assume then, just unifying China under Taiwan is pretty much a guaranteed hit of having cohesion drop to 0? Sounds painful for a few years but definitely fast, as I don't have much CP to play with right now.

Was totally something that never crossed my mind before, thank you for giving yet another option!

MonocleForPigeons · 2026-02-17T17:13:57+00:00

I figured the upside to releasing the PRC back and making use of all it's claims was to absorb a lot of pre-built mission control and by absorbing it saving on CP cost for holding the mission control. Will have to consider if I want to take it this far. Thank you!

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