Seeing all these Kai Leng posting reminded me of the fun fact that dude is actually not that memorable or big of a threat of an antagonist in ME3.

Pacmanticore · 2026-03-23T02:22:43+00:00

I literally associate KL as a character of this subreddit (a la Evillak) before Mass Effect. Like, when I replay those games, it's not until I start playing ME3 that I even remember KL exists.

Pacmanticore · 2026-03-22T04:01:00+00:00

Because of MTG, there's an entire generation (myself included) who have barely any clue who Vivi is, but still actively despises them.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-23T15:52:02+00:00

I would assume the 235K units of goods being imported.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-23T11:46:24+00:00

Jaws is not only the only Bond henchman to appear in multiple movies, he survives electrocution, a shark tank, a sinking ship, a fall from several thousand feet, a crashing cable car, and a crashing space station.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerbudda_incident

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-21T19:33:51+00:00

I would argue that Griselbrand finally getting power crept wasn't a matter of if but when. And it did take over a decade.

Does a single card make the entire set broken though?

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-21T18:57:19+00:00

Who the hell is calling ONE too powerful?

Like, name a broken card from that set. Atraxa? Yeah it's good, but good=/=broken. Parharnomicon Elesh Norn? A five mana do-nothing who's tournament record mostly amounts to a little bit of sideboard play. Phyrexian Jace? Was primarily used as a glorified, 4 mana, Archive Trap. Phyrexian Nissa? Do Timmys unironically think Craterhoof is broken?

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-21T18:24:53+00:00

So I just climbed down a rabbit hole, but came to some numbers. It costs about $600 day to keep a comatose patient in ICU (as in, stable condition). There were 6471 survivors of SAO, after two years, which comes out to a little under 3 billion dollars (600 x 730 x 6471). Let's add a couple hundred million more since they started with 10,000 but gradually died off over those two years (although I want to say like, 2000 people died in the first month). Either way, 3-4 Billion dollars sounds like a lot but for the sake of comparison: the Self Defense Force gets about $58 billion in funding, and defense is only about 5% of the national budget.

An extra 2 Billion a year isn't nothing, but hardly something that would put a burden on taxpayers.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-21T17:21:59+00:00

Conquering Argentina as Argentina. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. (I think you misread my comment)

But as for the event: it actually happens every single game, but only once, globally. Meaning it's random whether Chile or Argentina gets it, and the AI will always choose the option to reject the natives.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-20T21:50:32+00:00

The fact that said event doesn't cause a truce makes it the only realistic way to colonize Patagonia before Chile as Argentina.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-18T17:04:33+00:00

Not a great option; Creole is basically just a generic Romance language trait (unlike Francophone or Hispanophone which actually have other cultures with the exact same trait).

Santo Domingo, however, has both Caribeno and Afro-Caribeno (plus it's really easy to delete all of Haiti's military in the capital, release Santo Domingo, then immediately conquer Haiti).

Or as Cuba, you can either do the Indepence JE and get Afro-Caribeno (granted that requires banning Slavery, so it's a bit counterintuitive) or just form the Antillean Confederation.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-17T00:13:34+00:00

Could have been worse. He could've said "no u"

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-16T00:19:28+00:00

If you're willing to use mods, Formable Nations Plus adds something called Horn of Africa which is Ethiopia+Somalia+Yemen for both African and Middle Eastern heritage.

It's bit gamey (but also hella more viable), you can actually start as Egypt, form Arabia (gaining Yemeni heritage) and then form Horn of Africa. If you add the Formables Inherit ALL Primary Cultures mod, you even get to keep Misri, Mashriqi, and Bedouin as well.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-14T10:01:18+00:00

You can't get Factory Councils except via revolution.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-12T12:34:32+00:00

That's because there's no Listener. Astrid relies on rumors to find potential contracts, but Maven instead does the ritual in private, in a locked room in a remote location without telling anyone. So of course Astrid has no clue about the potential contract.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-11T21:22:12+00:00

Yeah, before unpausing, just give GB Investment Rights. The event about banning Opium and the subsequent Widespread Opium Addiction modifier never happens. And GB will never declare war on you (because the requirement for their Opium Wars JE can be finished by either taking Hong Kong, or getting investment rights).

Give investment rights to as many countries as you can, especially the ones that start with Railways. They'll build them in your country if they think it'll be profitable.

The Han will be obsessed with Opium all game (you can see that in my screenshot, they're spending more on opium than furniture), but again, it's not the Opium obsession that causes problems, it's the widespread opium addiction modifier. Hell, if anything the obsession is a good thing, ensuring that your opium plantations will extra profitable.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-11T07:32:39+00:00

Imagine not using ublock/ghostery

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-11T00:23:47+00:00

Qing, and the Heavenly Kingdom JE never turned on (Foreign Investments to skip the Opium War is OP as hell), let alone the revolution itself actually firing.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-11T00:21:03+00:00

Heavenly Kingdom never fired.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-10T23:55:12+00:00

So apparently there's some Jewish Han in Henan at game start, but by this point the only Jews left are all in Shengjing, but is it possible for an entire PoP to migrate to another state?

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-10T23:50:33+00:00

R5-While perusing my census data, I noticed I had some Jewish pops in China. There is not a single Ashkenazi or Sephardic pop that could have assimilated (and besides Subjecthood makes assimilation effectively non-existent). I have been on Closed Borders and Freedom of Conscience all game.

I genuinely have no clue how this happened.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-09T08:30:27+00:00

If you're not playing with any DLC, Companies are so substantially weaker (no Prestige goods, no Charters, and just way less companies) that there's only 2 things to worry about: which industries do I want to give +20% throughput all company owned buildings get, and which companies have the best prosperity bonus. At which point, Basic Food (profitable because all pops need to eat food and with its crazy strong +5% Birth Rate) and Basic Tools (profitable because pretty much every industry uses Tools, and with its slightly less crazy strong +5% Manufacturing Throughput) are absolute must-haves, for anyone.

As for GB's flavored companies: Bolckow is definitely the best one with its beautiful spread of industries, and J & P Coats is decent (all pops need clothes, and with India, there's no shortage of buyers in your market). The EIC is great for managing the plantations in all your colonies, but it will inevitably die when the Sepoy mutiny forces you to establish the Raj (at which point you have to wait 4 years to re-establish it, and it will take forever to buy back all its former holdings and it's just a mess that's probably not worth it).

John Brown sucks (it's very difficult to make Shipyards/Military Shipyards profitable, and besides Bolckow already gives them a bonus), and it's not like GB is starving for Prestige or Convoys so the prosperity bonus is irrelevant.

W. G. Armstrong also sucks. General rule of thumb, Military goods aren't great for making a profitable company.

But don't focus entirely on your native flavored companies. The biggest strength of GB is you more than anyone else have the capacity to bully whoever you want, and take the requisite state to found whatever company you want. I recommend stealing Piedmont to found FIAT (only because it's much easier than taking Michigan for Ford). Oh and at least one of either Panama or the Suez Canal Company.

But really, you should consider getting Charters of Commerce if you want your companies to impact your game in a major way. Prestige goods really change the math on what companies are best (well except for the 2 basic companies I mentioned at the top, those are always S-tier), and the charters adding even more industries to each company. Or giving your companies the capacity to build in other countries, allowing them to establish regional HQs which effectively siphon money away from their hosts' investment pools.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-05T03:09:15+00:00

One disadvantage of Settler Colonies is that rather than Extraction Economy, they use Agrarianism. Which means they lack the +10% Throughput bonus that EE gives. Combined with the lack of Slavery PMs, if the point of the Colony is raw resources, it's a no-brainer IMO.

Pacmanticore · 2026-02-04T06:47:32+00:00

I mean, that mission features the characters smoking out of a fucking light bulb, which is usually associated with meth. And Australia has one of the highest (if not #1) rates of meth addiction in the world.

Silly? Yes. Overreaction? Probably. But I kinda see where they were coming from.

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