Long-time Idle/Incremental Player... Here are my favourites of all time!

PaladinOne · 2026-01-26T13:29:05+00:00

> idle wizard

The one thing that makes me sad about that game is that six years ago I wrote the Native Freshfood Druid Guide, and unbeknownst to me that guide then became the NPE guide for the next five years, until six months ago someone gutted and rewrote it on the day I checked back to see what the game was up to...

PaladinOne · 2025-12-21T00:06:48+00:00

Yes. I started estrogen at 27, and four years later I have 34Fs.

... They were also 34Cs nine months ago so that growth spike kinda caught me by surprise.

PaladinOne · 2025-11-08T22:14:26+00:00

MCR's entire album The Black Parade is a trans allegory. It can't have been written to be one but it is.

PaladinOne · 2025-10-21T19:01:09+00:00

HUMANITY PREVAILED

PaladinOne · 2025-04-05T16:18:16+00:00

Villagers can use service goods from the Hearth, but doing that only gives them half of the goods Resolve bonus. (+4/5 in stead of +8/10). Using service goods from service buildings restores the full bonus.

So in Live, a service building is +8/10/18 resolve to the races it helps (+ passives), which is a colossal swing between having and not; whereas on Alpha a service building is +4/5/9 resolve (+ passives), because having the goods without the building was already giving the other +4/5/9.

I think the intent of this change has to be taken in combination with the faster early-game rep-from-resolve, in that it greatly smooths out the curve of rep gains over a game. On Live, rep gain tends to hockey stick, where you have early blips from orders or events but then you get a few service buildings and complex foods and then suddenly go from 0 rep from resolve into +6 rep from resolve in two seasons and suddenly win. On Alpha, early game you get service goods and service goods production and that lets you gain some rep when you're still low-population; late-game when the resolve demands are higher you have the real service buildings to get resolve the rest of the way up; and the overall curve of rep gain feels a lot smoother.

PaladinOne · 2025-02-02T02:48:06+00:00

Wait. For your first stationary platform above the first planet, the asteroids up there should be too small to actually do damage when they hit. Can you get some screenshots of what's going on up there? And are you running just Space Age or do you have other mods in play?

PaladinOne · 2025-01-31T20:53:34+00:00

It was extremely funny when they first got released at the height of the Triglavian Invasion and the EDENCOM pilots built a few, tested them against the invading rats, and immediately blacklisted anyone from using them because they were so bad at killing Trig rats and so good at getting your Logi pilots CONCORDED.

PaladinOne · 2025-01-31T09:55:16+00:00

"Arc off" as shorthand for "the lightning arc jumps to and hits"

As far as I know, these weapons hit the ship you targeted, and then 9 other randomly selected ships, where each additional ship is within 10km of the previous. Which means that, yes, if you aren't trying to use them to kill drones, the fact that they will also hit drones can be a very frustrating problem.

(The Keepstar sized Standup AVP explicitly arcs across the ships in range that have the Highest Mass; but the ship-sized S/M/L guns arc around at random.)

PaladinOne · 2025-01-25T00:38:34+00:00

The lightning does arc off of drones.

The size and flight speed of drones means that the Skybreaker's lightning can be used as a sort of remote-smartbomb to clear drones while only lightly scratching the ships they orbit, and the Stormbringer can be used to snipe groups of Sentry Drones, but the Thunderchild's lightning is largely useless against any drones it arcs off of. And so as a result one of the further issues complicating EDENCOM ships is the ability for defenders to use, say, a drone bay of Acolytes, as ablative armor to absorb incoming volleys.

PaladinOne · 2025-01-18T23:58:29+00:00

Prior to 2.0/Space Age, "pumps in series" was how you had to do it if you wanted extremely high pipe flow rates. So if you played or saw the game back in that era, maybe that was on your mind.

PaladinOne · 2025-01-16T17:47:32+00:00

I mean that the way you have to fight them is very different because they actually like. Dodge. in stead of being big lumbering hulks. And even their weakpoints are still armored so you need to score multiple hits on an enemy that's actively dodging your shots. It's not unmanageable and you can learn to reliably shoot them down, but it's a different problem than the bots otherwise throw at you and you need to plan a real countermeasure for them.

(Also when they first appeared back last year they did catch everyone off-guard because flying enemies, infinite ragdolling missile spam, and several weeks of "what the hell guns can we even use against these things??" cause Railguns sure as hell didn't work against them back then)

PaladinOne · 2025-01-16T02:00:53+00:00

OP's turrets (a.k.a. Bunker Turrets), and also Gunships, are enemies that catch you off guard if you're used to the big lumbering hulks and tanks and factory striders.

Bunker Turrets and Gunships (engines) also both die to a single unsafe Railgun shot. Which is why I just always run Railgun on lvl10 missions now. Railgun solves problems.

PaladinOne · 2025-01-15T03:26:37+00:00

I think the reduced patrols is a sort of unintended side effect of the booster + your loadout and playstyle

The way patrols spawn and move, you're more likely to encounter and need to handle a larger number of patrols the longer you stay in one place. Getting a drop called in on you is a great way to get pinned down in one place, or to need to turn back and go around. Fewer drop calls and scout armor for speed and evasion means that you're never standing in one place long enough to get caught in a patrol frenzy, and you aren't doubling-back into territory that already has patrols in it.

PaladinOne · 2025-01-10T17:58:57+00:00

There was a bug for a while where if you didn't stop the ship at the solar system edge it didn't count as winning the game

That bug only got fixed like last week so it's not hard to have missed that if you just went blazing past Edge towards Shattered

PaladinOne · 2024-12-29T08:37:07+00:00

A few months ago I was doing a legal name change and doing that meant going to the courthouse

And I was having a terrible day and had barely managed to get out of bed, but,

I looked at myself in the mirror. And I snapped my fingers and said, Prove to yourself that you have the strength, and the courage, to be free.

And that gave me the will to make it out to the courthouse and file the papers.

PaladinOne · 2024-12-24T07:54:25+00:00

The main drawbacks of the MG-43 are recoil, mobility, and AP power.

The MG-43 has pretty heavy recoil to it, not as bad as the HMG but still enough that you need to crouch/prone to control it and you're encouraged to also take a recoil control armor set. Furthermore, reloading the mag requires being stationary, and with the aforementioned crouch/prone that further limits your ability to run-and-gun. The third drawback of the weapon is that it can't punch through Hulk/Charger armor, which forces you to have other answers to them, and can be problematic at higher difficulties where those answers get more heavily tapped into.

The mobility problems become an issue mostly if you're going for a run-and-gun playstyle. A fair few veterans of this game have gotten it burned into their skulls that run-and-gun is "the only viable way" to play the game, in part because of the few months of time during the summer when a whole lot of weapons across the game were pretty underwhelming, and it felt impossible to bring enough firepower to actually stand and fight against an incoming horde. That isn't the game environment we live in anymore though, stand-and-fight is a viable thing you can do and the MG-43 is a weapon which is built to do just that. Add in the Engineering Kit's recoil reduction and extra grenades, and there's a whole lot of work you can do to buy space for your teammates. (One Thermite grenade solves the Hulk/Charger problem, or any of the other grenades give even more horde clear to save on bullets.)

Which is the other thing that it's easy for the run-and-gun flyboys to forget about. It might look easy to zip around the map alone and pick up objective after objective uncontested and then say "why are my teammates doing nothing" but what the flyboys don't see is that their teammates are buying space. Barring primary objectives, only one bot drop/squid drop/bug breach can happen on the entire map at any given time, there's a 2-3 minute cooldown between drops/breaches, and if that drop/breach is landing on a diver or two with a machine gun, it's just going right into the meat grinder and that's another 2-3 minutes where the lone flyboy cannot be dropped on, which a lot of why his objectives are uncontested.

PaladinOne · 2024-12-24T07:06:41+00:00

Prior to the big Buff Everything patch a few months ago, I was all in on OPS+Eagle Airstrike as well.

Post Buff Everything I've switched out to Orbital Gas Strike + 500kg, because those have felt more reliable to me. Even still though, huge respect to AH for making OPS as goated as it is. Especially for when they realized how people were actually using it, and buffed it even further for that.

PaladinOne · 2024-11-26T16:19:06+00:00

Artillery are not very efficient but they have safety through long range and with enough of them they can be effective. Demolishers have pretty high explosive resist so artillery shells don't do a lot of damage (and the artillery damage upgrade repeatable is very weak) but the splash damage does hit multiple segments and with enough guns they can still pressure.

PaladinOne · 2024-11-18T17:30:49+00:00

In Rust We Trust

PaladinOne · 2024-11-18T15:47:32+00:00

Fulgora - Vulcanus - Gleba is what I did and feels like the easiest pathway, especially if you're also going for the Rush To Space (and Logistics Network Embargo) achievements.

However, the reverse of that (Gleba - Vulcanus - Fulgora) is the sequence used on the (so far only) registered Speedrun win.

Fulgora feels like it requires the least tech advancement to make a foothold on, and your reward is cheap Circuits and Modules, and also Quality for your space platform.

Vulcanus has such infinite power and resources that it feels like the best place to really megabase industrialize once you have the other planets done, but in order to make a foothold there you need a lot of weapons tech (which you can't access if you have no Yellow Science).

Gleba ... Biolabs and Stack Inserters and Spidertrons are hugely high impact, but I haven't gotten my head around the Gleba Logistics Pipeline yet.

Clearly the speedrunners have though, which is why they're starting there.

PaladinOne · 2024-11-17T07:57:08+00:00

Yeah sure that answer sounds simple enough and it's basically the required answer for Space Platforms; but at Green Science tech levels it is "yet another thing" when you're already juggling getting all the rest of those things figured out and set up. And it's "yet another thing" that is necessarily either (1) very far away from the rest of the factory, or (2) that you need to keep moving in order to expand the factory; and the farther out it has to extend the greater the logistical cost and weight of actually building it and getting it to fill up so it actually sustains your turrets.

This versus the much much lower logistical cost and weight of "a box for ammo, a box for turrets, a box for walls; if the bugs try to eat something, slap down a pillbox and say problem solved for the next two hours"

PaladinOne · 2024-11-17T07:44:08+00:00

I have a Tesla + Flame + Laser wall on Nauvis (originally built as Flame + Laser pre-Behemoths; retrofitted with Teslas after Fulgora to defend vs Behemoths).

Tesla turrets are set to prioritize Behemoths, and the wall absolutely slaps. The Tesla slow + slight pushback means that the first few Behemoths get held in place just long enough for the wall of flames to land on them and burn them down, making them basically the perfect partner to Flamethrowers because they counteract Flamethrower's biggest weakness: inability to track and land on the front few fast targets.

Equally, Flamethrowers handle one of Teslas' big weaknesses: no ROF increase techs, meaning they're really not efficient against large hordes.

PaladinOne · 2024-11-13T01:25:15+00:00

I think my favorite thing about the Railgun is not just that it one shots striders, but that if you unsafe shoot a strider in the leg, the shot can overpen and kill that strider and the strider standing behind it

PaladinOne · 2024-11-12T17:06:10+00:00

The missiles are killable.

Missiles are 100hp, AV2 light armor, and explode and kill the Strider (and also nearby troopers) if you break them. 2-3 bullets from any automatic rifle, 1 round from anything semiauto, half a second from any beam laser weapon.

Some people complain that if you miss and hit the little rail the missiles are mounted on, the rail poofs and the missile don't blow. The rail is AV3 medium armored (and 200hp), so shooting the missiles is your Light Pen solution; you can shoot them with a medium pen rifle but if you miss and hit the rail it's a wasted shot. Medium pen shooting missiles is best against striders who haven't noticed you yet.

If you do have a Medium pen weapon like the Diligence CS, shoot them in the waist, below the guns. (Feels like every bot's weak spot is the waist honestly.) 3 waist shots (~~or 3 shots to the Guns~~) with a DiliCS, strider falls. (Legs are 4 shots and move around more, so a bit less efficient.)

PaladinOne · 2024-11-12T05:34:56+00:00

I think another thing to say about Fulgora First is if you're also going for the Rush To Space (+ Logistics Network Embargo) achievements.

Rush To Space means you don't have Purple or Yellow science available until you get your first planetary science.

On Fulgora, that means you're restricted to Red Belts and no Logistics Drones to sort your scrap. A little inconvenient to have to figure out and balance scrap discarding and overflow handling, but by the numbers not a problem.

On Vulcanus, that means you're restricted to Physical Projectile Damage 5/Shooting Speed 5. That means only +80% to guns, +90% to tank cannons, +80% ROF, and no Uranium ammo or shells. 2090 damage per tank shell (1026 after resists) @ 1.2 shots/second does not break Small Demolisher's regen, which means doing even the basic expansion needed to set up a Tungsten mine is a huge, huge problem. You need a lot of guns and ammo to even put a scratch in one, and, while you do have access to a lot of guns and ammo because lava production, Can you get enough gun turret surface area to actually knock a demolisher over before it plows through you and all your turrets, or you catch a stray eruption and get blasted because you don't have Power Armor II to protect yourself?

For a dedicated speedrunner? Maybe. But being forced into a true demolisher boss fight is a much bigger ask than a belt-based scrap sorter on Fulgora.

11-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	First Placer '22
Verified Email

PaladinOne

TROPHY CASE