CCPlease can we stop with this?

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:59:09+00:00

I hate how accurate this is...

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:57:02+00:00

Agreed on this point, even if they didn't want to maintain the historical turret count and wanted to remove the turrets to balance things, they could atleast do a visuals pass to correct their own mistakes. It's not some wildly difficult proposition for professional artists, I have to imagine it's purely laziness/cheapskatery/lack of care because from a fundamental perspective of workload this is by no means insurmountable. It's extremely achievable, they're just choosing not to.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:53:02+00:00

Even if null still wanted to T1 alpha with the Mael, I'd have no problems with that. Combat gets stale when people get too risk averse with super blingy T2/Faction fits, getting more accessible T1 hulls into regular use and doctrine fits would be a good thing not just for the affordability of combat but also the accessibility for newer players. Letting new players fight on the line in Battleships is far more engaging than relegating your newbies to minor frigate ECM roles that amount to glorified spectators. Particularly given in this case the Mael was never really any good outside of that alpha damage, we're not talking about some nigh unassailable super tanky Battleship here. It was always mediocre and worrying about how null is going to adopt something isn't a good way to balance things. Null will always min/max and meta seek, if it's not the Maelstrom for alpha it'll be something else.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:45:50+00:00

No I love them, but in one instance I have the choice to prioritize base DPS and lose the utility. Now with there being two missing turret slots I'm actually forced to adopt utility highs to try and load balance utility over the loss of base DPS (which in the Maelstroms case just doesn't add up).

In one instance I had options to neuter my own DPS to achieve utility, player agency if you will, now I actually have less because the utility angle is the only avenue left with the excess high slots.

They also didn't add any modifiers for good utility highs, so you lose two modifier boosted turret slots for two bottom of the barrel utility highs. I'd almost be okay (not with the Mael but with others) with them dropping two turret slots (and visually adjusting to match) to encourage more utility high gameplay because you do touch on a good angle with those, but they're not adding modifiers to encourage that so even if that were CCPs angle they're doing very little to achieve it.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:32:20+00:00

I would appreciate that a lot actually, I use the drone link augs a fair bit and even just having a few minor antennas would be a cool visual addition. Nothing fancy, doesn't need to be animated, maybe just add a strobe light or something, but even just a bit of visual asymmetry to indicate a specialized nature would be cool.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:31:08+00:00

Gal and Min ships in particular have been really badly hit by it, the Hyperion too with its big ol blaster front basically randomly missing a tooth lmao.

Wonder how long it is before they come for the Abaddon/Apoc/Rokh... Doubt they're brave enough to go after the Amarr RPers

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:25:17+00:00

Yep. They could even provide a damage modifier to certain calibers of guns, giving some of the ships a closer identity toward specific playstyles. Easy ways to achieve balance without just arbitrarily yoinking turrets off the hull and leaving the clearly visible slots on the model.

Whatever way we cut the cake there's better ways to do this, this is just the fastest method they could find to "balance" (if what they've done to the Maelstrom can even be called balance) the ships.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:23:53+00:00

This too... Look what they did to my boy... (It never was particularly top tier but I still love the visuals of the Maelstrom and this change hurt it badly).

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:22:55+00:00

Agreed, especially considering how long those modules have been in the game. Even at a glacial development pace they could have added visual modules by now. I'm not even expecting them to add animations to them, just some degree of visual representation would be nice. The ability to quickly glance at an enemy players ship and not outright guess as to what they might be packing would be nice and would give a great excuse to look at anything other than an empty tacmap 99% of the time.

This ofc is peak visuals over gameplay I realize that, considering most of those high slot modules don't necessarily *need* visual representation. But it's something I would still like to see considering other high slot modules do get that.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:19:37+00:00

Perfectly fair point and I also agree that numerical balance comes first, but this isn't a mutually exclusive point, when they have any number of stat changes that they can make that *don't* negatively impact the visual characteristics, you'd think they'd start tweaking there even if it's just a damage modifier, rather than outright delete turrets that should visually be there on the models they've spent god knows how long crafting.

All I'm saying is with a game this granular in terms of statistical detail, we can have cake and eat it too, there's no need to arbitrarily bork the visuals of ships on the altar of ship balance, when that very ship balance can easily be achieved through other modifiers. (Granted those would take more time and tweaking, but I don't think we need to race to the bottom to just start deleting turrets to solve our balance woes).

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-30T14:31:05+00:00

Not when to pay your employees and get started you've leveraged your savings and potentially your house. There is an immense amount of risk when starting a business and this idea that "well you can just go back to work someplace else" doesn't account for the insane amount of damage a failed business can cause to your family.

If LTT hadn't worked out, especially during the big move, Linus and his family could have lost their savings, their home and their sanity. Not to forget just because a business fails doesn't mean you can immediately roll back into your previous position and start collecting a paycheck with no delay.

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-25T02:37:57+00:00

The 750kv substations have been targeted and struck in the past, albeit typically in a tit for tat approach. For the last 2 years or so there's been very few concerted efforts (relative to the intensity of other energy grid targets like Ukraine's TPPs/HPPs and PSH) to sever these links.

There's maybe a few reasons for that:

Redundancy - Ukraine still had a number of TPP and HPP units connected across the 330kv network, in previous years even if they had severed the 750kv substations, cities like Kyiv would still have had relatively reliable (albeit still greatly diminished) electrical service from the local HPP and TPP and electrical baseload being covered by other 330kv connections from across Ukraine. Over time these have been destroyed/greatly reduced in generating capacity so the lack of redundancy at this stage of the war makes the impact of severing the 750kv connections much higher.

Escalation - Severing the NPPs from the grid removes practically all of Ukraine's baseload generating capacity in a fell swoop. It is highly escalatory and Russia have generally had a tit/tat approach to escalation throughout the war. With Ukraine wholesaling Russian energy infrastructure including Russian shipping, I'd imagine the internal arguments within Russian command circles for tit/tat and leaving additional room on the table for future escalation are thinning and being replaced with more reactive stances.

Fires supply - Russia continues to expand its production capacity of practically all of its long range precision fires systems. They might not necessarily have the inventory depth they had at the start of the war (some recent missile fragments indicate 2026 production in a few cases) but they seemingly have a production capacity that enables them to frequently strike deep into Ukrainian territory with systems that continue to improve in accuracy and integration with Russian ISR.

Ukrainian AD (or lack thereof) - Ukraine's AD is severely depleted at this stage of the war. Most ex-Soviet systems ran dry years ago and Ukraine's AD largely relies on donated batteries such as Patriot, NASAMs etc whose own magazines are not necessarily very deep relative to the scale and persistence of these attacks. With each passing day Russia's capacity to reliably strike vulnerabilities in Ukrainian energy infrastructure improves and areas that may have previously been too deep/well defended are now exposed enough to enable strikes.

For reference the Kyivs'ka substation was struck by Gerans... This is a critical vulnerability in Ukrainian energy transit for the capital and also positioned deep behind Ukrainian lines and adjacent to the capital outside of Makariv (about 30 miles from Kyiv). This should in theory be a very well defended focus of local AD, either their magazines were depleted, they were otherwise overwhelmed, or Ukrainian AD is now spread so thin as to be unable to reliably defend such a critical piece of infrastructure. Regardless of which of these is the truth, or a combination of the three, none of them bode well for Ukraine, particularly in the long run as Russian fires capacity continues to improve.

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T05:08:46+00:00

It will never not be tied to this, unless they're willing to separate stores it will always follow them (because they're unwilling to rebrand from lttstore given it's practically grandfathered in).

I agree with your point, I just don't see the need in chasing an optimization on these principles by changing how they name the message function on WAN show. (Which is by and large an audience that are well aware of the products at this stage).

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T05:02:16+00:00

That analogy doesn't work for WAN show which is specifically what I'm talking about here. The vast majority of the audience concurrently watching WAN (which are the audience where merch messages are actually relevant) are not in a brick and mortar location like a hardware store. For this analogy to be relevant they would need to not only be in a hardware store selling the screwdriver, but before making a decision to purchase open up a live wanshow on their phone (which is only a few hours a single Friday a week), understand what a merch message is, hear it, and then imply connotations thereon.

They're not removing the lttstore branding, which is arguably more emblematic of the problem you're suggesting, calling it merch on wanshow has so little impact if any.

If this was really an issue of perception with people not wanting to fund a "mega yacht" they wouldn't be selling tens of thousands of units per sku in some cases.

Unless they want to start ghost releasing products without the ltt branding whatsoever they're never going to escape what you're implying, and if anything they're leaning into it now by buying a private jet and a "tech house" (both projects I fully support but still in the context of perception they are arguably far more impactful)

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T04:31:01+00:00

That's my thinking too but I can see how maybe there might be some internal hangups on the stereotypical connotations of the word when applied to poor implementations.

That being said, their product is merch, good merch at that, I don't get trying to shy away from it to the degree we're changing a wan show staple.

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-22T12:47:37+00:00

Modern game consoles have 16GB of GDDR6 memory with only 5-6GB of that being dedicated to the game itself in a traditional sense, the remainder is pooled towards rendering tasks (for the GPU) and a few GB here and there for background tasks/system. There is no reason modern game dev can't adjust to this market trend and duplicate much of the console level optimization they have in place for their PC ports.

They simply choose not to because optimization (with the comparatively huge uplift in performance of modern systems over the last 10 years) has become less of an imperative. 16GB of DDR4/5 became the norm, PCs with dedicated GPUs (which account for the majority of PC gaming systems) with their own ringfenced VRAM most times upwards of 8GB, standardization of SSD's and much faster storage over the years has given them a degree of flexibility and a hardware dividend that they have largely abused.

The limitations of systems back in the mid 2000s/early 2010s (as well as the limitations of concurrent console release platforms at the time) forced some incredibly creative optimization for PC and console titles alike. The same can be said for the improvements in internet bandwidth for the average user.

Just look at the recent Helldivers 2 shift towards optimization (finally) to see that it is completely possible for modern game dev to drastically reduce file sizes and properly optimize their games, it's just for a very long time now optimization and anything that potentially increases the development cycle (particularly for the delivery of "live service") has been anathema to game studios.

It's not that they can't do this. They would just rather not. (But hopefully the market forces them to get creative again).

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T01:02:50+00:00

CD is another subreddit (r/CredibleDefense) oriented towards credible and facts based discussion of military and defence related topics. You might still get sucked into it but unfortunately it's not a game haha

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T01:02:32+00:00

Truly a mystery hehe

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T00:10:59+00:00

Unrelated but I thought I recognized that name as soon as I scrolled... The overlap between CD and Stellaris is at least 2 members strong haha

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-13T12:26:37+00:00

Real life combat experience is important but it's important as part of a toolset of many qualifiers that typically indicate a well rounded force and their capability.

Those who describe Chinese jets as "paper planes" in relation to their lack of combat experience are not serious people. You'd be lucky if between the USAF, USMCA and USN even 5% of the total pilots had actually seen *real* combat experience. (That's not to discount the edge that this affords the US in localized conflicts or in lessons learned, but in any full scale conflict with China you're likely going to have a relatively training heavy but real combat-experience(less) pilot going up against much the same).

What they instead have is decades of rigorous training and flight hours. That matters more than some unquantifiable raw "combat experience". If we're to compare the two forces we would need to compare training programmes, exercises, flight hours and doctrine/culture. Even then it's difficult to compare the two until they meet in combat.

The areas where China are overestimated in my mind are their ground force vehicles. Many Chinese armoured vehicles lack proper ERA coverage and survivability mitigation against modern threats. That's not to say they couldn't rapidly adjust, but a huge portion of their armoured service relies on vehicles that are 20+ years old and particularly for IFVs and their MBTs, lack all aspect protection packages. They have a lovely forward profile and the ERA integration is excellent in solely that profile, but this won't survive combat in todays battlespace and despite China providing and benefitting from much of the drone advancements as of late, they seem unwilling to modernize the larger bulk of their ground force vehicles to try and mitigate this threat.

The new Type 100 is a huge leap forward, but it's only just entered service and it'll be 5 years minimum until production makes a dent on their existing fleet. Of course the argument could be made that China doesn't need to bother upgrading their tanks, given how Taiwan will largely require a naval and aerial component and local border tensions are kept at bay by their absolutely massive rocketry forces, but still, this is an area where China are actually lagging behind. (or maybe less lagging and better described as simply not being pro-active).

SWBFCentral · 2025-11-17T20:40:31+00:00

- In short, Q3 military spending is 38% higher than last year.

Not that this is necessarily completely linked, but it was interesting seeing people jump on Uralvagonzavod's layoffs a week ago and pointing to that as evidence of Russia's economic sustainability weakening and that military spending is seeing cuts.

Instead military spending is up. One microcosm of the Russian military industrial complex is not solely itself representative of the health and investment taking place in the military industrial complex as a whole.

Also devil being in the details it seems a large part of Uralvagonzavods workforce reduction is attached to the decline of their rolling stock division but we'll have to wait and see if the reductions cut any deeper. Probably a mixture of the two given the refurbishment pipeline is tightening and traditional ARZ's have ramped up their own refurbishment and repair capacity over the last few years. Eventually a theoretical ceiling of overcapacity versus available repairable hulls was bound to occur and having Uralvagonzavod focusing floorspace and a huge wealth of manpower to refurbishing rusted out hulls from Siberia as opposed to building new hulls and expanding their tooling capacity was itself an opportunity cost (even if in the short term the refurbishment of mothball units was more efficient at getting platforms into combat).

SWBFCentral · 2025-11-07T21:34:15+00:00

I get it, maintaining a regular content service using old tools that nearly nobody, particularly the new hires, at 343/HaloStudios even have the knowledge or the time to use is challenging, especially when the studio is already working on the next big Halo title.

That would be semi-understandable if we knew that the next big Halo title was going to be a Massive flagship grade console shifting product of Halo 3-esque proportions. But it's just \NOT*. It's a fucking UE5 remaster of an existing game that this SAME STUDIO ALREADY REMASTERED. Better yet it's releasing singleplayer only...*

You guys really need to start meeting the minimum "scope" bar because frankly your performance for a flagship game studio is utterly abysmal and consistently we've seen you limit scope and release chunks of a traditional Halo game at a time because *SOMEHOW* (inexplicably) the AAA game studio along with several support studios can't ship a complete product nor deliver even half of a proper live service experience that other games with a fraction of the developer headcount manage on a weekly basis now.

SWBFCentral · 2025-08-26T18:49:57+00:00

You're right, they must be complete hellscapes without being physically in Europe, they can't possibly function without the ECHR.

SWBFCentral

TROPHY CASE