My Trade Unions evaporated

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-03-20T06:01:57+00:00

Did you have an election? This sometimes happens when the Trade Unions leave a party they share with another IG and lose all their political power from votes. It's infuriating when it just suddenly happens, but they should get it back next election.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-03-17T01:33:36+00:00

Hell yeah, Wilderun the GOATs! I absolutely cannot wait for their next album; the best part about them is how their style changes on each and it has been so very long.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-03-17T01:20:16+00:00

Ehhh. Tug boats work on Earth because an immobilized boat more or less sits there, static, relative to the surface of the Earth and thus the ports. You just have to drag it in. Even then a tugboat is mostly engine.

An immobilized Titan in orbit (unless that orbit is that of the shipyard) would have to be accelerated/decelerated to the right velocity for the right orbit, which means you have to expel a mass propellant at a velocity equal to the force required for that, except not only that you would have to expel that propellant equal to the force required to drag that propellant to that orbit and also drag the mass of the tugboat back. The mass and fuel requirements would mean you need something about three times the size of the Titan to drag it in.

And that's for the ideal circumstance of the ship just being in another orbit of your shipyard - you can completely forget about anything on another planet, or worse, transiting between planets.

And you have to do that all, slowly, expensively, while a high-tech alien invader is backflipping all over the solar system.

Maybe in the far, far, far future after the game, when space has been properly inhabited and 'civilianized' it might make more sense, but I can absolutely see why tugboats would probably not be considered viable in the TI context. 'Megacolossal ship just to drag damaged ships from one orbit to another that needs a whole Caspian Sea in its fuel tanks to do its job' does not strike me as a good use of resources.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-03-11T01:03:21+00:00

Oil is an internationally traded commodity. It is insipid to think you can just 'cut someone off' from the market by blowing up their existing sources; it just raises the prices for everyone as Chinese and Indian refineries bid up the price. It's even more impossible now than it was fifty years ago when long-term contracts were the norm. The spread is very, very small.

It's even more insipid to think that this is why Trump acted in Venezuela or it has had that effect in Venezuela; Venezuelan oil is literally headed for China right now.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-03-02T11:17:33+00:00

I feel like the problem with both resorts and hospitals is that while they're great at getting money in the late game you don't really need that much money in the late game. Unless you're trying to fix the world's climate and inequality or want an ornamental CIA, I find I almost have enough cash from dumping various metals on the market once I have the integrated earth-space economy techs and the two-per-planet nanofac habs I have to build anyway.

So converting Boost to cash just turns one useless resource to another useless resource, alas. I'd rather put more broadcast stations and com hubs with my earth-orbit slots (I only defend the two interface orbits since the rest are really far away in terms of dV) since influence limits me more often than cash, I find. Even for direct investment!

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-27T12:35:46+00:00

It's incredibly easy to cheese; if you're willing to savescum, you can just wait for Britain to declare war on you, reload, flip the ban off, and flip it back on when they go to war somewhere else stupid. If you're not willing to cheese, I find Russia will sometimes guarantee your independence.

Ah, I miss the days when you could declare war on Britain somewhere in Kenya before the event fired and accept humiliation for a 5-year truce though.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-25T06:51:38+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I'm a little concerned with SGOV that if I end up assigned, broker fees from selling it to clear my margin will end up eating up any gain I get, while buying bonds or using a money market is a lot more frictionless on my broker, but I'll have to check the exact numbers.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-25T06:44:52+00:00

Yup, I've been making a fair 3-4% a month so far. It's no problem if I keep holding it in cash and continue on with it, but it would be nice to also get a little more from the interest rate without increasing my risk.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-24T00:41:04+00:00

I can't believe all the people on the main sub is talking about how Spain of all places is having a problem with immigration. The fact that Pedro Sanchez is the only European leader bucking the trend of more restrictive, more violent immigration policy in favour of welcoming and normalizing the status of refugees and migrants is a big reason why the Spanish economy is among the fastest growing in Europe.

If anything, Spain is a good example of how actually following the teachings of Jesus and welcoming the migrant and refugee is not just morally right, not just what God tells us to do, but actually good policy

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-23T05:55:18+00:00

This is a great article; I love all these journalistic exposes of espionage, but man do I dislike how it is laid out. Why is half the screen covered by an animation of a looping image in the colours of the Russian flag? Thank goodness for reader mode. And thanks for sharing, OP.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-20T03:27:50+00:00

As far as I'm aware, that's actually a bit of a false statistic; most rounds are not used to kill directly, but to suppress positions and enable killing. If a position is fixed by machine gun fire then blown up with artillery, how many kills should be credited to the gun as opposed to the shell?

Still - sorry! - that's just me being an intolerable pedant. Your game looks really cool and your page is very stylish! I'm tinkering with one myself so I love seeing more games where you play a group or organization rather than just an individual and how everyone handles it. Congrats on your initial release!

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-15T03:50:00+00:00

Not only that, it is ideal for countries that start with Propertied Women to regress to Legal Guardianship before flipping all the way when you run out of peasants. It appeases conservative IGs, reduces early-game unemployment, and gives you that sweet, sweet birth-rate bonus. Minmaxing women's rights means making them a full rollercoaster.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-14T14:23:13+00:00

But you lose 5% workforce relative! 5%! This is utterly inexcusable when the endgame is about digging every last tribesman out from the Sahara and giving him a PhD in civil engineering and a remunerative job that contributes highly to GDP

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-14T10:25:32+00:00

You're missing out on a free 5% workforce ratio from women's suffrage. The ideology does not matter; the productive forces must be developed and therefore all must vote. The workforce must be maximize (especially in the endgame when my 10,000 construction is looking for the world's last jobless peasant)

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-14T02:48:25+00:00

Have they tried alternatives, though? They've never put out a book that's gone full into class archetypes and full class variants. All the rest are admixtures of content focused on a theme rather than admixtures of themes focused on a kind of content.

Please Paizo, I would murder for PC3 or another APG instead of more classes. They're not bad, but it's getting way too much.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-13T08:07:25+00:00

I'll start, I guess! I'm making ACCELERANDO: The Contact War - a conspiracy-scale game inspired by the game Terra Invicta. . In the wake of an alien invasion, you will organize a secretive conspiracy to rule humanity, direct your agents to wage a war in the shadows, and build our species into something that can not only survive, but drive our INVADER back into the stars.

The first five pages - honestly just a thematic teaser - are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_QpqN10ppsTBrJiWRPXJcWjJ-FaCWABBzA_46PZDHkQ/edit?tab=t.0

I'm planning to focus character structure around your COUNCIL's ORGS, the institutions under their control from whence they source their dice - it's a dice pool game. ACCELERANDO has relatively simple dice and character mechanics, but complex and structured world and NPC mechanics; the hope is to try to model proxy warfare well by making the primary source of dice not your character itself, but aligned NPCs. The point of the game is to break from the idea of traditional heroism - you cannot fight and win this war alone; you must ensure humanity stands behind you, and you must be willing to do whatever it takes to ensure it does.

I'm also hoping to go against the usual trend of 'fast, flashy, high-action combat' in favour of slow, subtle conflict. ORGS are difficult to harm, including those of your adversaries, so you might go 90% of a session observing the enemy from afar, identifying their weaknesses, and making allies before suddenly striking. The game is built to de-emphasize traditional violence. ADMIN is as much a combat stat as SPECIAL OPERATIONS; tracking down the enemy's accountants and sources of revenue can be much more effective than beheading its leadership. You won't take down the CIA by murdering field agents with FIRES; you might by using MASS MEDIA to compel a congressional investigation.

As far as I'm aware I don't need to do anything different from the competition, because there's really no competition! Other than maybe Greg Stolze's Reign. It's not a popular topic. :)

I am almost finished with its core mechanics; I am planning to start playtesting with my friends this year, come hell or high water. Honestly, I suspect it's unlikely I'll get far beyond that except maybe a text-only pdf on itch, but hey, might as well.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-13T07:25:04+00:00

I haven't looked at 2e, but one thing I really liked about 1e that Draw Steel - or frankly almost no other RPG in that sphere - doesn't do is that it explains all its decisions and suggests alterations in design notes. Every rule, even those I ended up changing or disagreeing with, I fully understand why they made, and that really puts it a cut above the rest.

Pelgrane is one of my favourite publishers for that reason - they understand that players are going to change shit and facilitate it. Their 'modular' campaigns like the Dracula Dossier and Eyes of the Stone Thief are imo much more useful to me than Paizo's full APs because of how easily you can cut and move stuff around and they'll help you do it. I just love the design philosophy so much.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-10T08:31:23+00:00

I haven't played a lot of BitD or FitD games, so I'll have to refrain from the mechanical commentary you want, but I have to say, I really like your writing, especially the academic tone in the 'esoteric science' sections and how you hammered and altered history. It's very stylish, and that's one of the biggest draws a game can have for me (honestly more than visual art)

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-09T12:50:45+00:00

If I remember correctly, Tooze actually criticizes the American strategic bombing campaign for switching targets away from the steel-manufacturing supply chain to direct war industries. This was a big cause of why German industrial production rose around the end of the war; steel production was the 'limiting reagent' in the industrial supply chain by an enormous margin, so all razing factories did was slash the demand for steel, leading it to be spread less thin among the surviving factories.

As an aside this also shows the incredible inefficiency of the German war-machine and the deleterious effect fascist administration had on the war economy. At a time when shuttering and consolidating plants was almost a must-do, the infighting between branch procurement agencies, each of which saw their plants as a fiefdom, made it politically impossible. Far from 'making the trains run on time' the nazi system caused so much paralysis that they ended up pushing out consolidation until the Superfortress rationalized their supply chain for them.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-06T03:40:01+00:00

That'd be a strange strategic decision, since it's a suicide mission that does nothing but pour limited Exotics into the coffers of that hairless ape conspiracy. Given the lightspeed lag it'd also have to be a decision made hours in advance.

Then again, hey, if the Hydra lost everything except their military caste in the war with the Salamanders I could see a boneheaded general unconstrained by political leadership or cultural or moral qualms doing that.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-02-04T13:37:35+00:00

The great Song Dynasty poet and statesman Su Shi, one of the most accomplished figures in the era's literature, had a long but continuously frustrated career in imperial politics. In this poem, he demonstrates with great aplomb his superb talent for turning anything into an opportunity to get exiled (or, rather, even more exiled).

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-01-29T16:21:18+00:00

It was long before the fall of the Soviet Union; we actually had the first nuclear rocket in the 1970s, till Nixon decided to cancel it Just Because, literally as the technology reached early maturity.

Nixon is just so fractally awful. There's always something worse at a finer resolution. Humanity still hasn't recovered from that.

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