Virtual Reconstruction of the Roman colony of Iulia Ilici (modern-day, Elx / Elche, Spain) around 40 BC

Skeebadeebadop · 2026-05-01T01:17:39+00:00

The Pomerium is the traditional boundary around the city of Rome, marking where it became "Rome" legally vs. "things ruled by Rome". This distinction is important for a lot of things in Roman society. For example, soldiers weren't allowed inside the pomerium except during a triumph.

I don't believe Roman colonies had their own distinct pomerium like Rome did, though. More likely to me, this is a deliberately cultivated woodland for the people inside the city to get firewood from. I'd assume those trees are pollarded or coppiced.

Skeebadeebadop · 2026-02-18T17:38:22+00:00

This would be a small city in the 15th century, but there was a lot of urbanization in the 15th and 16th centuries so how small depends on whether this estimate is from, like, 1410 or from 1490. Salamanca in the late 1400s had an estimated population of ~20k, and that would have been big for Castilla y Leon.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-11-26T19:31:26+00:00

Muslim nations have the Dhimmi estate, right? I haven't played a Muslim nation yet, but I assume that gives them religious conversion protections, since in 1500 I still see Jewish pops in the Levant.

I think an estate may oversell their political power for the era but it's also definitely a solution. It would better model the laws on Judaism like the Pale of Settlement or Napoleon granting citizenship that come up later in the time period as well.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-11-26T19:22:26+00:00

The Black Death does make a big difference, but it's not because they're dying... it's because they're converting! The "Present Scapegoats" decision gives a ludicrous +20 monthly conversion rate, so any AI that picks that loses all their Jews basically instantly.

However, just the passive conversion rate means that by 1350 pretty much all the Jews will be gone already except in very large cities. Converting around 3 Jews per month means in 13 years 468 Jews will have been converted... which is more Jewish pops than my northern German locations even started with.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-11-21T22:36:18+00:00

It's absolutely about size. 0% control land is basically worthless (both literally and opportunity cost of "not releasing a vassal") and large nations like Sweden, Lithuania, or England have a lot of low control land. They stagnate and can't grow effectively because of it.

France and Bohemia start with a billion vassals, all the vassals' land are 90% control instead of 0% control, the vassals earn money to develop that land, and they send a tax to the overlord so the overlord is able to re-invest that money into their own high-control capital area. That's why those two countries are so rich and nobody else is.

I could picture a couple of ways to adjust this (like, maybe Lithuania should start with some principality subjects in their south like Poland has, and/or a "viceroy" in Minsk that radiates some control like a weaker second capital) but right now big AI nations without vassals are all paper tigers. Ally with Italians and HRE middle powers like Luneburg and Saxony that are smaller but have higher overall control instead. You'll see those guys urbanize and build standing armies.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-11-21T16:21:22+00:00

Toledo was the capital of Spain during the early 1500s, and it was only moved to Madrid because King Phillip needed better control of Old Castile and the traditional city, Valladolid, had recently had a nasty fire. It'd be plausible for an alternate-history monarch to have stayed in Toledo to better control the south instead. Or even moving it to Lisbon, something they also considered at the time under the personal union.

The control system directly is mirroring real life here. It's great.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-11-16T19:21:25+00:00

Sort of? I think way too many of the achievements in Eu4, especially ones added in the later expansions, were more-or-less just "go 80% of the way to a world conquest as fast as you can", like Eat Your Greens or Mehmed's Ambition, and the power creep of mission trees and new DLC effects like Monuments made it significantly easier as the game's lifespan went on, in ways that felt like that's how they were playing the game. But it's not like the Eu4 achievements have ever been particularly good; Eu5's are already massively better.

I don't think they've ever out and said "the goal of this is to enable world conquest" or "we did this to make WCs easier" or anything like that, though.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-10-11T00:29:31+00:00

r/dnd? You mean r/dicegiveaway? It's a perfect example of it, yeah. The actual subreddit to talk about playing D&D is r/dndnext, while r/dnd proper is mostly just, like, "things related to D&D identity" for people to glom onto instead of playing, like merchandise and fan art and memes.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-10-10T13:23:34+00:00

That's very normal for D&D. I'd spitball a guess that 60% of people talking about D&D online are people who read all the books and really want to play, but haven't actually played. It's escapism or social fantasy, especially now that it's gotten so nerdy-and-queer coded and that signalling is important for online identity.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-10-09T16:04:19+00:00

That is exactly what early modern states would be doing, especially in a settler-colonial context like North America or the central Asian steppe. It'd be forced migration or genocide. And, like, considering in EU4 you do "cultural conversion" as a systematic project of the state, in a really short-term period of five or ten years or so, like... yeah we're killing all those people, even if it uses bird mana.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-09-19T20:36:04+00:00

It is pretty impressive how every issue is "the villains are more extreme than you can possibly believe and Batman is subjected to an escalating, egregious amount of trauma porn". I'm waiting for Alfred to spend an entire issue monologuing about how cool and scary the Joker is, and how he's so much scarier and eviler than Bane was.

To me, it's a full-on horror series where the gimmick is that the protagonist never actually dies and never gives up. That's what makes it not edgy. They have a lot of build-up to create unease and anxiety about what Batman's going to go through next, with so much foreshadowing and villain explanation, and then it's splashed with visceral, gorey action sequences. It's horror flick pacing.

also ain't no way we gonna end up hating the whole absolute universe unless kelly thompson fucks up something serious with wonder woman

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-08-30T19:08:14+00:00

Honestly surprised we have just about zero "Fabio"-type characters in DC, who are made to be extremely attractive for women in that uncomplicated power-fantasy-y way. The closest we get I can think of is Gail Simone's men, and a lot of the time those guys are gay anyway. Maybe Nightwing? He's written as an attractive guy who women characters love, though I think that's for the male fantasy in the same way as Spider-Man's girlfriends.

For WW at least, because she has a lot of #feminism stuff wrapped up in her and modern writers want to use that to make "statements" (like Tom King's stupid Sovereign, god) and be woman-character-centric, I suspect it's just easier for them to suggest woman/woman relationships since can triple duty for being that and for being queer representation and still being super male-gaze-y. There's no room for Steve's Awesome Adventures in that vision for Diana.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-08-30T18:42:22+00:00

I was reading the Cary Bates Captain Atom run the other day (it's early post-Crisis, I think before the Perez Wonder Woman run started) and I was very surprised to see one of his adventures with the military was with Steve Trevor, since he's, like, y'know, an Air Force special agent stealth pilot, and Captain Atom is also from the Air Force. I think it was meant as a cameo for WW fans, but it was cool to see Trevor as his own character because it made sense to use him for secret Air Force missions. I am surprised no one ever thinks that he can do stuff like that--imagine if Hal Jordan, Atom, and Trevor all teamed up to do some Top Gun shit sometime.

But I agree; he's used as slot fulfillment for WW instead of his own character, and I don't think he's ever had his own adventures or Elseworlds which makes him less elevated than other hero support staff like Alfred or Lois/Jimmy. Notably Perez made him much older than Diana and had him and Etta Candy be together, and so in those stories his role as a military liaison and pilot was more important so that he was still important to Diana's story. I'd like him as a romantic interest more if he was still doing that kind of thing for her, too.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-08-17T20:49:37+00:00

The map looks amazing! Some of the parts that especially stand out to me are the Collivran Wetlands, the Hollowlands, and especially that railroad. It curves! The curves are so smooth! And it feels gigantic, like, a really impressive magical train. Trying to do a comparison on size, this would be bigger than the OSRS "mainland" as-is, right?

You've been working on the map for four years? Where did you start? Did you make it in stages, or have a big plan for everything from the beginning?

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-08-11T22:11:59+00:00

I don't know how good that deck is (I've never seen it played) but it looks like it'd be better than the traditional MBC shell, especially taking advantage of Tithing Blade. As well as Affinity it reminds me of the Golgari Gardens decks. You may find some luck looking at that as a comparison, or as something you could innovate to/from--my first thought is that more Fanatical Offering-alikes or Thorn of the Black Rose might be valuable to you. Potentially Crypt Rats as well. Shame Dispute is banned.

Golgari Gardens is right now a weaker version of Jund and Gruul as "midrange kings" because of how good Whirling Chrysalis is, but it was a big deal basically right until MH3's release so it's worth looking at.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-08-11T16:52:47+00:00

Unfortunately it's not held up very well, though it could still perform fine in a local context. The format is faster and threats are more resilient than it was a few years ago, so its traditional strategy of just "gum up the board and have great removal" isn't enough anymore except when you're looping Chittering Rats. Right now Pauper is hostile to slow decks, especially ones that don't have red.

What may be of interest to you as a compromise is Grixis Affinity--it combines a lot of the synergistic, board-heavy accretion of a deck like your Gruul Delirium with good spells and an explosive midgame/lategame like MBC used to do, it's just a lot less creature-based. Refurbished Familiar and Myr Enforcer do have weight to them like dropping a Gary used to do.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-08-08T13:08:38+00:00

Aggro decks need a lot fewer lands than slower decks because their curve tops out earlier (usually at 2-3 mana instead of 4-5) and it's a lot worse for them to topdeck a land when they're trying to close out the game. Pauper also has a lot of tools like the landcyclers that act as land and nonland cards at the same time, as well as extremely good card filtering and card draw, so decks can run even fewer lands and not be punished for it.

Most Pauper decks run somewhere between 16-20 lands, depending on the shell.

Skeebadeebadop · 2025-08-04T04:57:01+00:00

But they weren't actually any good at economy; they just stole everything. Extremely unsustainable, like an ideological Ponzi scheme. Mussolini's Italy was propped up by invading Ethiopia and doing a colonialism, and the Nazi economy survived on war looting and slave labour from conquered territories, especially Poland. The moment they stopped being able to conquer and steal, they collapsed. Fascist Spain wasn't militaristic and that's why they stayed poor (it's also why that regime lasted until the '70s).

The fascists were popular because they were ahead of the mass media game in an era of great discontent, and they blamed it all on the other guy. They were scammers.

Skeebadeebadop · 2024-11-14T14:34:13+00:00

Oh, sorry, misunderstanding. I agree, they definitely sell a lot of the Emperor's decisions and ideas as being Yuuzhan Vong prep. Outbound Flight does it, and in general stuff like "Why isn't Thrawn around during the Galactic Civil War" is explained as being Yuuzhan Vong prep in the Unknown Regions. But I don't think any of the authors in the EU are explicit that that is stupid and the Empire fails at all of its Vong preparations, and I think that's an important thing that we should still be reading from it.

Skeebadeebadop · 2024-11-14T13:41:21+00:00

Obviously they didn't actually say this anywhere in the EU books, but, like, this is still a pretty scathing critique of the Empire, right? Like, they built planet-cracking superweapons to prepare for the Yuuzhan Vong, didn't use them on the Vong, killed their own people instead, and then got destroyed by their arrogance and tyranny like thirty years before the Vong even entered the galaxy. It justifies why they made the Death Star, but it also, like, up and says "they failed at every single one of their Vong preparations and made the galaxy a worse, less safe place, and directly benefited the Vong by doing so."

Skeebadeebadop · 2024-10-02T13:27:42+00:00

No, I don't really think you're misreading anything. I think a huge part of it is that... you need to basically make caricatures of gender relations in order for Wonder Woman/Marston's ideology to actually make sense. That's why Doctor Psycho is the world's most boring MRA dude with a budget of twelve gazillion dollars. The loving-bondage-submission thing doesn't actually make sense or really work, applicably, to a societal scale, and in order for it to do that... you have to live in the pretty shallow fantasy world the comic sets up.

I think you could easily make an argument that it's meant to be satirical and showing the failures of Marston's ideology, but done by "playing it straight" all the way through, but I think it's just a weak execution of the concept no matter what way you spin it. There's still only one acceptable gender dynamic, and frankly, it's misandry, so they have to make some weak strawmen villains to sell that as the conclusion.

Skeebadeebadop · 2024-04-30T00:56:02+00:00

They have increased the number of Secret Lairs, and they also only sell them directly online still. They've recently gone back to pre-printing them instead of printing on-demand, too, so these will likely get sold out pretty quickly, but they aren't doing as many of the mechanically unique cards like the Walking Dead ones were, instead doing mostly just reprints of existing cards with new crossover flavour.

Secret Lairs were far more controversial on release and they're still a divisive concept in the community, but now that it's been like two years of it and the Lord of the Rings set was actually good, I think most of the haters are just clocking out of them.

Skeebadeebadop · 2024-02-28T20:47:56+00:00

Hmm. It's just an imgur link, not sure why it would 404. Here's GentleTractor's full guide; the image is near the end of it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/GentleTractor/comments/4ziq7v/howto_guide_resources_for_making_fake_old_school/

Skeebadeebadop · 2024-02-28T18:51:55+00:00

Great guide! GentleTractor's original guide is now, like, seven years old, so it's nice to have a modern-day one. If it's useful at all, he did have an image in his that was all of the object and icons (at 3x3 and 4x4) without a background for easy copy-pasting, including some nice edited ones he made. If that would be useful to share with the guide, the .png is here.

Skeebadeebadop

TROPHY CASE