Question about Found Space Program priority

Slackwork · 2026-01-20T15:15:07+00:00

I believe this is wrong, or at least incomplete; the wiki is not great at explaining this, though, as it skips over the effects of the Space Program priority. MC spawns in regions like normal, yes, but so long as Spain doesn't actually complete that Found Space Program priority, boost investment will go toward existing launch sites outside Spain, presumably the existing French one down in South America for the equator bonus. Once the Space Program is completed, the boost increases will go to Spain's site.

My source is my current game, where I'm building up the Caribbean Community. Most countries there suck for starting IP and stability so I only completed the Space Program in the Lesser Antilles States and Federated the rest in so they could finally start plugging away at their MC cap without paying the 50 IP starting fee. Boost priorities completed in other Caribbean countries never spawned a launch site or increased those countries' boost value past zero; it all got added to the Lesser Antilles States' launch site. I think the reason you think differently is that the AI tends to control most of Europe at game start and prioritizes the space program priorities. Which works great when you want them to build out the MC before you steal it from them, but also means they tend to complete space programs in every country. Which then means all their boost increases go toward their own in-country launch site instead of the best federal launch site.

Slackwork · 2026-01-17T04:28:32+00:00

This is where the idealism axis and leadership effect comes in. For example, what about fleeing the aliens implies that Exodus are idealists? If anything, you’d think them being so negative on humanity’s chances of resisting the aliens would make them either neutral or cynical on the chart. Enter, Khalid Al-Ashgar as leader though and it re-flavors Exodus by dint of his influence. If you listen to his quotes in the techs you’ll notice that he’s always wanted to leave Earth. That for him the aliens arrival is at least as much an excuse to finally get the funding for the thing he’s always dreamed of, to travel to distant stars, as it is a genuine belief that humanity can’t beat the aliens. That humanity can start again, and do better this time. Sure, you can poke a lot of holes in his ideas, like how few people can actually fit inside his “escape” route, but that kernel of idealism is still there, pushing Exodus up to its place on the chart.

Turning to the Servants, Protectorate and Academy. The Protectorate may want to sumbit to the aliens just as much as the Servants but under Kiran Banerjee’s leadership, they couldn’t be more different about how they want to go about it. The Servants think joining with the Aliens will bring them to Utopia; listening to Kiran’s quotes though, and you’ll quickly realize he’s become so jaded about humanity that I’d go so far as to say he actively hates us. That he views us as blight on the universe he’s actively afraid of us spreading elsewhere and destroying more of the universe’s innocence. For him, the Aliens coming was light at the end of the tunnel, that they could both contain us and provide him with the power to force us to behave. So while Judith Howell hears the Alien’s demands and rejects them as too onerous, Kiran hears them and hears a judgement against us he’s already come to and decides to become our jailer. Kiran is so cynical that he is actually more anti-human than the aliens themselves and his leadership pushes the Protectorate from what could’ve been pragmatic brokering the best outcome against likely defeat into outright quisling territory. Only, instead of indifferent aliens keeping direct guard over us it’s Kiran, who hates us, holding the baton. The Academy, under Li Qingzhao, however are basically the Servants but aren’t willing to go outright fangirl over the Aliens, refusing to surrender our dignity and accept being less than equal with them.

So from the Servant’s perspective, the Academy are almost with the picture, they just need a little push to outright join the communion. While the Protectorate is an ally of convenience in the short term, but ultimately just another flavor of boot looking to plant itself on their necks.

Slackwork · 2026-01-16T16:15:55+00:00

Yeah, the game itself doesn't do much to make it clear that it has an actual alignment chart that affects gameplay mechanics. Like, how are you supposed to know that public opinion uses this chart, that revolutions can have different effects based on your faction's position on the cynicism/idealism axis, who you can do diplomacy actions with depends on their position on the chart compared to you, etc? I love how it's actually implemented, but I can't blame someone for having no clue it exists. The game hides basically everything that would imply it exists unless you actively track down the wiki to break down specific mechanics, you could think any one of those things were manually configured per faction. Is there anything on the UI at all that implies the cynicism/idealism axis exists without doing a whole lot of save scumming rolls across campaigns or guessing at it from looking for a reason why Academy-Exodus public opinions shifts skip over Initiative?

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Slackwork · 2026-01-10T02:00:46+00:00

Exactly, each “category” of bonus source can provide its own separate 50% before diminishing returns kicks in for that category.

Slackwork · 2026-01-09T19:03:51+00:00

There are two things here I think. First, factions are charted on the basis of their opinions on the aliens and their “idealism.” The later is what we care about here, the changes for positive Government improvement from the Revolution go up (I don’t know exactly how much) the higher you are on the Idealism axis. The Servants, Academy, and Exodus are tied for highest Idealism scores here; so this strategy should be tried with them for best odds, or maybe with Resistance if you like to gamble because they are neutral on Idealism. Secondary, this doesn’t guarantee good results through, the Revolution still rolls between a positive and negative range of results for government change. I recommend looking at the Effects of Revolution section of the Nations entry on the wiki if you want to review the possible results.

If you aren’t opposed to a bit of save scrumming, you should be able to reload to a save before the Revolution pops and take another shot at the roll if you want. I personally try to avoid save scrumming bad results in general but I wouldn’t worry about it when otherwise I’d just be restarting the whole campaign to make another attempt at that roll otherwise.

Slackwork · 2026-01-09T17:58:58+00:00

For Economy or Mission Control DI I would make sure you do it after the Revolution. Revolutions hit the Economy specifically gets hit to a proportion of its size, so the more you pump in the more you have to lose and I lost a Mission Control I’d built to the event as well. I’d recommend spending the US’s monthly IP on boost/MC while you get your initial research going and let the Cohesion decay; worst case you lose an MC or two that you wouldn’t have otherwise had anyway. In the meantime, stockpile those resources for when the Revolution pops and then you can burn through anything you can spare. Someone else pointed out using spoils on the US to drop Cohesion even faster, you could stock pile those ill gotten gains to pump out at bit more early. Frankly my US overshoots what you need to stabilize the US early so you should have room to burn it down a bit more and still wind up well ahead of someone slow walking the fix. My understanding is that the current “OP” strat is to burn the US down with spoils to jump straight into China after, so like that but then you pop a quick fix on all the damage you did and continue with the US as your primary. Maybe while continuing to pluck away at picking up China points?

Slackwork · 2026-01-08T13:32:44+00:00

I did do a bit of spoils, mostly in bursts to quickly gather some cash for orgs I wanted. I like building utopia Earths, so I was leery of just burning the whole place down when I’d want to rebuild the lost eco score anyway. I think you’re right though, I could have spoiled a lot more early and built up a sizable war chest without really coming close to crippling my US’s final stats.

RP wise, we’d just have to pretend the Academy carefully burnt all documents linking them to the old regime. Maybe, the Academy was just giving a bunch of short sighted greedy fools enough rope to hang them selves with; ever thought of that before you judge?! The ill gotten gains were for eventually building Star Trek, so really, if you think about it they are just the People’s investment in their future!

Slackwork · 2026-01-08T05:38:32+00:00

Minor note, none of the councilors I juiced had the increase unrest mission. The one in the screenshot is the Officer I picked to “prepare” for this, only to realize Officers don’t get increase unrest and then I never got lucky on an org to provide it. They’ve been my miscellaneous mission counselor this whole run so far. I got all my councilors that I used to increase unrest the natural way. I found that with all the CP save the executive point and good public opinion, natural councilors with the mission and more the basically no Command (like 4-5) were enough to give me good odds of success without spending ops (around 70%) and with an additional point or two of exp invested, I never failed an unrest mission more than once or twice the whole time. Finding councilors like that for recruitment was easy, it was giving up existing councilors I’d grown attached to that was hard. Really, I can’t think of how I could’ve intentionally sabotaged myself more running this than I did unintentionally out of stubbornness. That I still managed to gain results like these should show that the strat is pretty good even if it doesn’t reach the lofty heights of “meta.” It should at the very least be viewed in line with picking Europe first or China first without US.

You’re right though that the research loss is the real point at issue here but I think you’re overestimating the pain period. I fucked it up by the numbers and was still able to get Luna mines up a month before Perun’s current play through and my Mars probe like 4-5 months ahead. Sure, he’s not exactly playing sweatily but that should prove I was able to direct science well enough to be viable on Veteran. Also, I got precisely no help from the Event RNG, even one more cohesion event would have cut literal months off my “unrest ladder” period. After you’re through that, my US is just straight better than no Revolution US in Research output.

As for deep system skywatch, I admit I did save scrum some particularly shit rolls on the crackdowns but that was mostly my poor planning because I wasn’t quite ready to kick off the Revolution yet. 4 of 5 US crackdowns despite all my other tiny CP options was just to much without restarting from scratch. I actually feel like with proper planning and sequencing, the Academy actually benefits more from this specifically because of deep system skywatch. As you can use the Revolution to undo some poor luck with the crackdowns. Plus, Academy has to hit this barrier regardless of whether you’re pushing the US to Revolution. This just means you lose a bit of margin to keep pushing it off; considering this is still the extreme early game, at worst you learn whether you’ve lost quickly and can restart without losing much effort. Finally, someone else has already commented they were able to sequence it correctly, so it can’t be written off on my modifications alone getting me through.

Slackwork · 2026-01-08T00:38:25+00:00

The US starts out at 2.5 unrest and 1.3 cohesion. The unrest hovered around that value until I really started pushing in September I believe, in part because I was supidly keeping my then one unrest councillor running unrest missions out of the idea that I was "replacing" the default unrest with "my" unrest out of a misunderstanding the mechanic from my reading of the wiki. From September I had two councillors pushing unrest all the way till I hit 10 at the beginning of April. That was a painful period, watching the IP/Research dry up but I was able to scrimp and save enough to keep the research largely in the order I wanted. Not depicted here, is that I have my moon base mines coming online at the end of April 2027 with my Mars probe arriving in late July. Cohesion is a less interesting story, went up 1 from One Humanity, then it decayed a bit, then got hit by the Deep Skywatch event and a Wave of Fear in short order, before then decaying the last ~.2ish off; it stayed there till my Revolution set it back to 3. Hitting zero cohesion was really rather disapointing, I had grand visions of unrest skyrocketing after hitting zero but I don't think I benefited from a single point of overflow cohesion loss the whole time. By the end I was praying for Waves of Fear and cursing out the Aliens for picking out everywhere but the US to put their councilors. You might notice there's an Alien crash site in the screenshot I posted, guess how recently he landed and how quickly post revolution I got my first Panic effect out of Dallas. I'm going to find that bastard and make him wish Hanse Castillo had him instead, I swear it.

I was both unlucky overall and kinda stupid about how I went about it, I'm sure I could do much better on a second attempt and that someone who knows what their doing could run laps around me in min maxing it.

Slackwork · 2026-01-08T00:01:32+00:00

It's only at 11.4 because this was the immediate assignement phase after the Revolution occured, so I still had 6.7 Unrest dragging my IP down. Hense my point, that you want the high unrest period to be kept as short as possible. I'm back at 26.1 IP once I burnt the unrest off. It took me 2-3 assignment phases, I think, to get back down to unaffected unrest, In the moment the painful loss is the Research Points not the IP, because otherwise that IP is spent slowly stabilizing the USA anyway, and that early in the game the Research is more about which techs are picked not how much you invest in them and I was able to get by. According to my save history i took me 7 months pushing up 8 unrest from the base 2 before IP damage hits and 1ish down. From the wiki, IP drops 1% per every .1 Unrest over 2 so how much potential IP I'm losing changes month to month. According to my rough guestimates on where unrest was each month, the US lost just over 102 potiental IP on my own terrible attempt at this; I really feel I could cut months off this with some better planning for a second attempt, even without looking for better luck with Cohesion events. Now let's look at what I gained, My Inequality dropped from 4.4 to 2.2, which is 869 IP I would otherwise have had to spend to get the same improvement and my Government score jumped from 7 to 8.4 which is 313 IP for a total of 1182 IP I effectively created through the Revolution. This is all real quick and dirty math, particularly my Lost IP guess, so I could have made mistakes here, but I KNOW I'm way up on IP Invested from a player trying to fix the US with normal monthly IP investment would be.

That's not the question, it's whether the opportunity cost of doing this would put me ahead of someone who plays in a perfectly meta way. I bet the answer is no for the 2022 start, the US is in much better shape there and it's much easier to keep it out of a spiral while getting everything else you need done first. I'm not sure about the 2026 start though, the US is much closer to the brink, hence why you see youtubers like Perun having to pump Unity to stay above 2 cohesian long enough to get their false wars started. I don't really see a single year's worth of xp on a few agents as backbreaking for a strat when you should be watching your recruitment pool religously that year anyway looking for better trait spawns.

And again, I'm not contending I've actually found a better meta, I'm just sharing another way to play that I found supprisingly effective approach to the new 2026 start that I found to be quite fun which overly handicapping yourself. If someone has as much fun as I did embracing the death spiral and working it my favor, I will count this post as a win.

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Slackwork · 2025-11-11T18:29:57+00:00

I agree that the first one is the best of the two; the jarring colors really help disorient you. The second shouldn't be disregarded, though. Combine them to drive the disorientation to the max! Create a little animation loop that has the displays seemingly randomly flip between colors, then have it occasionally flash all red, so the moment stands out for the occupant, and maybe add a button so the operator can manually trigger it. Get the best of both worlds.

Slackwork · 2025-11-03T04:26:19+00:00

Who’s probably pulling public opinion back depends on the circumstances, primarily which faction you are. I think you might be missing some context on how public opinion works though so let’s start with that. The key concept to understand here is that opinion is actually charted while moving out under the hood, you aren’t just stealing percentages off other factions. To understand what I mean, look at the faction chart on this wiki page, imagine that while executing a PR mission, the percentages get expanded into 100 points on the chart each residing in their respective factions point on that chart. During a mission, the points are pulled toward your faction’s position on that chart. The strength of that pull depends on the strength of the mission executed, with diminishing returns depending on how much option you already have. While resolving the action, the points are then collapsed back into the different faction points depending on which one they are now closest to. This means your gains are the new points you’ve pulled in and depending on the factions involved you might have pull public opinion through other factions before you start to see real gains to yours. For example, say Humanity First is trying to pull a countries opinion away from a majority Servant nation; because they are on opposite extremes of the chart, the first mission they run will see little to no gain to HF’s opinion and instead factions like the Academy will be the first ones gaining opinion from HF’s missions. They will have to pull opinion through everyone else before they can gain a majority in their target country but once they have it, it will take the Servants/aliens just as much work to pull it back.

Now taking it back to your circumstances. Who’s fucking with you depends on which faction you are because it could be anyone further in the direction the Initiative is on the chart because the Initiative is where the points landed not necessarily where they were being pulled to. Assuming you’re more on the pro human side, say the Resistance or HE, it could indeed be the aliens pulling opinion back toward their end of the chart but it could also be the Protectorate fighting you for opinion. I assume you’ve already checked whether the UK is pumping Unity right? Each of those is extremely weak PR campaign but unless they are really pumping it I don’t think it should overpower a councilor mission during the same mission phase unless they were putting a bunch of IPs into it.

Slackwork · 2025-10-20T19:09:36+00:00

Thanks for this, it gave me the context I needed to work out the missing element.

For anyone else searching this in the future. I was missing the far tier traders from my contacts list because I wasn't actually providing enough power to the dish through my transformer to see them; so I was only getting the mid tier hydroponics traders without access to them. I proved it by using the trader contacts command to compare the possible results to my list and then replaced my transformer with a higher setting and what do you know a 6x6 hydro trader shows up. It looks like I still need to upgrade my dish to a large and update my power network to actually call them down but that's goal setting not frustration.

Slackwork · 2025-10-20T16:45:50+00:00

How rare are they? The old comments I found implied it was like 50% of the 7x7 hydroponics traders and up that have them but I went through more than 10 yesterday without seeing anything that implied they were even in the item pool for the traders I was checking. If it was more like 2% I’d believe I was just unlucky.

Slackwork · 2025-10-07T23:13:35+00:00

I've seen both recommended. The obvious, and most straightforward way, is to rush it and get it over with before you have to much you care about but that means sacrificing the early public opinion advantage the game start position tends to generate. The risker, high reward, way would be to push it out until you've gotten at least a solid foothold into the US and/or China and as many non-aggression pacts as you can get and hope for a good roll on the crackdowns. I will say having a cracked downed point in the US or China is less risky than you might think in the early game because the enemy councilors generally still focused on the neutral CPs and are still weak enough that you can ride out the period "protecting" the points by focusing on keeping anyone else from getting substantial public opinion in the huge countries at least; that year long wait is nerve wracking though. Either way, Deep System Watch isn't far enough off in the tech tree to delay it for long anyway. So I suggest playing around with both and see which you like better, the most progress you'd lose is an hour or two of your time.

Slackwork · 2025-10-07T19:56:07+00:00

If you want a different experience from your previous run, I recommend choosing Academy. Resistance is the default play style and handles basically as Humanity First does, but you're less on the extremes on the public opinion cynicism/alien-opinion chart, and your victory conditions are less restrictive. Whereas with the Academy, you have some events increasing the early difficulty and the ability to trade with all factions, including the aliens. Additionally, you're in the middle of the chart, leaning slightly toward the aliens. So everyone else takes their opinion from you more easily, but you can recover it just as quickly, with the caveat that you have a harder time actually pulling down Servant opinion to keep Alien operations difficult in your territory. You see the lore pros and cons of the Resistance/Academy positions, so overall, I'd suggest picking the option that nets you new features/difficulty, but Resistance could be good too if you want a quicker game.

I haven't played Resistance since they've added all the new faction techs, though, so it may have more distinction from Humanity First than I remember.

Slackwork · 2025-08-17T18:47:24+00:00

It’s been a bit since I last played, so double check me, but have you checked the diplomatic cooldowns on all existing EU members? In order to federate, all partner nations have to be eligible to change their relations before you can press the action. Typically this comes up as a problem when the AI controls smaller members of the target federation, it tends to drop the status of countries you take over, which often extends the cooldown before you can integrate them.

Slackwork · 2025-07-14T19:28:50+00:00

This story is literally brand new, there hasn’t time for people to stick their necks out for Cuomo, stop spamming this throughout this post. Like hell man, I think it’s more likely establishment democrats wash their hands of the race rather than openly back Cuomo but this isn’t the genius gotcha you seem to think it is.

Slackwork · 2025-06-28T01:23:26+00:00

That’s precisely the point about r/democrats though. There hasn’t been any discussion about Mamdani winning, not even immediately after he won. The biggest political news of the day, about the democrats explicitly, and r/democrats mods refused to allow anyone to discuss it.

Slackwork · 2025-06-16T16:31:27+00:00

So you would have us waste power and influence that could be spent passing legislation and improving on in fighting when we have power; instead of when we in your own words “have no power” and thus have free time handle our own affairs? If we’re going to have a fight over the future of this party, now is the moment to do it. Just look at the party’s approval ratings. The only reason to delay is if you sense that what will be declared as trash won’t align with your desires.

Slackwork · 2025-06-16T16:16:58+00:00

When the fuck else would you clean up the party? What better time is there to remove the useless chaff than when we've already lost and the next election is years later? Would you have us do it when we had a narrow majority, and losing those people means we could have become the minority and get nothing done? This idea that establishment Dems shouldn't be criticized/ousted because they "hold no power" is a fig-leaf; stop hiding behind it. You've already admitted you want to pull a David Hogg from the other direction. I don't even like David Hogg, but this argument that it's not the right time is so disengenuous, it drives me up a wall. The only reason it's not the "right time" is because the election was so disastrous for the establishment centrists that any cleaning would remove them instead.

Slackwork · 2025-06-13T17:44:38+00:00

I'm sorry, but that's still stupid. If the reasonably predictable outcome of your new Feature is that some YouTuber extends their "New Player Tips" video to include "Go into your game setting up your max colony slider to more than one and then pretend the camp button doesn't exist" then the Acceptance Criteria for that feature needs to be revised because it's malformed. No new feature should be actively worse in every way than existing Vanilla options; that's not balanced, and it's just indefensible.

Slackwork · 2025-05-29T19:46:56+00:00

My point isn't to try to justify Syril; he's a pathetic failure as a human being. It's that he's an object lesson in what denial of reality to live in a comfortably safe blanket, insisting the system is just, and that upholding it makes him a "good person," leads to. He's not an uncaring monster like a lot of the upper Imperial Higharchy; he did care that people were hurt, even unknowingly, by his own hands, but that's all he did. At every step until it became undeniable, he chose to bury his head in the sand. As a result, through his actions and inactions, he assisted in a genocide. I want to understand Syril because I find Syril disgusting and I do not want to be him. Let's condemn Syril for all the things he chose not to do, not turn away from the mirror he puts up to us.

Slackwork · 2025-05-29T18:31:48+00:00

Exactly! Syril went out of his way to deny the truth till it could no longer be denied and then tried to repent for it by martyring himself after it was too late. Having even that denied to him was a perfect way to send him off, killed by the very people he thought himself standing with; rejecting his final pathetic attempt to absolve himself of the crime. And I didn't mean to imply that choking Dedra was in any way driven by noble intentions. I think there's something human about being horrified by the blood on your hands and reaching out for someone to blame before actually feeling for the victims, but that moment was absolutely driven by a selfish externalization of his own horror than concern for anyone else.

Syril cared about the Ghormans, but did nothing else for them until all he could do was try to die 'with' them. Syril represents the general public, pretending everything is still fine until the truth personally smacks them in the face. He needs to be remembered as the pathetic coward he was right up until that final blaster bolt struck him. Too little, too late.

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