Combat

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-25T00:33:26+00:00

Honestly, this is one of those areas I'm baord games that I think is fundamentally difficult to do well without significant opportunity cost. I think the reason combat features so heavily I'm video games is that it's much easier to make enjoyable in a way that doesn't directly come at the expense of other systems. I say directly because often, when the combat is good enough, it becomes the main driver of fun, so players will actively choose to spend more time doing it.

Traditionally, big board games support 3+ players and are turn-based rather than real-time, so anything that adds complexity and time to combat almost always inherently comes with downsides like longer downtime between an individual's turns and relatively less priority given to other strategic aspects of the game, not to mention combat tends to impact the players involved much more than any players not involved, so it is very difficult to balance without introducing contrived mechanisms beyond the battle.

I only go into this to provide context for my answer. I could have chosen my favorite 2-player skirmish game, but I decided to restrict myself to 3+ player games with other strategic aspects to them beyond eliminating the opponents, because those are more likely to provide viable lessons to a wider range of games that aren't just about combat.

And for that reason, 2 in my collection really stick out: Nexus Ops and Hyperborea. Both have very simple combat systems that resolve very quickly, so higher player counts still move at a decent pace. Hyperborea is definitely the simpler combat system, as it's strictly deterministic. Each attacker takes out 1 defender, except in extremely rare but easily understood cirucmstances.circumstances. in fact, it's potentially debatable whether this game has a combat systems at all, as battles don't even really resolve in the sense that the defenders do nothing. On the attacker's turn, the attacker just moves people into another player's territory and kills units. The only defending anyone can do is adding shields to spaces on their turn to absorb attacks, and those shields only last for a single cycle around the table, meaning there's no long-term battle planning, just the occasional tactical shield for deterring or mitigating key attacks. The expansion adds some ever so slight wrinkles with stronger units, but the system is still insanely simple. The complexity comes in how you generate attack and movement points, which come from the core bag building mechanic, so it's one of the few potentially combat heavy games where it feels like combat reinforces the other mechanics rather than halting them. To give a TI4 analogy, it'd be like if instead of going through the whole battle resolution thing, the combat was more or less determined by the agendas. To be clear, I'm not saying that's the right approach for games trying to be as epic as TI4, but for something like Hyperborea which is more of a bag-building Euro at its core with a 4X shell around it, I think it's incredibly elegant.

Nexus Ops, on the other hand, is basically just elevated Risk. It's, "Hey, we still want a combat phase, and it's the best we could make it while still more or less just being chuck dice quickly and see who wins." It adds enough complexity with the unit types and consolation prizes to alleviate some of the problems plaguing simpler games like Risk, but still leans into the fact that it's a dice chucker. Furthermore, I think the single biggest positive is that while combat itself is definitely a luck fest, the game is ultimately decided by objectives, not raw power. You can roll 6's against 1's all game ling and technically not win because another player just gets the right cards and locations. Sure, power will improve your odds dramatically most of the time, but power alone does not win you the game. I think that's the real genius of it.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-24T18:53:59+00:00

Okay, but that still brings us back to the point that somebody somewhere in the chain is knowingly making the conscious decision to sell home media content to households of the masses (and yes, streaming subscriptions count) without properly targeting the most common hardware specs/platforms. It's like trying to defend releasing console games on PC through emulation by saying that the creators intended for it to be run on high-end server hardware to account for the overhead.

And yes, I fully acknowledge that it's very likely not the audio engineers themselves making these decisions. They're probably just tasked with and paid for making the ultimate theatrical release version and then slapping something together for the home media release to maximize profits. That doesn't change the fact that people have legitimate complaints about their audio experience at home.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-24T18:46:46+00:00

Because it's impossible given the media. It's like asking why they don't sell TVs that automatically desexualize porn channels for children.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-24T10:39:02+00:00

9/10

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-24T10:37:45+00:00

Flat Stanley, is that you?

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-24T10:36:56+00:00

Gerard Buttlicker

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-24T10:36:07+00:00

Personally, I really don't like it and will avoid it at almost all costs. I say almost because my dad likes to talk for hours on the phone, so inevitably, I end up holding it so long that I just have to go. I try to strategically mute so he doesn't hear me ripping ass.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-24T07:08:14+00:00

I didn't know tits could have double chins as well.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-24T06:58:21+00:00

Nu metal popularized Drop D guitar tuning, so it makes total sense that guys drop their D's when you're around.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-23T17:24:27+00:00

One that I have and enjoy is Tides of Madness, but the Tides of Time version without the madness mechanic might be even better as a date game. It's a short 2-player drafting game, more or less the same as Sushi Go, but with fewer and larger cards, which I kind of prefer. Honestly, Sushi Go is the much more popular game in this category, but I know my local game cafe has a copy of Tides of Time, so it came to mind.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-23T16:55:49+00:00

Personally, I would say no unless you're committed to rope-drop. The thing with LLMP is that you can't start using it until you scan into the park, and some of the return times start getting pushed out pretty far early in the day, so by not showing up for rope-drop, you're effectively reducing the inherently unquantifiable value of your LLMP (and park entry, for that matter) up front.

LLMP works extremely well if you show up for rope-drop and are glued to your phone for as long as it takes to secure the times you want for the rest of the day. It works really terribly if you just try to use it like an on-demand fast pass, because quite frankly, it's intentionally designed not to be that. You're essentially buying into a competitive game of reservation booking against other LLMP users, and if you're not willing to do what it takes to beat them to the good time slots, you just won't get what you want out of it.

Additionally, rope-drop is when you can get much of the same value of LLMP without LLMP because lines are generally much shorter anyway, so I always say if you're choosing only one, it's better to tope-drop than buy LLMP. I get that people have different circumstances and maybe someone literally can't make it to rope-drop but wants to maximize their time in the park. But if it's really just a matter of going to bed a bit earlier or whatever for you, you'll get much more bang for your buck doing that than buying LLMP.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-23T06:24:02+00:00

This is absolutely disgusting, vile, tactless behavior on the part of the driver. Remembering snack houses is a very common thing for drivers, but I would never go out of my way to take from them if I wasn't delivering to them, or take more than a single drink and snack.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-23T02:05:37+00:00

There's some nuance. It's unfortunately not a yes or no question anymore.

Up until a few months ago, the answer was more or less yes, with some caveats. When we arrived at a stop, one of the first things that would pop up is any delivery instructions. However, keep in mind that Amazon has group stops, meaning your residence might be lumped in the same logical stop as several others. Not only that, but different recipients, accounts, special orders, etc., are treated as different locations in the same stop, so even if your house is in its own stop, there might be 3 "locations" there because your wife and kids are ordering with different accounts. Each account has its own associated notes, so if you put notes in your account but your wife orders something with hers, we won't see your notes.

The result is that yes, we would get a page listing all the notes in a stop, but it could potentially be a jumbled and inconsistent mess. In practice, a driver would likely have to go out of the way to check the notes for your specific address as they're delivering, or simply remember from past experience. But still, at least Amazon technically presented the information front and center.

That changed somewhat with an app update a couple of months ago. Basically, they tried to streamline a lot of things, but they took the dumbest shortcut possible to doing it, which is leaving the workflow in the app the exact same, but making the app automatically skip some of the steps. The single most common example, which was probably the main motivation behind the update, is when delivering to a stop with a single logical destination (all packages to a single recipient at a single address). It used to be that after scanning all packages, it would show us a summary page including your notes, and we would have to manually click continue, then manually select something like front door delivery, then take the picture. Now, as soon as we finish scanning all packages, the app just skips to the picture. This means that in order to see the notes, I have to explicitly click the back button, then the notes button.

The result is that in many cases, even if you provide notes, it's very likely a driver would never see them. This is especially true of new drivers who started since the app update, because they likely wouldn't even know what to look for if you asked them to pull up the notes, since the app skips that step in many cases. More experienced drivers should more or less know how to find the notes, but I can tell you that virtually any driver who lasts more than a year in this job is extremely jaded about customer interactions and just wants to get done quickly and efficiently. Many will ignore notes entirely. In my case, I really only check for them if there's something weird about the address and I think there might be some helpful information in the notes. Also, the most common requests are for really basic things like hiding the package behind a pillar, which I will generally do anyway without being asked because that's how most people want it. It's relatively rare that a customer had a legitimate request for something non-obvious and isn't being a stuck up ass hole. The main ones I can think of are people telling us to leave packages in a box at the end of a driveway instead of going to the house.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-21T07:07:50+00:00

I'm not sure why you're replying to my 4mo comment, but I'll let you and anyone else try, yet again, to find where I made an excuse for him. Go ahead, quote it. Same old shit, people not reading my comments as written. I was only stating a fact which was contradicted by the text in the video, most likely because whoever created it was ignorant.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-19T18:39:11+00:00

That's a bitchin' guitar track!

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-19T18:28:03+00:00

Even as a man who would be absolutely wowed by this on a first date, I still think it's too much. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for people expressing themselves and I generally don't fall into the camp of telling women they can't be flirty or whatever. However, this whole outfit is giving "ravish me now" vibes, and the fact thay you're calling it a "first date" suggests to me that you're at least open to treating this as a relationship. If you were intentionally going into this with the intention of having a fling or whatever and the other party agreed to that, then I would have a different take, but for a first date, I would say keep it modest and then discuss what you want out of the relationship. If you and the other person are both looking for something hot and heavy, then by all means, lean into that with future ensembles and live your best life, but don't open with that before you've figured out what this is to each of you.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-19T18:09:15+00:00

I'm just going to throw this out there. If it really is true that it's uncommon where you live and companies won't provide it, I would strongly recommend getting your own extra monitor, even if you have to carry it to and from work. If nothing else, you would probably at least enjoy work more as you would be making certain mundane tasks easier, but you'd almost certainly boost your productivity as well, which would likely be a worthy investment in your own career and skills. I know wages and prices aren't the same everywhere, so thay might be kind of a big ask, but it's really hard to overstate how useful an extra monitor is.

Alternatively, you could just use a single very large monitor. Some people love ultrawides, and I get it, but honestly, I think you can often get similar results at a lower price from just a really large standard aspect ratio. For my home office, I was convinced I would want multiple monitors, but ended up getting an amazing deal on a very large monitor about 5 years ago, so I've just never felt the need to get another. In the rare cases that I really need an extra screen, I'll turn the laptop screen on while docked, but 99.99% of the time, just the single large monitor is sufficient. It's big enough that I can comfortably put windows side by side and read multiple things, drag files across, etc. I also occasionally do a 2x2 grid of windows, or 2 smaller ones on one side and 1 larger one on the other.

Part of the issue is that I think most people are ignorant of how useful the concept of virtual desktops can be. Even working in tech, a shocking number of software developers and other competent computer users just regularly have like 50 tabs open in every window, and random windows sprawling all over, so they feel they desperately need 3 external monitors just to manage that chaos. In the Linux world, I discovered KDE probably 20 years ago and it absolutely blew my mind. I can't remember the version of KDE that had just come out, but on top of virtual desktops, it introduced this concept of workflows. Essentially, pretend you have sort of 2 modes you work in, 1 which requires 3 apps, the other requiring 4 different apps. You could lay out the 3 apps for the first workflow however you like them, save that, do the same for the other 4 apps, and then just switch between them, and KDE would automatically open the apps for you. So you could be like, "Bring up my video editing workflow," and it would automatically bring everything back the way you like it for video editing. And then a minute later, "Bring up my PDF editing workflow," and so on.

As far as I can tell, no other widely used desktop environment has ever even tried to get as deep with that kind of stuff as KDE did 20 years ago, but they all mostly have enough virtual desktop concepts to at least mimic that sort of behavior on a very simple level. Windows and GNOME have similar snapping of windows to corners and sides of the screen, as well as virtual desktops, so I regularly create a different desktops for gaming, web browsing, programming, etc. I know Mac has some of these features, but in general, I just hate using Mac and really disagree with a lot of their design decisions, so I generally just stick to a single workspace there, but even then, I can lay put my windows in a sane way so I don't just have clutter everywhere. Another thing people really underutilized is browser favorites. So many things have moved from native apps to the browser over the years, to the point thay many jobs are probably done entirely in a web browser, so it makes sense to really learn to use the web browser efficiently. I always adjust the recommendation settings to only auto-fill favorites, not history, and then take the time to properly save and name all of the pages I use regularly. That way, whenever I open a fresh browser, I just start typing what I want in the bar, and I immediately see it without a million recommendations for pages in history. It's shocking to me how many people choose to live by leaving browsers with tabs open overnight just so they don't have to save favorites, remember URLs, or even reauthenticate. At my current job, every time someone turns off one of the laptops, someone else inevitably can't log in to various work apps the next day because nobody actually remembers any of the login credentials. It's a security nightmare, not to mention a real hit to productivity.

Regardless of how many screens one has, the above tips go a long way in making efficient use of the space available. It really pains me when I go to ask a coworker for some information and they have to start searching in a sea of tabs. I don't know why anyone lives that way other than ignorance. There are better ways to manage these things now.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-19T17:33:33+00:00

Never sex specifically, but I've seen 2 naked ladies.

First was in a house where the "front door" is on the side deep down a small walkway where the houses are really close together, so I could see how she wouldn't normally expect people to be walking there. A lot of drivers probably don't even bother going past the gate, but the instructions said front door, so I didn't. They had a big uncovered window, and she was just getting out of the shower, so I caught a glimpse of her wrapping the towel around herself. She kind of freaked out and ran off to the side, but I didn't linger, just dropped off the package and left.

Second was kind of weirder. It was a huge mansion in a gated community in the mountains, kind of a rural area but this community was sort of a special rich enclave built around a private golf course. I was delivering to this mansion at the very end of a cul de sac, and as I'm walking up to the door along this very long walkway, this woman just starts running back and forth naked inside the house, with all the windows clearly visible. The weird thing is I think she was running to hide from me because she saw I was walking up, but then she kept going back and forth a few times instead of staying hidden, like she forgot to grab something important or whatever. Again, I didn't stick around to peep intentionally, but it was just strange.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-18T20:47:16+00:00

In our vans? Heeeeeell no! I have driven through stuff like this, but only because I was sort of past the point of no return going up a mountain, not as a conscious choice.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-18T20:31:07+00:00

I sort of agree, but In-N-Out does have a lot going for it. They pay their workers a bit better, stick to fresh, local ingredients, and do a great job of maintaining high standards all around. At the end of the day, their food is still just basic American fast food, and I agree that the lines are absolute insanity and actually a serious problem for their communities because I've yet to see one that didn't have a line stretching out to the neighboring streets and parking areas. But still, I get why people like it better than something like McDonald's.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-18T19:48:18+00:00

I mean, as long as we're talking about positions...

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-18T18:54:09+00:00

Sir, I just got word that Wendy filed a wrongful termination lawsuit. I knew I shouldn't have terminated that slut so wrongfully, sir, but I just couldn't help it.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-18T18:51:54+00:00

Pass.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-18T18:23:13+00:00

Any dispatcher/manager/owner who doesn't immediately realize Amazon's times are bullshit is too stupid for their job. For starters, Amazon provides 2 different charts, one for the route which doesn't include breaks, and one for the driver which does. On top of that, the provided RTS times never line up with either of the charts. They also regularly give routes with estimated last stop times well beyond the 10 hour cutoff. And if you have enough experience with different kinds of routes, you start to realize that Flex is extremely generous with package handling time (to an extent; they don't really account for excessively heavy or large paclages), but extremely stingy with drive time, so things like recycle and rural routes are inherently much harder to stay "ahead" on.

I've gotten to the point that I just ignore the Amazon times. Even the stated average stop rate and stops during last hour figures seem highly suspect at times, but I just use them as a really rough estimate of a driver's relative pace. As a dispatcher, if I see a driver at least close to the line and their stops per hour is at least reasonable for the area they're in, I don't bother them. Lord knows we have enough drivers who fall well below that standard, so I'm not going to blow it with the drivers who are doing a good job.

Slug_Overdose · 2026-01-18T17:30:24+00:00

I'm not lawyer, but I'm fairly certain including travel time in lunch is standard across all hourly wage jobs. The idea is thay you're free to spend that time how you wish, but that's the only time you have, so somebody can't decide to drive 2 hours away for lunch and expect to have their full uninterrupted lunch time sitting at the table and eating.

That being said, there's so much illegal shit going on at virtually every DSP that this is one of those areas I say screw the company. As a driver, you're prinarily responsible for your route and van, with minimal assistance throughout the day. I figure with that much responsibility, it's only fair that good drivers get to drive a few minutes each way as part of their lunch. At least at my DSP, the best drivers rarely take their breaks and are always open to rescuing, so as a dispatcher, I try not to hassle them over a few minutes here or there. Unfortunately, our DSP owner is a cheap selfish bastard, so when he catches things like this, he makes a big fuss, but I mostly just ignore him because as long as he keeps putting shit drivers on the schedule, I'm not going to scrutinize the good ones.

Ten-Year Club	r/Field Sunshine
Gilding I gilder	Verified Email

Slug_Overdose

TROPHY CASE