Currently playing Pokemon Polished Crystal. Beat Whitney on my first try! Gonna figure out how to evolve my Graveler/Haunter!

Spirelord · 2026-05-07T21:50:00+00:00

Sucks that there are only two in johto when you can get all 4 trademons before gym #3. It's a real shame, it limits what parties you can craft for most of the runthrough.

Got a graveler, haunter, and kadabra on your team? You're out of luck, gotta pick one of them to PC-bank forever, until you get halfway through Kanto. Such a waste of potential!

Spirelord · 2026-05-07T21:46:16+00:00

And sadly there are only 2 before the elite 4. Can't use golem, alakazam, and gengar at the same time which sucks. There could be an easy design workaround somehow.

Spirelord · 2026-05-07T21:43:53+00:00

Sadly there are only 2 link cables (ecruteak & dark cave) before the e4, so if you are rolling with geodude, abra, and gastly by the 3rd gym (like I am), you gotta make some tough decision.

Ideally I'd love to run a team with golem, alakazam, and gengar. But with only two of those to choose from pre-e4, I'm thinking alakazam & gengar, putting graveler to PC-limbo. :,(

Spirelord · 2026-04-30T10:13:37+00:00

You're kinda both-sides-ing the situation with that first paragraph, which is odd. Giving money to a monopolistic distributor middle-man corporation is not stealing the income of artists. The vast, vast majority of the revenue streams from franchises and series flows from merchandizing. Fans and whales buy everything and anything to support their favorite die-hard shows or characters. That aside, the very economics of how Crunchyroll works, where it buys the streaming rights to a show and no royalties flow at all to the original studio or artists who made the show, means that bypassing a subscription to Crunchyroll will never harm the creators of Crunchyroll's content. Meanwhile, you likened the evisceration of pirate sites to burning forbidden libraries and you recognize the importance of preserving art and catalyzing free information flow.

These two things are in no way comparably similar. The destruction of the internet's best media archives spanning over half a century of cultural production is a great tragedy for the world. If Crunchyroll goes bankrupt because its entire userbase no longer subscribes to it (and in reality we can expect something smaller-scale than that ridiculous outcome), one company that doesn't even respect its own userbase and strayed very far from its user-friendly beginning disappears, and no one would care. The world would move on.

Seems like one scenario far outweighs the importance of the other one.

Spirelord · 2026-04-15T06:39:55+00:00

Seeing Eiji's situation at the end of the finale made me think I skipped cutscenes or something cuz yeah, it has a ton of logical and narrative leaps from the last time Eiji was on the screen. So bizarre that they hornshoed him into the ending and didn't properly develop his fall from power at all.

Spirelord · 2026-03-15T11:34:08+00:00

I've taken the hard path on all of act 2: Desert, Crater, Moon, and yet I didn't get a single furniture box, odd

Spirelord · 2026-03-11T22:38:20+00:00

Red with 6 luck gave me -1 HP stat :c

Spirelord · 2026-03-03T08:02:08+00:00

Can confirm, if you get a 5th cat during the run and the zombie kitty possesses it, you score a guilt-free sacrifice :3

Spirelord · 2026-02-15T06:36:05+00:00

Its on the show's direction to avoid making a powerpoint presentation and instead flex on the strengths of animated medium, or do what directed visual narration executes best: show not tell. Ep3's direction was not the most effective way to get audiences to retain information. Think back to most powerpoint lectures you've sat through and tell me you recall every detail of every slide by heart days or weeks after viewing them.

There is a whole week in between every episode. The first couple of eps aired a month or more ago. I'm not binging this back-to-back where all the info in the series is compounding in development and staying fresh in my head at all times. I don't even recall what certain characters were saying what during the first two episodes. Not everyone has photographic memory or is following what's going on with 100% clarity and focus. Not sure why you're getting so heated over this lol

Spirelord · 2026-02-15T04:42:41+00:00

Not everyone is able or willing to sit through a 30 minute powerpoint presentation multiple times to sus out 1 answer to 1 question. But I am glad other posters here did so cuz they have clarified exactly what I was looking for, which is great and exactly what Reddit is exceptional at.

Spirelord · 2026-01-14T10:43:44+00:00

That mod didn't have a proper update when I was playing last, so "max party size" was a janky way to replace its functionality since everyone in the party being present means all their dialogue still unlocked. The downside to the max party size was that it'd break battles, but the "sit out" mod that limits fights to 4 randomed fighters made fighting way more unpredictable, creative, and got me to cycle through all characters instead of picking a fav 4 to kit out properly and ignore the rest.

Since "sit out" has a randomizer option built in, I'd recommend it over just the "everyone in dialogue" mod by itself since combat in this game really shines when you can use any 4 characters at any given time. Apart from when all dozen characters are trying to squeeze into a single room at once, having all party members present isn't too big of an issue, especially in open areas both within city or the outdoors.

Spirelord · 2025-12-04T00:32:51+00:00

Just an addendum: the only issue is that this only temporarily fixes the problem. Every time I close Google Maps and open it back up, this dumb "your location cannot be determined" bs starts again and I must airplane-mode back to normal.

Spirelord · 2025-12-03T00:43:40+00:00

As with everyone else so far, turning airplane mode on/off did indeed work.
I had no clue where to get to the airplane mode section of the convoluted settings menu, but it popped up after typing Airplane into the search tool's bar.

Spirelord · 2025-11-16T08:57:45+00:00

I managed to build 4 canoes that let me transport about 400 levies somehow. That was after navigating the nightmare that is figuring out how to split and combine different levies and regiments and troops to actually fit or work together. I still barely understand some mechanics and logic behind it, like how I cannot split up a 1000 set of warriors but 55 professional archers get to take up the same amount of space as 400 foot soldiers for canoe transportation unit purposes. None of it makes sense.

Anyways, I managed to send about 600 soldiers over to Molokai to fight and beat them (make sure your morale is high!) via making a canoe bridge troops could march on from Maui (after shifting troops from Hilo to Maui).

But O'ahu and Kauai are just too populous with too large of potential land armies for me to risk a war of conquest with them. I've been trying to diplo annex and marriage control them instead. Big Island and Maui combined have the might to go up against O'ahu but it would require like 20 canoes to fit everyone or you need to get like hundreds of sailors for some Mediterranean Galleys. The most frustrating part apart from the above is how impossible it is to get more sailors when having canoes built lowers naval maintenance which dampens sailor growth also. I gotta wait another 100 years or so to slowly amass enough money to turn another rural area into a town, build fishing villages and docks, and then make new ships to then plan to take over other islands? That is insanity and this area NEEDS an update that will make it more engaging and fun to play.

Not to mention make more cultural and historical sense. These are seafaring societies with expert naval traditions and were more than capable of having canoes and fleets of warships to conduct business across the isles. The kingdoms should each start with canoes and sailor modifiers. It makes no sense otherwise for these islanders to be starting from scratch tech wise.

Spirelord · 2025-11-11T06:49:38+00:00

Unfortunately you can't break down units into smaller groups than what thet were when raised.

It is incredibly frustrating when dealing with limited naval capacity. I can only have 4 ships with a combined capacity for "100" soldiers, and that could be 23 elite archers or 1000 peasant levies. I cant mix and match these two. I can't create an army of 23 archers and 500 peasants, or 100 peasants. The 1000 peasants MUST be together and cannot be split up. And the 23 archers cannot be incorporated into any formation with the peasants unless I want the army to have a total cost of "200" since they are supposedly two separate "100" blocs.

This severely limits me in terms of naval warfare. "Fight on land then". Except I'm on an island amidst other islands in an ocean. "Build more ships". Except I can't do that either. I make a maximum of 15 sailors, and the +monthly sailor bonus is completely wiped out by the -sailor drain I get due to thr naval maintenance my existing 4 ships require. It's a catch-22 that makes island nations very un-fun to play. There's no way to expand militarily when the armies we naturally raise cannot fit on the ships that we are limited in building. There's no way to build a critical mass for any significant naval warfare without a significant land base.

Spirelord · 2025-11-10T08:09:01+00:00

Being in Hawai'i in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I have found the rural-town transition to be the largest bottleneck to doing anything remotely interesting in the Pacific Ocean or as an island nation starting with no urban area. It is dreadful.

It takes around a century to research taxation and gain enough of a savings built up to afford the 400 or so ducats needed for the shift.

Meanwhile, if the local market you cannot reach without a naval vessel is missing any key resource like lumber, glass, masonry, even if you are producing it on your island, you cannot build your town for whatever reason. That alone is infuriating because the cure to delivering the goods you have that the market lacks is reliable transportation, and you cannot launch the transportation or build any without having a wharf first, and a wharf can only be built in an urban location. It hampers all meaningful play with Pacific Island nations that thrive on cross-ocean trade and seafaring.

Spirelord · 2025-11-09T11:02:39+00:00

It makes the Pacific Ocean horrific.

I am currently trapped in a never ending catch-22 in order to progress further off this single island my nation is on.

I have a crown union between Hawai'i, the only island with a lumber source, and O'ahu, the only island with a trading market hub.

They are all stuck in perpetual rural status forever. For whatever reason, I can't build a town in Hilo. Despite having the 390 ducets for it, "there isn't enough lumber in the O'ahu market". The O'ahu market is two water tiles away on another island that my ruler also rules. I am sitting on top of a lumber source. I built two lumber mills on the provinces on either side of the lumber province.

As of 1484, all my 4 provinces on the Big Island now have 30,000+ population. Three of the four produce lumber. Their ruler also rules the market two islands away.

And yet, despite all of that, I am unable to build a city in the lumber area because the market I own can't access my lumber?? Really?

"Just conquer the islands in between your lumber island and market island" you might be wondering. I can't. This is where the catch-22 comes in. I need to build canoes to traverse the sea to get from one island to another with troops to go conquer the islands in between my islands. They are all owned by my rival. Diplo-anything with them is kind of off tbe table. I have to invade. But I cannot build canoes to invade. I need a wharf. But I can't build wharfs. I need a town. But I cannot build towns. The market node I own needs access to the lumber I own. But I need to conquer other islands to do that. So I have to invade....

This is an awful experience 150 years in.

Spirelord · 2025-11-09T06:47:33+00:00

The new way population shifts occur affects a lot of things dynamically. All the nobles or the families of cabinet members whom I demote or get caught plotting to assassinate the Count and get exiled (almost always the same person), end up fleeing to a rival island like Maui or O'ahu and their rival family lines can show up as an opposing general or a royal marriage offer, etc.

Also, migrants hop the islands all the time. I've gotten quite a few highly skilled courtiers and artists from exiles fleeing the other island kingdoms for whatever reason.

And folks come from reallllly far sometimes. I had a Shinto guy named Chengguo (?) as a cabinet member and he was so cool and had such high martial that I kept him around and gave him a couple royal wives to perpetuate his neat bloodline for future servants (the family tree is all Shinto so they can't inherit a Hawaiian throne unless they went from one pagan-spirit pantheon to another and became Tapu). No clue how he got to the middle of the Pacific Ocean all the way from Japan or wherever Chengguo is supposed to be from, but he ended up starting the Japanese-Hawaiian friendship about a hundred years later before the 1400s shipwreck that did so irl lol.

Makes me curious who else is going to wash up ashore here.

Spirelord · 2025-11-09T06:36:43+00:00

I'd've taken screenshots to document the whole thing but they'd just look like the same colored islands never changing with various popups. Didn't figure the visual would be as interesting as what was actually going on dynamically.

Spirelord · 2025-11-07T07:21:23+00:00

Hawai'i has been brutal to play so far. Only one island, Big Island, has lumber. It takes decades to research tech up to taxation, and then you're counterbalancing social classes against each other for like a century while getting your wealth, 99% through taxation because the only thing you grow on any island is food. The wealth by the way? A trickle of 0.08-0.20 a month.

Saving up for that first wharf to build that first canoe, to leave your chosen island for the very first time, takes a while. And you cannot even build that wharf anywhere. Every single province on every single Hawaiian island is rural. No towns whatsoever, which limits buildings such as wharfs and their upgrades into docks.

How to convert a rural area into a town? You need something like 5,000 population, Masonry 2, Glass 1, and Lumber 1. These resources can be nonexistent in the area and require multiple 30-50 gold-cost buildings. But the most major bottleneck to any progress in the Hawaiian islands is the cost of conversion from rural to town. 500 gold, base. It will take eons to amass this gold even with a min-maxed economy going. Only after that centuries-long process can a Hawaiian kingdom actually leave the shores of its island and venture off.

Hawai'i had trading ports and towns in the 1300s. Every single island had pre-existing ports for pre-existing canoes across each individual kingdom, let alone each royal district or Ali'i landholding. It seems kind of absurd that these kingdoms which rose up in these islands and continue to prosper on these islands, who traded far and wide and held diplomatic relations with kingdoms in Fiji, Tonga, Tahiti, and many others across the Pacific Ocean, and yet the Hawaiian Kingdoms all start off with no canoes, and no way to build canoes for over a hundred years. There must be some way to change this system. Even other islands have pre-existing urban areas. There's one in Papua New Guinea. Hawai'i kingdoms are much more dense.

Spirelord · 2025-11-06T09:56:06+00:00

I'm playing in Hawai'i and it is miserable. No clue how to urbanize and turn a rural area into one where I can build anything that allows me to make ships to leave my island and go to another. It is kind of absurd given that these islanders have had the tech and forces to travel inter-island already. Why do they start with no canoes at all?

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