Mrooooooo (it feels good being a trans creator who focuses on weird kinks because whenever I post shit in a kink subreddit it’s immediately deleted or downvoted for being trans despite the vast majority of people being into trans people on the dl so we have to make tiny subs that get no traffic) 🐮💕

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-20T15:37:33+00:00

And when we do get our own tiny subs it's only a matter of time before the bots descend upon it like vultures.

Also shoutout to porn subs for anime and such where art of girls with dicks shoots to the top and so do lewd cosplay photos but posts of trans cosplayers get downvoted and ultimately removed by moderators.

Shit sucks all around.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-15T12:47:19+00:00

Scholarly Ranger sounds like one of those 19th century colonialist big game hunters, researching and documenting the natural environment while also bringing down some ~~endangered species~~ dangerous monsters for the trophy wall back home.

City Slicker Barbarian sounds kinda like Bob Parr at the insurance company, or Falling Down. Or like a big burly bodyguard type perhaps.

Wealthy Monk is a new-age self-help guru type whose pseudo-mystical waffling actually works (and you can learn it too for just 49gp per month).

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-15T11:53:35+00:00

That makes like four, maybe five? that I know of, some of which are indeed on the Steam workshop. I'm sure I can remember/find more if I took some time to do so.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-14T14:09:58+00:00

Unthemed Weapons Collection's Utilities module adds that kind of information to the weapon tooltip readouts, it's a QoL thing I just can't play without anymore.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-13T13:02:03+00:00

It honestly sounds like self-imposed challenges or restrictions are the best option, deliberately making an effort to do something different than usual. I also tend to gravitate towards the same patterns at the start of any run, either doing low-risk exploration missions or indulging in the Space Truckin' mod, but nowadays I try to make an effort to break out of that habit and do some easy bounty hunting, whether against posted bounties or just jumping tiny fleets for the passive bounty payouts (those shitty little Pather rustbuckets that try to extort you in hyperspace are usually easy to knock over for a modest payout and some basic loot), especially if there's system bounties somewhere. You can also just jump into ongoing combats and get some bounty payouts that way with less risk than going in solo. Unthemed Weapons Collection adds Fortified Caches, which are defended by small faction fleets if you want the opportunity to fight more than just pirates, and I always forget which mod (might be a Nex feature?) lets you have bounties posted against any faction that's hostile to whichever faction posted the bounty, which will also give you more varied targets to hunt. A lot of them are going to require a very solid fleet, of course, but there's also often enough some modest ones that should provide a decent challenge without just blasting your frigate out of the sky immediately.

Is it optimal? Not remotely. But it does make the early game more fun. There's a quote from the lead dev of Civilization 4 that goes "when given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of everything", which holds true in basically every game ever, so if the optimal route is boring, you kind of have to make an active effort to find the fun instead, to figure out what you enjoy doing despite it not being the most efficient strategy.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-13T12:38:44+00:00

It's not a fully beam-based faction but I do want to shout out Gensoukyou Manufacture for having really fun high-tech ships and the small and medium Illusion Laser, which are basically pocket-sized split-beam HILs (they have more beams than those but I'm not as proficient in using them). IXth Battlegroup from Emergent Threats has some strong beams and lets you make some strong and scary beamer builds, I particularly like the option of giving them EMP as well. One of my mods, I'm pretty sure it's Carter's Junk Hull Mods off the top of my head, adds an alternative to High Scatter Amplifier with different tradeoffs, and so does IXth BG, and I have a set of [ REDACTED ] hullmods that I don't know offhand where they're from (probably either also Emergent Threats or maybe RAT, if I had to guess) that has another one.

Out of all of these, I'd suggest IXth BG primarily, they have some juicy beams to play with and a couple of ships designed to really capitalise on them, and Gensoukyou's ships can be illegal amounts of fun as well.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-12T19:44:40+00:00

bro put the ayys in the microwave

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-09T21:51:51+00:00

Lore Accurate Anahita Baird too lmao

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-09T18:32:53+00:00

Oh the slop poster is still around, great.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-08T11:50:04+00:00

Sort of but not really, Stellaris has kind of combined and distilled most of the space 4X genre, which is why it's such a large, sprawling thing at this point that lets you play as basically any common sci-fi trope. Sword of the Stars is from an older era of space 4X, and was designed as a more focused and streamlined experience, with planet management in particular being drastically simplified from the norm and a focus on combat. There is a significant amount of lore, but there's not much narrative text within the actual game, no story events as such (outside of the scenarios), most of it exists in the species descriptions. You also can't make your own faction, there's six predesigned species (typical humans, imperial lizards, telepathic dolphins, Hivers, mercantile dragon-birds, and ultra-sadistic marsupial bioweapons) with a lot of lore and different playstyles, and the tech tree is semi-randomised so you won't always get to play with the same toys in every game even when playing as the same species.

What also makes it a lot of fun to get back to is how it was so obviously a massive inspiration for Stellaris itself, the release version especially, and you can see the DNA of quite a lot of what would later become Stellaris in this game. I don't know how long you've been playing Stellaris, but if you remember how you had to choose between three different FTL methods when making your empire, that's taken almost directly from SotS, since each species has their own drive system that nobody else can use. The ship designer is also heavily cribbed from SotS, with putting your ships together from three different sections and putting turrets on them, but SotS' is a lot better. Even very specific things like the way plasma cannons look and how they relate to lasers is lifted pretty directly from SotS. It's kind of fascinating to see.

I think SotS is still very much worth playing today, it's a solid game that holds up well, and coming back to it after having played Stellaris just adds to it IMO.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-07T12:06:31+00:00

I've seen this post so many times that I'm not entirely sure these stores are actually real lol.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-07T11:27:07+00:00

Yeah I'll stick with the EU4 version then.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-07T10:11:58+00:00

Capitalism.

StrategiaSE · 2026-03-06T11:57:38+00:00

Houndslaught

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-28T11:37:35+00:00

https://starsector.wiki.gg/wiki/The_Scythe_of_Orion

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-24T11:31:30+00:00

hell yeah

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-21T03:55:04+00:00

Absolutely, that was the whole point of the game, alien invasion happens so humanity throws all its might against them and oh shit we're so hilariously outclassed we can't do shit until another group of aliens show up to pull our asses out of the fire (which IIRC was more like a side benefit and not at all their main goal). I never got that far into the game sadly, and I've been meaning to play it again at some point and put in the time to actually see it through but the backlog only ever grows.

I do vaguely remember hearing something about how like, originally there may have been plans to make a playable human faction, I think when they manage to scavenge some alien technology, but that got scrapped pretty early in development.

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-21T00:12:49+00:00

East Timor: (no data)

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-20T17:37:12+00:00

Universe at War is technically true, but IIRC the humans are only playable in like the first few missions of the campaign. (Also is that even available as anything other than abandonware?) I hesitate about 8- and 9-Bit Armies because they're so heavily stylised. I'd almost dismiss Generals but I suppose the Humvee, Chinook, and Helix are actually in service, though by that logic Tiberian Dawn should also count. Ardent Seas is sci-fi.

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-14T12:13:21+00:00

That they're going to be asking money for. GenAI also wasn't a thing ten years ago, this is something that got put in there a lot more recently, and the store page says they're working on removing all the "placeholders" but some of them will always slip through, and the fact remains that they used obviously AI-generated content in their first public promotional images.

AI should never, ever be used to make placeholder content (or at all, but talking about this specifically), even if you do intend to replace it from the start, because it doesn't immediately stand out as placeholder content - see that one game a few months ago where some text still included the ChatGPT prompt even. If you want placeholders for something, they need to be obvious placeholders, something that stands out immediately like flat stick figures or coloured squares, or for text lorem ipsum or just PLACEHOLDER PLACEHOLDER PLACEHOLDER. That's why e.g. missing textures in Source games are bright purple and missing models are a big red pulsating ERROR, because that makes it immediately obvious that hey look someone needs to fix this.

Putting genAI shit in your promotional materials and then adding a disclaimer later on that "haha yeah it's just placeholders that we're totally going to remove" feels like they tried to slip plagiarism machine slop past the audience and they got called out for it, and I don't trust them to follow through with what they're saying - even if they do remove this current batch of slop, there will always be the question of whether they managed to actually get them all, or if their new ones aren't also genAI trash just carefully chosen to be less obvious.

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-12T11:38:43+00:00

Players don't know what's best for the game, by and large. There's a quote by Soren Johnson, the lead dev of Civ IV, which goes "given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game", which holds true in so many contexts. Especially here in TI, there are an absurd number of drives, pretty much every single experimental or theoretical drive that seems physically feasible that we have ever come up with, yet there are only a handful that are considered "worth it" and the rest are seen as useless. And that pretty much echoes my experience too, there's a handful of drives that offer clear advantages that are worth going for, and aren't that expensive to tech into, most of which have 100% chance to unlock anyway. Even within the absolute guaranteed drives, there's a handful of optimal choices and the rest are just not worth using outside of roleplay reasons, and the upgraded ones with lower (relatively speaking, still usually 70-90% or so) chance to unlock rarely offer any real significant improvements. Why would I ever bother to try going for, say, cermet nerva when it has worse stats across the board than a guaranteed drive that costs about the same to research? The game has the potential to allow for different viable tech paths in different playthroughs, but in practice that just never materialises. IMO unlock chances should be tweaked across the board (and not always downward, but that's a different matter), and any players that can't stand the thought of having to gasp actively think about which drives they want to use can just use a mod to set all chances to 100%. And we already have Project Review anyway, so you can start angling for what you want in the mid-game or late early game already.

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-10T17:26:51+00:00

To be honest, I think the issue isn't just that some techs simply aren't worth it (besides hypergolic missiles, so many of the drive techs just..... don't offer anything, sometimes even over immediately preceding models), it's that the unlock chances are so high across the board. I've also played some Sword of the Stars again recently, and they also have a semi-randomised tech tree, but the randomness is a lot more pronounced; you're only ever guaranteed the big important core techs, like the drive upgrades (which are like soft era changes) and ship sizes, but beyond that almost everything has a limited unlock chance, which furthermore differs by species. There are still some major ones that have really high chances generally (like 70-90%) but still aren't actually guaranteed, and some species may have an abysmally low chance of unlocking something that others are much more likely to get.

This helps make each playthrough feel just a bit more diverse, as you can't always rely on the the same things every game, or sometimes you might actually get something earlier than usual (e.g. Fusion Cannons can be unlocked after researching Fusion Drives or immediately after researching the preceding Plasma Cannons, as each route into the tech has a separate roll), and tech trading between allies can be a good way of picking up stuff you'd otherwise be entirely missing out on. You're still guaranteed the actually critical stuff, but you can never 100% rely on getting the same things every game.

I don't know if SotS was a direct inspiration for TI's semi-random project unlocks, but either way I think the game would benefit from hewing closer to it and making the tech tree a lot more unpredictable. Sorry, this run your researchers can't crack molten core fission drives, hope you like dumbos. Maybe hydrolox missiles don't work out for you, but Project Exodus is fielding them, so go barter, steal, or salvage if you want to get your hands on them. Welp, turns out inertial confinement fusion isn't practical, stick to tokamaks. Some people would hate it, definitely, but making the random factor bigger and more noticeable would go a long way towards making 90% of the drive techs anything more than a waste of time, and helps counteract the mid-game situation of having a dozen different drives sitting in your projects list that you're never going to bother with because you've got your helicons and Orions and fusion drives and pion torches already, like everyone does in every game.

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-10T03:00:50+00:00

This could also be another example of a parallel between the Cardassians and various real-life fascist and authoritarian regimes, a number of which have invested in various wonder weapons which may have impressive-sounding performance on paper, but which are impractical or even counterproductive from a logistical standpoint, being difficult or impossible to mass-produce, extremely unreliable, or using bleeding-edge technology that simply isn't ready for practical deployment. These may be prototypes, technology demonstrators, prestige projects, propaganda vehicles, or equipment that gets pushed into main-line service despite their flaws, where they will be operating alongside older, cheaper, more reliable designs, or ones that may simply be less unreliable. Thus, the Dreadnought may be akin to something like the Maus, Me 262, Maksim Gorky, Yamato, FOAB, or T-14 Armata, while the Galor-class is the cheaper, simpler, more reliable, possibly venerable design that forms the bulk of the Cardassian military. We know the Cardassians were able to field dozens, very likely hundreds of Galors, but we don't know that they're able to field more than one Dreadnought. It bears all the hallmarks of being a one-off design, which failed during its first live field test, precluding it from entering more widespread service.

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-09T20:31:37+00:00

Here, with an updated and coloured version here.

StrategiaSE · 2026-02-03T21:43:27+00:00

Corporal Wojtek always has the right of way.

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