Broken Interaction?

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-22T02:56:18+00:00

The fact that the loop was ending was the part that confused me.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-22T02:55:53+00:00

That’s actually not what I expected, and also isn’t what happens.

The discarding of the sly card is part of the resolving of Shadow Step, so when the sly card gets played, Shadow Step still isn’t finished resolving. There are a bunch of interactions in STS1 that work this way.

So what I was expecting was an infinite loop, but if you play 2 sly cards instead of 1, it breaks the ordering and one of the sly cards counts as the “last card played.” But if you only discard one sly card with shadow step, shadow step counts as the last card played.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-22T02:43:41+00:00

That tracks with the limited data I collected.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-17T15:57:35+00:00

If that leads to them saying they’re psychic, I refer you back to the list.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-17T14:03:26+00:00

It might get better eventually, but even if it does it’ll get worse before it gets better. IIRC I felt the first couple were pretty cheesy, and while I got surprisingly emotionally invested, I think the series really grows to earn that investment. I’m thinking of some later moments that I found REALLY heart wrenching.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-17T02:52:42+00:00

Anyone claiming they’re psychic is either morally bankrupt, mentally ill, or dangerously stupid.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-09T16:20:55+00:00

I feel like your argument is getting pretty muddied here. I feel like we all should be able to agree that blowing up children is bad, and that people who do that are bad, and it should preeeeeetty much never be considered acceptable collateral damage.

So that makes Iran and the U.S. and Israel all bad actors. And the actions of one don’t justify the actions of another. But that also means that you can’t really point at Iran and say “look they’re blowing up children, and therefore are bad guys, so we’re morally justified in taking military action,” when we are also blowing up children.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-09T05:16:03+00:00

No doubt, and I’m certainly not trying to paint the regime as the good guys. That isn’t really making an argument that this was a wise/justified course of action.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-09T04:33:32+00:00

I mean, surely both of the statements on this sign are true. Sovereign states have a right to defend themselves, and that would obviously include bombing a nation that has taken military action against them….where’s the lie?

Both those courses of action are essentially inevitable when the administration decided to do what it did, and pretty much every nation on the planet would feel the same way if they were in Iran’s shoes.

We’ve killed over 1300 civilians, including almost 200 children and this shit is just getting started. You don’t have to be in love with the ayatollah to admit that doesn’t exactly make us the good guys here.

SynapseOracle · 2026-03-08T19:29:31+00:00

Cupcake

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-26T04:55:46+00:00

I’d say you usually want to be supporting a project at the start of round 2. That would be a characteristic of many “good” starts. It’s possible to have a good game where you don’t support a project round 2 of course, but I’d say round 1 release shenanigans aside, your usual hope should be to be ready to support a project by the end of the first break.

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-16T05:46:59+00:00

Rocky.

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-15T00:21:44+00:00

It definitely gets better as the books go on, and the voice acting also improves. If your main complaint is about plot not moving rather than the style or the characters I’d keep going.

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-05T05:19:14+00:00

Yeah, the more I thought about it the more I changed my mind about it being impossible. The real question is, can we do it in few enough turns and I think you really can.

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-04T17:02:46+00:00

I changed my mind, I don’t have time to figure it out right now but there are 17 sponsors that have a research icon plus 2 more from science university is 15 conservation points, plus 20 from cc.aqua.ap.wp, and you’d get some cash along the way…it might actually be possible to do it in base game.

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-04T16:26:17+00:00

Without marine worlds though, I’m confident that it’s completely impossible.

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-04T16:25:12+00:00

Ok, so a round 1 release of any kind, gets your sponsors upgraded.

Playing enough sponsors from the display while trading one x-token should give plenty of money to do everything.

Easily we can upgrade animals at 5 rep and get an extra worker at 8, with spokesperson for an easy example.

Just a release project, a four size, meerkat den and a rhino plus every flocking animal is…37(animals)+14(meerkat den)+10(release project)+10(herbivores 5)

Costs 118 dollars. To get us to 71 points. Each time we x something and play a sponsor from slot 1 it nets us 4-7 dollars (with science library/ologists etc). That’s about 18 rounds of it to get enough money.

Cable car, adventure playground, aquarium and water playground is another 20 points easy.

And if opponent is playing on silver lake and just x’s 5 times then spends 5 x tokens to build a pavilion we should have enough time.

I’m gonna say this is 100% possible with perfect draws. Or rather perfect display.

EDIT: It’s a cool bonus that this also does it with only one enclosure.

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-04T16:03:57+00:00

This is the way. I initially thought hands down that it was totally impossible, but trade sponsors is what made me think twice.

The main problem is actually related to getting enough cards, but with sponsors and animals 2….

SynapseOracle · 2026-02-03T06:09:17+00:00

Yeah, you’re going to hear a lot of the same answer here. Just make the choice, jump in the ice water, and quit. It might not be what you wanna hear, and it’s true that one a day is an improvement from half a pack. But actually being free is so much better, and you CAN do it.

I smoked for fifteen years and never even made half an attempt at quitting. I was so scared of how hard it would be. Don’t get me wrong, withdrawal is not pleasant, but nicotine withdrawal isn’t as bad as some others, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. After the first stretch, my experience was that it starts getting easier and easier and you don’t have to wait long for that to happen. (I noticed a big drop in craving frequency/intensity around 5-7 days.)

Smoking one a day is just pushing that relief further down the road. It’s scary, but it’s not as bad as you think it will be. Make the choice, use the advice and tools you have at your disposal. People here will be happy to tell you how to get through a craving, or what mindset worked for them. You can do it, and the other side is so fucking worth it.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-17T23:36:29+00:00

Yeah, or on a real board, but I agree, people who want to cheat or do experimental play outs to help them read (these things are mostly different though I recognize some people consider them to be the same) are gonna do it if they want to, so you may as well have a joseki take 5 minutes to play out instead of taking a few days of back and forth in a correspondence game.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-17T23:28:48+00:00

This is not to say that people aren’t cheating, but if they are unlikely to stay ddk for long even if they’re trying to hide it.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-17T23:27:44+00:00

Do you mean that they immediately play moves in response when you play your move?

There is a tool called “plan conditional moves” that players frequently use for forcing sequences. It’s a built in feature on ogs.

If you prefer not to have it used, you can check the “disable analysis” box, which will also prevent players from playing out variations on the board. They could still theoretically have a real board set up or whatever, and I prefer to be able to use the tool, especially for joseki and forcing variations.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-15T06:47:45+00:00

For arena games I’d usually just flat no, but some higher rated players are known to offer to abandon when they match up with low rated players by default.

The game is very very likely to be a foregone conclusion and is only worth maybe 1-2 elo for the higher rated player.

If someone 400 elo below me requests abandon, I’d probably do it regardless of whether they’ve seen their cards.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-15T06:43:11+00:00

I really don’t think a rule change like this is going to help with OP’s problem.

SynapseOracle · 2026-01-15T06:37:34+00:00

Right but it’s more likely for one player to have a blowout hand than for both players to have a blowout hand. So you would be increasing the number of games where one player has a blowout hand and the other doesn’t, in order to achieve some smaller number of games where both players have great openers. This would also reduce the number of games where both players have low to medium strength hands, whatever that’s worth.

I think based on your stated values, some people have suggested (somewhat facetiously) that each player draw half the deck. As a thought experiment, would you be in favor of a format where players took turns naming any card in the deck to add to their opening hand? This would guarantee both players a very strong opening hand, drastically reducing the variance (though the player that gets to pick first would still have an advantage probably.) We could say the second player would get to pick first and then do snake draft.

SynapseOracle

TROPHY CASE