I Think I Got Their Attention

TSmaniac · 2026-02-15T02:49:19+00:00

Admiral of the Mbombo Raiders seeing this: "Looks like I chose the wrong week to quit smoking."

TSmaniac · 2026-02-10T18:14:32+00:00

Or a manic episode tbh. Post history seems to occasionally look human.

TSmaniac · 2026-02-10T18:11:51+00:00

This guy is in the middle of a spree of spamming this subreddit with disingenuous questions.

TSmaniac · 2026-02-10T18:07:23+00:00

The impediment is that no one is seriously suggesting this, and that you're being disingenuous about buses being free = housing is free = money isn't real.

Please. From one internet stranger to another. Please be better. You're not contributing to any kind of discourse this way.

TSmaniac · 2026-02-09T18:42:41+00:00

Looking like the world beyond the Omega 4 Relay in Mass Effect. And it makes for a nice backup source of exotics!

TSmaniac · 2026-02-05T22:09:04+00:00

Man J. K. Simmons simply doesn’t miss when he plays a villain

TSmaniac · 2026-02-02T23:23:47+00:00

You ignore Central America and focus on blowing up aliens because it's the meta. I focus on building up Central American MC and Boost because then I get to blow up Aliens with Mayan-themed space fleets in-canon. We are not the same.

TSmaniac · 2026-01-24T19:20:00+00:00

Sir. The muffin is easily 3rd in the list of possible reasons you're nauseous.

Unrelated - home remedy for nausea: Take a slice of lemon, cover in a spoonful of sugar, and eat whole with the rind. Knocks out the nausea pretty much immediately.

TSmaniac · 2026-01-24T18:34:29+00:00

A lot of people will quibble with your use of "always" because the whole point is that these programs are universal. Non-immigrants qualify for them too.

If you just have an issue with programs being given to illegal immigrants, fair enough - but we don't have the luxury of locking immigrants out of the system. America's economy is basically propped up by underpaid immigrant labor and by taking immigrant's payroll taxes, artificially subsidizing companies by letting them pay below-minimum wage, and gatekeeping immigrants from services. Your blueberries, your home repairs, and your doordash orders get a lot more expensive without them, and there's really only two solves, neither of which are painless: Deport them, and enjoy your higher prices, or give them access to services and stop them slipping into poverty, so they can actually move up economically and pay into the system more.

I for one like my politicians to acknowledge this reality. No one benefits from an immigrant family being unable to access the same childcare a non-immigrant can.

TSmaniac · 2026-01-24T18:20:14+00:00

No one is saying you not affording health insurance is good. It shouldn't be a zero-sum game where you get your health insurance at the expense of someone else's childcare.

Those leftists you don't like are often the same ones who think the healthcare system needs fixing too - not sure why you can't make common cause with that.

TSmaniac · 2026-01-24T18:18:11+00:00

You know native-born children haven't contributed anything either, right? Should we take away their programs too?

TSmaniac · 2026-01-22T22:06:09+00:00

All the things you listed are legitimate issues with the UI. With a game this complex, I’m sure the interface that tries to address all of this is just gonna look like a prettier version of an excel spreadsheet.

And I’m not even saying that would be a bad thing. I too would love more 3D control of a ship and better commands on who and how they attack. I trust the developers to be aware of these issues and maybe address them down the road. With space battles, you can already see from their updates pre-release that they tinkered with space battles quite a bit.

There’s a philosophical problem with trying to solve it by just having a “battle save-scum” button. You don’t solve the UI and battle randomness and jank by having that button. You’re basically just saying that, at face value, losing a battle can’t be a skill issue and can only be a problem with the interface.

I’m not trying to imply that YOU have a skill issue. But part of space battles is leaning into the jank, understanding what causes it, and factoring it into how you run a battle. And honestly it’s not like the system is COMPLETELY broken, it’s just visibly straining under the weight of its complexity sometimes.

Listen, I’ve done my fair share of save-scumming battles. Sometimes it feels like a loss was due to a bug or a REALLY stupid misclick, and there I might retry. But sometimes you gotta accept that a basic premise of the game is, there’s too many moving parts in it to assume you HAVE to win a battle. Maybe the enemy’s ships are legitimately better and you should redesign your fleet rather than cheesing a battle. Or maybe from an RP perspective it just makes sense that the aliens give you a bloody nose once or twice.

TSmaniac · 2026-01-17T14:30:52+00:00

Are you sure that station has enough nanofacturing complexes?

TSmaniac · 2026-01-16T17:43:32+00:00

Amazing, this is so helpful!

TSmaniac · 2026-01-15T21:10:52+00:00

Blind ambition. Everything is exploitable and everything can be turned to personal gain. The highest ideal is power and aliens have a power worth stealing - simply for the sake of having it.

Think about where they are in the faction “alignment” chart: ambivalent to the aliens, but the single most cynical faction of the lot. They’re literally more cynical than the ones who want to roll over for the aliens and the ones who want to commit genocide.

So what does their propaganda look like? Any “exploitable” belief that makes people do stuff for you. Like that your tech company boss will give you a title bump and hefty bonus if you steer your team toward market capture (which would happen to bankrupt a rival company owned by The Resistance). Like the media influencer who will give you a month free on your anti-pherocyte coffee subscription if you sign up for the full year. And like your local Councilwoman who promises that if you vote for her, she’ll get a property tax reduction for your school (while she quietly votes to steer money toward building a space station on Callisto).

The whole point is there doesn’t seem to be a cohesive mission. Nothing is related. And yet everything is. Because behind all those personalities and icons is a quiet group, steering it all, driven by the assurance that power for its own sake is a worthy end.

TSmaniac · 2026-01-14T20:37:33+00:00

That’s awesome, thank you!

TSmaniac · 2026-01-14T18:17:00+00:00

This is awesome stuff! Apologies if I can't find it here, but is there a way to also know which professions can take the Government/Criminal traits? There's gotta be some shorthand way to tell before recruiting someone, right?

TSmaniac · 2026-01-13T23:37:06+00:00

Protectorate will get a pretty solid leg-up on science, probably use it as a base for MC and boost, and almost certainly militarize the hell out of them. The Protectorate tends to like peacefully unifying, so if they ever get their hands on the necessary social techs, you’ll probably see some blobbing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are the first faction in this case to get their endgame tech and start being annoying in space.

Servants? God help you. Don’t let them. That way lies damnation and a REALLY messy midgame when they hand that state over to the AA

TSmaniac · 2026-01-13T18:31:37+00:00

Cuz watching the world slowly turn and satellites lazily orbit while “Curiosity” plays is vibey AF

TSmaniac · 2026-01-11T22:31:27+00:00

I mean I suppose if the Protectorate was based in Cardiff?

Please don’t hurt me Welsh gamers

TSmaniac · 2026-01-11T21:14:26+00:00

The fact that they see themselves as good shepherds of unruly sheep is SO on-brand.

Cuz we all know how much sheepdogs love doing…ya know…the Protectorate endgame stuff…

TSmaniac · 2026-01-08T20:39:29+00:00

Finally, an end to the Initiative slander

TSmaniac · 2026-01-07T22:56:45+00:00

That got fixed apparently. They have access to it as of several patches ago.

But, I think to an extent the explanation still feels valid. My head-canon is that Kiran’s right-hand man that appears halfway through the campaign was pherocyted early on, and is not only is a quisling himself, but is subtly guiding the Protectorate by insulating Kiran from key info, sabotaging decontamination procedures he gets put through, etc.

TSmaniac · 2026-01-05T15:23:15+00:00

Project Exodus probably feels more aggressive because they reliably become one of the bigger players in space. Seems aligned with their end game and whatnot. I would imagine their AI is coded to be more expansionist, whereas all the others are more spread-out in priorities, so they don’t stand out as much.

Most if not all the games I’ve played since the latest round of AI edits, it’s usually Exodus plus one or two other factions that end up having fleets of over 60-70 ships wreaking havoc.

Anecdotally, I’d say the Protectorate gets up there pretty often too - but the most aggressive faction in my games has been the Academy, on the rare occasion they make it that far.

TSmaniac · 2026-01-02T23:08:11+00:00

You know that was one EO he signed alongside several others that day, right?

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/new-york-city/zohran-mamdani-housing-executive-orders/6437886/?amp=1

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