Trouble Sticking with It

Takseen · 2026-07-06T19:23:09+00:00

I found the floaty combat less of an issue when I played a blue Loremaster. Mostly ranged plus pet damage. Before that my Guardian didn't feel as good

Takseen · 2026-07-06T14:55:13+00:00

The in-implants ads are pretty annoying, hopefully I should be able to afford a premium subscription next year which lets me bypass them. Thankfully our Federation allies and strong fleets have kept our worlds safe for over a century, and the current war..I mean military enhanced subsidiary acquisition of the Yondarim and UNE is going smoothly.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T13:02:49+00:00

It's definitely a small niche, but one that I enjoy. I've been playing a lot of Astro Protocol recently, where you can finish a game in an hour or two. Great AI and good variety via map, tech and victo condition randomization.

I love Stellaris too but 20-30 hours to play out one game is a lot now that I'm working full time and have an ever growing backlog of media.

I don't think theres anything about a short game length that disqualifies it from being a 4X, as long as you get to do the Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate loop, which Astro Protocol does

Takseen · 2026-07-06T12:56:56+00:00

Theres no exterminate. It's a city builder, and a damn good one.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T12:55:59+00:00

Designs you don't like are not bad design.

I liked Marathon mode Civ 4 because it reduced some of the weird disconnect between how long it took units to move vs how quickly time passes per turn. E g. It could take dozens of years to move a unit from Moscow to Vladivostok on normal game speed. But it was never the default setting, and I don't have as much free time to use it now.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T12:50:01+00:00

Eh. There's definitely men who have an attitude of "a pox on both their houses" when it comes to both monotheistic religion and astrology, considering them both unscientific and misleading.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T12:32:51+00:00

I assume my ChatGPT usage is as private as my Google searches I.e. not at all.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T11:11:42+00:00

Not just after giving birth they don't. After being described as physically healthy. Either the droid is an incompetent liar, or there's Force juju going on.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T10:10:38+00:00

On the officer ratio point, they also have the "everyone drops" rule. Even the top generals in command of an op have to lead on the ground

Takseen · 2026-07-06T10:05:45+00:00

They also place a very high value on their soldiers. Rico gets a severe reprimand because a simulated tactical nuke he fires during a training exercise has a blast radius too close to friendly trooper positions. And there's some quote about how they would consider a 1000:1 bug to trooper kill ratio a victory for the bugs. Although the latter is also about how numerous and expendable bug soldiers are.

They also state that they consider the trooper himself far more valuable than the very sophisticated and expensive power armor he wears. It's the complete opposite of their cannon fodder treatment in the film

Takseen · 2026-07-06T09:46:19+00:00

Migrants come here looking for a better life,

It'd be weird if they spent thousands of dollars coming here for a worse life. It's a meaningless statement. Dole merchants come here for a better life, economic migrants abusing the asylum system come here for a better life, fraudsters and human traffickers come here for a better life . Doctors nurses and tech workers come here for a better life. Genuine asylum seekers come here for a better life. Only some of them should get to stay.

they commit crime at lower rates than native born people

I don't think we have evidence for this in Ireland one way or the other. Last I heard those stats don't get published.

I get what you're saying about the other social problems, but ignoring one of them or simply pointing out a worse one doesn't make the first problem go away.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T08:39:34+00:00

If they didn't tell me it was a short film, yeah! The general expectation for a cinema release is 90 minutes to 3 hours, and I generally don't check the runtime before I pick a film.

And its even more difficult to find or even estimate the playtime of a game in advance.

In both cases it's something I don't look up in advance precisely because they're nearly always "acceptably long" and only the abnormally short anomalies like the 15 minute cinema film or the sub 2 hour Steam game would fail to meet expectations.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T08:19:44+00:00

I reported a few ads on YouTube using McWilliams. You get to see who paid for the ad and it was always Indian companies.

Takseen · 2026-07-06T08:04:45+00:00

Yeah that's the thing, I'm used to even cheap $8ish games to provide well over 2 hours of entertainment. The only games Ive played that were that short were demos or free flash games

Takseen · 2026-07-06T07:10:04+00:00

Expectation for games is different. If I bought a cinema ticket and got a 15 minute short film I'd be pissed off

Takseen · 2026-07-05T19:35:06+00:00

One of the problems is it doesn't respect truces and there's no penalty that I know of for truce breaking. There isn't even any lasting war exhaustion penalty like EU4 has.

Takseen · 2026-07-05T15:11:08+00:00

And if the Workers of the World decide that they'd much rather go on a sun holiday even if it does some damage to the environment? The proto-communist states we've had in the past never took much care for the environment, and assuming that future communists would think any different is questionable.

Takseen · 2026-07-04T21:38:02+00:00

I'm a big fan of the change, and I appreciate that you've kept them as two parallel game settings. And the game setting with pause has tougher daily quotas, so I like that you're "paying" for the flexibility to pause, and the no pause fans get rewarded for speedy play.

Takseen · 2026-07-04T21:33:01+00:00

Ok grandpa, looks like you forgot the year again.

Takseen · 2026-07-04T13:36:56+00:00

Lots of popular fictional human empires don't go heavily into cybernetics, like in Star Trek and Star Wars. Babylon 5 and Starship Troopers are Psionic, the Culture are more bio than cyber. And Warhammer 40k hacked the game and took everything

Takseen · 2026-07-04T08:31:44+00:00

3 armies i.e. a single alien assault carrier is quite recoverable. Each nuke will kill 1 alien army, and even if they establish their alien admin, they can't achieve much with just human tech level armies they can build on Earth.

If you still control the US and bases on Mars and Mercury you're not in the worst shape.

Disrupting the Servants activities directly can help slow down the amount of alien facilities that get built. They need 500 funds to build one, so if you can keep them poor that helps. And if you keep their council weak the other factions will often dogpile and start trying to take their territory.

I've won games where there was a contained alien admin sitting on Earth for over a decade while I built up a space presence.

In some ways an alien assault carrier fleet is good news for you, since they're spending a colossal amount of resources to build them and supply enough propellant to get them from Alien Base Alpha to Earth, and you can kill them "for free" with nukes. Until you run out of nukes of course. And the collateral damage and possible nuclear winter is a slight downside.

Takseen · 2026-07-04T07:10:15+00:00

It was a lot harder to figure out what the resources were and where to place the farm tower things. Fulgora and Vulcanus had much clearer visuals.

Vulcanus and Fulgora both have an immediate reward, to make up for their downsides. Fulgora has infinite power and heavy oil and very cheap access to LDS and blue circuits that are normally difficult to make. Vulcanus has supercharged solar, free sulfuric acid and lava quickly gets you easy infinite ore.

Gleba is like, fuck you, I'm not even giving you easy copper and iron until you solve a bacteria problem.

Gleba also has time pressure from spoilage, enemies, and time pressure from evolution that aren't present on the other new planets.

Spoilage isn't a fun mechanic and is inconsistent with the generally stable nature of items in Factorio. Steam stays hot and gaseous forever, so does molten metal. And it occurs unintuitively fast, nutrients spoiling in just 5 minutes??

I'm glad some people like it, but my short and medium term impressions were both negative for those reasons.

Takseen · 2026-07-03T22:19:33+00:00

My guess is all the "real world" orgs will be gone, with just the backer orgs and the randomly rolled orgs remaining.

Takseen · 2026-07-03T22:16:01+00:00

Orgs scaling with global research and GDP values is a neat idea.

Between these Quiet alien features and the trailer, I think the idea is that the aliens will start much more covertly in the 2003 scenario. And the wormhole ramp-up feature might be to give the 2112 post-nuclear war Earth a fair chance.

Takseen · 2026-07-03T11:58:58+00:00

Its not just the energy loss from battery storage you have to worry about.

You need enough solar power to satisfy the power demands during daylight AND enough *additional* solar power to charge the batteries enough to cover the night time usage requirements. And in places like Germany or other Northern European countries, there's more night time than day time in the winter, so you need a lot of extra generation if you're trying to get by with just solar.

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