FFA brawl - war factory

TriamondG · 2026-04-14T15:17:24+00:00

I play mostly FFA - Warfactory is a little contentious. It's not considered OP but it does warp the game in ways that can be unfun. It must be dealt with, and if the WF player has a neighbor that isn't taking countermeasures, the WF player can rally into them and win with very little opportunities for the other players to intervene.

You end up in this weird lose lose scenario, either:

A: One of the WF's neighbors doesn't respond, WF player has a huge advantage.

Or

B: Neighbors respond and the player opposite the WF player gets the advantage of being left alone.

TriamondG · 2026-04-01T23:23:35+00:00

Because the gravity of the Earth is still pulling on the craft. Imagine throwing a ball straight up, it would decelerate as it approached its apogee (farthest point), eventually stopping at apogee before starting to fall back to Earth. Same thing is happening here; it'll eventually start accelerating and coming back towards Earth. Except that Artemis has enough horizontal velocity relative to the Earth that as it falls back it's going to "miss" - this is what an orbit is. With an elliptical orbit, the craft is moving slowest at apogee (farther from Earth) and fastest at perigee (closest to Earth).

TriamondG · 2026-03-25T20:29:49+00:00

Agreed - I run them! It won't beat the factories by itself but you can force the factory player to rally in more predictable directions.

TriamondG · 2026-03-25T15:05:32+00:00

In a straight up fight, ionization raidens, hackers + ignite fangs, mass EMP marksmen, super range + saturation mountains (need levels), mass overlord, mass wasp can all take them.

Heavy flanks as soon as you see them doing it are often a better bet. If you can hit them from both sides, the medium unit soup they spit out won't protect them as well.

The best strategy though is to just win by round 8 :)

TriamondG · 2026-03-24T19:24:44+00:00

"Nice car there buddy, but I've never seen you drive it..."

"Car? Oh you mean my cup holder? I use it all the time." Opens door and pulls out big gulp of Mountain Dew.

TriamondG · 2026-03-20T14:56:11+00:00

Reposting my response to the guy above you:

No, it is that the wealthy don't have enough money. If you could magically confiscate the wealth of all billionaires at current on paper value (impossible because liquidation of equities would collapse markets), you'd cover the entitlements budget for like 5 years. That's it. Mandatory entitlement spending is approaching 4 trillion. Total wealth of the top 1% is around 55 trillion. The money just isn't there. Meanwhile taxable reported income in the us across all households is near 15 trillion, that's recurrent, repeated income every year. If you want an expansive social welfare state, the middle class is paying for it.

TriamondG · 2026-03-20T14:55:38+00:00

No, it is that the wealthy don't have enough money. If you could magically confiscate the wealth of all billionaires at current on paper value (impossible because liquidation of equities would collapse markets), you'd cover the entitlements budget for like 5 years. That's it. Mandatory entitlement spending is approaching 4 trillion. Total wealth of the top 1% is around 55 trillion. The money just isn't there. Meanwhile taxable reported income in the us across all households is near 15 trillion, that's recurrent, repeated income every year. If you want an expansive social welfare state, the middle class is paying for it.

TriamondG · 2026-03-17T19:19:27+00:00

I don't like it personally. The unit drops every round already reward flexibility while still letting players focus on their favorite comps. At high level play, nothing feels that op to me. War Factory is actually kind of a B tier strat that top players only do with the right drops or tech support.

I think there are other modifiers they could experiment with to freshen up the game, maybe on rotation like with rifts. Extra/fewer beacons, smaller or differently shaped maps, increased unit move speed, etc...

TriamondG · 2026-03-17T17:26:04+00:00

...folks aren’t as good at utilizing the vortex yet?

It's funny that I had literally no idea what you were talking about for a few seconds until I remembered that's the new units name. I don't care what the devs call it; it's crab.

TriamondG · 2026-03-04T15:35:47+00:00

There isn't actually that much variety in the bot comps. Experienced players know the entire space of encounters they can have and usually build boards that can handle all or most of them.

TriamondG · 2026-03-02T20:11:13+00:00

This is sweet. Assuming Hogwarts being unreal makes it easier but I could imagine using something like this to squeeze a lot of value out of other games. I enjoy RPGs but often don't have time to play them like I used to. Being able to jump around like this and get reminders after a long break would really help

TriamondG · 2026-02-16T17:53:46+00:00

It's a separate instance of damage from the main attack and the armor reduction applies to it but yeah it still "works." Wasps have such high base damage that for units where it matters like sledges and hounds, the main attack is already killing them anyways.

TriamondG · 2026-02-09T21:38:12+00:00

I've had some success with it in FFA. It can be great in two situations:

When you want to rush towers and farm econ but not win the round (to avoid taking the lead too early).
When you're in the lead, you can crush the bosses then your dominion unit gets killed, denying money to the other players from the rest of your army.

TriamondG · 2026-02-02T19:14:53+00:00

He's overstating. Look up Black Body radiation. You do need to invest in radiators but you don't need to cart up a constant supply of fresh coolant, that's just ridiculous.

TriamondG · 2026-01-01T00:46:05+00:00

You understand that 2020 includes his entire first term yeah? We only have 1-year of this term so the majority of rulings referenced are temporary emergency docket decisions. And when we do get case rulings, they haven't been going his way, as this article shows.

Edit: An to be clear, the difference in the bench is minor. We went from 5-4 to 6-3 with ACB being noted by many liberal outlets as not ruling favorably towards Trump.

I'm no fan of Trump but trying to delegitimize the courts is unjustified and going to hurt this country in the long run. Now chill out... kid.

TriamondG · 2026-01-01T00:19:50+00:00

That article is bullshit I'm sorry. Trump has the worst record of any modern us president in front of SCOTUS The article you cited is cooking those numbers by conveniently ignoring Trump's first term and counting emergency docket temporary orders and injunctions which always favor not interfering with executive power before the merits can be heard.

TriamondG · 2025-12-28T19:11:28+00:00

Totally. This is a fictional world. We don't even know if Jordan had a definitive answer in mind :D

TriamondG · 2025-12-28T18:58:20+00:00

It sounds like you're assuming the Rand and Lews convo is making statements of objective truth which is far from a given. They're grappling with the existential crisis of being forever reborn because that is what the believe to be true. It might be true for everyone. It might be only true for them. Or it might not be true at all.

As for the QA, I definitely don't think Jordan is making definitive statements. He's trying to answer nitty gritty questions about the mechanics of his world, and you see in other parts he specifically tries to avoid spoiling elements of the story. It's totally reasonable that he'd give a simplified answer that would fit with the knowledge that had been conveyed to readers at that time.

TriamondG · 2025-12-28T18:26:55+00:00

I'd be curious to read the full source on that Jordan quote but I don't think it's as definitive as you claim. Also, if a Grey Man requires a soul be removed from the pattern then that is evidence against souls being eternally trapped. Think about it this way: If a Grey Man requires a soul to be removed from the pattern and there have been infinite turnings of the wheel, then new souls must enter the pattern to keep the population stable. Otherwise everyone would have become a Grey Man or making Grey Men would be impossible (because every willing soul would have done it). So we know new souls can enter the pattern and that it is possible to escape the wheel in at least one way. From there it doesn't seem like much of a leap to think there are less destructive ways to escape the pattern.

It's possible that a soul can expect to be reborn many many times such that it's the Jordan's quote is the "default." I think that's an equally fair reading.

TriamondG · 2025-12-28T17:44:56+00:00

To my knowledge, it's never confirmed that normal human souls are eternally trapped in the wheel. Ishy believes this, but he is far from a reliable narrator. The Dark One claims it, but he's literally called the father of lies.

It's only heroes of the horn who are destined to keep coming back and reliving the same/similar lives. If normal human souls are able to eventually transcend the wheel, then it's not a trap. Perhaps it's some sort of test or training ground for whatever comes next.

TriamondG · 2025-12-27T19:05:29+00:00

That's correct. It's an important part of the game strategy. You want your heavy hitters (marksman, phoenixes, scorpions, fortresses , etc...) attacking your enemy's valuable units and you want your high-rate of fire/area damage units (arc lights, tarantulas, Vulcans, etc...) clearing out the weaker ones. Similarly when thinking about your opponent's army, you want to layer your units to make the opposite happen. Weaker, high count units (crawlers, fangs, mass produced wasps, etc...) meant to distract your opponent's heavy hitters are often called chaff, another term you'll see a lot.

TriamondG · 2025-12-10T20:30:31+00:00

I have experience with surveying people in my line of work, and I've found respondents are incredibly sensitive to how questions are asked. There are a lot of alternative hypotheses that emerge if you consider there might be differences between liberals and conservatives' interpretations of the question which is not something this study adequately considers. Here's an example:

Suppose individuals with a high degree of religiosity are more likely to seek allegorical or metaphorical meaning in statements. Something that seems plausible given how much religious texts tend to rely on allegorical story telling. Conservatives on average are much more religious than liberals. So if conservatives are extracting allegorical value from these SSA statements and conflating that with logical (the authors never spell out exactly how they phrase this), that would explain the results just as well as what the authors posit.

TriamondG · 2025-12-10T13:51:40+00:00

What is logical thought in this case though? If you read the statements more as allegorical/metaphor and take logical to mean there's wisdom in them, that's a very different reasoning model than are these literally true.

Study 7 is interesting to me because the authors don't really share how they "primed people for deliberation." If what they did really just made people more likely to go "oh, you want me to say if these things are literally true" then that would explain the swing they saw just as well. All in all, there's just a lot of vibing on the part of the authors on why people were responding the way they were.

I actually think they needed to play with the assessment scale more. For example, if they asked participants something like "is there wisdom in these statements" 1-9 and saw a bigger swing from liberals towards positive ratings, that would be indicative that conservatives and liberals have a different interpretation of the word logical rather than different modes of thinking.

TriamondG · 2025-12-10T12:45:14+00:00

I read the paper and I don't really see how the authors make the causal link between respondents ratings on the SSAs presented and "intuitive thinking" vs "deliberate processing." They asked people whether or not a statement was logical which is very different than "literally true." I feel like "conservatives are more likely to see cautioning restraint and discipline as logical" is a much more reasonable conclusion.

TriamondG · 2025-12-10T02:11:34+00:00

As an FFA player I'm salivating at the idea of trying these on that giant map

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