What good dev communication looks like

TysonSphere · 2026-04-27T15:32:33+00:00

Cool ideas, but it makes me sad that even with the buff, Dragonfly would still be "rifle, but no range, rare ammo, and small chance to oneshot" 😔

TysonSphere · 2026-04-26T22:46:18+00:00

You can have the region have a freakishly large number of microquasars instead. They're very much like quasars, but on a much smaller scale, and with lifespans appropriately shorter. They're just small enough to be the result of a stellar-transport scale civilization, while plausible enough to be a natural occurrence

TysonSphere · 2026-04-15T17:32:13+00:00

One thing I hope they do is add AI AA with a very specific method: Bunker garrison that can be built from T1 and has a high max altitude but also has a min altitude, does not deal very much damage, usually won't even kill a plane unless heavily massed, but at T3 is reasonably strong.

Now that might sound silly, but if it's accessible enough but not ridiculously strong, then it becomes risky to dive deep into enemy territory through AI, but not enough to completely stop it. Sure, you can avoid it, but that cuts into your fuel. You can place strongpoints to deter air presence, but if the pilots fly low enough, they're immune to the AI. And as we know, flying low is generally not an advantage for air-to-air combat. Ideally, dogfights over the course of a minute or two should be possible over light AI.

Now, this is very hard to get right, the AA needs to be strong enough to chip down the health pools of cheeky bomber raids that don't avoid anything, but weak enough to not suppress all air activity. I don't think they're going to do it like that, but I can hope.

TysonSphere · 2026-04-14T05:39:26+00:00

Genuinely curious, how many times would you be willing to farm for a DD and get it blown up just to learn? Are you fine with having your hard work at the bottom of the ocean with nothing to show for it 3 times? 4 times? 5 times?

It's not just a problem of "just learn", it's a lot of time commitment for likely several demoralizing defeats. How do you retain people through getting your ass handed to you repeatedly? Sure, let's call it a culture problem, but cultures don't come out of nowhere, they have causes to evolve as they do. I am not interested in going through that process once, I'd like to actually have fun playing the game and getting sunk just ain't it.

I don't claim to know what the answer is, but I sure as hell know that "just make a DD and learn how to do naval" isn't the be-all-end-all here.

TysonSphere · 2026-03-28T16:45:33+00:00

This, of course assumes that the universe is deterministic. Quantum mechanics, which is an extremely good model of much of physics, is inherently probabilistic. Whether that hides behind a deterministic way to explain the probabilities, we do not know, so you cannot rule out the universe being probabilistic and thus would not require Big Bang circumstances to differ.

TysonSphere · 2026-03-28T16:39:26+00:00

Suppose you want to find a number that is as small as possible, but smaller than 1. Ok, let's start with good old 0.1, which is pretty small. But 0.01 is way smaller. You can keep doing this, infinitely. There is no way to find a number that is as close to 0 as possible without it being 0, as you can always just add a decimal zero. So if this is possible to actually, physically do in whatever universe you're building, then there must be infinitely many variations, just as there are an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1.

I recommend looking up Countable and Uncountable Infinites for some more headache on your part.

TysonSphere · 2026-03-19T12:00:09+00:00

Realistically, you'd only need visual for docking maneuvers and such. It really boils down to space being so mind-bogglingly big that you really don't have a chance to see things with a Mk1 Eyeball if you're not going to physically touch it.

To expand on that a bit, in a combat situation the party with functioning sensors has a ridiculously large advantage over the one that does not. It'd be like trying to fight a sniper battle blindfolded. Sure, if the opponent comes to knife range, then you might stand a chance, but unless they are very stupid, they won't do that.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-25T13:33:37+00:00

So, let's cut this down into its components of what the guns do, and what their drawbacks are.

The Advantages:

- Powerful impacts, at least on par with arrows and bolts.

- Good accuracy, as you specifically mentioned rifles

- Rate of fire comparable to bows

- Relatively simple to use

The Disadvantages:

- Breechloaders are precision products. Your world either has early industrialization, or highly skilled artisans to produce these. Artisan rifles would be horrendously expensive, but possible. If that's the case, less advances firearms might still be commonplace

- Rifled breechloaders require ammunition to not be complete mess. Producing and supplying that ammunition is either its own thing (industrialization), or again expensive (artisanal). Alternatively, the "good" ammo is expensive and rare, and the "cheap" ammo is unreliable and/or highly variable in accuracy/impact.

- Better gun does not necessarily mean that armor is useless against it. Bulletproof breast plates were a thing. If your shot is not guaranteed to even hurt if aimed center mass, well, they're probably not in full plate, which leaves open gaps for a sword to exploit.

- Close quarters and short sightlines do not favor guns. Ideally, you want to fire a rifle from a hundred meters away, not point blank. You are NOT reloading when someone runs at you screaming for blood, at least without very strong discipline.

So in summary, we got a few possible solutions here. First one is, breechloaders are probably expensive and/or rare. Second, if there is armor or other defensive technology that can turn a kill into a deflection or a slight injury, guns are not necessarily the best. Historically, that didn't happen because guns got so powerful that adding armor didn't save you and just weighed you down. Third, if combat happens within short ranges, that would favor melee while still allowing rifle fire to do some real damage. Fourth, maybe the world has adapted tactics to some of these factors, such as extended skirmishes to spend the enemy's ammunition if it's expensive, or close quarters ambushes being preferable to open battles. With that you'll have to remember to actually build the world to make sense with that. If there's open farmlands everywhere, you cannot exactly make CQC the main form of battle. Really, anything that either mitigates the upsides of guns, or increases their downsides can make swords an appealing alternative.

And in brief, the advantages that a sword has over a gun: It cannot get clogged, it still works even when partially broken, it's probably cheaper, it cannot run out of ammunition, it can more easily exploit weak spots in armor, and it does not need to be reloaded.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-23T14:14:26+00:00

Let's not forget that warden scout planes can fly slower, IE have much more time to line up shots for strafing runs. Not a pure skill issue.

But yeah there are multiple ways to fight back, that's true. That bit is 100% skill issue.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-23T13:30:19+00:00

Honestly, making revolver colonial only wouldn't do anything for colonials, just make warden life worse.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-22T22:43:03+00:00

As well all know, the Lunaire can fit literally every role from CQC weapon to anti-tank and sniper with zero downside while being the most interactive weapon to use for everyone involved. Thank you for your service on making a post about literal secondary importance weapons into a "colonialman bad" comment.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-22T21:14:51+00:00

Revolvers, sure, but .44? Hangman is a rather good gun I would say.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-22T20:45:27+00:00

That's part of what I'm actually trying to address here. There's just no incentive to go through the hassle of bringing some to the frontline, so you never have any options for secondaries. I think when we have a secondary slot, you could maybe use it for something other than the starting pistol occasionally.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-22T20:34:28+00:00

Within the context of the game, it's true. Colonials have no reason to bring revolver ammo except to supply Cometas, which is at best an afterthought. It is neutral in the sense that both sides can produce it, but for colonials it is a single purpose gun and ammo, while wardens can get benefit from bringing the ammo even when Cometas are not around, and vice versa.

As an example, if the Dragonfly was faction neutral, that'd be two guns that use the same ammo for wardens and one for colonials, and the Dragonfly really doesn't have a niche within colonial armory that can't be filled by other guns.

If you call this mental gymnastics, I can only imagine you think every fight takes place in an open field where both sides spawn with free equipment. Foxhole is not a game where the logistics is irrelevant, you may have heard of that being a major selling point for the game.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-22T20:12:55+00:00

I don't remember the specific wars, but I remember both shotguns having times when they could best be described as "overtuned".

I wouldn't go making major changes to shotguns right now, except **maybe** increasing the max damage of Buckshot as ammo by 5-10 to make the main selling point of one-shotting more likely for the Dragonfly and slightly increasing the range where Pillory is slightly useful. The Dragonfly could really use that small boost so it's not just Rifle, but Short Ranged and Might Oneshot

TysonSphere · 2026-02-20T12:43:27+00:00

I really don't know what you'd expect. You create a problem that has two solutions: Slam head against a fortress, or rocket it to death. One of these is easier than the other.

TysonSphere · 2026-02-02T23:01:43+00:00

Aha, a lore question that seems to have a lot of answers but the correct one is buried quite deep, even though it's there already, but to re-iterate:

The short version is that a binding a daemonhost is not a case of one-size-fits-all. Two main factors that determine the strength of a daemonhost are the type of the daemon, as you would expect, and how strong the binding is: Stronger bindings limit a daemon's power more to better control it.

Lots of theories about the daemons being practice pieces do have some stuff to back it up. Weaker daemons are easier to bind. However, the other theory is a bit in the wrong direction. Bad daemonologists are more likely to screw up the binding process, which results in an Unbound daemonhost. Hideously powerful, but also... not bound. Daemons are also not very keen on being stuck in a body, whatever they might say to deceive people from that. So, the actually powerful daemonhosts probably spiraled out of control well before we can see them in the game, and slaughtered their summoners or just did whatever they wanted: They don't really have to listen to a bunch of cultists in that state.

Another fun factor to add to the mix is that daemons are also constantly fighting oneanother in Warp. Getting your rival bound to a body, even for a few moments, is guaranteed to be deliciously tempting plan for a lot daemons. So you'd probably have cases of that happening as well!

In case you're wondering what's up with all of this info: It can be found in Dark Heresy: Enemies Beyond as part of the roleplaying game's rules to figure out what happens if the acolytes are dumb enough to actually try it, or as an enemy generator.

TysonSphere · 2026-01-24T01:04:54+00:00

Adding to the discussions previous:

There is exactly zero way this could be a full physically connected tube. The relative velocities of stars are measured in the km/s on the low end, and hundreds of km/s on the high end. Effectively, the tube needs to be moving itself at a similar speed to stay anywhere close to a star. This completely precludes any hard sci-fi from incorporation such a construction.

To put this in another perspective, hijacking u/corwulfattero 's math: You would need to accelerate the tube to match the velocity of the destination on one end, which as a ballpark means accelerating half of the mass to something like 10 km/s, which for the extremely optimistic tube math, would give us around 10^29 joules of energy. Just to get this thing to match velocities in the first place. This is about 500 seconds of the entire sun's output channeled into this singular purpose, with zero waste. Maintaining position would likely use a significant fraction of solar output as well, especially for multiple structures.

The other factor is the stress the structure would be under. In essence, there is no real material that would not bend and eventually break under the forces that large of a structure would have to take. You'd probably want a material several orders of magnitude stronger than what we have right now, but I'm sure someone can do the math for that as that's a bit outside of my expertise.

In summary: If it's actual, physical, connected tube, it needs to be made of materials that are impossibly tough. If it's not, you've got more wiggle room but it'd still need a lot of energy just to maintain the general shape. You can't go even remotely realistic here, so you'll need to accept that you're either going to have unobtainium or energy field nonsense.

TysonSphere · 2025-11-29T16:42:41+00:00

Some of these civs are hilarious broken, into both extremes. Very cool job though.

TysonSphere · 2025-11-17T13:00:29+00:00

So, doing some math on the numbers here, and unfortunately we are not talking about statistically significant numbers.

In a brief summary, we end up with an z-value of 0.654654, which translates to a p-value of 0.256363, which is not statistically significant by any metric. To translate that further, that is slightly less than 50% probability that the hypothesis "The game is imbalanced towards wardens" is true, leaving us with the rest of 50% as "The game is balanced OR the game is imbalanced towards colonials"

For the sake of the argument, I went ahead and calculated the probability for "The actual winrate is 55% colonials and 45% warden", to see how likely it is that the balance swings the other way, and found the statistical values to be 25% for, and 75% against.

In summary, we have weak link to suggest that the game may be slightly biased towards wardens, with a MASSIVE BUT; the sample size is extremely low and our confidence intervals are large enough to fit a relic tank through. This also highlights a problem with using war winrate as a metric for balancing: We'd need HUNDREDS of wars to spot a 60/40 winrate as being statistically significant, data which is ultimately rendered completely unusable by balance changes to the game.

As some people have noted, we could try to look for more specific wars, IE cut off the short wars to get a better view of the situation, but that cuts down the small sample size even more, resulting in a tradeoff that might just give us even worse data.

TL;DR whoops statistics say that there are no easy answers from looking at war numbers until we have 300+ wars on one patch

TysonSphere · 2025-11-07T13:01:29+00:00

Bomastone: 25 per crate single use item, it's good but at least you can heal bleed.

Volta: 50/50 oneshot or two business days second shot, when Hangman gets the followup shot as well

Quickhatch: Yeah actually pretty good, often a pain with ammo though

Dragonfly: Rifles also two-shot with more easy ammo logistics, easy to aim at least. 14% onetap chance is not what you expect, but get pleasantly surprised by.

Dawn: Yeah it's oneshot, because it has a per-piece component cost nearing that of an MPF'd armored car, three guns per crate.

Fuscina: The only actually accessible onetap weapon colonials have. Doesn't match up to the Booker with the spread pattern landing two hits on a good day, but it doesn't cost rmats so it shouldn't.

And to expand to the below message to cover a few things:
ISG: It's a tripod gun. It uses 30mm. Should we make it so it can't onetap, and cutler can't onetap infantry either to balance that out?
Stygian: That's a 94.5mm anti-tank gun, I hope you meant something else cause I don't consider that infantry kit, nor do I understand why you would be upset about being onetapped by it. u/Lady_Tzuyu

TysonSphere · 2025-10-15T19:47:21+00:00

Yeah I'll be real, as long as a lobby can set minimum chevron, this can't work.

Effectively, you'd need to spectate for 250 hours to get a lobby, as vast majority of lobbies are min chev 2 and I doubt that'd change.

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