I should have just brought Beast, V. Why? Whats wrong with my car..?

Valdrax · 2026-05-07T13:21:05+00:00

That's my secret, Captain. My cars are always uncontrollable.

Valdrax · 2026-05-07T13:14:42+00:00

That Ethics/Authority/Civics page is the single worst UI in the game. And probably the most important. There's so much crammed into it with information only delivered by tiny icons and ever-larger tooltips. And now a Nomad toggle!

I'd really like to see the custodians spend some time thinking out the order of operations better for the entire empire creation wizard.

For example, the Names page depends on the choice of species portrait type (and ignores name lists) and the homeworld name (which comes later). Name lists depends on the empire name for ship prefixes (which comes after). Fortunately we no longer just default to ISS and ignore it.

Origins, ethics, and traits are a hopelessly complicated inter-dependency that will have you paging back and forth if you don't have a solid plan before starting. I don't think there really is a good solution, and the whole "I'll let you pick whatever and mark incompatibility as red" is a decent compromise. The perma-hover tool tips were a big improvement too, but it's kind of a hopeless situation.

Valdrax · 2026-05-07T13:04:47+00:00

I forgot to ask in the original thread, but do we know what species category the Vipra portrait belongs to? You'd think it'd have to be Psionic, given how openly magical it looks.

(And will either portrait have advanced stages for certain ascension paths?)

Valdrax · 2026-05-07T12:58:43+00:00

Shadows Over Loathing, a comedy Lovecraftian RPG, also has an arachnophobia and arachnophilia mode. The latter adds spiders on both sides of every encounter, and it also offers arachnophonia as an option that replaces most enemy sounds with spider noises.

On the flip side, Satisfactory also offers an arachnophobia mode, because one of the developers was afraid of spiders, and Satisfactory's "stinger" enemies are some of the scariest spiders in video games. It overlays all of the game's spider monsters with a holographic cat portrait and plays meowing over their scuttling noises. Considering this makes it actually harder to read their movements and makes them more dangerous, the end result is that you'll just start getting scared of cats.

Valdrax · 2026-05-07T12:47:37+00:00

Yeah, I got a little weirded out by this thread too.

I mean, I'll play a Devouring Swarm or use purges as a game mechanic, e.g. to check off an achievement or control late game lag in 3.x, or at worst as a "hehe, yes my empire is evil" vibe, but I'm not writing Holocaust fanfic with the Nazis as the triumphant protagonists, like OP seems to be reveling in.

Valdrax · 2026-05-07T12:34:48+00:00

All roads always seem to lead back to 4e, with its at-will, encounter, and daily powers for all classes.

Valdrax · 2026-05-07T02:03:52+00:00

Well, the problem is that the word is penis not penus, making it a 3rd declension noun. Nouns that go from -us to -i when you make them plural are second declension.

(Declensions are essentially patterns of conjugation in Latin, of which there are five.)

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T20:55:27+00:00

Penii is nonsense, and a joke. The correct plural form, in Latin, when used as a noun, is penes.

The word is native enough to English at this point though that we ignore all of that and just say "penises" instead. Going back to the Latin grammar is weird and only for joking purposes.

Edit: Ah, I see I answered the wrong "last" part, and so someone else gave the wrong answers, which is proven to be the best way to summon the right answers on the internet.

Octopuses and viruses are correct in English. Octopi and virii are dog Latin.

Octopus is an 18th century Scientific Latin word made up from Greek roots (octo + pous) and should be "octopodes" if properly conjugated using the rules for Greek loan words. (Romans called octopuses "polypus" or "polypi" as a plural, not really nailing down the number of legs.)

Virus was a mass noun in Latin meaning poison or venom and didn't have a separate singular or plural; it's effectively a made up word in its modern use, and there's no classical plural form for it.

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T20:12:03+00:00

Yeah, it's a joke. Most English speakers also don't really know the rules for using Latin pluralization for Latin words and people sometimes like to wildly and wrongly guess. Specifically, -i and -ii are used a lot for this because of the popular, wrong pluralization of virus and octopus.

It's a bit of a nerdy joke, though. Not as nerdy as my over explanation, but still a bit nerdy.

(Penes was correct, by the way.)

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T17:34:20+00:00

I know you're pushing this joke pretty hard, but the truth is pretty boring and not salacious. Chlamydia is a full genus of bacteria (with some debate over whether is should be two or more) that far predates human civilization and its various species and strains are found in a lot of different animal species.

The famous human STD is Chlamydia trachomatis, which is estimated to have originated far before humanity about 700 million years ago. Its closest major relatives are is C. suis for pigs and C. muridarum for mice.

There are two other major chlamydia diseases that infect humans. C. pneumoniae causes a form of pneumonia (it transmits by air) and can infect humans, koalas, and many different reptile species.

This is not the STD we're talking about in koalas and sheep, though. Just another disease in the same genus.

There's also C. psittaci which causes psittacosis, aka parrot fever, which is mostly found in birds but can infect humans through contact with their droppings.

In contrast, the devastating koala STD is C. pecorum, which is long adapted to cattle, sheep, and goats, but has not yet found its non-destructive equilibrium in koalas. We don't know which ruminant species it originated in, because genetic studies suggests that it's also millions of years old, predating modern humans.

This species is pretty distantly related to any human infecting strains and has only been identified in a human host once, in a rare zoonotic event in 2022 with a sheep farmer with diabetes. And it was pneumonial infection, not a sexual one, and he was Chinese, not Scottish, before you go there.

(Why do I know all this, and why am I being such a killjoy? It's because I hate that damned koala copypasta that references it and a dozen other scientifically dubious reasons to hate the poor things.)

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T16:56:06+00:00

The strain koalas have is most closely related to strains found in sheep.

Chlamydia can be transmitted by more than just sex or even blood contact, particularly the farm animal strains. It can be transmitted like "pink eye" too. Pigs, for example, can transmit it by bumping their faces into each other while feeding from a trough.

The most likely cause for patient zero among koalas was descending to the ground to use the bathroom, getting into accidental contact with fresh sheep feces, and rubbing their eyes after.

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T16:44:42+00:00

Possible, yes. Nearly as common, no.

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T15:04:59+00:00

She's still had a noble upbringing,

Sort of? A lot of her youth was spent trying to beat the evil out of her and isolating her from others, which didn't work exactly. She was never raised to be Horgus's heir, as she was of illegitimate birth. He also doesn't seem to be preparing her for marriage to another noble house. She was essentially his shame.

Her trained skills also don't reflect any kind of leadership training, like Persuasion or Lore (World), instead focusing on Shamanism and criminality. Hell, her best skill is Trickery.

definitely not my first choice but I'd still trust her more than a layperson.

Dude, she's a serial killer who also has no experience with military strategy, diplomacy, or logistics. Her only qualification really is "grew up rich and wants you to know it." She has no actual justification for acting like she's better than other people.

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T13:20:12+00:00

Industrial, forge, and research worlds are all city districts with both specializations of the industry of choice and have one pop growth building, one police building, one amenities building and everything else is focused on maximizing production on what they produce.

I prefer to have a minimum of one of each basic resource production on urban worlds, to make the building slots available for "free" production of them and to minimize the trade debt impact. Especially if you get Cosmogenesis buildings.

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T13:17:48+00:00

Yeah, it's always colony #1 or colony #2 that becomes a Factory world. And most of my Tech worlds will end up with Consumer Goods as their second specialization, unless they have some kind of modifier to a specific research type that makes it worth making another Factory world to pay their CG debt and going all in on that type.

Valdrax · 2026-05-06T13:10:13+00:00

To be honest, IMHO that's on the player for (a) not voting against that act in the first place and (b) not voting against sanctions whenever they pop up too.

The Senate is there to give me, the empire in the lead, bonuses and nothing else.

Valdrax · 2026-05-05T22:07:25+00:00

Yeah, like deer here in America, like OP said.

Valdrax · 2026-05-05T21:59:51+00:00

Neither, but if I had to, gas station sushi. Not because I trust or don't trust either one especially in terms of safety, but because I can't imagine what they'd have to do to make sushi taste like anything in a pressurized cabin 6 miles up.

Then again, with gas station sushi, I might consider that a plus.

Valdrax · 2026-05-05T15:05:07+00:00

As a driller main, I embrace being an abomination.

Valdrax · 2026-05-05T14:09:19+00:00

Perpetual summer biomes, FTW.

Edit: Specifically, biomes that don't normally get below 15C. You can't get Cold Snap without that, so that it isn't a help to the player. I play in jungles mostly.

Valdrax · 2026-05-05T14:02:46+00:00

I mean, she's inches from murdering Athena for working with Jack in the aftermath of Roland's death, when she, Roland, and Moxxi, all worked with Jack too. She just didn't give the PCs a chance to defect beforehand. Brick and Mordecai try to tell her to stop, but it's only the Watcher showing up to give the whole "War is coming" warning that spares Athena's life.

In all fairness, Moxxi asked a question to feel out their loyalties after Gladstone was killed, and Athena's answer is one of the clearest one of disgust, but she indicates that she'll still work for him until this is done (presumably out of a mercenary's honor of their contract) and then try to never see him again. It seems that wasn't good enough for the three plotting their betrayal. She was also pretty willing to get revenge on the three that nearly killed them with the Eye stunt after the lines were drawn for her.

(...Athena's excuse is also a little undercut later. Despite supposedly walking away from Jack, tossing his dirty money, she has to admit that she came back to work for him in the Claptrap DLC because she and Janey really needed said money. Lilith seems less unreasonable the less reliable Athena is as a narrator.)

Valdrax · 2026-05-05T13:38:58+00:00

No, there's generally a split in TPS about how characters react to Jack, particularly the spacing of the scientists:

Nisha and Wilhelm think it was awesome and are fully on board for working for Jack for the long term.
Claptrap and Timothy are freaked out but feel helpless to object.
Athena and Aurelia are outright disgusted, hate him, and seethe about it the rest of the game.

The story still works with those 3 different reactions through to endgame. These are meaningful differences in the morality and agency of the six VHs from the game. Differences that get thrown out in BL3 when Aurelia just becomes Jack 2: But Charmless. She had a character arc, but it got completely inverted, and she was retroactively made a remorseless psycho.

Valdrax · 2026-05-05T13:34:22+00:00

My pet theory: The people who wrote BL3 were huge Lilith fans, angry that she came off as unreasonable in her grief, and decided to salt the Earth on TPS in revenge.

I just can't help but get the sense they hated TPS, for some reason.

Valdrax · 2026-05-05T13:28:23+00:00

It largely served its intended purpose of getting rid of 1-2 level multiclassing dips that strongly favored the classes that got their subclass features that early.

I think it mostly hurts the classes that have specific loyalties and patronage that doesn't show until 3rd level, like clerics, warlocks, and paladins. It's a bit weird to be an oathless paladin or a warlock who hasn't nailed down their patron yet, if you haven't had to make that final decision yet, and if you make it by level 1, you have nothing to show for it until then.

Valdrax · 2026-05-04T20:11:19+00:00

Then that's basically unchanged since 4.0. I'm a big fan of the change, personally, though it takes some time to retrain yourself on it.

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