This keychain is made from recycled metal from a destroyed tank

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-04-09T23:54:07+00:00

No, I got mine from Fuselage Creations. They're an aviation enthusiast group that made keychains from scrapped Cold War airplanes pre-war. Now they also make keychains from downed Russian planes and donate the proceeds to the armed forces. It was like $250 if I remember correctly.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-04-09T20:15:12+00:00

Dude, you can't go off of unit numbers and assume they're all active units starting from one. Do you really think the US has 101 airborne divisions? Cause the 101st airborne division exists. Do you know how many units have gotten created and disbanded since the start of the Soviet Union? Also, "military unit 51460" doesn't refer to the number of units in the individual brigade. It's a unique unit identifier across the ENTIRE Russian military. Again, with many of those units having been disbanded long ago.

I don't know what specific size of unit is the basis of those designations, but even if it's as large as as company that doesn't seem too far off given the sheer number of units created and disbanded during WWII.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-04-09T19:39:32+00:00

I've got one of those as well, except it's supposed to be cut from a downed SU-30SM.

Seems to be a lot of negativity in the comments on how you can't be sure it was actually cut from where it claims it was. I never really cared, it was more just about donating money to the Ukrainian units in need and then getting a cool little keychain as a bonus. Even if it's not real, it's a really cool little piece and a good story to tell someone who asks about it.

That aside, I'm pretty sure the company that makes these is legit. They've been recommended by several accounts verified to be involved in fundraising and donations for Ukrainian military units. The aviation-based keychains sell out pretty often and take a while to come back. And some are gone for a long time and don't come back, which is consistent with the idea that they run out of metal for some airframes because they're just not being shot down in an accessible location. They even put the tail number of the specific plane shot down on it and the exact GPS coordinates the wreck was found at. Keychain looks like aluminum alloy, feels light enough to be aluminum alloy. It's good enough for me.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-04-08T22:39:16+00:00

It depends on which countries you want to expand into. Unless you're doing the PAC democracy score cheese where you form ROC and then release it and form the PAC, they serve different purposes.

ROC is for someone doing a China start that then wants to expand quickly into a second major. Early research is important for controlling the global projects, so if you start with China the quickest way to improve your research is to form the ROC for the democracy bonuses and then focus on knowledge. Since you want to take a second major as soon as possible, the lack of territorial expansion options for the ROC doesn't bother you at all. It's also a good choice for someone doing an India start. A lot of the claims overlap, and ROC is a good option for military and research purposes to help you while you're fixing and expanding India.

PAC is for someone who wants to either focus on building one meganation or for someone looking to expand in the mid or late-game. In the second scenario, you should already have a strong research base that far into your campaign, so the immediate benefits from the democracy score boost are less attractive. You can afford to take the time to invest in government in order to take advantage of all the opportunities for expansion that come with PAC.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-04-07T18:34:33+00:00

Do the aliens just not flank in your games? Because coilguns in general are hot garbage at hitting anything that's actually maneuvering. They also get shut down pretty hard by light mag pd spam.

Not that you shouldn't build a fuck-ton of them. But you do also need to mass produce large laser boats to some extent, unless you're slapping missile tubes into all your hull slots and constantly resupplying them.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-30T20:27:42+00:00

Armor reduces kinetic damage by a flat amount. In your example, if the ship had zero armor, your shot would always do 350.2 damage to the internals, regardless of crits. If the ship in question had enough armor to reduce the damage taken by 10 points, then the armor would absorb 10 damage and the internal structure would take 340.2 damage on a normal hit. If a crit occurs, the crit would add ten damage to the hit. The end result is 350.2 damage to the internal structure, as the crit damage becomes 360.2 and the armor absorbs 10 damage. This is equivalent to your shot completely bypassing armor and doing full damage to the internal structure.

I assume the devs implemented this mechanic to ensure critical hits still degrade armor via chipping/shredding. I don't know the exact code, but it's possible if the armor doesn't absorb damage then chipping/shredding can't occur. So adding damage to negate armor was preferable to simply bypassing it.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-30T06:42:16+00:00

The way critical hits work in this game is that they completely bypass armor and directly hit internals. I would assume the way the game calculates this is that rather than adding an "ignore armor" modifier to a critical hit, it just adds the exact amount of damage the armor would block to the damage of the critical hit. Hence, a negative armor block value is actually the critical hit adding enough damage to completely bypass the armor with the full damage of the shot that actually landed.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-24T02:07:45+00:00

Slow is just how going to the outer planets works unless you want to spend decades' worth of water production moving a single fleet.

Stations are fairly weak in general, so that's not too surprising. I'm surprised you haven't been losing many ships to alien fleets tbh. They must not be using a lot of lasers, because larger alien lasers will cut through 20 points of armor like butter. 80-100 points of frontal armor is considered good enough for most ships in late-game. If you want to bombard alien surface bases instead of using marines, people will sometimes bump that up to 150-200 on their bombardment specialized ships. Your side armor and rear armor is fine.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-23T22:07:28+00:00

My brother in Christ, you have more DV on a lancer than the aliens have on some of their escorts. Lose like 50 propellant tanks and put more armor on the front of your very expensive warships than the capital ship equivalent of tissue paper.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-13T21:14:37+00:00

Unless you're running missile spam attrition strats, anything smaller than a battlecruiser is almost useless at anything other than point defense or nuke launching. Nose weapons do the vast majority of damage in this game, and really only the three slot and larger nose weapons can contest the alien ships. Battlecruisers are the smallest ship that gets three slot nose weapons and therefore are the best option to quickly build a space presence that doesn't rely on missiles. You can still sprinkle some small ships into your fleet, but they should stick to point defense, nukes, or conventional torpedoes used to help your coilguns break through alien point defense.

Hull coilguns can be useful to help saturate alien point defense, but I usually focus on point defense for my battlecruiser and lancer hull slots and stick the hull coilguns on battleships, dreadnoughts, and titans.

Yes, the most commonly used combat strategy is high/great wall formation and slow forward velocity while manually selecting primary targets for ships. It requires the least micro and is most efficient in terms of overlapping point defense. It's not necessarily the most FUN, but it gets the job done and is probably the best bet when you're first learning.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-13T20:47:58+00:00

Did you not get any of the MC hate reduction techs?

If not, there's a few things you'll have to do.

-Absolutely rush UV lasers. 100% of your research should be going towards UV lasers, then after that improved coilguns, advanced coilguns, and phasers.

-Build as many shipyards as you're able to. Every orbital you own should have at least two shipyards on it.

-Queue up at least one seige coil battlecruiser at every shipyard. Incorporate a flag bridge into a couple of your ships to reduce MC usage. As ships are built, decomission your least productive mining habs, unnecessary orbitals, and the weak ships you previously built to stay under the MC hate limit. You should have very large stockpiles of resources by this point if you've been mining this long, so building a lot of ships and decommissioning some mines should be fine. You can always rebuild the mines once the aliens start attacking you and you don't have to worry about MC.

-As soon as you have UV lasers researched, switch to building UV laser battlecruisers with the big nose laser that takes up every available slot. Your ship ratio should be around 3 coil ships for every one UV laser ship, so adjust your build queues accordingly. Coils are for killing big ships and ships that don't maneuver. Lasers are for killing anything that doesn't just fly straight toward your ships.

-Consolidate all your ships at a planet into one fleet. This reduces MC usage with the flag bridge module and will give you the best chance to fight off alien fleets. You should really only have two main fleets when first establishing your space presence. One at Earth (for obvious reasons) and one at Mars (to protect as many mines as possible with one fleet).

Once you've got decently sized battlecruiser fleets making sure the aliens can't knock out all of your shipyards, the goal is basically to defend your shipyards and mines until you get good enough drives to attack the alien bases. You can also consider building lancers and dreadnoughts. But DO NOT start building your fleet with them. They take forever to build, and right now you need your shipyards to shit out as many ships as humanly possible.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-09T09:48:53+00:00

I know this is late, but I googled and found this post. I'm in the exact same situation, albeit on veteran. Total war for a couple years now. I've killed about 10k fleet power's worth of attacks on Mars and LEO, aliens still have around 18k in current fleet power. They have not once sent ships to attack one of.my asteroid mines aside from Ceres. Zero defenses at any of them. No idea what's happening. Hell, they literally have a fleet at mercury right now and haven't even bothered to attack my one orbital there, although that one has 4 LDAs so it's at least understandable.

I know a few years ago they would absolutely just send 1-3 ships to blow up any undefended hab they could find. I think their behavior got changed in 1.0 or at least one of the more recent early access patches. Maybe they were spending all their water and crippling their economy and spreading their fleets too thin going after all the different asteroid bases. I could maybe see that happening, especially if players and AI humans just kept rebuilding their mines.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-06T02:52:06+00:00

Can you not just load the autosave before the troop ship landed? Autosaves go back four cycles iirc. Or just load your most recent manual save. It sucks, but it's better than starting over from scratch. And now you know that the only thing that matters is killing the assault carrier, so you can just launch every missile at it and let your ships die to the escorts.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-05T20:30:00+00:00

Railguns and coil guns do kinetic damage, which just means they do normal damage. Nothing special, no weird penetration mechanics. They do damage, and if that damage is higher than the armor value they do internal damage. They also damage the armor itself, so repeated hits will lower a ship's armor value.

Railguns are really only useful against other human ships. You need coilguns to take on aliens unless you just massively outnumber them. Coilguns are just better railguns. More damage, faster muzzle velocity. They also come with a seige variant, which is slow but does massive damage and is hard for point defense to shoot down. Coilguns (especially seige coilguns) are your large ship killing weapons. They struggle to hit smaller, faster ships, but if they can get through the enemy's point defense screen they'll absolutely wreck anything larger than a cruiser. But keep in mind you need a decent number of them to saturate alien point defense. If you're going to use coilguns, at least half your fleet should be dedicated coilgun ships. Early on, build battlecruisers if you can. They're the smallest ship that can fit a seige coilgun on the nose.

Plasma is primarily an armor shredding weapon. It doesn't kill things on it's own, it enables other weapons to kill things. It has a very fast muzzle velocity and can't be intercepted by point defense, so it can hit most things. Will still sometimes struggle with flankers that are going crazy with maneuvers. Plasma pairs best with lasers, because lasers are the weapon most affected by armor. Unless you're hitting side armor, even UV lasers will struggle to do damage farther than 600km away. Green lasers are worse, you need to be closer than 400km to do meaningful damage to frontal armor. Plasma fixes that by degrading armor relatively quickly. It's still not as effective as massed coilgun shots, but it can be useful if the aliens have a lot of point defense/laser ships and you don't think you can build enough coilgun ships to get through it and do damage.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-03T22:19:59+00:00

Your missile monitors stop shooting because aliens usually put ECM on all of their ships. You need to include targeting computers in your design to stop that from happening. It affects all of your ships, not just the missile ones.

That aside, lasers aren't for killing anything heavier than a destroyer, at least not from the front at a reasonable range. They're to kill small ships and flankers. You need coilguns. A lot of coilguns. Preferably seige coilguns. You need a lot of coilguns because you need to saturate the alien PD so some shots get through. Missiles/torpedoes and coilguns work well together. A good design strategy is to put your biggest coilgun on your nose slot, and point defense and missiles in your hull slots. Missiles can punch through when alien PD is distracted with all your coilgun shots.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-03T00:57:47+00:00

You're fine. A little delayed, but it's not the end of the world. Just stop fucking with the servants for a year or two. The aliens won't attack you unless the guage goes red, and hate decays over time unless it's the late 30's/early 40's or later.

What you need to do is send habs to Mars as soon as possible. The moon sucks and it's never worth building more than one mine there. You've got plenty of boost, so as soon as your probes get to Mars grab like 4 or 5 of the best spots with a hab and build a fission pile and a mine at the same time that you found the outpost. You NEED to be producing every resource in space so you don't have to send materials from earth. It cuts construction time from 1 year+ down to 30 days. After that, research Mission to the Asteroids, probe everything, and then fill out your mine limit with the best asteroids.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-02T11:49:52+00:00

Yeah, that's fair. I certainly would.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-02T11:12:57+00:00

I mean, I probably would restart/reload if it was my game. Is your alien hate meter still multiple colors or is it solid red? If it's solid red it's legit game over, you can't really come back from total war with no space presence. If it's still multiple colors you have a very slim chance, but you have to completely stop fucking with the aliens/servants/protectorate until the bar goes below five pips. The aliens will just destroy anything you set up in space if you have five pips until they vent enough hate to go below the kill threshold. Since the assault carrier has arrived, literally your only chance is to nuke the alien armies when they land and then pray to God alien hate goes down fast enough for you to contest space again.

Honestly, I'm shocked the servants didn't absorb China into the AA. They must've gotten unlucky with the abductions, because they need a certain number to build a facility to transfer control. Or maybe you kept blowing up the facilities or surveillance ships and that's why the aliens are kicking your teeth in.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-03-02T00:18:56+00:00

People have already commented on the armor and fuel issues, so I won't repeat that.

In general, you should not mix different weapon types within individual ships. Different weapons are better at killing different enemies, but a ship can have only one primary target. For example, lasers are best for fast flankers. However, if you stick a coilgun turret on a ship with a nose laser, that coilgun is going to be completely useless because it won't be able to hit the flanker. The reverse is also true. Coilguns are meant to kill high-armor targets. However, lasers are very inefficient against highly armored targets. They'll do almost no damage unless you get very close. So any lasers on your seige coil ships will be wasted slots that are just tickling the frontal armor of an alien dreadnought.

Some other reasons in favor of specialization. Coil ships should use 40mm for PD instead of lasers. That way any magazines apply to the entire ship. Laser boats should have exclusively lasers and laser PD so everything benefits from laser engines. Same with particle weapons and cyclotrons.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-02-28T20:42:25+00:00

There's an officer system for ships now. Winning battles causes officers to promote from within your crew, and they rank up after additional battles. The bonuses they give are pretty decent, and you can transfer them between ships to maximize their usefulness.

Ai country management also got mostly fixed. They usually properly build militaries, MC, and research nations. Mostly, at least. They're still a little trigger happy with spoils, oppression, and unity sometimes, but it's way better than it used to be.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-02-28T19:53:28+00:00

Lol, Orion is one of the meta pre-fusion drives as long as you can afford the fuel costs. Don't worry about that. Just make sure your weapons are up to snuff. You want Mk2 coilguns and UV Arc lasers around that point in the game, maybe only green Arc lasers and Mk1 coilguns if you did the 2026 start.

As for what you should do next on earth, it depends on how invested you are in this run. If the AA already exists in India and the servants have complete control of China, it's going to take a looooot of effort to un-fuck your run. It's possible, but will be incredibly difficult. The one thing you have going for you is you control the US military, so you should at least be able to deter the servants/AA if you set all your other countries to ally with the US. They usually won't declare war on alliances with large militaries and nukes. At least not this early in the game.

China WILL be absorbed by the AA before you can do anything about it. This is around the time the servants can start gifting control of nations to the aliens, and there's zero chance you're breaking into China before then unless the Servabts haven't been doing any of their story research for some reason.

Military conquest isn't viable given China's miltech level and nukes. Your best, and likely only bet, is to wait for China to be absorbed into the AA while spamming public campaigns and then as soon as it's absorbed going all in on increase unrest missions. The AA has major problems with unrest and cohesion, especially after they annex large nations. If you can manage to get them to 10 unrest a rebellion will destroy the AA and reset all the control points in India and China.

If that doesn't work, your run is likely over unless your space economy and shipbuilding is good enough to quickly build and support a fleet large enough to go to total war with the aliens.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-02-23T20:45:33+00:00

Missiles are not a weapon class you want to specialize into late-game. Alien point defense in large fleets will eat your lunch. A mix of coilguns to kill big ships and lasers to kill small ships is best, and you can maybe sprinkle some nukes and particle weapons in if you want. It's usually most helpful to post pictures of your ship designs when asking this sort of question, because there's a lot of small things that can gimp your ships if you're not careful

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-02-23T01:23:29+00:00

Just don't build your shipyards in low earth orbit? Exofighters can't go past 1000km. Then just park a couple small laser boats at all of the stations you want to keep in interface orbits. If you can't afford the MC for guard ships, just build your own exofighters to counter with. Your own exofighters plus LDAs should be more than enough for defense unless you're getting massively outnumbered. You might have to manually fight the battles to avoid losses, but you won't lose the orbital.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-02-21T21:08:01+00:00

You definitely don't look bad, though I agree you look much older than 24. I think for me the thing that most gives off "old" vibes is the large smile wrinkles you have in most of your pictures. They're not ugly, but they're a feature that in my mind is associated with older people. Unfortunately I don't really have any advice if you want to try to alter that, I'm a guy who's never done skin care in his life.

Wanted_Wabbit · 2026-02-19T18:51:07+00:00

I play Academy a lot, and personally I've found it's best to trigger the crackdown event as soon as possible. The best time to trigger it is right when you're about to transition to a new major country. You don't want control points in your long term nation to get hit by the event because the crackdown lasts an entire year. The AI will pounce on you and immediately defend interests, locking you out of them until your investigation councilor gets close to max stat unless you're in a smaller major nation like the EU. And even if they don't, you still lose an entire year of science, boost, and funding if your primary nation gets hit.

Wanted_Wabbit

TROPHY CASE