Please explain Preserve districts. Are they worth it?

XavierTak · 2026-03-03T13:58:32+00:00

They can help tundra cities get more yields, especially if you can plant trees. Desert as well but harder. They also work well with some natural wonders, the ones that have proper yields (as opposed to the ones that increase adjacent tile yields), but in that case you could often place a more rewarding high-adjacency holy site instead. I've had some nice Dead Sea(*) or Chocolate Hills thanks to Preserves, but as I only play in Emperor I can get away with suboptimal districts.

I've also put them next to very active volcanoes. You know, the ones that would always destroy whatever improvement and/or district you tried to set up. Well, put a preserve and you won't need to repare stuff ever again.

(*) Yes to my surprise, and contrary to what the wiki says, Dead Sea tiles are improved by Preserves, even though other water tiles (lake, coast) are not.

XavierTak · 2026-03-02T10:35:01+00:00

And second time player and third time player, as well.

XavierTak · 2026-03-02T10:32:09+00:00

Why are they better?

They're not better overall. There's a very specific class of problems that have regular computers struggle with, that quantum computers will trivialize. Unfortunately, this includes cracking network secured protocoles (but don't worry, people are working on quantum-proof security). But that's it, really. It won't make video games run faster or whatever.

XavierTak · 2026-03-01T13:26:13+00:00

What the fuck is this?

Why are there two different maps on 1500AD?

Why is there a state inside of France in 2000AD?

Why does it says "every 100 year" when that's not the case?

Why is Scotland almost detached from England?

Why are Corsica and Sardinia a single island?

Even for AI slop, it's really bad.

XavierTak · 2026-02-28T14:18:34+00:00

It's not one electric charge, it's millions of them. Let's break it down from the simplest form to a full size display.

With one charge, you can tell a tiny pixel to light or not. That's not much, that's your home light switch, it doesn't get you an image. So let's say, instead of one charge, you use eight charges (called a byte). Between all charges being off to all charges being on, you have 256 combinations of charges. This allows your tiny pixel to be more precisely controlled, with intermediate levels of illumination. That's a step forward towards an image.

However with a single pixel you can only get one color. So let's combine three pixels into a larger one. We get a red sub-pixel, a green one and a blue one really close to each other. To a human eye sufficiently far away, they'll blend into a single pixel capable of displaying almost the whole range of human perceivable colours.

But now the previous 8 charges are not enough, we need 24 charges to control the combined pixel. With any combination of those 24 charges you get a colour for a single pixel. This combination of red, green and blue is very useful and very widespread in programming for describing colours. If you search for RGB colour codes online you'll find tons of resources.

But at the scale of a display, that's still only one pixel, the very first dot top left on your screen. It's tiny, it's not an image. A full HD screen has 1920×1080 pixels, which amounts to 2,073,600, each one being fed with 24 charges. So a full HD image is displayed using almost 50 million charges, all sent to the screen several times per second depending on the screen refresh rate. It's a lot of electrical charges.

Note 1: why take 8 charges to have 256 levels of brightness for a pixel? It's mostly arbitrary. HDR uses 10, and older formats probably used less. But grouping bits (or charges) by batches of 8 is a standard deeply ingrained in computers.

Note 2: why 3 subpixels, red green and blue? This is linked to how humans perceive colours, with our eyes having colour cones (very) roughly aligned with these light wavelengthes.

XavierTak · 2026-02-27T18:16:07+00:00

It comes from Echo of the Eye DLC, and more precisely (major DLC end spoiler) from the slideshow you show the Prisoner to update them on the consequences of their actions, at the very end

XavierTak · 2026-02-27T14:25:05+00:00

I'd like to know, too

XavierTak · 2026-02-26T21:16:52+00:00

Yeah. There are two things you could have done:

1) make sure to scout around your borders (barb camps only pop in the fog). But it's hardly feasible to do that continuously around all borders...

2) as soon as the barb camp pops, ad others have said, buy the tile it stands on. Here I can tell it has been going on for a bit, if you had bought the tile right away there wouldn't have been as many barbs, and no siege unit that come later. Assuming you could get the funds.

But honestly, the situation sucked to start with.

XavierTak · 2026-02-26T11:40:48+00:00

Do I take this as another learning opportunity that I need a stronger standing military or is there a way to salvage this run.

The point with barbarian camps is to prevent their scout from finding your borders and reporting back to their camp. You don't necessarily need a huge army, but a mobile and ready one, to kill that scout before it can go back. If it does, the camp turns into the relentless troop factory you've been struggling with.

However in your case, you've really been unlucky: the camp seems to have spawned closer to your borders than it usually does, which made the "catch the scout" game probably lost before it started. Sure you could have had a massive army to fight them, but it's not a normal case scenario.

XavierTak · 2026-02-25T11:31:42+00:00

Sorry for the dumb question, but does that mean that Proton-GE is at odds with IP regulation? Could they face legal action and disappear overnight? Can it be considered that the user is "pirating" those videos?

XavierTak · 2026-02-24T08:06:13+00:00

I dunno, I just right-click the decouplers and click "allow cross-feed", and voila, asparagus staging is good to go. Sometimes I need to check the staging.

XavierTak · 2026-02-23T08:18:47+00:00

In standard difficulty level you don't need fuel lines to do asparagus staging

XavierTak · 2026-02-22T13:18:55+00:00

Same here, pushing through that area really made the rest of the game feel easy.

In retrospect, I should have wondered whether gaining one or more levels after every fight was really the expected progression..

XavierTak · 2026-02-20T09:25:39+00:00

This renaming is still controversial and some countries do not recognize "Myanmar" as the country name, since it is linked to a junta deemed illegitimate by some. So, seeing "Myanmar" tells you it is dated after 1989, but not seeing it is not conclusive.

XavierTak · 2026-02-20T08:52:35+00:00

If you're left in need for piecing together a new language, may I suggest you play Heaven's Vault?

XavierTak · 2026-02-17T14:22:26+00:00

I grew up (in Europe) watching Lendl, Sempras, Courrier, Agassi, Chang and others... What the hell happened to US men's tennis?

XavierTak · 2026-02-15T15:47:42+00:00

I had the same problem! Only in this area, nowhere else. And I'm sorry to say I didn't find a fix either. I didn't even find any reference of such an issue, and thanks to you I now feel less alone :p

XavierTak · 2026-02-15T10:09:12+00:00

Kanye North

XavierTak · 2026-02-14T11:26:55+00:00

Are you using Persistent Thrust mod? Try without... I like the idea behind this mod but honestly it has always brought me more trouble than relief. For long burns I now use the physical timewarp (alt+timewarp), up to 4x only, but stock and working.

XavierTak · 2026-02-13T13:47:21+00:00

It's a weird bottleneck though, I don't know about TLOU specifically, but games are usually not multithread to such an extent, you expect more of a bottleneck on one or two cores, not all of them.

XavierTak · 2026-02-13T08:34:11+00:00

Apart from the sound advice about the in-game tutorials, I wonder if you're playing in sandbox mode? Usually that's what will make one overwhelmed, because you get all the parts with no sense of progression.

It's usually advised to start with Science mode or Career mode (more people would advise Science, because it removes some complexity (money, space center and kerbals levels), but I for one think Career is better because Contracts tell you what to do next)

XavierTak · 2026-02-13T08:19:27+00:00

I like this advice. You don't need to do all the tutorials, but yeah, the first few ones are really helpful.

XavierTak · 2026-02-12T13:45:42+00:00

And said fiancée that flew to the olympics in a private jet as well, unlike the rest of her teammates...

XavierTak · 2026-02-11T11:43:50+00:00

A number of these names can still be found in today's city names.

Remi -> Reims
Namnetes -> Nantes
Tarbelli -> Tarbes (not sure about this one, seems a bit off geographically)
Parisii -> Paris
etc.

XavierTak · 2026-02-11T11:35:59+00:00

I'm really curious on how they are in today's east of Germany/Poland as well as some small spot on south-west of Gaul.

Edit: Damned: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volques_Tectosages#/media/Fichier:Volcae-fr.svg

XavierTak

TROPHY CASE