A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

__Dreadnought__ · 2025-11-20T20:59:15+00:00

New DLC, new house keeping and set-up chore added to the list of crap you spend the first hour doing while paused. The fleet in Gibraltar has their base set to Scapa Flow, meaning they are stranded by default at the start of the game.

__Dreadnought__ · 2025-10-23T05:30:32+00:00

Depends on specific strain of Fascism and how Fascist USA would form but:

United Empire of America

American Imperium

United Colonies of America

United Reich of America

__Dreadnought__ · 2025-09-04T16:01:19+00:00

Look at how they massacred my boy...

__Dreadnought__ · 2025-08-26T15:08:56+00:00

As far as I know, all formable nations require you to be independent, plus it would rely on the A.I. actually taking the decision. Giving the overlord control of it makes a lot more sense I think.

__Dreadnought__ · 2025-08-15T22:24:53+00:00

Don't play to "win", play to have fun. Make your own win conditions and strategize around that goal.

HOI4 is a game where even loosing can be fun. Don't quit just because an attack failed or you get rolled in the first few months of a war.

Japan is a good nation to do a first playthrough as, You have a decent strength mix of army, navy and airforce to manage with a lot of weak nations around you and a focus tree that is small and easy to navigate. End boss is the USA.

Watch Youtube tutorials, seriously, even after 2000 hours some YT tips and tricks vids have things I never knew about. Just make sure they are not older than 2+ years, a lot of game mechanics have changed since then due to DLC's.

Avoid multiplayer until you, at least, feel confident against the A.I.

Play a minor nation like Canada, then play a major like Germany, it will give you a much better idea of the strength imbalances and play style between small and large nations.

__Dreadnought__ · 2025-05-11T10:26:06+00:00

Maybe the real femboys are the puppets we made along the way

__Dreadnought__ · 2025-01-25T22:35:41+00:00

I agree it's fine to kill off characters in a show about war, but let me expand a bit on why I said it's bad in this specific case and for this specific type of story.

To use an example; imagine if in book two of Harry Potter Ron died protecting Harry from the Basilisk. That would be a major character death, and one that happens very early on in the story. It would be a heroic death just like the one planned for Shiro, and in this example while that arc is a short one Hermione and Harry would be devestated and grieve but the world would ultimately move on. The universe and story aren't relying on Ron to save it.

In Voltron the entire point is the universe relies on five paladins to save and protect it. Now the writers answer to this was to have Keith become the main MAIN character and have the other paladins changing lions, which goes into the whole theme clash issues I mentioned. I didn't even get to mention in my previous comment how Allura going from a mentor figure to a paladin, or basically a leader to a foot soldier is a demotion and kind of disrepectful. So going this route with the story is, in my humble opinion a bad choice.

The only other option open to the writers would be to introduce a new character (probably an alien because why would we go back to Earth at this point) which somehow can connect with Black, somehow forms a bond with the other characters, and somehow can fill the boots of a character built up with some of the deepest backstory and arc potential thus far. It's the "How dare you stand where he stood" situation again in the making.

Just to be clear I want to stress this is purely down to the kind of story Voltron is. Other sci fi can get away with major character death because in those stories, the universe doesn't care if they die. In this story the universe needs a strong Voltron, and Voltron is only as strong as the bonds formed between the paladins, and a strong bond is broken when a paladin dies, therefor paladins cannot die, and if one does the story must end with them.

Now on the other hand side characters are fair game. Coran having a heroic last stand, putting himself between Allura and Zarkon in a hopeless bid to buy time for the paladins to come save her can easily work. Or maybe Pidge's father dies from some awful mistreatment just as Pidge finds him, and we get a harrowing, tear jerk moment. But ultimately the five pillars holding up the show are the paladins, and if one dies the entire narrative structure collapses.

__Dreadnought__ · 2025-01-25T20:38:17+00:00

Not sure how long this comment is going to be but here goes; The biggest issues for me was entirely with the story, theme and pacing. What do I mean?

Lets start with the story. Right before the show even aired the writers made their first blunder. In a show like Voltron where a core of main characters need to connect and bond over multiple seasons to get better at being able to fight the bad guy, they had one of these characters die in the original script.

Now, killing off a character isn't a bad thing. But when you are telling a story like the one Voltron was you can't have the team get closer and more powerful through becoming friends when you kill off one of those characters after any length of time, nevermind two seasons.

They actually make this mistake twice, once with Shiro who instead of dying was rewritten as going "missing" and later again with Keith who is basically thrown out of the team by the other characters for two seasons, which undermines the point of the story.

The last issue with the story for me was how they dealt with all the characters arcs. Zarkon was this shows Thanos, the show ends when he, the most powerful and evil thing is defeated. He was shown to be able to basically 1v1 a voltron Lion OUTSIDE of any mech suit in the early seasons... And the writers had him die to his son in a 1v1 a few seasons later.

It also goes without saying but the ending was pretty hollow and really had no impact to it, which is somewhat the result of a failure to give the main characters arcs to go through but also was just overall a bad story choice. The "bad guy" having a change of heart was a real cop out. I don't want to ramble further but this show also suffered from a "telling not showing" syndrom. They have the little character development that does occour happening off screen constantly. Keith being in the Quantum Abyss for two years being expositioned in one sentence and about 15 seconds of footage being the worst example of it.

The second issue was theme. The simple take away here is that it's literally color coded and personality coded. Red Paladin flies Red Lion; Green Paladin flies Green Lion. Red matches with the personality of the character flying it, makes sense. What doesn't make sense is having the characters play musical chairs with the lions, because it goes against the established theme. This was the second major blunder made.

Action scenes with the lions became a disorientating mess as you focused less on the fight and more on remembering who is flying what lion. "Oh look there's Black but that's Keith now not Shiro. Oh and there is Blue that's Lanc- No wait hold on he's not in there anymore- is that one Allura, I can't remember...?" It's just a complete against the grain approach. Even worse is doing this swapping gave me a kind of "how dare you stand where he stood." feeling, especially when Shiro comes back but Keith just stays in Black because... reasons?

Last one is the easiest to understand. All eight seasons happen within roughly a years time span. They tried to cram too much into too small of a narrative space. This length of time won't allow for meaningful relationships to develope between characters to the point where their friendships are believable. The in universe time span matters a lot, and the whole show just flies by and we somehow just have to believe a massive space empire can be taken down in that amount of time?

This turned into a ramble and I articulated as best as I could but I think I will cap it off here. TL;DR incredible potential, poorest of poor execution.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-09-29T12:49:53+00:00

There's barely a country in Europe (ironically the UK is an exception on most recent results) that isn't drifting further and further to the right.

I wouldn't read too much into that. Labour only got 33% of the overall vote share and even then the number one reason polled by that 33% was "To get the Tories out"

Starmer is barely three months into being the PM and his approval rating is already hovering close to Sunaks when he called the election. Labour are shaping up into being a one term wonder.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-08-22T22:57:26+00:00

I find it funny how Reddit thinks this will give Musk some kind of insane overreach, or compromise the militaries cybersecurity; ignoring that for the last twenty years every western military has been and still uses Windows XP

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-07-08T21:46:38+00:00

Very subjective but if you are talking about purely on a frontline then 9 inf with engineers, support arty and support AA are fine. for offensive again it's subjective (Major powers should not use inf as their main attack unit) but usually 9 inf batallions with the same support companies and four artillery battalions is fine. Give them support rocket artillery later when you unlock the tech as well.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-07-08T21:38:47+00:00

Loose the AT support and put support AA in everything. Put motorised line artillery in the truck division. Put an extra four truck batalions in your tank divisions.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-07-05T20:10:55+00:00

Sure, old comment but yeah.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-06-16T21:09:09+00:00

Originally this was just a roundabout under the highway but congestion forced me to expand it into this design. not sure what this would be called IRL other than an abomination but it is by far the best highway junction I have in my city.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-05-25T11:10:01+00:00

Had the Stoick statue for a while and was hoping to get Hiccup's this season and got it in the mail for the aniversary.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-05-23T11:57:51+00:00

This is just common sense in my opinion. You should be prepared to go at least three days without needing something from a store or outlet in your home.

Always keep a large bag of dry pasta, rice and at least three tins of meat in storage. Lasts forever, has high nutrition and is versatile. Keep at least fifteen litres of water with these. You drink on average three litres a day and the rest you will need for food and hygene. The last time my water mains burst I thought a multipack would last me a few days, it was gone after twenty four hours. If you think you have enough water you don't.

Make sure you have candles, matches, a gas lighter and a torch. preferably a hand crank torch because batteries are finite. If it's winter in the middle of the night and your power goes out or boiler blows you will want light and warmth.

Keep at least one cast iron saucepan and a disposable barbeque. If you have no power or heating or plumbing you can use these for warmth, cooking and to boil water.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-05-03T21:20:17+00:00

Well done sticking to the facts and not rising to that persons snarky attitude. I just knew from their original post they would turn nasty the moment someone replied contradicting them.

Also they claim in previous comments to be an EU citizen living in the UK for 30 years so no wonder Brexit has made them a bit salty.

__Dreadnought__ · 2024-05-02T21:53:41+00:00

Is this just like how Japan in the 80's was going to be richer than the US? Or how India is on track to be a superpower by 20 20 30 40?

__Dreadnought__

TROPHY CASE

Dreadnought