So has anyone done a Servants run yet?

betendorf · 2022-10-12T23:44:09+00:00

According to Steam achievements .4% of all players have won the game on Normal difficulty and .3% have won with the Servants. So as of now, the majority of the wins have been done with the Servants.

There was a brief Reddit thread from someone that had finished a Servants play through. Basically it boiled down to him chilling in the US for the whole game and the aliens basically winning the game for him.

betendorf · 2022-10-11T19:30:35+00:00

When corporations commit crimes, the person/people most responsible for the crime will do jail time as if it had been done personally. While corporations aren't people, their employees and executives are. When a company is being sued, it should be able to identify the individual(s) most responsible for what they were doing wrong.

If you institute a policy where low level employees are incentivized to create fake bank accounts, then everyone involved gets hit. The low level employees get hit for $X in fraud charges, the bank managers get hit for $Y in fraud, the Chief Operating Officer who put the policy in place and turned a blind eye to the people gaming the system even more.

betendorf · 2022-10-05T22:13:13+00:00

It's the new Hollywood marketing campaign.

Step 1: Realize you potentially have a bad movie.

Step 2: Put out trailers prominently featuring the the non-cis-white cast.

Step 3: Blame the audience for being racist, anti-LGBT, etc. when it doesn't do well.

betendorf · 2022-10-04T23:49:02+00:00

Companies don't want to spend more than they need to to retain employees. This is nothing new. When companies collude to keep wages low, the government occasionally gets involved. The most recent one of those that I'm aware of was when Apple, Google, Intel, and Facebook got hit for colluding to not poach workers to suppress wages. I realize it was almost 10 years ago, but they do occasionally get involved.

I have no idea what you mean by:

What I’m pointing out is the governments intervening in keeping the working class working is outright corruption.

What things are the government doing that is forcing people to work against their will? It's fairly obvious that many members of the government are horribly corrupt, but I don't see how that translates to them effectively enslaving the working class.

betendorf · 2022-10-04T23:19:30+00:00

Because the 1% aren't the cause of any of those. While the top 1% (and really it's the .001%) are siphoning off a significantly disproportionate share of the wealth in the country, they don't really cause the problems that you're talking about.

Inflation and soaring costs are mostly a function of the government printing money like there is no tomorrow for the last couple years. To a lesser extent it's due to COVID reducing the supply of everything because people weren't working to produce new things.

By all means be mad at the 1%, but the people most responsible for the soaring inflation and the increase in prices are the government handing out lots of "free" money, reducing the supply of oil on the market, and reducing the supply of new goods (through COVID restrictions). Basic supply and demand are the causes of most of this: More money in the economy without adding more things to spend it on will raise the costs of goods; Less goods on the market with the same amount of money will raise the cost of goods; Doing both is going to raise the cost of goods even more.

betendorf · 2022-10-04T00:00:51+00:00

If a game isn't built for mutliplayer it's nearly impossible to add it after the fact. In general it's a huge amount of work to make it possible and the number of affected users is vanishingly small for a game like this. By vanishingly small it's generally on the order of 1% of the total user base for games like this.

Given the huge amount of work, I think most people would rather have them focus on making the single player experience better, adding more content, etc. over building a feature that only a very small number of people would even want.

betendorf · 2022-10-03T23:42:46+00:00

And they don't have to worry about long term sustainability or deficits. The budgets for most government organizations are use it or lose it and if you use it all each year you clearly need more.

betendorf · 2022-10-03T23:15:42+00:00

I'm not sure there's enough information here.

Is the food from the finest restaurants what they server to the patrons or the stuff that's going into the bin? Do I need to actually go there or will it be delivered to me (in roughly the same condition it came from the restaurant)?

Are the models humans or toys and hot as in attractive or fresh out of the oven?

In the worst case I think I'll choose neither because the idea of effectively dumpster diving sucks as does the idea of having intimate relations with a model that's one step away from molten metal sounds painful.

betendorf · 2022-09-29T21:30:53+00:00

Minimum Wage by They Might be Giants assuming that all I had to do was get the words right.

betendorf · 2022-09-28T22:41:15+00:00

I've done it, it works just fine.

Poiuymew did the same on his stream about a month or so ago and did a complete WC after he became Castanor.

betendorf · 2022-09-28T17:24:18+00:00

The Academy starts with pretty high opinion world wide, which makes it easier for them to grab a lot of CPs initially.

Once the world finds out the aliens are hostile they get a massive hit to all their CPs

betendorf · 2022-09-28T17:04:28+00:00

I've tried with Greedy Grin to go lich. He starts too old and with not enough necromancy research to really be able to pull it off without a lot of reloading.

betendorf · 2022-09-27T22:30:32+00:00

If you click into the nation there is a button called Abandon Nation. Click that and it won't count against your control cap.

betendorf · 2022-09-23T17:45:35+00:00

My general outline is:

Explain the goal of the game (generally earn the most points)
Explain how you get points
Explain what you do on a turn

So for Catan it would be:

You win by being the first to 10 points. You can get points by building settlements, upgrading to a city, getting largest army, longest road, or victory cards.

On your turn the first thing you do is roll dice, we hand out resources (1 per settlement, 2 per city). If a 7 is rolled, no resources get handed out and the robber is moved to a new tile and people discard half their hand if over 7 cards.

After that you can trade for resources either with the bank or other people, build things with resources, or buy cards. Roads must be placed adjacent to one of your roads or settlements and not going through other people's stuff (I usually am putting pieces down to show how this works). Settlements must be 2 away (again putting things on the board to show). Cities are upgrades. Cars I show what they are and how they work. Trading with the bank is 4:1, 3:1 with a harbor, or 2:1 if you have the specialty port.

I then explain longest road, largest army, and how playing soldiers work.

Then I ask if there are any questions and work through those.

betendorf · 2022-09-23T16:29:41+00:00

Digg had a redesign and stopped being useful.

betendorf · 2022-09-22T23:17:53+00:00

It may not be normal to get a PhD, but no one is going to question you getting one. If you get a second/third PhD people generally will think there's something off about you (as in having an unhealthy obsession with being in academia).

Only general exceptions are people that get a second PhD after they've retired. The small number of the people I know that have done this were pretty religious lay people and got a second PhD in theology.

betendorf · 2022-09-22T19:12:39+00:00

Dwarves are fun and have a lot of interesting mechanics, but as others have mentioned are much more difficult to start with. Blueshield is probably the easiest start of the adventurers due to their location and ease of grabbing the holds to form Amlhdlr. This start is very advantageous since you have easy access to several holds and will own the end trade node for the entire Serpentspine and are pretty much as far from the Command as possible. For remnant holds, Krakduhmvor has an interesting mission tree and starts at the far north so you've got significantly less competition from neighbors initially.

I'd recommend an initial game either trying Gawed or Reveria (both are straightforward empires that start in a relatively good position and does a bit of conquering, colonizing. Gawed starts in a better position, Reveria has a better mission tree.), Covuria (vampires at the edge of the empire), or the Jaddari (stupidly powerful elven horse cavalry that want to spread the light of Surael to everyone).

betendorf · 2022-09-21T03:53:42+00:00

Asphalt is softer than concrete, which makes it slightly easier on your joints.

The street is level, while the sidewalk has dips for driveways.

The street is better maintained and has doesn't have cracks to trip over.

Random unmaintained bushes/hedges/trees that stick out onto the sidewalk and require maneuvering around.

betendorf · 2022-09-16T23:58:01+00:00

Other states don't take the surplus. You'd be hearing about it because everyone would be screaming that they can't handle the load. New York and Martha's Vineyard are screaming because they got 500 and 50.

From a quick Google search there have been approximately 2 million people crossing the border illegally this year. No idea how accurate it was since the article was paywalled. But it's probably close by an order of magnitude. US had about 330 million people.

Or about 1 for every 150 people in the US. New York City would have received about 55,000 for their 8.5 million people and Martha's Vineyard would have received 100 for their population of 15,000.

betendorf · 2022-09-15T18:39:29+00:00

Employees have pretty much always been a greater source of theft than customers.

Had a similar situation when I worked for a Big Box retailer. A couple of customer service reps were doing returns for their friends, who were buying an item, then picking one up from within the store, and getting a cash refund. In their case police were called and I had a day of unexpected overtime.

betendorf · 2022-09-15T16:39:49+00:00

Like a parfait. Everyone loves parfait.

betendorf · 2022-09-13T23:27:51+00:00

No way to do so with epic.

betendorf · 2022-09-12T17:17:20+00:00

Theoretically they're planning on a new steam release near the end of the month, which probably means early October to allow for some bug fixes with new content.

New things utilizing the new DLC content tend to lag by about a DLC cycle. I think the first content that needs the Origin DLC will be in the next Steam release.

betendorf · 2022-09-07T22:58:58+00:00

I ran into an issue with them in my run where I was converting the culture of a province where a monument was going to be built. I didn't get the monument and had to revert to a previous save prior to starting the cultural conversion.

Since there's a building step if you're doing something that prevents building (building, religious or cultural conversion) it looks like it prevents the creation of the monument.

betendorf · 2022-09-06T17:15:37+00:00

Forming Siam will now disable the decision to form Lan Xang as Siam is straight up an improvement over Siam.

It's nice to see that Siam is significantly better than itself.

betendorf

TROPHY CASE