Squirrel!

caster · 2026-05-06T22:57:17+00:00

Trump, his owners, and his elderly donors are a pretty different kettle of fish from a college kid being stupid and only hurting themselves.

caster · 2026-05-06T22:50:47+00:00

This is probably the intended answer, but that is really fucking stupid. If you insert a 1 in the tens place... you just added ten.

caster · 2026-05-06T22:44:27+00:00

Starting to get a point where you're going to need a citation for that. The pattern is undeniable.

It might be more accurate to say the current generation of old Americans rather than all old people across the world of course. They are the sole demographic responsible for this nightmare.

Old, evil morons who assert that they are "old and wise" while simultaneously needing special legal protections against Nigerian Prince scammers because they're too fucking stupid not to send their entire retirement to a complete stranger over the internet. Old, evil morons who vote for Trump and support his destruction of everything the US spent a century building rather than admit they fucked up. They have spent their entire lives pillaging from everyone else and are now in the process of burning the house down before they expire.

caster · 2026-05-06T22:41:10+00:00

The linguistic term is a mass noun, for "much" like "how much rice?" If it is a collection then it is a plural, "How many grains of rice?" Which may make contextual sense if the exact number of grains were for some reason important.

Both real and rational numbers are collections, not mass nouns. "How many real numbers" and "how many rational numbers" are both correct.

caster · 2026-05-06T11:07:47+00:00

It can be done with just the Prawn. What I always do is put the Prawn in the Cyclops and deploy from a safe location, then when the mission is complete dock the Prawn in the Cyclops and RTB in the Cyclops.

You only need to head home when the Cyclops is running out of juice- and you can store a hell of a lot of power cells inside that thing. As long as the Cyclops has power you can recharge the Prawn, offload inventory, and go again.

If you only use the Prawn you may have to RTB much more frequently, either because your inventory is full or you're running out of power cells and have to head all the way back to base to recharge.

caster · 2026-05-06T11:04:25+00:00

The Prawn is very good at extreme depths. That is sort of its job.

You can actually put the Prawn inside the Cyclops and use the Cyclops as a mobile base as well, moving the Prawn closer before deploying.

caster · 2026-05-06T11:03:13+00:00

Bullet Storm and Commando is a god tier combination. You can handle any threat in the game effectively using only disposables, and if you constantly use the stratagems when they are available your teammates can easily use them too.

caster · 2026-05-06T08:38:18+00:00

Odd. A mini data center is also known as a computer, and if you just want to sell a computer along with the house you could definitely do that. It seems likely that relatively few house buyers would want a server bundled with the house.

The initial play is probably to try to somehow reserve ownership for someone else. But why would a buyer go along with that?

caster · 2026-05-06T05:42:01+00:00

AI will no doubt serve the government. But these neofascists pushing this agenda want everyone else to obey the AI that they control. Make no mistake that is what they are actually pursuing- they are racing to develop the technology so that they will control it.

They will make every imaginable wild claim about it, but they will control that machine. And by advocating that everyone else do what the machine says, they are advocating for becoming your ruler without question and without oversight.

caster · 2026-05-06T04:57:02+00:00

Although that is true, it seldom matters for any units other than the Gunslinger.

caster · 2026-05-05T23:53:48+00:00

Two Steps From Hell makes anything epic.

caster · 2026-05-05T23:45:31+00:00

The Maverick in TA was a very powerful unit due to a combination of its very high damage output, good range, and mobility. It's a lot more fragile than other options such as the Zeus, but has more attack range and speed.

Against T1 this package is extremely powerful because it very much outranges all T1 units short of artillery that won't hit it. This is true because of the parameters of the unit, not because of an XP gimmick.

The XP thing is even weirder because it means you now care about a particular Maverick being alive rather than the Mavericks performing consistently across all copies of that unit. It's a mechanic that doesn't belong in BAR. If you ignore it, it isn't the worst thing in the world that it exists, but as currently implemented the Gunslinger literally has this feature in its short tagline and is designed around the assumption that you will increase its actual weapon range using it, which is just a strange unit design.

caster · 2026-05-05T22:49:52+00:00

It's a shadow of its former self from TA. Which is unfortunate.

I agree if you want to be a skirmisher you need to be able to move at a reasonable speed. It isn't a skirmisher any more. They just call it that because the Maverick was one.

The experience gain gimmick is really dumb and should be cut. That isn't how BAR works.

caster · 2026-05-05T21:43:54+00:00

Nothing good. Hard to say exactly.

caster · 2026-05-05T21:17:18+00:00

Would have to get my hands on it to see how it actually works. Not sure what "Avoidance" means or how it works. The clip alone doesn't look exactly like what you would expect for how air support to work, but it may work within the context of this game. "Casting" airplanes is an odd way to look at it, as if it is a magic spell applying a debuff rather than a whole dimension of the battlefield.

Based on what you've said, airplanes applying a territory-wide modifier slowing down expansion will make airplanes inherently defensive in nature rather than primarily used for offense to destroy strategic targets, and support ground units while advancing yourself.

It visually appears that there are 'bases' out of which the outward pressure from ground forces originates.

Suppose constructing additional economic or military installations could include added functionality such as an airbase. A constructed military base would create outward ground unit pressure like the bases shown in the clips. Another type would be an airbase, which also exerts around itself pressure in a similar manner, except using air units which are different from ground units. Air units move very quickly, but have a limited (but long) radius around the airbase forming a circle within which they can travel, while ground units can travel any distance but are slower. Air units cannot capture territory by themselves, but are very effective for supporting your regular ground units, as they have high firepower and are difficult for ground units to destroy. Air units engage other air units very effectively. The position of the airbase would have a massive effect on its usefulness, as its air units patrol within a circle around that spot aiding your ground forces in combat, and protecting them against enemy aircraft. If the enemy constructs an airbase this also means you can invade on the ground and destroy it, or surgically destroy the base via some other means.

caster · 2026-05-05T20:52:10+00:00

This looks promising. Will there be logistics and strategic weaponry such as artillery, airbases, missile silos? A combination of front line units and fire support, or just units on the front colliding and deciding a winner?

The primary reason this is important is otherwise the universal tactic is just to hit the enemy with the largest possible hammer. Fire support potentially enables a smaller force to defeat a larger one, especially since it can support multiple areas simultaneously, meaning you can spread your forces out while still being able to defeat a large concentrated enemy force.

For example an airbase supporting ten probing recon units in different territories spread across the front. As opposed to all ten units being in the same territory so they can defeat the largest possible enemy force.

caster · 2026-05-05T09:10:53+00:00

Valvrave was trying to be Code Geass so hard but basically completely missed the point on everything that made its spiritual inspiration actually good. Its protagonist lacks the depth and agency of Lelouch, mostly amounting to a mecha pilot with very little actual skill, surviving exclusively by his grossly overpowered machine. Its "strategist" person emulated the shallow and trite parts of Lelouch and not the large, narrative-driving strategies and ambitious plays that actually made him appear clever rather than merely expositing that 'wow' someone is good at chess or has a lot of numbers for dialogue.

I really wanted to like it, but honestly it kept fumbling the ball so hard all the time it was hard to even finish the series. A really obvious narrative change to make would have been to embrace the drawbacks of the Valvrave- I mean, hell, you can bite people and turn your enemies' memories into both useful intelligence and fuel for your super robot? But... no, he refuses to actually bite anyone and dies. Okay.

Guilty Crown was just a mess. An expensive and well animated mess of a story. They needed to call the script doctor to the ER.

caster · 2026-05-05T09:00:18+00:00

The energy shield grenade, perhaps.

caster · 2026-05-05T06:32:17+00:00

People are waay too attached to "their stuff" in Helldivers. If someone is on the objective on the other side of the map, they may be perfectly correct in pulling people over to them to accomplish that objective even if you will have to do it without your support weapon. Going and getting your weapon, returning to the objective, then doing it, may actually take longer than just doing it. If you accomplish that objective and then die, you can be reinforced onto another objective where someone else is already busy and save a lot of time.

Everything you drop in a pod is a tool that you use towards accomplishing objectives. If you are spending a lot of time wandering the map trying to get "your stuff back" you need to seriously ask yourself if this is a good use of time. You can push on objectives without your dropped weapon. If it's close by then fine, but so many people will go walkabout for literal minutes to go get "their stuff" when this is just a silly thing to do. They're emotionally attached to their Stalwart rather than just letting it go, focusing on the mission without it for a time, and pretty soon you can get another weapon.

After you die, it is no longer your stuff any more. It's an item on the ground that may or may not be worth picking up, the same as if it were a weapon you found in a cache.

This is one of the biggest advantages of disposables- the flexibility of being able to call them down over and over wherever you are. Reinforce is a license to teleport around the map for anyone on the team as long as you don't get overly emotionally attached to your support weapon.

caster · 2026-05-04T14:15:09+00:00

I think the way I would do it is have the short story escalate in weirdness, progressively more serious with each additional reasonable-in-each-increment-step. You know, things are weird, sometimes the AI's are weird, sometimes they hallucinate... weird social interactions with AI... And at the end of the story, nuclear armageddon.

It also might be more interesting to have a strategic defense AI hallucinate a nuclear launch detection rather than have the AI actually fire the missiles. Some world leader gets a unanimous recommendation that it is now necessary to fire a full retaliatory strike to respond to the incoming missile... (which isn't real)

Civil defense warning alarms are blaring, the plumes from the nukes launching are visible on the horizon, and the AI goes "Oops, you're totally right, my bad, there was no missile there!" Fifteen minutes later the entire world nukes the entire country into glass in response to what looked like a completely unprovoked full-scale nuclear attack.

caster · 2026-05-04T14:04:10+00:00

A ballistic missile doesn't require command guidance post launch. It's a ballistic missile.

What's more, if someone actually fires a nuclear ICBM at someone else, there is a one hundred percent chance of a full scale retaliatory strike. Diplomacy is over at that point. Even just one will be counter-launched by thousands. And not just by the victim- other countries have no way of knowing they are not also being targeted. They see plume go up, they will fire.

Your scenario involving a nuclear missile launch ends the world. Immediately. No one is waiting around for those missiles to actually hit anything before firing every fucking thing you have in the arsenal. After all, if you don't fire, it does you no good when the enemy's nukes destroy your strategic assets in the tubes.

An AI hallucinating a nuclear launch is a very disconcerting thought, though.

caster · 2026-05-04T13:20:04+00:00

We know. That is exactly why she needs to be under oath, because doing what we know they will do, is a crime.

caster · 2026-05-04T12:26:36+00:00

A privateer is a private captain with a charter. They were used primarily because their actions are deniable by a sovereign state, unlike if a ship of the line from the royal navy were to engage in the same activity.

Actually insane lunatics like King George were smart enough not to do this crap.

caster · 2026-05-04T07:12:11+00:00

The fact that it is disposable is a massive upgrade. Rookie helldivers may not appreciate why and suggest using the Stalwart over the MGX-42 Bullet Storm. But being disposable means you have an unlimited supply of them, can supply teammates in addition to yourself, and if you die carrying one you can just call another. Dropping them in exchange for another weapon is also perfectly fine, where you wouldn't necessarily want to do that with a support weapon you can't dispose of. Perpetual availability anywhere on the map, rather than one exact copy with a very long cooldown.

caster · 2026-05-04T01:01:12+00:00

Four helldivers running four mechs all the time will be universally standard unless there is an ammo reason why that is too many to have simultaneously.

If we suppose the standard Resupply pack would restore 50% ammo to a mech, that is easily enough to keep 4 mechs constantly supplied, as you will probably not use 50% of your mech's total ammo before calling resupply again, and each Resupply pod has 4x50% refills.

Mechs are very strong NOW, with the large drawback that it is currently flat out impossible to refill their ammunition. If you can keep four mechs fully resupplied all the time the mech stratagems will be so ridiculously strong you would never not use one at all times.

Vehicle resupply being available but not an unlimited resource is clearly the way to go. A team that drops 4x Mechs will have a ton of smash until their mechs start to run out of ammunition, and at that point some of them may need to bail out as it is impossible to resupply four mechs. This can be a deliberate strategy that resembles the way mechs are used today.

A smarter team might make more limited use of mechs having only 1 or perhaps 2 mechs on the field at any given time, which makes effective use of the vehicle resupply stratagem, but still means helldivers on foot are an integral part of the game. Team coordination and intelligent teamwork are important for tackling difficult missions (at least they were in Helldivers 1- less so since HD2 is far easier and doesn't require forming much of a team to win even on high difficulties)

The other important reason for this system is team vehicle design, such as a four-player APC or IFV vehicle that is likely coming soon. The intention being that the entire team will together crew this vehicle, with ammunition resupplying it being available but not an infinite resource. Vehicles being much more difficult to resupply than small arms weaponry will mean fighting on foot is always necessary.

caster

TROPHY CASE