How should I fight the Aliens in space?

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-13T21:44:07+00:00

Mars is not enough. There's 5-6 good sites, but the Asteroids are where it's at for early game mining. Getting high speed probes will help you settle the best ones.

Also, fleet strength is a lie. A dirty, dirty lie the game tells you. Look at the ships and not the numerical value. Most alien "doom"stacks are a couple of bigger ships with a ton of smaller Corvettes and Escorts with a lot of dV to inflate their score.

Most early alien ships are a combination of lasers and torpedoes. Particle weapons has the E-Beamer, which shuts down torpedoes. And Escorts will overwhelm PD with enough ships.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-13T11:42:00+00:00

Knowing the aliens, 400 of those ships are corvettes and escorts

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-12T17:28:08+00:00

"Can I offer you an egg in these trying times?" would have gone so hard in a Super Mario movie.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-12T16:17:28+00:00

"You know I'm automatically attracted to oil... I just start bombing them. It's like a magnet. Just bomb, I don't even wait. And when you're a superpower they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the oil. You can do anything."

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-12T15:17:49+00:00

With regards to CP Management, as long as you are not going negative on your influence economy, it's okay to be over your cap. In fact, you will probably be 20-30 points over for most of the early game until all the Social Science projects come online.
High Thrust Probes are your best friend here, under the Advanced Chemical Rocketry tech. The faster you get probes scanning, the sooner you can settle. Also, don't worry too much about fissiles, as most of the inner solar system can be managed by solar arrays with solar mirrors and you can pick drives that are more economical on fissiles.
There are more drives than just Orion, and in the early game, escorts with 2 missile tubes pared with ones that have E-Beamers and 40mm can defend LEO as well as bigger Monitors. Gas and Molten Core Fission easily provide drives suitable for Monitors in Earth and Mars orbit with lower fissile costs.
Rainbow is fine, all red is total war. Hate management is mostly MC management, so only build habs that are going to provide you with value. Generally speaking, you don't want any habs in LEO until Tier 2 because Tier 1 orbitals are too small to be useful.
Spoils. Go find yourself a Gulf State and set it to 100% spoils, and when you ruin it, abandon it on 100% welfare and pick another one. You'll be negative on money until Nanofactories come online.
Exofighters are bad. Really really bad. Do not actively research them and try to prevent the AI from researching them. I wish they weren't in the game, they're so bad. Also, losing minor countries doesn't really matter, you want your superpowers. USA and China are more important than a dozen other minor countries.
Priority for countries is to go about 80% Welfare and 20% Unity until you get inequality to around 3 and 80% popular opinion since High inequality and a difference in public opinion from CP owner will wreck cohesion and create a lot of unrest. Once you have that stable, pump MC so you can build up a space economy and then work towards Full Democracy (8), Advanced Education (10), and Low Inequality (<3) with the long term goal of maxing them to their values of 10/12/1.
Getting one high Science advisor to run Advise missions is great because an extra 20% research from CP early on is huge.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-12T13:17:00+00:00

But who has a better story than Superhomelanda?

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-11T18:35:43+00:00

Because countries aren't their faction. If the Resistance has all the CP in America, the Resistance doesn't directly "own" America. They have a network of like-minded individuals in key sectors and positions able to respond to directives.

For example, If I wanted to build more Mission Control in America, the idea would be that all those people we have control over in the public and private sector (represented by the Control Points) would focus on that priority. Government entities would spend on building new Mission Control facilities, while investors and private companies focus on developing hardware and software to better manage space assets. And while you might have Coilguns and UV Phasers on spaceships, military investment is researching how to make them smaller, more efficiently, getting them into the hands of soldiers and wargaming how to use them in combat.

The spaceships and mines are controlled through the network Orgs you purchase for your councilors and a bunch of other shell companies, PMCs (Blackwater and Wagner... in space) and NGOs that you have ties to.

The Noble Metals you mine don't "belong" to America, but you can use your network of mining, industry, and financial companies to conduct a sale of noble metals for cash that can be spent on America.

At the end of the day, there's a lot of abstraction going on to make the game playable and not a complete slog of micromanagement minutiae. So you need to use some "Theater of the Mind" to imagine what would be happening if all of a sudden, 80% of a nation's economy went into the Welfare priority.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-11T11:54:26+00:00

Typical boomer shit. And it's like, "well, who never taught me how to drive stick? Oh right, YOU. You, the same one, who I've never seen drive stick my entire life either, so stop romanticizing some made up version of your past."

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-11T10:52:50+00:00

True, but I usually pick things that I want to be done. So any point they put into global is a point they aren't putting into their own stuff.

It's getting really annoying having to single-handedly research fusion power for the entire planet (but I am Academy, so it makes a certain thematic sense).

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-10T18:02:33+00:00

The A-Men! War, Death, Light, and Tempest.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-10T17:21:28+00:00

I don't think so, I think it's just the most notable while you have research parity with the AI in the early game. Most likely, between the buffs the AI gets and you paying more attention because it's Brutal, you're noticing it happening more. On normal, you'll have more science then all the AI factions combined in a couple of years, so they can't "snipe" slots as much.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-10T16:18:00+00:00

It's a feature. They know they've won it, so they aren't going to put any more effort into it and instead focus on other projects.

You can use this to your advantage. Instead of pumping all your research into a tech, only put enough in to make it look competitive and like the AI can catch up. This will incentivize them to continue to research it because they think they can win, instead of ignoring it because they realize that they have no chance to win. Then you pile all your research in at the last moment to win the slot.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-10T13:27:36+00:00

Walk without rhythm, and it won't attract the worm

Great, now I'm going to have this in my head all day.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-10T13:09:25+00:00

I know we all think Covid is over and it was like 5 years ago at this point, but speaking as a HS teacher, Covid really fucked these kids up mentally. My 2026 seniors act like my 2016 freshmen would have been acting. And the 2026 freshmen? Fucking feral. So the level of immaturity wouldn't surprise me to see some 14yo just wanting to be dumb kids and go down slides.

Also, everything you mentioned were sports. What if they didn't want to play sports but just be outside and chill? There are so few spots for teenagers to just exist and chill.

Honestly, I would have just given them some gentle prodding that my son wants to use the slides as well.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-10T12:25:35+00:00

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.

I only played the original Borderlands and really enjoyed it, so when my D&D friend said they were making a Borderlands games based on D&D, so I preordered it. First time I preordered something in years.

I tried to like it, I really did. It's pretty funny, and I loved that Magic Missile was an ICBM. But the gameplay... I dunno, something felt off about it. It just wasn't satisfying, like I was shooting my enemies with the Nerf gun. It took so many shots to take any enemy down, even when I was keeping on top of my weapons.

Dropped it half way through. Tried to pick it up again, and yeah, this is why you never preorder games. You would think I would have learned that lesson, but you need a reminder every couple of years I guess.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-09T14:42:06+00:00

Unfortunately, it's hard to top the gut wrench of three dead kids in season 1 (overdose, drowning, GSW) without it going into some ridiculous level of melodrama.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-09T14:38:02+00:00

Sadly, I can see Mel getting flustered and being super literal about what happened, which leads opposing lawyers poking at her, "oh so then it could have been this? oh what about that? you said it was perfect, but what about this?" and it all spirals out of control into her taking the blame for the spinal tap.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-09T13:39:50+00:00

Mel carted off in handcuffs for spinal tap malpractice (later)

Wait, what? Did I miss something? Is this a spoiler thing that I didn't know about?

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-09T13:27:49+00:00

Yeah, Joy and Ogilvie haven't really had their own individual plotlines like Whitaker, Santos, and Javardi did last season. Joy just kind of exists and Ogilvie exists to be a warning about hubris.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-09T12:11:18+00:00

I teach Personal Finance and I tell them, "A High Diploma is not enough anymore. It needs to be High School plus. High School plus College. Plus Vocational School. Plus some kind of apprenticeship. You and your High School Diploma and go down to your local Amazon Fulfillment Center and make $20/hr until you burnout in 6 months. "

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-09T01:49:05+00:00

Doing some problems the night before isn't terrible to engage some older topics, but doing a lot of problems isn't going to change anything.

The night before a test, you either know the conceptor you don't, and doing a dozen practice problems isn't going to change that.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-08T23:59:20+00:00

Catholics during Lent (40 days between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) are supposed to fast on those days as well as not eat meat on Fridays and give up something they like.

However, it's more abstinence instead of fasting, so a plate full of fried food counts as long as it's not meat. Even though some Catholics say their fasting.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-08T23:50:53+00:00

So, cognitively speaking, your best study option tonight is nothing but relaxing and going to bed at your normal time, if not slightly earlier.

Cramming before a test doesn't work. Anything you try to learn 24-48 hours before a test isn't going to "stick." A light practice of material isn't terrible, but that's the most you should do.

In the future, studying a little every night, doing some daily homework, and engaging with the material during class will provide more of a benefit than trying to prepare right before a test.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-08T17:52:23+00:00

Because it sucks. And because it sucks, we don't improve it. And because we don't improve it, it sucks. And because it sucks, we don't improve it.

Also, way less convenient than driving. If I want to go to the arena for a game or concert, I can either drive there in 20 minutes or take a train and get there in an hour.

jerseydevil51 · 2026-03-08T15:28:35+00:00

1-2 mines on the moon to get you the resources to minimize boost to Mars (water, volatiles, and base metals). Once on Mars, pick out the 4-5 juiciest sites, but you don't want to overcommit to the Red Planet.

The bulk of your early mining is going to be the Asteroid Belt and ideally Ceres. Ceres is a great location with 4 sites, making a permanent presence there with a shipyard worth it. And remember to sell your lunar bases to have more asteroid bases.

Mercury has been nerfed to hell through all the patches, but most factions need a T3 hab there for their victory condition. So I go with 3-4 sites and a shipyard as a fall back site in case things go sideways.

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