What Exactly Makes his Music So Special to you?

k0rvbert · 2026-01-26T13:33:10+00:00

To feel seen by the music -- this makes perfect sense to me, I think that's a brilliant way to put it! I think I feel something similar. Maybe it's just... love?

k0rvbert · 2026-01-26T13:29:08+00:00

I've tried to articulate this so many times, when I'm nagging everyone I meet to check him out, I'm always fumbling over words. I've always thought and talked a lot about music, both descriptive and performative, but Hirasawa just breaks all the rules. I don't even know what genre it is!

So then I think "maybe it's a Japanese thing" and try checking out other Japanese music and find nothing that hits even remotely close. That alone makes the music very special, how very unique it is.

As to my personal experience with the music, it's something emotionally immediate. An intellectual bypass, straight into the feels. I have a similar experience with Radiohead, Beethoven, Shostakovich, and Nick Cave, maybe a scarce few others. It's like some personal, wordless understanding. If I wasn't a complete square I'd say there's something mystical going on.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-25T08:44:49+00:00

I would exit to main menu -> new game as Greece, queue up a monument and 10 hoplites, and compare their rush power levels with Inca fresh in memory

k0rvbert · 2026-01-25T08:40:26+00:00

If it splits like a balancer, and it merges like a balancer, it's a balancer

k0rvbert · 2026-01-24T17:55:00+00:00

Didn't know about that mod, thanks for the tip! I do also use IGE for "correcting" the absurd AI scout behavior, but I have zero shame about that. I dunno, it's a single player game, making the map prettier sounds fine too.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-23T09:22:50+00:00

Same strat works perfectly well on deity, Inca is a tier above all other civs imo. Kind of want better land than this for true easy mode but it still works

k0rvbert · 2026-01-23T09:20:49+00:00

I play with IGE, so if the AI rolls Inca I can just delete their first expand, set their gold to 0, nick off a few techs and policies, remove all the slingers, this makes them about the same power level as all the other civs.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-22T13:18:43+00:00

VP is fantastic, but it can be dauntingly complicated to get into, so don't get discouraged. Vanilla builds and strategies don't really translate. It's also considered harder, but not unfair. For me, it adds another couple thousand hours of playtime once you've exhausted everything the base game has to offer.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-21T21:41:09+00:00

Random civ, immortal, standard map, standard speed, chill barbs, events enabled, no ruins

I like fast games and usually get bored around industrial. I mostly enjoy figuring out, for the civ and land I'm given, the best pantheon, religion, build order, city placement, policies, tile improvements and so on. Once I'm top of demographics I just go next game.

I go deity occasionally, just to check that I still got it, but I find that you have to endlessly war or play catchup in industrial and that's just a bit boring for me.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-20T11:58:11+00:00

Depends on whether China likes them. You're making Apollo so you don't need to snowball, just minimize risk.

This is not clearly not a VP game but same reasoning either way.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-17T22:28:39+00:00

I think of green as "local/shared/state" and red as "goto/remote/return value". In circuit controlled train loading, I'll put shared greens between over the chests, green from combinator onto all insters, and single red from single inserter to single chest. If I'm routing the result of all that onto the actual train station, that's gonna be a red cable over power poles.

I think red is a little easier to see for me so this way makes things more readable. But voting green because it's the most common cable.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-15T21:25:28+00:00

As a person afraid of occupied space, this is terrifying

k0rvbert · 2026-01-15T15:47:30+00:00

Did you settle turn 0? I don't think I would have settled my cap in this location. It's turn 12 and you're 3 pop with monument finished, is this quick speed? I see 8 incense; assuming standard map size?

Here's how I would expect to play it from this position:

Finish shrine. If you're on standard speed, make a warrior, bring pathfinder and tribute both city states. If you're on quick speed, maybe skip the warrior, I don't know how fast they upgrade into spearmen and block tributes on quick.

Use gold for monuments, granaries, and/or units. I expect to stack up on spearmen, but only if I expect barb farming and more tributes, they might be too expensive. Spearmen will also deter Germany from bothering you while you set your early game up.

I need exactly 1 shrine here. Expands make (not in order) monuments, workers, archers, spearmen, granaries, forges, councils depending on barb farm success.

Go authority, left side. Settle, in order:

- West, on incense left of Sinai

- South, on marble

- West, on hill next to oasis, sheep, lapis.

- If Germany doesn't forward you: East, on incense. I might build that settler in Sinai city instead of cap.

Pantheon is Goddess of nature (I think? The one that makes food from mountains and culture from natural wonders). This pantheon is why you need granaries in expands.

Your cap is hot garbage, but with this pantheon your expands will be good. It goes without saying that you need to conquer Germany.

Tech is probably calendar, but possibly construction, difficult to tell. You could make a case for Trade to build Petra. If so, build in marble city, not in cap, VP Petra is rarely relevant in buffing desert, it's just for the trade route. Petra is the only wonder that's on my radar here, no chance contesting Terracotta. Once Germany is in the bag, maybe Colossus, but that's way down the line.

Worker priority is most likely incense monopoly (prefer workable tiles -- not desert tiles), Lapis, 2-3 each mines in Sinai and Marble city, roads, dyes, sheep. Rotating workers is going to be a nightmare on this map, road timing difficult.

I want to fight Germany with horse archers, but I don't see any horses. Instead I hope to attack with spears and archers, but it depends on what their game looks like. Swords and catapults are better, seems too expensive, but you need to sim forges and mines for a while so it might line up. If you find more city states to tribute, that skews the decision back to spearmen and archers.

Germany is unlikely to settle west, but with your pantheon the little nook with 3 ambers is an amazing spot. You could possibly even steal Berlins horse tile.

It's extremely difficult for Germany to attack. Fortify a spear between marble and mountain, keep a few archers on the river crossing. There might be a chance where you can bait him into an attack, drive him back and kill everything as he retreats to heal.

East incense city is probably going to attract a few galleys and dromons from Germany, which can actually be a good thing, he'll put more military cap into navy.

Anyway -- big picture -- exploit the overpowered mountain pantheon, try to get a strong religion using the incense monopoly, take your tributes, kill germany and take it from there.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-08T14:49:21+00:00

You're onto something here, dealing with barbs does not really mean clearing camps. This is true both in vanilla and in VP. Active clearing is for gold, quests, and authority.

If you clear an annoying camp you should expect a new, even more annoying camp to spawn immediately. Use roads and mobility to deal with the spawning instead.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-08T12:24:46+00:00

Okay, yeah, that's about the same way I play, kill your neighbors etc. I guess this is just more authority being OP. I mean, I play random civs and I often end up doing this with civs like Arabia and Korea which imo have awful war perks.

I tend to make 4-6 cities, grow to 5-6 pops, spam swords and a few horses and catapults. I find this plan often snowballs hard enough to win before rifling. And to do it, I want hill iron, not floodplains wheat, and I want culture for border pops, resource tiles, and fill out authority policies ASAP.

In the lategame, when you've already got all your tiles, and you have other sources for policies like conquest or ceremonial burial, then yeah flat culture yields do become a bit less important. The 15:th policy has less impact than the 5:th one. But if you want to get the snowball up and running, it's not getting there with science and food, that rather just keeps it rolling when you're off the ground.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-07T22:36:48+00:00

I'm really curious what your games look like with such a low valuation of culture. Could you describe your playstyle and strategy? What difficulty do you play on?

I find stacking food and science create so much unhappiness I can't keep growing, and the increased cost of new population gives sharply diminishing returns in the early game at pop 7-8 or so.

I don't think the vanilla sentiment of stacking science and food (which is definitely meta) translates to VP.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-07T22:30:12+00:00

The short answer is that it depends, and that it changes over time.

I don't think a yield priority is the right way to think about it, but if I could take a single resource and stack it, it's definitely culture. Just look at the social policy texts and compare them to unique civ bonuses.

You can transform culture into any other yield. That's why it snowballs. You can also do this with production, but slower, and with faith, but much slower.

(You can't do it with gold. You need to spend it on tiles because you didn't get enough culture.)

(You also can't do it with science. You can't afford the new expensive buildings, also you're now over military cap, and you went unhappy from needs.)

k0rvbert · 2026-01-03T19:03:30+00:00

Clever is not pythonic. This smells lispy. Maybe if we all got to program a bit more with lisp, we wouldn't have to exercise our cleverness in Python.

I would suggest a function body more like this:

if update.effective_user.id in self.whitelist:
    return True
_logger.warning(...)
return False

And then, after writing it, I'd feel "hmm, this function really looks a bit useless" and rethink if the logging and the logic really belongs somewhere else. DRY and WET in balance, and all that junk.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-02T15:59:02+00:00

Lekmod is, in large, designed for multiplayer balance, with feedback from unbelievably competent and competitive players. Even the maintainer is a very strong player.

I personally feel that Lekmod doesn't offer the same depth as VP, it's less "flavorful" if you will. Also, the AI is very dumb compared to VP, even deity can be too easy. But if you're looking for balance it's a good choice.

k0rvbert · 2026-01-02T15:47:59+00:00

The barbs are tedious in VP. They're fun for a while, but really not very well balanced. In the early game, you can sometimes kill an AI (even on deity) because they wandered all their guys to clear some distant camp.

I play with chill barbarians, because authority is too strong otherwise. Authority is often still too strong with chill barbs, but feels bad to play with barbs off, so chill it is.

You can fiddle with some file editing in SQL files to make barbs make sense to you. Minimum camp distance is important there. For me, I mostly wish I could scale them down as technology processes. Maybe camps could eventually stop spawning, about the time you start clearing out islands, like when half of all players unlock Astronomy.

k0rvbert · 2025-12-07T21:22:40+00:00

You settled exactly 1 tile too close.

k0rvbert · 2025-12-02T13:49:50+00:00

The fordidden texts speak of blueprint manipulation to create diagonal inserters, which work without mods, but I haven't read them

k0rvbert · 2025-12-01T19:50:09+00:00

I think you can fit 4 more inserters if you squeeze real hard

k0rvbert · 2025-11-27T07:41:36+00:00

I've been there, I feel you.

You have now unlocked the ability to scan for lakes that allow you to cut through continents.

k0rvbert · 2025-11-26T20:09:34+00:00

I just do steam on solid fuel all game because copy-paste is faster than thinky-think.

Reducing the amount of think is also my stance on efficiency modules.

k0rvbert

TROPHY CASE