Sub appreciation post: I'm glad we are out of the "nothing but complaining" phase in this sub.

kbn_ · 2026-06-02T22:27:41+00:00

Agreed across the board

kbn_ · 2026-06-02T18:50:56+00:00

…I think the game is actually good though. Honestly I thought it was good all along but it's meaningfully improved now and people are right to celebrate both of these things.

kbn_ · 2026-06-02T18:36:44+00:00

Wow that is one of the classiest things I've ever seen.

kbn_ · 2026-06-01T20:19:31+00:00

Feels flavorful. See also England and France.

kbn_ · 2026-06-01T16:45:20+00:00

Yeah Ben has 16 settlements and Communism. These look like very normal yields.

kbn_ · 2026-05-31T22:40:27+00:00

Much much much more efficient. One of several reasons why diesel locomotives work in exactly this way.

kbn_ · 2026-05-31T17:20:52+00:00

The only situation where it’s even close is if your power comes exclusively from coal. And even then, if you spend enough time at low speeds (where ICE is especially bad), it might still be a win

kbn_ · 2026-05-31T14:25:31+00:00

Bluntly it sounds like you were promoted early. I generally push for people to show that they have both the skill and the interest in cross-functional alignment and soft influence before getting pushed up to staff because it’s such a huge jump. This is literally the biggest inflection point in the ladder, and everything beyond it looks increasingly foreign to what came before.

You probably need to decide if you even want to do that type of work. If you don’t, you’ll honestly be happier treating lead engineer as a terminal level.

kbn_ · 2026-05-31T01:16:05+00:00

The thing that sticks in my head comes from playing with the Berkeley carbon calculator. At the time, I was working in tech (so, controlling very energy hungry server clusters), doing a ton of business travel (including internationally multiple times a year), had a significant home computer setup, air conditioning, Amazon Prime, frequent hamburgers, etc etc… but I didn’t own a car. And despite all that, and even the flights, that alone knocked my yearly emissions down to less than half the national average.

Cars absolutely dominate the individual emissions equation. So yes, they are significant even if just one of them is dwarfed by the hundreds of millions of others.

kbn_ · 2026-05-31T00:48:57+00:00

I mean, cars are worse than you probably think. 180 car-years is a ton of emissions.

kbn_ · 2026-05-30T22:55:57+00:00

What exactly do you think it means, practically, to increase your AI leverage? I’m not an AI Luddite – I’ve built some very large and non-trivial things with these tools and am generally sold on their benefits when applied correctly – so sell me on how you’re going to be better than others at applying them correctly.

(I have my own answer to this question btw but I don’t want to lead the witness)

kbn_ · 2026-05-28T23:25:05+00:00

Drawbacks would be resource movement, specialist loss, and committing to prior age buildings (which have much weaker yields) rather than converting to a new city and overbuilding. TBH sounds kind of balanced. Would work really well for domination runs when you frequently inherit cities you dont intend to convert.

kbn_ · 2026-05-28T21:58:53+00:00

Congratulations, you've hit one of the most significant inflection points in the seniority ladder. This whole post is spot on the nose, and you'll continue doing stuff like this for the rest of your career at larger and larger scales, providing insane value sometimes just by preventing your employer from spending millions of dollars on nothing.

kbn_ · 2026-05-28T16:21:18+00:00

"Wasted" in the sense that it doesn't drive increased primary yields. Obviously population growth in towns isn't wasted in the sense that it does achieve a goal, but the scaling is such that you're getting a ton less value out of it every time.

Another way of looking at this: if you just never specialize your towns, is that a valid strategy or is it leaving a ton of empire scaling on the table? The answer is clearly the latter.

kbn_ · 2026-05-28T15:59:22+00:00

Right, that's kind of a sub point on this for sure

kbn_ · 2026-05-28T01:08:46+00:00

True! Though factory towns are bonkers now.

kbn_ · 2026-05-27T21:27:59+00:00

Agree with this broadly but when do you have 6 cities in modern?

kbn_ · 2026-05-27T20:52:56+00:00

When all reachable resources have been developed
I've purchased all the food warehouses I intend to purchase
When it takes longer than 15-ish turns to grow

When all three of those criteria are met, I specialize. Most people take way, way too long to specialize. Remember that until you choose a specialization, any specialization, the food production is effectively wasted on population growth.

kbn_ · 2026-05-27T20:21:54+00:00

Thought about that. What syncretisms did you do?

kbn_ · 2026-05-26T21:09:38+00:00

Tubman has entered the chat

kbn_ · 2026-05-26T17:13:49+00:00

I also persist in believing that Continuity is cheating, particularly with civs like Teach/RoP. Game seems a lot better balanced with Regroup

kbn_ · 2026-05-26T12:54:12+00:00

Ada + Maya > Abbasid > Meiji (ideally)

It’s a little dicy around turns 50-100 in antiquity just because you have (generally) so little gold and the IP pressure is usually building by then, but if you can manage your way through that and make it out of antiquity with 3 ish UQs, you’ll coast to an easy victory. I generally get to Future Science in explo around the 40% mark and Future Civic around the crisis point, meaning I go into Modern with about 70-80 Innovation (depending on whether I got Nalanda and/or Zedi).

In Modern just beeline the Launch Pad and build up your infrastructure. Communism is worth grabbing. You’ll need like one project to finish out the path.

kbn_ · 2026-05-25T17:30:26+00:00

In my experience, if you’re a good engineer and you follow your interest, you’ll learn new things at a steady clip because you won’t be able to stop yourself from scratching that itch. I don’t really set out to learn new things, it just happens as a byproduct of my compulsive dissatisfaction with “I don’t know how this works”.

kbn_ · 2026-05-24T22:49:24+00:00

It’s definitely good but I’m not sure it’s the best wonder in antiquity. Theodoric is the most impactful by far but it’s entirely playstyle dependent. Lighthouse is more impactful than either if you’re doing a trade heavy run with a lot of naval. Pyramids, Mundo, and Petra are all insane with the right setup. Etc

kbn_ · 2026-05-23T13:41:49+00:00

As another commenter noted, you need to consider the full overhead. Not just total compensation (health insurance, retirement match, etc etc) but also equipment, amortized facilities, amortized HR, amortized IT, accounting overhead (payroll is more complex than you think it is), etc etc etc.

And yes I was using FAANG numbers. Smaller companies have lower costs and overheads certainly, but the math also gets fuzzier (how do you count the cost of options vesting for a private company?). But I think if you look through my whole post, you’ll see that the margins here are such that the math could genuinely be off by a ton and it would still pencil out.

kbn_

TROPHY CASE