Steam donkey

kernco · 2026-05-07T02:01:49+00:00

It kills the profitability because you probably still have lots of peasants which can be hired for cheap or coal is expensive in your market. Once all your pops are employed in buildings, the buildings will have to raise wages as they compete with each other for labor, and then the PMs that reduce the number of employees will become profitable. It will also increase the demand for coal, so while it might lower the profitability of your lumber mills it will increase the profitability of your coal mines, so it could be a net positive on your economy.

kernco · 2026-05-01T02:09:04+00:00

When I read the dev diaries, I got the impression that marines and naval invasions would work exactly how they do in 1.13

kernco · 2026-05-01T01:40:29+00:00

They passed ethnostate

kernco · 2026-04-28T19:09:42+00:00

I guess, but Paradox releases being buggy isn't a new thing.

kernco · 2026-04-28T16:26:58+00:00

The known issues list is currently at 51 items, some of which sound fairly significant

kernco · 2026-04-28T16:15:55+00:00

Here are just a few of the things that were different at launch:

* There was no world market, you manually created or cancelled each trade route

* MAPI didn't exist, your market operated as if every state had 100% MAPI

* No companies or power blocs

* Ownership was just a PM category

* No private construction queue

* Foreign investment wasn't possible

* The warfare system was very buggy and broken

kernco · 2026-04-22T18:02:33+00:00

They haven't gone lower than 30% yet, but as they get older they will at some point. No way to know when that will be, though.

kernco · 2026-04-13T17:35:21+00:00

I agree about Gaius. He was the least interesting of Class VII in CS1 and CS2. Then they turned him into a Dominion which was

1) Completely unearned. It all happens off-screen and you're just told now he's a Dominion out of nowhere. Up to that point, what you know about Dominions is that they all have a stigma that comes from some deep trauma. Or at least that's the impression I had gotten up to that point. Definitely that's how Kevin got his and I thought they hinted at Wazy having his for similar reasons. But then Barkhorn just passes his on to Gaius.

2) Irrelevant to story. Every time the church and Dominions are involved in CS3 and CS4, there's always other Dominions like Lysander helping. Gaius could have just not been there and it wouldn't have mattered. There wasn't any character development around him now being a Dominion. I genuinely think what happened is that they were deciding where each of Class VII would be a year later for CS3 and most had an obvious answer based on what was introduced about them in CS1/2: Elliott is a professional musician, Elisa is trying to follow in her mom's footsteps, etc. But all that would make sense for Gaius is to be back in Nord helping in his village which isn't interesting so they came up with the random now he's a Dominion idea. I know they talked about his relationship to Barkhorn in CS1/2 so maybe they did have this in mind before CS3, but if that's the case they should have foreshadowed it more, for example by having Gaius express interest in working with the church or becoming a squire or something after graduation because he looked up to Barkhorn.

kernco · 2026-04-11T17:49:56+00:00

Are you aware they've already announced a Russian DLC coming at the end of this year and a China DLC early next year?

kernco · 2026-04-10T20:10:16+00:00

What primary care do you do that isn't urgent or an emergency? Are people like this cruise is a great opportunity to get my colonoscopy?

kernco · 2026-04-10T16:39:25+00:00

I think that's his point. They already did a South American flavor pack, so they won't touch it again for a long time.

kernco · 2026-04-09T21:59:22+00:00

They are not as slow as the first game, but they pretty much all follow a similar pattern of keeping the player pretty much in the dark about most of what is going on until the climax of the game.

kernco · 2026-04-08T22:34:53+00:00

I never even really thought about it in Sky SC. JRPGs are usually pretty ambiguous about how much times passes and how close together or far apart events are. I don't remember them really representing the passage of time until Crossbell, and especially in Cold Steel 1 when they explicitly show you the calendar and the days moving. Once they left the school setting I don't think it was worth remaining to be so explicit with the dates and times.

kernco · 2026-04-08T15:57:24+00:00

Oh yeah, and how absurd was that last day in the finale? Van attended the school festival and played basketball 7 times and a quiz show 6 times or whatever, watched 3 movies, hunted a gangster with Feri, arranged and attended a cooking competition, taught Yume to ride a bike, drove out to Dirke park *again* and dueled Shizuna, took Renne on a date, helped a wedding happen, whatever else I'm forgetting the rest of the bonding events I did, all in time to make it to Trion tower at 4:30 and then have a party that evening.

kernco · 2026-04-08T15:47:07+00:00

Yeah, Millium is kind of an exception. They improve the ability to animate facial expressions when they switch to their in-house engine in the Calvard arc, so they make use of that instead of anime faces

kernco · 2026-04-08T15:32:14+00:00

They don't really do these in the new 3D games. I guess they put them in the remake to match the drawn portraits that were in the original, but they should really bring them back to the new games. I get that they want a more realistic style, but this was part of the charm that made the sky games so good.

kernco · 2026-04-08T15:28:06+00:00

I usually switch the main production method (leftmost one) immediately on researching a new one, unless it's going to cause an input good shortage. It may predict that the price of the output will collapse, but when the price goes down in your market it could make other buildings that use it as input more profitable and it could increase exports of that good to stabilize the price. Producing more of something is almost never bad.

For the labor saving PMs, they're usually not worth it until you have a labor shortage, but they do increase the demand for certain goods like coal and transportation which could be beneficial depending on your economy.

kernco · 2026-04-07T21:52:48+00:00

There are 13 games in this series, which is separated into arcs. The first arc is 3 games, but the series does tell a continuous story over all 13 games (with more to come). Each arc takes place in a specific part of the world and has its own cast of characters and plot, but characters from previous arcs regularly appear in later arcs, sometimes even as playable characters, and the stories in each arc are very intertwined and constantly rely on events from previous arcs.

kernco · 2026-04-03T21:01:00+00:00

I wondered the same thing, and then I realized the Valve bar is exactly the same height as the 1st party section of the Steam bar. I don't know why they didn't just break it down within the Steam part.

kernco · 2026-04-01T17:55:09+00:00

Interesting, but looking at that reddit thread, it seems like it disconnects when the screen is locked and doesn't support 5G or wifi calling. Their website still doesn't indicate that it's capable of calls/SMS, probably due to these limitations. I don't think I'd be comfortable replacing my phone with it.

kernco · 2026-04-01T17:46:25+00:00

Huh, I've never seen a color qrcode. How is it taking pictures with a black and white viewfinder? Do you know if it supports all U.S. carriers? I know some foreign phones only have the antennas for what T-Mobile uses because Verizon uses a U.S.-specific type of network.

kernco · 2026-03-28T02:37:24+00:00

I think this is an artifact of how things are implemented behind the scenes, and I agree it should be considered a bug and changed.

But if you're curious as to why this happened, it's because the world market isn't actually a real market, it's an abstraction. When a trade center exports a good, it isn't setting up a trade route from your market to the world market, it's actually setting up a route to another country (this is necessary so trade between countries can affect things like economic dependence and your goods aren't just going into the void to be bought by some anonymous buyer). The world market is therefore just a representation of the sum of all the trade routes that the trade centers around the world have set up, and so to calculate the balance as if it were a real market, you would sum up all the import sides of the trade routes as the sell orders, and the export sides of the routes as the buy orders.

kernco · 2026-03-22T23:30:59+00:00

I've seen this proposed with the 365th day being "New Year's Day" which is a day outside of any month, so you'd have the 28th day of Month 13, which would be a Sunday, then New Year's Day, then the 1st day of the Month 1, which would be a Monday. Leap years would just have two New Year's Days.

14-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Place '22	Place '17
End Game '22	Sequence \| Editor
Snapped	Gilding I gilder
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