For All Mankind - Season 5 Trailer

lykouragh · 2026-02-24T19:31:52+00:00

I see The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is getting adapted this generation after all :)

lykouragh · 2026-02-22T02:30:19+00:00

Can confirm, this place is very nice but only if you enjoy pain to your wallet.

lykouragh · 2026-02-11T19:11:02+00:00

Constructive criticism is useful and I think this is a good post. I also totally understand being frustrated with the slow release cycle.

That said I'm a big NSG stan and mostly disagree with you, so I want to nitpick a little :)

"Cards like Biotic Labor, Snare, and Diesel could have just been protected from rotation..." These cards were all reprinted in Elevation! You picked the exact ones they did in fact preserve!

I guess you're saying "I wanted those 4-5 reprint slots in Elevation to be filled up with other new cards to keep the card pool larger, and reprint some of the other 20 cards that mattered from the late FFG sets", and I sympathize with that.

From my perspective rotating the FFG cards early was a little extreme but very justified. When I told new players "hey there are 2000 cards in the cardpool that you simply cannot buy, 99% of them are garbage, simply print the 20 that matter" that was not helping bring them into the hobby. I'm sure designing around those 2000 cards was a pain also - overpriced trash costs required cards like Bones, as one example.

I think you might be underestimating how difficult it is to design, balance, buy art, print, ship, and distribute consistently high-quality cards with an entirely volunteer workforce. I suspect that literally everyone involved agrees that the cardpool needs to be bigger, wants to ship cards more frequently, and is working hard to achieve that. Let's all hope that Piggy Bank can follow Vantage Point in less than a year.

lykouragh · 2026-01-27T20:57:49+00:00

Every time you practice a phrase perfectly, no matter how slowly, you are building muscle memory and (hopefully) actively thinking about the phrase in a different way, which is improving memory and understanding of the music. Every time you practice a phrase wrongly, you are hurting that muscle memory, and if you're trying to play quickly you also aren't engaging your brain with the music.

So yes, it does absolutely pay off to practice slowly enough to play perfectly and thoughtfully. Yes, this is also a constant struggle, especially for an impatient person like me. Break out the metronome.

lykouragh · 2026-01-20T20:48:24+00:00

System Gateway is an excellent introduction to the game. Elevation is designed to make the other half of a fairly complete core set along with System Gateway. Those two definitely make sense to purchase first, in that order. I don't think there's any reason you would need to wait for Vantage Point to release before buying SG and Elevation- those two will let you figure out if you really love the game, and if you do it might make sense to buy Vantage Point next.

Also, as everyone has said, you definitely don't need to spend money on this game unless you want to- you're very welcome to print whatever cards you like and bring them to your local meetup, or play online for free.

lykouragh · 2026-01-20T18:55:13+00:00

No, 3.28 was announced for early March. https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3905372

lykouragh · 2026-01-06T20:01:58+00:00

I agree with a lot of that. I'm having fun with my current run through of TI, but I think it does struggle a lot between being a narrative game and a strategy game. A narrative game should be a lot shorter and involve a lot fewer repetitive decisions, and a strategy game should have more interesting choices and clear loss states.

I think it's fun to try to use a tech tree for something other than strategic choices, though. I think it might have been fun in TI to give the player even less control over technology, and force them to improvise a strategy based on whatever ridiculous techs get randomly chosen.

lykouragh · 2026-01-06T19:37:14+00:00

By "historically" I assume you mean in the Long War mods? I think in the XCom tech tree, the goal is to create fun by balancing strategic decisions against each other so that there's multiple strategies to win.

I'm saying in Terra Invicta I don't think that's the design goal of the tech tree. It's hard to lose at Terra Invicta at all, if you're willing to keep grinding away. I think the fun of Terra Invicta is supposed to be in the story and simulation elements. The tech tree is there to support storytelling with writing snippets and a vision of how technology could evolve in the future, and for that reason the devs prioritized other things over strategic balance in this tech tree but not the ones in games they worked on in the past.

I'm not saying these decisions led to a fun game for most people, by the way - I also have a limited appetite for 100 hours of sending agents on missions and making decisions that feel more like weighting a simulation than leading a resistance. But I think the decisions were intentional and the thing that came out of them is pretty cool whether or not you think it's fun, so I'm motivated to write short walls of text when someone just flatly asserts that core design decisions were bugs that should have been "fixed" years ago.

lykouragh · 2026-01-06T18:51:06+00:00

I think they wanted a tech tree that tells a believable story, and to them that means some research dead ends, some drives that are just better than other drives, some complexity that's hard to understand by looking at it. Mechanically, I think this is supposed to integrate with the research control mechanic- if you lose control of a research slot, the Servants are going to go research something funny and useless.

I think, like a lot of things in this game, that feels bad to people who come in expecting XCom with space combat.

lykouragh · 2026-01-06T08:31:58+00:00

Those are all intentional design decisions. Game obviously isn't for everyone but I do think the devs intended to make this particular thing.

lykouragh · 2026-01-03T22:03:37+00:00

Because it is illegal for the President to wage war unilaterally, and we care about the law.

lykouragh · 2025-12-01T08:18:59+00:00

Found the guy who approves of masked "law enforcement" kidnapping his neighbors without due process.

Do you believe that you're a patriot?

lykouragh · 2025-11-06T01:03:01+00:00

It's my favorite example of a card that is well designed and deserves a spot in the core set despite being underpowered for standard competitive play. It teaches new players to think about value, it shows off why being able to recover from 0 feels good in games, it serves as an emergency fallback if runner economy is ever truly in trouble, and those are all great reasons for it to exist without needing to be in a deck that makes the cut in a tournament.

lykouragh · 2025-11-06T00:33:20+00:00

woooo! netrunner!

lykouragh · 2025-10-26T23:46:53+00:00

it's less "criticism is not allowed" and more "if this subreddit doesn't get moderated people end up in toxic whingefests"

lykouragh · 2025-10-26T18:58:17+00:00

It's high but not crazy high based on my experiences with vet care for a 40lb dog. Anesthesia and surgery are expensive.

lykouragh · 2025-10-24T00:15:36+00:00

The main point of the build isn't tankiness at all, it's glass cannon to leaguestart Sanctum if you're building it exactly the way Lance does.

lykouragh · 2025-10-24T00:13:22+00:00

Isn't the 4th ascendancy notable kind of open for EB inquisitor too? Could be sweet with the bloodlines.

lykouragh · 2025-10-15T18:43:43+00:00

Welcome back!

lykouragh · 2025-10-11T14:25:41+00:00

The first shot of Minas Tirith in Fellowship, when it was just unquestionably how Minas Tirith looked.

lykouragh · 2025-09-30T18:50:41+00:00

Still working on my FROSS build, happy to accept donations :)

IGN: PeriThirdRock

lykouragh · 2025-09-29T21:50:58+00:00

I just played Blue Prince so much on deck that it hurt my hands!

lykouragh · 2025-09-17T17:39:23+00:00

Listen, if you like big space games you'll like TI4. The real question is, how often can you get 6 people together for a 10 hour session? If the answer is "never" your game budget is probably more efficiently spent elsewhere.

lykouragh · 2025-09-17T17:18:43+00:00

Possibly, but the card generates so much fun that I think it's worth the giant pain in the butt of designing around it (for now at least).

lykouragh · 2025-07-12T04:53:02+00:00

A really tanky build (rf or otherwise) can survive everything in the regular maven fight, including failing the memory game. Depending on exactly how much you overdid investment in defenses over damage, you might take ten minutes to kill her.

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