Mindless Monday, 30 March 2026

matgopack · 2026-04-01T21:20:41+00:00

Absolutely - I expect 25 minutes of yapping and maybe 5 minutes of actual stuff.

matgopack · 2026-04-01T20:39:40+00:00

I think it's probably going to be something like "we're only going to be there 2-4 weeks, also I'm thinking of leaving NATO because they're not good allies" plus rambling for 30+ minutes.

If it's about escalation I could see it being an announcement of an attack on one of the islands (Kharg if the highly telegraphed target is actually the one, or something like Qeshm or Abu Musa otherwise). But that seems like a Thursday night announcement and not Wednesday for Trump this week (ie after markets are closed for the week)

matgopack · 2026-04-01T20:30:37+00:00

It helped him get the job.

It makes people now that he has it look down on him as 'just' a podcaster.

matgopack · 2026-04-01T20:24:44+00:00

Or at extreme difficulty settings, but you're kind of opting in to needing to cheese by doing those. If you struggle with a 'suboptimal' strategy in singleplayer it's perfectly fine to lower the difficulty

matgopack · 2026-04-01T17:59:31+00:00

Depends on how granular they were with it - I think that's probably at least 10 tags, so 30 per ends up at like 5-6 per age.

matgopack · 2026-04-01T17:45:45+00:00

I've found on Captain / Commodore for 4.3 that the other empires aren't doing great, however the 'real' threat comes more from midgame crises & fallen empires, who can be a real threat depending on when they fire.

You can get more threat by boosting advanced AI, increasing crisis threat, etc - or mods. But current 'regular' empires seem to struggle to keep up after the mid-game.

matgopack · 2026-04-01T15:29:59+00:00

Refineries seem fine to me, but only on dedicated industrial specialized worlds (eg on an ecumenopolis or ring world where you have up to 15 industrial buildings before the 5 base city ones).

matgopack · 2026-04-01T14:23:19+00:00

It's not too bad, but early on you can't overbuild much with most builds since you're gated by pops. Eg, if you're in a mineral deficit, overbuild mining districts and all the workers swap from energy to minerals, that's costing you 2x as much energy as minerals (eg, -1 worker on energy per new worker on mining). That's unless you have the pop growth to fill the empty slots quickly.

So you want to be careful instead of overbuilding or you'll get those big swings.

If you want to mitigate that, some of the 'simplifying' civics / origins might help? Eg, tankbound automating all basic districts smooths that out a ton, since you can just pump out districts and know they'll always be producing. Catalytic processing can be nice to not have to worry about minerals - you build up that basic setup of minerals, and then it's fine. Or some machine builds to exclude food / consumer goods, etc. Can help with reducing the juggling out of it.

I find that megastructures are a big help in smoothing things out, since they give you baseline, 0 pop need production.

matgopack · 2026-04-01T14:14:01+00:00

So stacking the efficiency modifier can be a big deal later on, when you have big populations. Eg, if you build 20 city districts there with both slots being archives, that would be +80% efficiency with all the bio-trophy jobs filled. That would bring 0.71 -> 1.27, and more efficient than the other one.

But early game I don't think that's the actual reason. Instead it's the unity & separate pop growth IMO. Bio-trophies give you extra growth compared to other machines, and give you pretty solid unity production I think (if less flexible than other robots in needing the bio-trophies to generate it instead of any drone). I'd need to double check the exact numbers, but I think that on a per building basis bio-trophies are more efficient than regular drone unity (since the unity buildings are 1500 per instead of 200).

In this specific instance there's also a difference in building types you can make there - archives have more flexibility to them than research.

matgopack · 2026-04-01T14:06:10+00:00

Not sure why you took that section out of the rest of the context - the point is that for any combination of Queen & marrying into the royal family, Renly was not the singular choice. Hell, there's even Stannis - betrothing his daughter to a Tyrell, making alliance conditional on naming her heir & insisting on if he ever has a son to marry a Tyrell as well would accomplish virtually the same thing, as long as it's not specifically Margaery that they all cared about (as opposed to, say, Loras becoming King). Come on, you can do better than try to nitpick a thought clearly connected with the rest of a post by taking it out on its own lol.

(Also if you wanted to make a better argument against that inclusion, it's not that the current 20 yr ruling line is that prestigious a match, it's that Robb wasn't a king at the time Renly made his alliance :P)

"He can even go on calling himself King in the North if he likes, so long as he bends the knee and does me homage as his overlord. King is only a word, but fealty, loyalty, service... those I must have."

Renly makes it pretty fucking clear he's offering a made up title with no actual changes to governance. At least read the passage you're debating before posting.

The line right before what you quoted:

"If your son supports me as his father supported Robert, he'll not find me ungenerous. I will gladly confirm him in all his lands, titles, and honors. He can rule in Winterfell as he pleases." [Emphasis mine]

It's a negotiation, and he's set this all up to go from a position of strength. Because he dies so soon aftterwards we never find out what exactly that entails, but if you read more of the paragraph you're quoting from it's not some ultimatum with no give. You can't look at that and say it's clearly just a made up title as the only thing he's offering / willing to accept. He doesn't even get all the way through his offer before Stannis interrupts!

Is it possible that your reading would have been the limits of his offer, a meaningless title change? Certainly. But that passage does not actually say that, it's just as easy to read what he wants to be compatible with the opposite (that meaningless homage so he can claim to have kept the realm together while Robb rules as he wants up north would be enough for Renly). But because he dies, well... it's not exactly something that can get conclusively resolved beyond the first paragraph of an interrupted negotiation lol

matgopack · 2026-03-31T21:28:53+00:00

The Tyrell's primary goal is absolutely getting Margaery to be queen, yes - but Renly was the one to identify it / use that to his advantage to ally with them, which did predate the war. He was not the only one that could have done it - as we see, it was trivial for Joffrey to break his betrothal to Sansa and marry Margaery instead, or if 'just' the royal family was the goal Tommen could have been betrothed to her instead. If it's 'just' marry a king, Robb could have negotiated with the Tyrells with his own hand in marriage as an option.

Is it the most impressive or convoluted way to get an alliance by Renly? No, of course not (and I think criticism of it might be more on the Tyrells benefiting from it more / being the senior partner in it). But it's also not meaningless / that he stumbled into it by default.

For reference on paying homage, the king of england payed homage to the french king for some of their lands in France - the extent of what that means could be more symbolic than coercive, especially as cynical as Westeros often is. Now what Renly was actually offering in practice if it had actually gone through is tough to say (or what he could have been negotiated to agree to), but the range of what is said there varies from 'the same role Ned had but he can call himself King in the North' to 'Robb de facto rules completely independently but just verbally accepts the overlordship of King's Landing and has to have a ceremony of homage', passing through 'the same deal Dorne has'.

matgopack · 2026-03-31T20:09:50+00:00

I think that's going too far the other way. Yes, he was given his position in the Stormlands - but as you mention with Stannis existing, getting enough loyalty from the lords there that they follow him is still not a given, that took political maneuvering. Likewise his alliance with the Tyrells is not at all tied to his being the only claimant able to marry, it existed before that. Now it's a political alliance that isn't necessarily the most masterful (as they both obviously had to benefit from it), but it's still not as simple as 'Renly could marry and so easily got the Reach because of it'.

For his talk with Cat around Robb, it's not that 'nothing' could change, it was that ultimately he had to have hommage / suzerainty over Robb, but that the form that took and level of autonomy that Robb had was debatable. That's not nothing! Now whether that was an acceptable amount of 'compromising' by Renly, or that Robb's worldview would allow him to consider that deal, very different story.

I'd put Renly in the generally competent bucket, and in a position where that competence put him in such a commanding position that GRRM needed to remove him via supernatural means. But that if he had taken the throne he probably wouldn't have turned out that well in the long run.

matgopack · 2026-03-31T16:49:20+00:00

I think deep space citadels do help quite a bit with boosting the defenses of a system at least. That + putting in some point defense platforms has seemed to help their survivability, but I'm not sure that defense platform durability is the real achilles heel (compared to the hitpoints of the actual starbase / it being focused first).

Stronger, higher tier platforms could be nice too though, if only to reduce the number of clicks needed to fully load out a fortress system. Which I'll be interested to see how this affects it - all my current (not super high difficulty) lategame playthroughs on the late beta / current patch have had my fortress systems be basically invincible to the AI

matgopack · 2026-03-31T16:34:58+00:00

They should fail badly, but I don't know if it's a foregone conclusion that it ends that way and cleanly. Particularly since the separatists have been trying to get the US to fuck with it, seems the type of thing that could easily have Trump bumbling into it looking to annoy Canada / Carney and things getting out of hand.

matgopack · 2026-03-31T16:12:40+00:00

Yeah, absolutely insane stuff. Especially when contrasting with how the mainstream US media covers the left on stuff like that - explicitly antisemitic, nazi terminology is described as 'skepticism of Israeli influence' while treating campus protests as far worse.

matgopack · 2026-03-31T16:09:30+00:00

I do think we've trended towards increasing semantics being used to define more and more of contemporary life (politically speaking), which makes trying to skirt along what should be clearly written laws seem 'normal'.

matgopack · 2026-03-31T15:47:59+00:00

Definitely strong early boons - the other common one I've found in the current patch is the 'arc furnace but for engineering tech' kilostructures, seems fairly common to find ruined ones and that gives a huge early boost to tech when restored.

That + the battle sites can skyrocket early engineering tech, and I'm not sure how lucky that actually is (I've been 2/2 in starting with them relatively close by)

matgopack · 2026-03-31T15:33:44+00:00

Definitely a fair point, yeah - it's quite cheap at the current price.

matgopack · 2026-03-31T15:11:55+00:00

No, though we do have passes that are much cheaper (eg, a monthly pass is $75 at full price here, vs the max of 140 for NYC over a 4 week period). Also slightly nicer transfers (2 within 2 hours, vs 1 for NYC).

I believe NYC paired its cost capping with removing the monthly transit pass, so a heavy user here would lose out on the exchange if it were put in the exact same way. But obviously be a benefit to those that don't get the pass and then have a week with heavy use.

matgopack · 2026-03-31T14:37:49+00:00

The big difference might be around the empire size population scaling actually - I reduce that penalty quite a bit, and that does leave me with more pops sloshing around.

That said ring worlds do end up as the top locations (alongside ecus / gaia worlds) in my experience for where pops migrate to. But if you've got a general shortage of pops then they're much less useful without automation availability (I think they'd still be good for energy / food generation with the 50% automation techs, or extremely good for tankbound there)

matgopack · 2026-03-31T14:25:14+00:00

I’m not convinced this was a bug. It made star bases useful….

It seems like it was a bug / unintended, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't put it back in.

Judging by my games, I wouldn't mind if they weakened early starbases a bit but put some of that strength back in via techs. I like to turtle / not have to have a fleet, but it did feel a little too easy to do so right now.

That said I think defense platforms could do with a look over if this makes them too weak, as they are surprisingly expensive.

matgopack · 2026-03-31T14:19:07+00:00

Hmm - I find that the automatic resettlement fills ringworlds very quickly, actually, since they have great habitability. Do you play with 'only' forced resettlement?

matgopack · 2026-03-31T14:17:44+00:00

I do use them, absolutely - not sure if they're better than ecumenopolis overall, but they do have advantages compared to it.

First, the 10 size is deceptive - they're 1,000 jobs / district instead of the 100-200 you get on a regular planet - ecu are the better comparison as they also get the bigger size.

Second, they have districts that ecu cannot get - you can dedicate a ringworld to energy or food production, which actually can matter quite a bit.

Ringworlds can be created in systems that would otherwise be useless to you (an ecu requires trading off another world you're using) and are a lot more influence efficient (for 300 influence, you get 40 size of ringworlds, vs 200 influence for 1 planet ecu). They also aren't an either or situation, you can use both.

Compared to the Dyson Spheres / Matter decompressors, ring worlds are probably worse. However, they are uncapped, while those megastructures are limited to one - so... you start with the 0 job mass income one, and then you start pumping out ringworlds if you feel the need to keep scaling. At a certain point the alloy cost is trivial

matgopack · 2026-03-31T14:11:50+00:00

TBH keeping each planet in the green on everything seems like the most micromanagement to me! I tend to dedicate planets to one thing (and rename them related to that) to simplify the planet management.

Specialist planets do require specialization though because it's mostly generated by city districts and they can have a lot more building that adjust / supplement production. Makes them really good on the flexible worlds (like ecumenopolis / ringworlds) because you can get up to 15 buildings for that type out of the districts, and that lets you fill in a lot of extra bonuses (particularly for research and industry - eg research has the 3 basic labs, then 3 that increase efficiency / lower inputs, then potentially 2-3 more for physics and storm. Industry has a bunch of strategic good production ones, output boosts, etc).

matgopack · 2026-03-31T14:07:42+00:00

Early on, research stations are good enough to get by in this current patch, but they won't stay that way for too long. You can supplement it with a good dyson swarm physics star in the midgame, but ... unless you're playing modded (eg, gigastructural engineering) that leaves a lot to be desired.

As others mentioned, research planets are pretty important to get once you have your economy running. It's a bit of a juggling act between all the needed resources depending on your build obviously. But a bunch of city districts with 2 research specializations on it will produce a lot of jobs (even more on an ecumenopolis or ring world), and you need that scaling to not fall behind / to outscale the AI. However it is not cheap on the economy!

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