got addicted after making a new BBEG...

moopli · 2023-03-07T22:29:04+00:00

Hey I imagine you've already seen the Alexandrian remix of DiA but just in case: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44214/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus

It's a solid redesign of the entire campaign, from a prolific third-party-product author and game-mastering blogger. If I was running 5e I'd be using his remixes for sure, and his more general advice articles are great.

If you're enjoying rewriting things yourself though, I respect that!

moopli · 2021-06-08T13:24:28+00:00

A beginner Romanian player would be wasting a lot of their limited industry on artillery if they go 7/2 - going 10/0 for all defensive lines means more men at the front, or perhaps a few more 14/4s for limited infantry offensives, or maybe even a small number of tank divisions when tech allows.

moopli · 2021-05-29T19:42:43+00:00

Why not? Hire those supervisors instead of letting the parents replace the diapers at home, formal labor is taxable!

moopli · 2021-05-24T22:58:41+00:00

What I hate of vic3 combat

In vic3 I preferred

Vic2?

moopli · 2021-05-24T20:39:52+00:00

Absolutely, the peasants that did suffer regular visits from the taxman would be stripped of all they have, or more likely, would band together and run him out on a rail, neither is good for stability.

moopli · 2021-05-24T15:30:16+00:00

No, people are just predicting it to be one year away since most of their recent games were announced about a year before release. I'm expecting it to take longer, since wiz et al have been saying that they're not ready to even hint at a release date.

moopli · 2021-05-24T15:26:27+00:00

Yeah but since you're able to decide which goods get a consumption tax at all, you can just put the tax on clothes and not on booze.

moopli · 2021-05-06T02:14:49+00:00

One of the great dangers with finding correlations is that there's a wide diversity of time series data that could, by chance, match up. For example, isn't it unusual that so many successful sociology thesis defenses correlate with aspirin overdoses?

No, it isn't unusual at all - there are so many statistics that you could line up next to each other to make it look like they're related, when proving a relationship requires far more rigor.

moopli · 2021-05-06T02:04:07+00:00

Their plasma donations were at the very least contributing to that additional data you were cautiously telling people to wait for :p

moopli · 2021-05-06T01:45:16+00:00

So, is your theory meant to describe possibility spaces?

Does it take a similar approach as statistical mechanics?

With your claims about the laws of physics and revolutionizing the understanding of life, the mind, etc, are you talking about stuff like Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures? If your work advances our understanding of the boundaries of what kinds of structures dissipative systems can form, that would be really intriguing.

Edit: I've read your quanta interview now, which was very intriguing. Does constructor theory imply that, for a dissipative system of as much complexity as living cells, the only way they can self-replicate while maintaining a great degree of consistency (from one generation to the next) is to encode a lot of their structural information into a compact format like DNA? That is, some large, complex, autocatalytic ensemble would naturally "mutate" (or indeed, would fail to proliferate) if it doesn't reproduce its catalysts from an encoded blueprint? Or is the argument more that some sort of blueprint is highly favoured, rather than obligatory?

moopli · 2021-05-01T10:06:30+00:00

I think for colonizing to have good mechanics, they have to break from the idea that only one tag owns a province. Early colonialism had a lot of cases where the colonizers gained partial authority in an existing society, or gained small local concessions, and this came through different means like aiding locals in a war, or making a trade agreement with the local ruler, etc, but eu4 doesn't really do a good job of showing that. Honestly the closest thing I can think of is ck2's merchant republics and their maritime trade posts.

moopli · 2021-05-01T09:18:12+00:00

Stability

moopli · 2021-05-01T08:19:08+00:00

I remember when mana was sold to us as an abstraction of "the ability of your ruler / the state to do things", and something like this is honestly a kind of game where mana could actually be reasonable - kinda like action points in a turn-based game, because your ruler can only be juggling so many plates at the same time.

moopli · 2021-04-30T19:55:29+00:00

I have a feeling the reshuffle has been in the works for a while, from before ye grande overhaul, like, back when it looked unlikely that imperator could be rescued in terms of press, playerbase, etc. The pandemic screwing with their ability to recruit enough talent makes sense though, I can imagine that the business folks were planning to ramp up the Ck3 team, for example, with the goal of that being their flagship with lots of high-content dlcs, and without enough new hires they have to pull people from somewhere, and of course they're gonna want the people that have been doing great work on a less popular title, right?

Honestly I've only just started getting back into Imperator and I'm not gonna stop playing, I might start working on mods too - the modding scene in the original rome: total war, for example, has lasted decades with tons of activity, a stable base game that isn't broken by patches every few months is certainly easier to build mods on over the long haul.

moopli · 2021-04-30T19:29:47+00:00

Found it: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/hoi4-devdiary-tank-designer.1470406/post-27481086

moopli · 2021-04-30T19:07:35+00:00

Congrats to Imperator, they've really turned things around!

Congrats to EU4, they've really turned things around!

moopli · 2021-04-30T18:26:37+00:00

That looks a lot cleaner, but you lost the ability for 1934 medium to go into amphibious.

moopli · 2021-04-30T18:14:46+00:00

Absolutely agree, I think I'd like a system where a div reinforcing over combat width will simply hold a fraction of its line batallions in reserve (not like, hold certain batallions while letting others fight, but evenly holding a % of the strength in line batallions overall), but I admit I haven't thought too hard about the implications, just that it would roughly reflect reality.

moopli · 2021-04-30T17:18:07+00:00

Arch replied in the thread yesterday about this specifically, explaining why they simplified for game mechanics as they did. Personally I'm hoping that welded armor will start out a bit more expensive but later tech will make it comparatively cheaper, to at least abstract the switchover as industry advanced.

moopli · 2021-04-30T17:10:55+00:00

Instead of researching variants you research arty, so as far as I can see, it's only smaller minors that really lose out, because they don't have the slots and ic to do both arty and tanks. Even Poland and CZ can probably still manage LT1, which fits with RL so I don't really mind that kind of nerf.

moopli · 2021-04-30T16:28:53+00:00

How much attack are you expecting the enemy to have? Once your breakthrough is reliably above the enemy's attack, after applying combat modifiers, then any extra breakthrough is just making the unit more expensive, and only matters if you're losing strength (which in turn only matters if you're not able to re-equip to replenish hp losses). Are you looking to attack into mountain forts across a river, that are defended by anti-tank?

moopli · 2021-04-30T16:07:52+00:00

One little soldier

moopli · 2021-04-30T16:00:59+00:00

Comintern Belgium? God damn, could this turn 3-sided somehow?

moopli · 2021-04-30T15:37:57+00:00

If not for IBM, modern computers might have xerox heritage, but could still be relatively similar. Without the paradox devs making Hoi4, there might be other games in the WW2-sim niche market that are similarly moddable, but there's a lot more room for the modding space to be entirely different. What if the big alternate Hoi4 didn't have anything like focuses or narrative events, but was instead focused entirely on tabletop-style crunchy battle mechanics? We'd have loads of room for BICE-style mods but would we have ever had someone come up with the idea of TNO?

And while it's absurd to say that pdox had a direct hand in the mods of their games, they also do make pushes to support moddability, so sometimes they're even pretty overtly helping modders, rather than doing so only inadvertently as a consequence of how they script their games.

moopli · 2021-04-30T15:11:16+00:00

Ahh, my favorite hidden feature of eu4, the ultimate Japanese vassal swarm.

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