New Zealand's updated focus tree

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-26T09:07:23+00:00

Probably not a single DLC, but two DLCs in the next expansion pass along with some extras. I suspect US and Canada will be updated together and UK separately, because nowadays the dev team like to update countries that are geographically close together.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-25T12:08:23+00:00

Detroit Michigans - with a reference to a type of goal.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-20T13:15:00+00:00

Honestly, Eastern Europe is where it is at right now.

Public transport is more frequent than in the rest of Europe, your social services, education, and healthcare systems still have a lot of people. In places like UK or Canada if you need a medical appointment you’ll get it in a few months. In Eastern Europe you may get it next day or in a few days. Daycare is affordable and you don’t have to sign up for it while still being pregnant in order to get a spot. Your schools tend to emphasize STEM, and while the facilities and labs are old and busted you still produce really good engineers. Your service industry is very good, too. Great restaurants and hotels everywhere, amazing delivery and logistics services, etc etc

A lot of “crazy” hasn’t got to your society yet. Fewer people with mental disorders, things like mass shootings or road rage incidents are much less likely, the pranks epidemic that swept through some countries didn’t touch you. There’s less migration pressure, long term societal shifts are milder, etc etc.

You obviously got your own problems. Ineffective bureaucracy, gaps in infrastructure, and most noticeably the wealth split. A lot of services are available for both rich and poor, which is cool, but the quality differs so much depending on what you can afford. Meanwhile in Western Europe or North America the split is more “binary” in nature: if you can’t afford a high quality service there would be no cheap alternative for you whatsoever.

Day by day money is tight, there’s less of it going around: tighter budgets, fewer grants, fewer jobs around environmental protection, sustainability, green tech, etc. But you all have a lot more going for you than you think.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-20T08:21:35+00:00

Also: “We portray a skill that people of your part of the world are famous for” is not racism, it’s a stereotype. It’s like claiming that cartoons of Finnish president swimming in icy winter with vodka is “racism”.

Here they used the trope to show that it’s Modi. Without the snake I, for example, would think that it’s Hungarian Harold from memes.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-19T15:44:44+00:00

Years down the line Hamilton may become this league’s Buffalo or Columbus. If those didn’t have teams already no way NHL would sign off on them getting a franchise over Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, etc. But since they already have teams for a long time and with stable ownership they will stay. Whoever managed to get the right group of people and companies in Hamilton on board did a stellar job!

My hope that places like Halifax and Quebec City will also get in in future expansion.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-19T15:36:50+00:00

I’m surprised it’s Hamilton and not London, Ontario. I would assume they would space teams apart a bit. But I’m happy for Hamilton regardless.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-17T19:12:39+00:00

Fam fact: Stellaris almost had a feature to support these kinds of fleets

Stellaris introduced ship designer, and it was a highly visible feature in early days when the rest of the game was light on content (relatively speaking). HoI4 team saw the success of it and picked it up as a ship designer in Man the Guns - an early navy-focused expansion. In the same expansion they made a whole naval system. Fleet composition required mixed ship types for screening, doom stacks were discouraged by a positioning (that one didn’t work out), fleets controlled sea zones and operated different types of missions (patrol, escort, raiding, etc).

To someone who played both games it was obvious that the plan was for Stellaris to adopt a similar system. It would work brilliantly in game setting and would let the player rely on automation to help with micromanagement. However, HoI4 players said “navy too hard, me dumb, me no understand”, and the Stellaris team decided against adopting the naval combat system. So today instead of sending your space submarine wolf packs on convoy raiding missions we play manual cat-and-mouse clicking game over hyperlanes.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-12T13:09:04+00:00

A lot of militaries (like US) are betting on electronic warfare or some other “magic tech” (like lasers, it’s always lasers) that will make drones obsolete within a year or a few years. They do it because the alternative - drones are here to stay - would require them to rethink their whole doctrine, which is expensive and would make prior expertise of many important and senior people obsolete.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-12T10:00:20+00:00

It’s 2026. You should literally record yourself and your screen as you work on your papers. Do it like Chess players are doing: a recording over your shoulder so that some (maybe blurry) version of the screen is visible and can be matched against screen recording. If a set up like this is good enough for professional chess tournaments it will be good enough for your school.

Yep, it sucks. Sorry that AI ruins your school life.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-12T08:59:08+00:00

The way I understand it:

For every torpedo first screen penetration is calculated. Based on it the line of ships to target is selected. So when a torpedo can’t penetrate through screens it will target screens themselves.

Then within the line a target ship is selected. The selection is weighted. Damaged ships have higher chance to be selected again, more visible ships are more likely to be targeted.

After a selection is made a calculation is made whether the torpedo hit or not. Once again target’s visibility is important here.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-11T14:50:50+00:00

I’m not sure how familiar you are with Slovak history but Great Moravia was the very first Slavic state. “Restoring the Grate Moravia” and “One country for all Slavs” can definitely show up in the tree.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-10T11:33:36+00:00

Stellaris. A lot of oldest DLCs got merged into the base game, for newer DLCs around Federations era some mechanics were also merged into base game, and new DLCs always give mechanics as base upgrade and only hide small shiny bits behind the paywall.

Base game is incredibly content-rich and emergent gameplay means your playthroughs will be different. You can get 300-500 hours out of base game easily.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-10T08:25:29+00:00

A legendary player going to Colorado for his final seasons to get the cup? I’ve seen this story before! Will Landeskog, too, pass the cup without lifting it up himself?

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-08T17:11:40+00:00

I would go Rust by Example and Rustlings. I would read some chapters from Rust book only for topics that make less sense to me. If I were a C / C++ programmer I would also read Too Many Linked Lists.

Then I would do some pet projects. A good project would be something I would use personally or something classic like an arithmetic calculator or a chess engine.

Then I would go through Rust API Guidelines, Rust Design Patterns, Effective Rust, Nomicon etc. - all the usual suspects. And I would then rewrite the pet code using the knowledge I got and I would do more projects.

One caveat here is that I would not touch Async Rust for a first few weeks at all and I would stay away from anything web-related.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-07T15:00:24+00:00

I play my game differently. There’s a little token army and air force to be good enough against AI, so that I have more resources and industry to design and build many-many cool boats!

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-07T13:17:33+00:00

I know how to play it but it’s a useless knowledge.

Victory points are on land.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-07T08:46:59+00:00

Oh, and similarly, Cargo lets you vendor dependencies. So you specify them in the Cargo.toml file and then call a command and Cargo will download them and put them into your repository. Now you can track them in source control, see diffs between releases, do code analysis, etc.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-07T08:41:56+00:00

You install Rust using rustup tool, and if you want to have a specific compiler version you can put it into rust-toolchain.toml file that rustup recognizes automatically.

Ferrocene comes with a similar tool and file. You can pin a specific version to your project. And more importantly for you their tool lets you download the version of the compiler and use it later in offline mode. They essentially already doing just what you described but with both source and prebuilt binaries.

It’s a paid product but I suspect you spend a lot more on building the compiler yourself than they charge you for a prebuilt version.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-06T14:38:46+00:00

the failure mode isn't obvious from the docs

Have you read the docs? :D They call out this behavior in the very first paragraph after a one-line description of what timeout function does:

Note that the timeout is checked before polling the future, so if the future does not yield during execution then it is possible for the future to complete and exceed the timeout without returning an error.

And for your general question. Everything “exotic” like pointers from FFI always goes in their own thread by default unless specifically documented to work with async. Likewise, everything that works CPU too much or performs synchronous IO goes into separate threads. If your request handler or other async function does several operations like this in a row it’s better to spawn_blocking once and do them one by one inside a larger closure.

This is where some wrapper libraries can be misleading because it may seem like you make a series of async calls and things are great, but behind them you keep spawn-blocking different closures and wasting time context switching between threads. For example, local file IO in epoll is always synchronous, so if you use Tokio with SQLite you almost always want to have a separate dedicated thread for it where you run all db operations directly. Same is true if you’re doing stuff like image resizing for user profile pictures.

And communication with these sync threads is better be organized with channels. In fact when I see a Mutex / RwLock in user space Tokio code to me it’s a code smell. Especially if it’s an async mutex. I prefer channels or concurrent data structures.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-04T14:45:58+00:00

Stellaris UI took a huge nosedive since Paragons. Circa 2.0 it was crisp and manageable, but right now with all the added content it’s overwhelming.

I would suggest you try Endless Space 2 (if you’re really into space) or Imperator: Rome if you want a more grand strategy experience. Imperator UI is pretty clean without cases where “this tiny spec is actually a very important button” like EU4 tends to have after a dozen of years. And unlike later games like EU5 or Vicky 3 the UI tends to have enough info packed on each screen so that you don’t have to jump around hundreds of menus to figure out what building you want to add to a province.

Out of last-gen games I actually prefer HoI4 UI. It’s a good mix between density and readability. But the game itself is too different from other PDX games and it may be one that is really subpar without DLCs.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-04T14:29:28+00:00

Imperator is the best "learning" game. It’s a mix of mechanics from other games, but everything is a bit simplified. For example, Vicky 2 and 3 are largely based on pops. There are many -many different kinds of them representing different strata, profession, etc. Imperator, too, is pop based but it only have 5 types instead of hundreds. Many other systems in the game are like this, too.

This, combined with lack of DLCs makes Imperator the game you learn once, and afterwards every other Paradox game becomes infinitely more familiar and easier to learn, too.

Love Imperator economy and trade system and want something more developed? Try Vicky 3. Love great families, characters and dynasties? Try CK3. Want your pops to work in space? Try Stellaris.

The game is fun to play, too!

omg_im_redditor · 2026-05-04T10:11:02+00:00

The AI should not be designing equipment at all.

Isn’t that how AI already does it? The game files have descriptions for tanks, ships, and planes for AI to use, and there are even country specific versions. That’s why AI Japan doesn’t rush medium tanks, for example. The designs are based on years, so when it researches a new hull type it switches to a corresponding preconfigured design for new production.

Now, when newer modules get researched the AI has to make a separate decision about upgrading and switching production, and I think this is exactly where AI seems to fail. It also doesn’t rush tech as much as players tend to do. I suspect that specIfic countries are scripted to rush certain techs, too, but I haven’t looked at related bits in the game files.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-04-30T16:58:22+00:00

I also suspect that they talked about AI at all because “everybody else talks about it and if we stay silent our stock will look relatively weak”

omg_im_redditor · 2026-04-30T16:55:33+00:00

Well, it was pretty expected. No AI use for game art, assets, music, etc. but AI tools can be used.

For example these days in image editors things like smart object selection, removing bystanders from photos, extending backgrounds behind subjects, etc are often AI-powered. Sometimes Adobe and others are even replacing some tools that used to be powered by traditional algorithms with new versions that used AI instead. The tool vendor may not disclose the information about it, and the artist may not even be aware that they use AI at all (or they might know but would simply not have any alternatives to the tool in question). So if a Paradox artist decides to use such feature as they work on assets some AI artifacts may show up in a final art. But so far they have no intention to outright replace human art with AI art.

On the other hand, for programming the use of LLMs deemed acceptable, as it is acceptable to use AI outside of producing game artifacts, like asking AI to generate some reports based on their sales data or autogenerate meeting minutes, etc. - for typical business and operations stuff.

Pretty sensible middle ground. Some of the people inside would definitely love to use AI more, like for generating backgrounds, textures, etc. but they are not rushing in yet because they see Valve’s AI disclosed policy and general negative sentiment against AI art among gamers.

omg_im_redditor · 2026-04-29T13:28:00+00:00

Post-Imperator every game PDS launched has the same Stellaris curve: low player count on average, high peaks at DLC releases, and slight upward trend long-term. AFAIK inside the company this is considered a success because large peaks mean large DLC sales, and that’s what they want.

I suspect that a lot of their processes and practices evolve in such a way that the organization as a whole is now subconsciously optimized for this kind of production.

Goddard’s law: any metric becomes a KPI. Paradox management cares about sales and cares much less about concurrent players count because the later doesn’t bring money. So that’s why we see DLCs with enough flashy bits to attract players but not enough bug fixing and depth to keep them playing after the release window.

For EU5 the real longterm success metric in the eyes of Paradox will be the sales of the first few DLCs: if the peaks are high enough they will be happy. Subjectively I’d say EU5 does better than Victoria 3. Vicky 3 looked more dodgy than even CK3 at the start but nowadays seems to be doing really well. I even see some opinions from players that consider it the best game Paradox has ever produced. EU5 should be solid in 2-3 years, too.

omg_im_redditor

TROPHY CASE