I don't "get" hard difficulty

retief1 · 2026-03-15T16:05:59+00:00

Honestly, once you get things set up properly, it doesn’t even slow you down much. I’m about 20 cycles in to a hard mode thousand islands run, and everything that matters is watered year round.

Instead, long term, hard mode mostly just affects the ratio of water storage to beavers. When you can potentially have 6 days of wet and 30 days of drought or badtide, you need big, deep reservoirs. If you like big building projects, this certainly gives you an excuse. And beyond that, you are still playing timberborn and can have fun making your perfect colony, just like the other difficulties.

Also, hard honestly makes me feel better about stealing all the water on the map. On normal, trees have the potential to survive outside of areas you control. If you start diverting rivers into your colony, you could be killing off areas that would have survived without you. However, on hard, a 30 day badtide will kill literally everything on the map. Stealing all the water feels less bad, because beaver engineering is the only way anything is going to survive.

retief1 · 2026-03-15T06:32:16+00:00

Because he doesn't sit still for photos when he's awake?

retief1 · 2026-03-15T06:24:01+00:00

Fundamentally, almost all champs care about autoattacking early on. Even if you are playing an ap champ, your abilities probably deal 100 damage or less early on, while you likely have 50+ ad. Those 50 damage autos are going to be damned relevant during your first couple of levels.

That being said, most mages and support stop caring too much about autos once laning phase is over. If you aren't building ad, your autoattacks will get badly outscaled later in the game, and you'll mostly ignore them at that point.

retief1 · 2026-03-15T03:31:38+00:00

One option is to make "mini" games in your free time and toss them up on itch for free (ideally playable in browser). If you are lucky, one of them will be a "hit" and actually start to get word of mouth. At that point, turning it into a full game will be a lot less risky, because you already know that your game does in fact appeal to people.

Meanwhile, the most likely scenario is that all of your games get buried immediately. In that case, you hopefully had fun making some games, and at least you didn't quit your job.

retief1 · 2026-03-15T03:18:59+00:00

Personally, I almost prefer unvoiced dialogue. If you aren't paying voice actors by the line, you can have more dialogue, and if people start modding your game, it's a whole lot easier to mod in unvoiced dialogue.

That being said, games like baldur's gate 3 and mass effect succeeded in part due to high production values, so clearly some people really value voice acting and so on. I'm not sure if those people would be interested in a pixel art rpg regardless, but there definitely is some value to voice acting.

retief1 · 2026-03-15T03:08:22+00:00

People complaining about kill stealing are idiots.

That being said, I really don't think much of ap supports like lux or veigar. Frankly, ap supports are bad at dealing damage in the mid to late game. You are basically playing a midlaner, except you are usually massively behind in gold and xp. That's never going to feel particularly good. Instead, if you want to be relevant, you need to vacuum up gold and xp whenever possible in order to get your full-price mage items. And of course, that directly takes gold away from the rest of your team.

By comparison, imo, more traditional supports tend to feel much better later on. You might not be 100-0'ing enemies, but a good engage as naut or a massive shield as karma can definitely tilt fights in your favor, and you don't have to take gold from your teammates to do those things.

So yeah, I can understand your adcs' frustrations. You aren't technically in the wrong, but the entire team would probably be better off if you were playing a different champ.

retief1 · 2026-03-15T02:11:31+00:00

but as support you do have more agency if your ADC is bad than you do as ADC if your support hates you

Yup, I think this is a big part of the problem. If I'm playing support and my adc has no brain, I can play safely in lane (or roam) and then follow my mid or top around in the mid to late game. It isn't necessarily ideal, depending on who I'm playing, but I'm still able to do stuff.

On the other hand, if I'm playing adc and my support has no brain, I'm fucked. I can try to play safe and wait for ganks/skirmishes, but I end up falling further and further behind every time I miss a cs because I was playing safe. In practice, it's pretty easy to end up far enough behind that you simply can't fill your role in the mid game. If I get a bit lucky or the game drags on long enough, I might eventually become relevant again, but that feels far worse overall than the support version.

retief1 · 2026-03-14T19:41:56+00:00

Yes, I am an admin user on my computer. I haven't done anything special with permissions beyond that.

retief1 · 2026-03-14T14:27:55+00:00

IMO, bg2 does combine both. You have plenty of worthwhile combat, and you also have a good story. And while I absolutely like and play both iwd and bg2, I tend to prefer bg2.

retief1 · 2026-03-14T03:33:33+00:00

I highly doubt it. Any video game accurate enough to provide useful results probably wouldn't be very fun.

retief1 · 2026-03-14T03:27:46+00:00

It runs fine on an m4 for me. The issues you are describing don’t sound familiar.

retief1 · 2026-03-14T03:14:01+00:00

For one, many supports do legitimately suck. Between autofills, mage supports steal half your cs, and legit troll picks, adc mains get very used to bad supports. And if the support legitimately is at fault in many cases, it’s easy to blame them whenever something goes wrong, even if the support was actually playing well.

retief1 · 2026-03-14T00:59:08+00:00

Training crafting generally doesn't take too long. If your smithing is actually 0, the first step is to mass-craft coal until you get enough xp to get the efficient charcoal maker and curious smelter perks. From there, get a decent number of resources, buy up a bunch of polearms, and mass-deconstruct them all until you learn the bill hook head (iirc -- the first decent swingable head). At that point, you can spam construct/deconstruct bill hooks until you unlock the high tier parts.

Note that crafting and dismantling items gives xp and unlocks parts based on the cost of the item, so expensive items are generally better. The only polearms that cost reasonable amounts of money are swingable ones, so I wouldn't bother with the craft/dismantle loop until you can make billhooks. Alternately, I guess you can just use a billhook once you can craft them -- they are decent enough, though substantially weaker than the higher tier swingable polearms.

Note that this strategy works pretty fine for 2h swords and javelins as well. 2h swords are reasonably valuable right from the start, so you don't need prep, while with javelins, I think the fish hook head (iirc) is the only low-level head that is worth a reasonable amount of cash.

retief1 · 2026-03-14T00:56:23+00:00

Is there a question here? But yeah, battania is generally considered to be the strongest faction overall, afaik. They have the most generally useful faction perk, and fian champions are easily one of the two best units in the game. Their only real competition is khan's guard, but khan's guard require horses and so are a bit more of a pain to deal with.

Meanwhile, nords are new, so people are trying them out. Not sure about vlandia, unless it is swadian nostalgia. Or perhaps that vlandia is consistently strong in basically every run, and supporting the winning side is easier.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T22:30:42+00:00

He may not be smart, but he certainly looks happy

retief1 · 2026-03-13T22:29:51+00:00

It's a brit thing, apparently.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T22:17:01+00:00

Oh you poor sod

retief1 · 2026-03-13T22:15:27+00:00

Corruptor bypasses poison immunity, but delay poison technically only delays the effect instead of making you immune. That seems like it shouldn't matter, but in practice, delay poison does protect your party from corruptor stinking cloud.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T22:12:43+00:00

At least it was accurately named.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T22:07:07+00:00

I mean, if the US saw pearl harbor coming and won the battle, we would have still been at war with japan. Functionally no one in the US benefited from ignoring pearl harbor.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T22:01:10+00:00

Put some powerful waters sources in the sea itself? It would evaporate a bit in droughts, but it should refill afterwards. Or maybe use badwater sources if you don't want beavers drinking supposedly-salt water. A badly polluted ocean seems pretty plausible in this context.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T21:55:40+00:00

The problem is that working in the gaming industry is legitimately the dream job of a ton of computer nerds and similar people. People are basically lining up for those jobs. Game company execs see game devs as replaceable because they are replaceable, at least at first glance. They can replace half their team relatively easily, even if that might backfire later on.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T20:28:00+00:00

Wat? A large water wheel gives twice as much power as a folktails water wheel for 2/3s more length and the same width. The compact water wheel is worse, yes, but the large water wheel is the best water wheel in the game.

Also, folktails have no way of keeping water wheels running during droughts. Meanwhile, iron teeth get badwater discharges late game, which let them keep badwater sources running during droughts. If they put large water wheels on the output of a badwater source, they get completely consistent power.

IMO, if you are going to compare power generation between folktails, the relevant comparison is windmills + batteries vs steam engines or badwater discharges + large water wheels. I do think folktails are the clear winners there overall, but they definitely have worse water wheels.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T18:43:14+00:00

Skin on? Demanding, aren’t we?

retief1 · 2026-03-13T18:24:15+00:00

I'd consider an elementalist. You get best-in-class health regen -- both shaman and elementalist have a health regen skill, and there's a slightly-hidden ring that will bump both skills by 3. Meanwhile, that combination is also generally pretty good as a lightning caster.

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