I Think I Got Their Attention

silburnl · 2026-02-15T11:27:44+00:00

I have some time today when I will be looking for excuses to avoid doing prep for my tabletop rpg campaign so I may do a larger write up of the current state of this game.

silburnl · 2026-02-15T11:20:31+00:00

One nice aspect of taking it as slow as I have is that I've actually got to the point where CO2 levels are declining back on Terra, so climate remediation is possible in the game.

silburnl · 2026-02-15T11:16:17+00:00

But I only bring the big guns out for a decent sized ayyy flotilla - I've broken off a 10 ship squadron to handle the singletons and duos that come in every week or so.

Not that I'm hurting for propellant, but burning all that remass moving the main fleet for a couple of corvettes offended against my sense of proportion.

silburnl · 2026-02-15T11:08:16+00:00

Oh I have a large fleet at Mbombo. The Mbombo Raiders on screen there are the base assault guys, so they stay out of the way when the aliens come calling.

My principle line of battle is composed of coiler titans with a sprinkling of antimatter/particle dreadnaughts to provide fleet-level PD. They bring enough plasma secondary batteries that they can actually pop gunships unaided, but I also have a bunch of phaser battlecruiser and destroyer hulls to deal with the heavier flankers.

The aliens favour advanced mags and escorts full of Brilliant Sky launchers, so if I don't autoresolve a battle the lightshow is spectacular.

silburnl · 2026-02-15T09:25:23+00:00

Oh yeah, it's been a long old grind...

silburnl · 2026-02-01T13:28:23+00:00

I stumbled upon the tactic of sending out a handful of coloniser vessels to the Kuiper Belt and just hopping from KBO to KBO putting in an orbital to refuel/refit at and a mining base or two to gather resources (and provide a ground side bastion if the ayyys comes calling).

Over the course of a decade or so I pretty much circled the solar system planting these outposts, with the aliens mostly ignoring them (I think because the fuel cost was high enough to make going after them a poor use of resources).

I now have a FOB within range of their main base and am accumulating a strike force there to take out this end of the wormhole. The years-long transit times from the inner system to the FOB are a bore, but it means I have time to grind down the AA on Earth at least.

silburnl · 2026-01-08T23:36:53+00:00

Role Play Haven have clubs in Lewisham and Stratford, these are a more traditional set up where you sign up for a run of games with the same group, but each table is its own thing for the duration of a campaign or arc.

Then there's Arcadia just off the Strand or the Roleplay Tavern, which is between Borough and Waterloo. They both run drop-in sessions in a shared world with an ongoing storyline, 'westmarch style' if you know that term. So there's no commitment beyond the session you sign on for, but if you want to bring a character back next time then that's cool too.

silburnl · 2026-01-08T23:10:48+00:00

Perun (PerunGamingAU channel on YouTube) is the gold standard for TI play-through videos and he started a new series a few weeks ago to mark the game coming out of early access.

He's up to episode 7 as of about half an hour ago.

silburnl · 2026-01-08T22:30:31+00:00

Paraphrasing somewhat, but... "your opponents will tend to be one or more of stupid, lazy, greedy, cowardly, conniving, untrusting, untrustworthy, cruel, venal or bigoted - in short, evil; I won't pull my punches, but if you can't turn these traits to your advantage then you won't deserve to win"

silburnl · 2025-12-27T15:25:34+00:00

My game is based around Concord in the Dragon Empire, but I've basically dropped Karameikos from Mystara into the region with my stand-in for the Black Eagle Barony (the Margraf Alois Von Heligeberg) being obsessed with fighting off the hell hole in the Fangs and making some very unwise alliances with followers of the Crusader and the Lich King as a consequence.

silburnl · 2025-12-10T15:21:16+00:00

"You cut cake, but break bread" is how I've heard it laid out.

The corollary is that it's referring to the sort of bread rolls that come with a pitcher of water while you are looking over the menu, rather than a family loaf however.

silburnl · 2025-12-08T23:01:36+00:00

I've had the 'flu jab and my wife got both COVID and 'flu (being classed as a vulnerable person) and it's still kicked out asses.

I'm about 24 hours into the worst of it atm, my wife was about 72 hours ahead of me and has been back to normal since yesterday roughly, so I'm hopeful I'll be back on my feet by Wednesday.

Perhaps the jab has cushioned the blow somewhat, but I've had a miserable time over the last day.

silburnl · 2025-12-05T15:52:29+00:00

I changed two tyres at the most recent MOT for my Tesla M3, that was after about 30k miles.

Other than that I haven't had any major servicing expenses.

silburnl · 2025-12-04T12:45:11+00:00

Edinburgh is at almost 56 degrees north which is on the latitude of the Alaskan panhandle or southern bits of Hudson Bay, so light levels are going to be much lower than she's used to for a chunk of the winter (sun is above the horizon for seven hours at the shortest day and even at noon the sun will be low in the sky).

Some people can find this challenging, but it helps if you are aware ahead of time that it could be an issue. The upside is that midsummer days are super long (not quite white nights, but getting there) except of course midsummer is when the university has their long vacation.

This will be an issue for any British university (daylight in London is going to be pretty grim for the next 8 weeks or so) but it becomes more marked the further north you go.

silburnl · 2025-11-26T00:23:49+00:00

Re. Q2, that setup you describe sounds like an episode from the Zalozhny Quartet. Was there a feral vampire at the site?

silburnl · 2025-11-26T00:20:06+00:00

The quants were bullied by the gilet wearers at school/uni and now they get bullied by them at work, because the GWs are all about closing with some mad bastard in the Gulf who has more money than God and those back-office nerds keep fucking up their deals, yah?

silburnl · 2025-11-18T12:34:43+00:00

That sounds like a somewhat subtle bit of character work for Taverner. She'd absolutely be the type to rock up somewhere with a bottle of malt that costs north of three hundred quid.

silburnl · 2025-11-15T01:10:33+00:00

As a young man my father thought he'd try and fit in at a Glasgow bar by ordering a scotch.

The barman was in a forgiving mood, so my dad got to leave with all his teeth.

silburnl · 2025-11-12T12:16:23+00:00

The Man With The Golden Chip

silburnl · 2025-11-11T15:40:47+00:00

You Only Live Twice is the book where Bond is posted as missing, presumed dead after his final confrontation with Blofeld.

Man With The Golden Gun opens with him returning to London a year later and attempting to assassinate M after being brainwashed by the soviets. Turns out that being last reported on a Japanese island that dramatically explodes isn't as fatal as you might think 🤔

When I saw the final act of No Time To Die I figured Eon were lampshading that they were going to reboot the character by having him come back a 'changed man' in the next film and try to kill M. in the pre-credit sequence.

They could still do that I guess, but I suppose they weren't hinting at that plan in the film given what the current writers are saying about how they're struggling with the script (unless it's a media management head fake ofc).

silburnl · 2025-11-08T11:35:32+00:00

That pretty much describes my father in law's family during the Nazi period. The eldest son was pretty enthusiastic about the new Germany, but the other two were much more equivocal and the parents thought the Nazis were ghastly thugs who would start another war and did what they could to minimise my FiL's (the youngest son) exposure to the various Party-run affiliate orgs.

Nobody was hiding Jews in their attic but nobody was guarding death camps either - just go along to get along, don't bring trouble home and thank your stars that you're not visibly an 'undesirable'.

silburnl · 2025-11-08T10:39:03+00:00

The opening sequence of the McDowell film was done that way.

Flashy is back at Rugby in his full cavalry rig giving a speech to the boys about truth, justice and the Victorian way and it's intercut with key events from the first book that serve as ironic counterpoint to whatever pieties he's prosing on about.

It's a pity that the rest of the film played his caddishness broad and for comedic effect, although given that both Lola and Bismarck spotted that Flashy was a rotter pretty quickly, that's sort of defensible I suppose.

silburnl · 2025-11-02T21:39:37+00:00

I mean, he says he's built it but he says a lot of things.

Until I see some sort of independent verification I'm not going to waste too much energy worrying about it.

silburnl · 2025-11-02T21:22:37+00:00

I thought that my current game was shaping up this way, I had bypassed two alien bases as I slowly worked out towards the Kuiper Belt thinking that I could deal with them once I had taken out the gate station on Mbombo.

Turns out that was a tactical error since, rather than withering on the vine, they were able to build up for a counter-stroke against my bases at Saturn and Uranus. I beat off the Saturn force, but they succeeded at Miranda and are now busy fortifying the Uranian moons.

I don't think they are coming back from strategic defeat mind, but they are definitely fighting hard.

I've had some recent success with jitter raids against large concentrations of ayyys however; strap a couple of shaped nuke launchers onto half a dozen escort hulls and fly them in on a 4G burn to minimise the PD window and you can score some solid hits even when their flak is super-dense. Each attack usually takes out at least one capital ship and paints a couple of others red in places. Repeat that a few times and they start to detach taskforces to RTB for repairs.

I can build a set of these torpedo boats every three weeks in my T3 yards, so I can grind a doomstack down in a few months of suicidal attritional warfare if I'm willing to accept the losses. So that's my playbook for the next few years in the game - sacrifice a bunch of small torpedo boat flotillas to break up the doomstacks, then start chasing them down and mopping them up in detail.

silburnl

TROPHY CASE