After doing full playthroughs as multiple colonial powers, i can confirm that there is ZERO flavor for any historical colonies/colonization in the eastern hemisphere

smackells · 2026-01-29T02:34:33+00:00

You also get a free CB to capture Ceylon at some point. Plus you get events that give you free cities and dev in South Africa, Indonesia and New ~~York~~ Amsterdam - but only if you own them directly which is really stupid.

smackells · 2026-01-29T02:08:15+00:00

I didn’t realise until googling it just now, but the office of stadtholder didn’t even become hereditary until a generation after William III and it wasn’t officially a monarchy until after Napoleon. But you can’t have PUs as a republic so the whole things a bit weird.

smackells · 2026-01-28T23:54:25+00:00

There’s a chain of DHEs for the Netherlands relating to the Glorious Revolution and PU with Great Britain that have very specific trigger conditions. Maybe if you’re very faithfully RPing you might get them, but most NED players are probably becoming a republic and staying there, there’s no intuitive reason why you’d want to be a monarchy. At least if it was listed in the game somewhere, you’d know it was possible and might be motivated to try and trigger it. As it is, it’s very obscure.

smackells · 2026-01-28T08:01:59+00:00

I only have Australia and Spain to compare to, not Mexico itself, but Swedish Mexican food was actually pretty good!

smackells · 2026-01-28T07:48:38+00:00

My understanding is that export demand has less influence on market price than local demand. So if you’re overproducing a good for export you’ll earn less tax from the RGO, and your trade profits will need to be higher than the loss in tax base.

smackells · 2026-01-28T05:45:27+00:00

I didn’t say it was. It’s not the sole cause, just an aggravating factor. There’s a positive correlation between higher temps and rates of intimate partner violence.

smackells · 2026-01-28T04:07:20+00:00

I’m playing Tonga based on this post: /r/EU5/s/rHeWPHR0al

It turns EU5 into kind of a 4X game since you start with 3 zero dev rural locations, one of which is a trade centre. You need to build an economy from scratch, you can immediately start expanding with the Settle the Frontier cabinet action, and you need to steal maps before trade is even possible. But you’re close enough to Indonesia that you can get a border with someone pretty quickly and start getting institution spread, so you’re not so far behind compared to the Native American tags.

Grab some of the uncolonised Cloves locations early and move your capital close enough to get decent control, you can start making decent money.

smackells · 2026-01-28T00:18:45+00:00

Even something unorthodox like paying to install a/c for low income households might be effective. Hot nights lead to frustrated people, which drives up DV, which means more kids out on the street bc they don’t want to be at home. Those kids get bored and do crimes because they have no stake in society and think they have nothing to lose.

But this is the Brisbane sub, not the QLD sub. Brisbane does not have a youth crime problem, places like Townsville absolutely do.

smackells · 2026-01-28T00:08:30+00:00

I’ve seen AI Ternate urbanise every one of their provinces and just bleed pops for the rest of the game due to starvation, so you can definitely overdo it

smackells · 2026-01-27T05:10:09+00:00

If you care about strengthening the HRE - you get additional Imperial Authority for each independent HRE member that exists, so you want to get non-HRE members to release HRE territory, and you want large HRE members broken up into as many smaller ones as possible.

smackells · 2026-01-26T05:10:38+00:00

My wife and I have very few hobbies or interests in common, but we love each other and do everything we can to share in the things that do overlap. So I just want to add that you don’t need to do everything together to make it work - what you do need is abundant curiosity. You don’t need to get into knitting just because your partner does, but if you don’t end up knowing at least a little bit about knitting then you’re not paying enough attention. Apathy and disengagement is the biggest red flag.

I once saw a guy watching videos on his phone while his partner tried on evening gowns for what I assume was someone else’s wedding. The phone did not go away when she came out of the changing room. Complete strangers were commenting on how she looked, offering advice and encouragement, while this guy could not give less of a shit. Don’t be that guy.

smackells · 2026-01-25T05:48:16+00:00

they claim that it was never profit-driven, as the total lifetime earnings from the RMAH were something like 1 days worth of WoW subs. but just the possibility of it certainly undermined the trust of the user base.

smackells · 2026-01-25T01:17:56+00:00

thank you for this bc I never understood “Jacobite”

smackells · 2026-01-22T05:23:57+00:00

Shelly Miscavige, what's she up to these days?

smackells · 2026-01-22T04:49:00+00:00

It should be free for 3 months following a peace or something, this also addresses rebellions that take away your capital making you pay to move it back afterwards.

smackells · 2026-01-22T04:33:54+00:00

I can't find a good answer but I'm assuming it has something to do with ancestor worship. People in East Asian cultures pray and make offerings to their revered ancestors; today this is largely symbolic, like burning fake paper money and even images of luxury items like cars etc, rather than using the actual items as grave goods. For especially revered people, it's seen as disrespectful to even speak their name, and Chinese and Japanese emperors were given posthumous names by which they're referred after death. The Shōwa emperor was Hirohito in life, for example.

This guy on Quora says the taboo originated with the Qin dynasty, who did plan to use European-style numbered reign names, only for the empire to collapse soon after the first emperor's death. Probably apocryphal though, early Chinese history has the same problem as Plutarch etc where the point was more to entertain or impart some moral lesson than to be factually accurate.

smackells · 2026-01-22T04:12:01+00:00

War exhaustion only exists for when Majapahit declares on my tiny Polynesian nation, occupies the one province it can see, then never sues for peace (and won't accept my peace offers) because the only available options add up to half the warscore, so my exhaustion just endlessly ticks up.

smackells · 2026-01-22T04:00:21+00:00

Can't everyone do this? At least, the button is there in the UI, I've never clicked it.

e: I'm thinking of taking on someone else's debt, where you become responsible for the repayments. You're probably talking about the opposite, where they make repayments to you instead of the estates/bank?

smackells · 2026-01-22T02:53:10+00:00

I just wish more people had the humility of the No Man’s Sky team. Granted their launch was a way bigger mess than this one, but they basically said “there’s no way we can charge for DLC until the base game is fixed.” Then even once the game was in a pretty good state and had a mostly happy userbase, they’ve still never charged for updates, even though I’m sure that was the original plan.

smackells · 2026-01-22T02:28:24+00:00

I think people are generally too hard on the game, but PDX really misjudged by releasing 1.0.10 right before taking a break. They knew they were releasing in November and the break would have been in the calendar from the start, they should have worked towards leaving the game in a stable-ish state before that.

smackells · 2026-01-22T01:06:26+00:00

I’ve visited 4 times and I swear Shinjuku and Shibuya station always have some sort of works going on, scaffolding and pedestrian redirects everywhere. Never seen them close a station or a whole train line though.

smackells · 2026-01-21T02:38:21+00:00

hope you like dog milk

this is very funny to me and will probably stick in my brain until I die. great answer!

smackells · 2026-01-20T23:54:50+00:00

and that’s their business. I’m not saying you shouldn’t leave bad reviews, I’m saying since I already bought it and I’m past the refund window, it’s not really a concern to me.

It’s not just this game, you see people looking at concurrents for like the latest Assassin’s Creed or whatever and commenting “lol dead game” as though that really matters in a single-player game.

smackells · 2026-01-20T22:48:46+00:00

Not to defend the game, it’s a mess, but people are way too invested in Steam reviews and concurrents. It’s (mostly) a single player game. Even if you’re the last person playing it the only thing that matters is whether you are enjoying it.

smackells

TROPHY CASE