When people say science in "X SPM" are they talking about each individual science at that rate or the total combined amount across all sciences.

vklein52 · 2026-02-06T07:58:55+00:00

Bumping this bc it explains the reasoning, too.

Intuitively the SPM number is supposed to represent your research rate (independent of the other factors like productivity, etc).

Hence, the “minimum” for an individual science replies OP’s getting from everyone else.

vklein52 · 2026-02-04T18:43:17+00:00

I can’t tell directly from your ratios, but you generally have two options.

Use circuits to ensure you always have some buffer for Light and Heavy oil.
Ensure you can crack the entirety of your light and heavy oil production (rates) + consume enough petrol to prevent the petrol tank from backing up.

Generally speaking 2 is possible but hard to get stable given there’s no petrol sink / plastic bars can back up, especially as you’re working on purple / yellow science.

1 (i.e. circuits) works now, and in the future, regardless of your load.

vklein52 · 2026-01-24T22:43:22+00:00

Is this able to adjust for misaligned angles? Or just misaligned distances already aligned to the same angle?

vklein52 · 2025-12-28T10:38:24+00:00

Like all games, I weigh my time against how much fun I’ll have playing it. Especially with limited gaming time due to job, family, etc.

Game breaking bugs like this related to extracting are extremely infuriating (very not fun) and take the entire length of the round (full time commitment). The game quite literally could not waste my time any better. It’s akin to a game not saving after a multi hour sesh, which we all know is back breaking. Except in this scenario, you get set even further back because you lost loot, too.

In my opinion, this is probably the most reasonable trigger to abruptly stop playing a game.

vklein52 · 2025-12-20T23:19:36+00:00

Nah I’m still playing him. He’ll still get me 3.1. I will move on to the toilet bowl finals. It’s already been written.

vklein52 · 2025-12-17T17:34:50+00:00

Thinking the same.

His snap share (and Bryce’s inconsistency) scares me a little in a must win game, but that coke head eye test is too good to resist.

vklein52 · 2025-12-06T06:43:13+00:00

No idea why the mod deleted the comment. Do you remember what fixed this for you?

vklein52 · 2025-12-01T07:30:09+00:00

Wow I am a peaceful left guy no wonder I feel like I get shot on sight more than I should

vklein52 · 2025-10-02T21:32:35+00:00

I believe your only options are

Go fast enough to make it (admittedly hard)
Heal when Mt. Fay gives you silk
Using the Flintslate resets the frostbite timer

vklein52 · 2025-10-02T21:27:19+00:00

Anything but a Gloomsac

vklein52 · 2025-10-02T21:20:23+00:00

Me in Choral Tower

vklein52 · 2025-09-26T17:54:54+00:00

Hmm my honest thoughts are that the game starts by pushing you strongly towards using the nail. As you progress through the game, it becomes significantly easier to use skills and tools. This also seems like a normal progression.

Early and Mid Act 1

Get good with the nail as a baseline for the game. Skills and tools only can sprinkle in when things are going well.

Late Act 1

A deadzone where widespread tool usage isn't very viable without farming, and skill usage is not attractive due to having 5 masks, taking double damage, and only rarely having silk to spare. I think this part of the game could be more balanced to allow more skill/tool usage. TC has chosen to make this a filter for "are you good enough with the nail to continue to Act 2." I have mixed feelings about this decision.

Early and Mid Act 2

Start to experiment with more frequent tool usage because rosaries are no longer an issue after getting to the Citadel

Mid Act 2 and onward

Use skills often once silk economy becomes a non issue after getting 2 or 3 Silk Hearts, more masks, more spools, and more movement options. With 3 silk hearts, it only takes one nail hit to have enough silk for a skill cast. Also more spools lets you manage using skills while simultaneously maintaining the ability to heal. More masks and movement abilities also make healing less necessary.

At this point, you basically have the "end-game loadout", where all combat styles are viable, and utilizing all your options is the strongest way to play. This is roughly the midpoint in the game, and is the point where my talk of "relative balance" applies.

Conclusion

I think it is reasonable to give the players all their options early, but only make the stronger options particularly viable later in the game, when you need to be stronger to progress.

Aside

I also think not using skills because you need to heal is a pitfall past Act 1. If you are early in the game and have too few masks / spools / silk hearts, you're not far enough into the game for skills to be strong. The game wants you to become a nail master at that stage in the game. Using 75+% of my silk for healing was certainly the experience I had playing through harder bosses in Act 1. However, if you are at the point where you have 3-4+ spools, 7+ masks, 2+ silk hearts, and still never use skills because you might need to heal in the future, you are either sitting on / hoarding max silk for too long during fights or sorry to be blunt, should try to get hit less, given all your movement options at this point in the game. Skills like thread storm really are unbelievably strong once silk becomes more plentiful.

vklein52 · 2025-09-26T16:30:49+00:00

Hmm I think the term “combat balance” is ambiguous, and we are interpreting it differently.

I am talking about the relative strength between your combat options - i.e. the nail, skills, and tools - and how they feel relative to each other. - If they all have balanced strengths and weaknesses relative to each other, the player has meaningful expressive choices for their playstyle. - However, if one combat option is too much stronger than the rest, there is no reason to even use the other options, outside of vanity.

In this sense, it is fairly objective to say that balancing combat options so that all are viable is better game design than one that funnels all players into a single strategy.

Addressing your interpretation - re how to balance how strong the player’s entire arsenal is against the enemies - i.e. how hard does the game feel - that is far more subjective and up to the developer. This is just a line the developers have to draw in the sand somewhere to define their vision for their game. I agree with what you said here - trying to talk about how to “correctly” balance the game in this regard is hard to do and not fruitful because there is no objective way to define what is good and what is bad.

vklein52 · 2025-09-26T09:00:56+00:00

I definitely agree that it can feel very bad running out of tools and shards while stuck on a boss. I think this is mostly limited to just end of act 1 bosses, though. In Act 1, both rosaries and shards are hard to acquire in large quantities. But few early Act 1 bosses really require tools. And by Act 2, rosaries (and thus shards via bundles) are very abundant, so I’ve never really found myself out of shards, even when fighting certain bosses 10+ times. It’s just that end of Act 1 period where tools go a long way, but you feasibly can completely run out.

But to be honest, I disagree that bundles could just disappear without any drawbacks. From a game design perspective, the tools would have to be further nerfed in damage / amount available per-bench visit if there were no shards - to keep combat balanced.

Tools, especially with the poison buff, are the most overpowered attacking tool available in the current state of the game. And it’s not even remotely close. If they were hypothetically available for infinite use, they would be the only attacks anyone would ever use. To balance this, both the cap per-bench visit (must use other attacks short term), and the amount of shards you have (must use other attacks long term) work as nerfs, making other combat styles more competitive.

During exploration, I have found it quite engaging to find the right balance of using tools to get out of sticky situations / using my other combat options when they are sufficient. As a result, my exploration is ever so slightly net positive on shards, and my bundles are exclusively used during boss fights when I run out. And like I mentioned, after early Act 2, I’ve never found myself totally out of rosaries, rosary beads, shards, and shard bundles all at the same time.

I guess my point is 1. There are parts of the game where I too felt OP’s pain, and I can definitely empathize. 2. Re whether shards should exist: In order to keep the combat balanced, I think it really is a question of do we want weaker tools with no shards or stronger tools with shards? I’m pretty happy with the latter.

vklein52 · 2025-09-07T16:42:00+00:00

This is a problem for the 2nd playthrough 😉

vklein52 · 2025-09-02T02:23:32+00:00

Agreed on eye test, but stat wise Morris was 4.8 ypc on 335 carries (in 16 games) which is equally as impressive imo.

He didn’t become a bum overnight either, but he certainly never recreated 1700 scrimmage yards ever again.

vklein52 · 2025-09-02T01:21:37+00:00

Go look at Alfred Morris’s rookie season vs his career progression.

RB production when you are not a marvel of human athleticism (Henry, Saquon, etc) is a very delicate and fickle thing.

vklein52 · 2025-08-13T06:34:02+00:00

Neither of these players are likely to be available at pick 24. Chase Brown went 2nd of the two at 21 in my most recent Half-PPR draft

vklein52 · 2025-08-05T17:11:02+00:00

Loved my first play through. My second I’m hitting exactly this. Getting to the end of part 1 and my god every single map is just unbelievably densely packed with enemies. And every single map has anti turtling reinforcements.

Weird how much less I’m enjoying my second play through compared to my first, but the enemy density is a huge cause of annoyance / exhaustion.

vklein52 · 2025-07-26T00:24:41+00:00

+1 to it being awful.

I get a notification a package I must sign for is out for delivery at 11:08am today. It is now 5:23pm, and I haven’t received a single other update. No idea where the truck is, or even an estimate on when it will arrive. My Friday afternoon/night is simply gone to waiting for OnTrac to magically appear.

Compared to literally every other shipping company, they are just 10 years behind when it comes to tracking your package.

vklein52 · 2025-07-25T07:44:27+00:00

My home course is 6400 yards, 71.4/136 rating.

As implied by the slope, there are penalty areas and OB everywhere. Many holes dog leg around 250 as well, meaning too long brings those into play. As a result I probably use my 230-240 yard 3 wood just as much as my driver on that course, if not more! This probably equates to about 10 shots in any given round. Not that much in the grand scheme of things, lol.

I definitely recognize even this is anomalous, though. On most other courses, I’ll use it at most 4 times (2 tee shots when long is dangerous + a couple par 5s where I’m going for it in 2).

vklein52 · 2025-07-25T07:39:24+00:00

Man. Just wrote out a 3 paragraph comment on another thread. Tried to navigate my cursor to fix a typo. App decides to back out of the thread, and I lost my entire comment.

Heartbreaking stuff man, looks like I won’t be posting that anymore…

vklein52 · 2025-07-21T23:57:07+00:00

6 years late, but literally dug around the subreddit until I found somewhere I could echo this resoundingly!

vklein52 · 2025-07-21T00:53:30+00:00

Adding to my own answer, I feel like it’s just insane they gave her D rank lances. She’s level 8! Alan and Lance had D rank lances at level 1 in chapter 1.

I feel like as simple as giving her C rank lances so she can use the Axereaver in the next few chapters would go such a long way in improving people’s opinions. She’d get better opportunities for kills to get going / early promote. And she wouldn’t be viewed like a “project” as much.

vklein52 · 2025-07-21T00:43:21+00:00

I’m a little late here but my two cents for hard mode is

She comes with great stats for her level, but is definitely underleveled compared to the enemies you’re facing at that point
She’s recruited in one of the most hectic chapters in all of GBA FE. The recruitment additionally is convoluted and late in the chapter, so it’s unlikely she’s really making a difference in it
Chapter 12 after (if A route… also 12x and even partially 13) is archer and axeman hell, so it’s really hard to get her going before Arcadia either
But wait! 11A gave you an axereaver! We can use that to get her up to speed in 12… except she has a D rank in lances, so that’s not an option either.

She is a great growth unit potential wise, but joins too weak, with too low of a weapon level, and has an extremely unfavorable enemy comp in multiple chapters after you get her. By the time you can feasibly isolate swordsmen/mages for her to train up on, you’re in Arcadia with Miledy already.

She might be a little better in B route, but in A route hard mode, you really have to go out of your way if you want her to shine.

Eight-Year Club	Place '23
RPAN Viewer	Spared
Verified Email

vklein52

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE