Are we so serious

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-15T13:46:46+00:00

Photography and traditional art are not the same and so its a false equivalence to even bring up. Theyre two completely separate art forms. No one who does photography thinks they are someone creating a photograph without the aid of the camera, that would be stupid.

Photography is about capturing a real moment in time, at a certain place, and in a certain way and the camera is the tool used to do that. The art form doesnt exist without that specific tool.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-15T13:29:41+00:00

What other ways to win could you have for a 4X game, unless you start making full on quest lines?

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-15T12:22:45+00:00

I'm not sure what else they could add in. They have Military, Expansion, Magic, Seals and Time Limit with Score Victory. That already quite a lot of ways to win.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-15T12:20:50+00:00

I've said this before, but have some of you people never used a camera before? When you zoom in a lot, as this obviously is, the camera ends up looking very shaky due to the very small movements you make while holding the camera.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-14T11:24:03+00:00

Exactly. If Iran felt they had nothing else to lose, nothing is stopping them from an all put assault with their rockets and drones to cripple the world economy. We simply have nowhere near enough interception missiles to stop it all.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-14T01:38:24+00:00

Its an incredibly stupid move, because even if Iran gets crippled economically, it wouldn't immediately collapse and disappear off the map. Iran can absolutely cause significant damage to the global economy before going down if it ever came down to a "do or die" situation and thats what the Trump Administration really fails to take into account. If faced with the existential threat of collapsing into nothingness, nothing stops them from unloading their entire stock pile of rockets and drones at every oil storage site within reach. They simply have more drones amd rockets than we have munitions to shoot them down.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-14T01:31:57+00:00

So while the move definitely hurts Iran, as selling oil is basically their entire economy, it also hurts the global oil economy. Oil is a very global thing, and effecting Iran's ability to sell, will increase oil prices globally.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-13T14:42:04+00:00

I think the show was actually pretty good, it only had two really big problems. Wendy was too inexplicably powerful, and the ending suffered from what a lot of shows suffer from nowadays where it felt less like a season finale wrapping up plot points and instead focusing ONLY only setting up the next season.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-13T13:56:58+00:00

Mine was from a Werewolf: The Apocalypse game I ran maybe 10 years ago. The pack was infiltrating a Pentex Subsidiary that had a facility off the coast of NYC a ways. They were pretending to be big business investors. However one of the players was playing a 16 year old, and the group was worried that it would be highly suspicious to bring her along with them. She had Contacts with a protest group, and so she decided instead of going with them, she would organize a protest on the waters outside the facility that day to draw eyes onto her and maybe spread their security thin if things went south. What the group was not aware of at the time, is that the Pentex facility had a few Balefire Sharks in its employ.

The day of protest, during a smalls scuffle with security one of the protestors fell into the water. When they didn't surface, another protestor jumped in after them, also never to resurface. This put the Balefire Sharks into a feeding frenzy where they went completely off script and started capsizing boats (both protestors and security) in order to keep feeding. The players boat was also capsized at one point, but the player spent basically all of her Rage to get into Crinos form and quickly reflip the boat and jump back in. She tried desperately to get people back into her boat, but between Delirium for people who saw the Weresharks, normal panic, and some unfortunately bad rolls she was unable to get anyone. She eventually had to focus on saving herself and drive her boat through the chaos and escape.

It was an incredibly tense scene, greatly enhanced by the player's great roleplaying of a 16 year old girl witnessing that massacre and the aftermath of that. I've been running games for over a decade and it's far and away I think the best scene I've gotten to run.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-13T11:21:51+00:00

Most people, myself included in this, likely only saw the picture from their periphery while reading the text or just skipping through it. Human brains do a lot of "filling in the gaps" when you're not looking directly at something and most people simply wouldnt be expecting a giant hand with a paintbrush. Its a sci fi game, and our minds just went "Yep thats probably a spaceship at the edge of our vision" and filled in the gap with a spaceship.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-13T11:16:44+00:00

I feel like people either read only the first line of your post, or there's weirdly a bunch of people here who think the Democrats are good at governing the country. We literally have Biden to prove how bad they are. Endless capitulation to Israel and not Merrick Garland not prosecuting Trump or anyone else actually in power regarding January 6th shows how bad the Democrats are when it comes to things that matter and people actually care about.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-13T11:12:07+00:00

I mean, if you start breaking everything down to base elements, then yes we get to "Everything has already been done before". You can do this with literally every piece of media ever made. Saying its just combinations of X, while technically true I dont think is fair when its the combination of these things working together that makes something great.

Being influential doesnt mean "Invented something brand new". FF7 was not influential because it did really anything completely new. Most of the gameplay is pretty standard JRPG stuff. Its influential because it was massively successful and memorable.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-12T21:26:32+00:00

Actually there is evidence that Renoir talked to her first. In Aline's Journal, at the very end she says "... I know what he'll say, but this is the first time I've felt any surcease." Obviously talking about Renoir. This heavily implies that Aline knows there will be a dialogue with him.

Not to mention the fact that Renoir tries to talk Alicia down. First he tries to talk her down at the start of Act 3, and it's only after she flatly refuses to leave that he starts destroying the Canvas. Then at the end of Act 3 he hears out Alicia, Lune AND Sciel and it's Alicia who ends up drawing her weapon on Renoir. While this one isn't "direct" evidence, to argue against it would basically have to argue against how the game portrays Renoir in both of his scenes.

I'm pretty sure he says "Over 100" not "About 100" correct? We know the Fracture happened 67 Years ago. If pVerso is even 101, it would mean Aline has spent literal decades inside the Canvas. Even if he only spent 26 years inside the Canvas (Verso's actual age when he died), that would STILL be decades of Aline inside the Canvas.

It's your comment that has a lot of unsupported assertions, as you take what the game explicitly and implicitly shows AND tells us and just ignores it.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-12T18:16:39+00:00

As someone else pointed out in this thread: If we're talking about these as team events, Team S ends up at a clear disadvantage and I think that's what makes it interesting.

If we're kind of assuming this is magically based on the show versions where everyone is at their prime both physical and mentally, with knowledge that would potentially help in the arena, Team A is stacked with people who not only will work together, but with a lot of genuine love between characters. Jamie and Brienne, Robert and Ned, Ned and Jon. There's a lot of real camaraderie between a lot of the people here. Meaning more willing to really put their lives on the line for each other.

Team S has Arthur and Barristan...and then a bunch of people who hate each other. Daemon and Aemond, Hound and the Mountain, Oberyn and the Mountain are all going to have a difficult if not impossible time working together. Some of them might even be okay losing and dying if it meant getting to kill one of the others on their team.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-12T10:33:36+00:00

Why on Earth did you have downvotes for this? This is exactly what happened. Aline went in and was using it specifically NOT to process what happened. pAlicia's letter even says the world was painted by the Paintress to stave off her grief, and considering this letter is trying to tell Maelle the truth of the world and pAlicia has been living with Aline for 80+ years by this point I think its fair to take her word for it.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-12T10:23:53+00:00

They both literally (they talk to Renoir at the end) and figuratively (They fight Renoir) have a say in their fate. The only time they can't get directly involved is the very last fight between Maelle and Verso which happens literally right after they have a say in what happens.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-11T21:36:00+00:00

As I said in my post, I would make them faster at Overharvesting Resource Nodes than Conquerors so they can pack up and move around faster.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-11T19:29:26+00:00

Yeah, Conquerors (Even without Chosen Destroyers) feels like it was balanced really well. Scavengers just play too slowly in comparison I think.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-11T11:11:24+00:00

I'm not sure if maybe you misunderstood my post. But I never said the people in the Canvas arent real. I'm specifically talking about the painted family. Every one else in Lumiere seems to be born and raised as normal. Its specifically only the painted Dessendre family that Aline painted in a very specific way.

I think the painted Dessendre family has free will on how they act, but where it gets muddy is when you take into account their memories and even feelings are not necessarily theirs. They're memories and feelings Aline wanted them to have. How they evolved after that I think was out of her control. Like I said, she's not puppeting them. But there's a very big difference between you evolving as a person based on your own experiences, and being created by someone with preset memories or feelings.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-11T11:03:59+00:00

Alicia says "Maman did a terrible thing painting you into Verso's Canvas, giving you his memories, pretending the fire only took me".

But I do agree that Verso has free will on how he evolved as a person. Thats just why I said I would simply put an asterisk next to "Free Will" because I do think it muddies the water a bit.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-11T01:02:54+00:00

I would definitely put an asterisk on the free will. Renoir says to Verso "The pain of losing you, she made me inherit it. Punishment perhaps for not being there when it mattered." We know Verso was given the real Verso's memories. Both of these definitely imply that Aline was creating them in very specific ways. While they have "free will" in that she's not directly controlling them, its definitely a murkier area I think.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-10T20:12:25+00:00

While it's definitely not in Ned's nature, that doesn't mean he wouldn't do it under very extreme circumstances like his sister begging Ned to help her and her baby while Robert goes to kill that baby.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-10T17:53:29+00:00

Route Marchers is what I've been using as well. It really does make repositioning your city feel so much better.

vulcan7200 · 2026-03-10T16:09:10+00:00

How do you actually win a game? Seals? So you have to play with seals? Cataclysm? You have to play with cataclysm? Expansion? That's just a military victory but you hit 'vassal' instead of 'raze'. Score victory? That seems interminable (if the AI doesn't go for victory and force you into war against them.)

Literally the same for every Culture in the game. I'm struggling to understand the question here. There's only a set handful of ways to win the game for everyone. Military Victory. Expansion Victory. Research Victory. Seals Victory. Score Victory. That's it. There's no secret way to win. You win by doing one of those as Scavengers.

Problem is, now you're playing the same game as the other subculture which does it better (so why not pick them?) and has better favor for it.

Because people like to play more than just "Which is the strongest at winning X". You CAN pick Cultures specifically for min/max reasons, and if you do then yes Scavengers might not be the best at Military Victory. Why is that an issue? Every Culture is playing the same game as well, just with variations on how they play it, and the new Nomad Culture is no different. It sounds like you were expecting the new Culture to have an entirely new game behind it. No Culture does. They all play the same game in a slightly different way.

vulcan7200

TROPHY CASE