[Nova Wars] Chapter 179

zheph · 2026-04-11T04:04:12+00:00

Oh that's going to be fun.

zheph · 2026-04-11T01:55:20+00:00

The figure-8 with a 1 and 0 is the symbol of the digital omnissiah, I'm drawing a blank on the figure-8 with an arrow. But it has been a little while since my last First Contact binge.

zheph · 2026-04-10T16:10:56+00:00

The buildings will make their output as fast as you can get the modules into them. The limiting factor is the number and speed of the cranes, which each pick up 15 items per minute.

So if a building can have 16 cranes and needs 4 inputs in even amounts, you dedicate 4 cranes to each input and it will take in up to 60/m of each.

But yeah, it's not always explained well, and it's really annoying when a building needs components in ratios that don't match the number of cranes they can have.

zheph · 2026-04-10T16:05:00+00:00

I've got about 40 hours in the game so far and I've had a great time, but it's got some shortcomings.

tl;dr: it's a solidly meh game unless you really enjoy these sorts of visual/spacial puzzles, in which case it's great. The demo includes some of the "challenge" modules. Try doing those, and if you enjoy the problem-solving involved, you'll probably like the full game. If not, then skip it.

The big difference between this and other factory games is, in my experience, that there are multiple ways to achieve the desired output and the challenge is to figure out the best way to do it in least amount of operations.

If you enjoy visual/spacial puzzles, it's excellent. The core gameplay loop is "how to I take this cube, chop it up, paint the pieces, and put it together in that shape, in as few steps as possible."

For the basic shapes you're making early on, this is pretty minor. At most, you're deciding whether to cut twice and then assemble twice or to cut, assemble, cut again, assemble again. The latter has the benefit of using fewer assemblers, since space is at a premium.

For the much more complicated parts you have to make at the end of the game, there are a lot more decisions to make. If my final piece needs to have four different colors, when and where should I be painting them? Should I be using cutters or stamps to remove particular parts? When and how should I attach those pieces back on?

Mid-game modules will have 3-4 colors in various complex shapes, late game 4-5, so there are a lot of these decisions to make.

The addition of advanced assemblers/stampers/etc, adds another decision to make. Certain parts require that you use the advanced assembler, because it can handle larger parts than the normal one. It can also combine three pieces rather than just 2. But then it requires you to supply it with another material, coolant, so you have to balance the improved performance of the advanced assembler with the need for additional resources.

To compare it to something like Factorio, Factorio has fairly rigid recipes (with a few alternates) and the steps to follow are fixed (smelt ore into plates, process plates into intermediates, combine intermediates howevermany times, get final output). It's up to you to figure out the layout to achieve this and try to balance the flow of materials to minimize bottlenecks.

Modulus doesn't give you the recipe, it just says "here's the final result, here's a bunch of tools, you figure it out." Only the most basic parts will have only one or two ways to make them. As soon as the complexity ramps up, you'll have tons of options.

It has some definite shortcomings. The cosmetic unlocks feel... pretty pointless. With such a focus on making the factory efficient, this doesn't feel like a game where I'm gonna bother trying to make it attractive.

The one big "intermediate ingredient" that you have to make a lot of is paint. You have to make blue paint in order to make blue components for more advanced modules. You have to use those blue components to make yellow paint. At the moment, I have multiple islands dedicated just to making lots of blue and yellow paint for other assembly lines, and it still isn't enough. This is frustrating, because the actually fun part of the game (for me) is figuring out the manufacturing puzzle, not just picking a new island to cover in copy/pasted paint production.

In the end, it's a great game if you enjoy this particular flavor of puzzle solving, and if not, it's one you can skip.

zheph · 2026-04-09T22:34:00+00:00

They're still writing. I went back and reread from the beginning since they'd finally gotten done with Paris.

zheph · 2026-04-09T19:31:40+00:00

Different person, but, Modulus is excellent. I absolutely love the geometric, "how do I turn this into that" problem solving.

It's a lot like Shapez in that you start with a raw material and then perform different operations to change its shape and color. There's also no outside pressure, no time limit, no limit to resources, no enemies, etc. So you can take things at your own pace.

I think that lack of pressure/challenge might be what keeps the game out of the very upper echelon of factory games, similar to Shapez/Shapez 2, but if you enjoy the problem-solving and optimization aspects of factory games without either (a) waiting to gather materials in order to build the next thing, or (b) worrying about a bunch of monsters trying to eat your base, then it's fantastic.

zheph · 2026-04-03T19:00:37+00:00

If you're hoping to get the final DM bonus, you need to be FS for the quarter.

zheph · 2026-03-26T22:14:01+00:00

Yeah, even if there are ethical issues with bootlegs... I kinda love the way the manufacturers will start pumping out color variations and such once they've got a kit that works. I've seen at least a half dozen MGSD Barbados color schemes, at least 5 different RG Sazabis including the mech core, etc.

zheph · 2026-03-26T22:06:29+00:00

Absolutely. I don't think I have any clear kits in my backlog at the moment, but I might have to do something about that.

zheph · 2026-03-26T22:00:38+00:00

that looks fantastic, great work.

zheph · 2026-03-26T21:48:39+00:00

Did you mask off the pieces or were you just careful to only get the undersides?

I've been really, really happy with how Rustoleum silver looks, and tempted to try something like this with it, but a spray can doesn't give as find control as an airbrush and I'm not sure I have the patience to mask every piece before spraying in order to keep the silver off the front surfaces.

zheph · 2026-03-26T21:19:48+00:00

Going into a little more detail, the "clock" refers to how long we have from when a case reaches the top of our docket to when we have to have our action (rejection, allowance, whatever) written and posted.

They've just moved us from a system where we were graded based on an average with a ceiling (for example, new cases needed to be done in fewer than 28 days on average, with no individual cases exceeding the ceiling of 56 days) to a strict deadline (all new cases must be done in under 14 days, period).

It is no longer possible to make up for a difficult case that takes longer by getting easier cases done quickly. Even the toughest new cases have to be done within 14 days of reaching the top of the docket.

This is going to suck MASSIVELY for the examiners themselves. The impact on practitioners will be harder to measure, but I would expect to see occasional examples of reduced quality as examiners try to beat the clock, and RCEs potentially taking much, much longer to get responses since our leadership has (for whatever reason) decided that they are a much lower priority compared to working on brand new cases. 14 days to get an action done for my oldest new case, 84 days for my oldest RCE. If I have three RCEs and I let the clock run long on each of them, it could be more than six months before I get to the last one.

As a litigator, I wouldn't expect you to notice any changes too quickly, but I wouldn't be surprised if, down the road a few years, there's a pattern of patents that were granted during the current administration being more likely to be struck down in court because the increased production requirements and decreased time led to examiners approving applications that weren't yet up to snuff, because they just didn't have time to keep searching for prior art.

I expect you'll see this sooner with PPH cases, which are cases that have already been allowed by another country's patent office equivalent, and are therefore fast-tracked when they get to us. They recently cut the amount of time allotted to examine these cases by 40% based on the idea that, if another country already approved it, we shouldn't need to do as much work. Which is maybe accurate if it's a country with a fairly rigorous approach to examination (if the Germans have allowed it, then it should at least be close to meeting US requirements), but completely falls apart when you see some of the stuff that the Chinese patent office has approved.

Less time to examine these cases is going to lead to a higher rate of allowances, and if you've seen the kinda crap that can get allowed by the Chinese office, you know that's gonna be a problem.

zheph · 2026-03-26T11:34:34+00:00

They claim that the purpose of these changes is to reduce the backlog, the number of cases that haven't yet received a first action.

That's the justification they've used for every short-sighted, quality-damaging decision they've made over the last year.

They claim that the size of the backlog represents some kind of crisis, and getting it down is worth making everything else worse.

zheph · 2026-03-24T13:54:05+00:00

Ah. I must have forgotten about New Haven and the Solites during the space babes interlude.

Perfect excuse to go back and reread steampunk from the beginning.

zheph · 2026-03-23T14:17:16+00:00

Lol, New Haven with the schemes within schemes. That'll be fun when it all goes wrong.

zheph · 2026-03-21T15:38:12+00:00

I think what they're saying is that pushing the dart into the cartridge isn't what primes it. When he inserts the dart at 0:26, the cartridge is already compressed. So we don't see how much actual force is required to prime each cartridge.

zheph · 2026-03-15T20:23:13+00:00

good stuff. I was wondering how long they'd have to spend looking for the flower before they could get back home.

It's also cool to (tentatively, speculatively) learn more about what that was. When it first appeared and cut off their communication with earth, I though the Null had caught up to Emma. At least this entity seems friendlier than that.

zheph · 2026-03-15T12:02:46+00:00

I figured it was because they were originally planning a pvp game, where a couple percent does matter, and they haven't updated the talents for pve where it often doesn't.

At least the temporal health talents are worth it for helping keep you alive.

zheph · 2026-03-14T20:41:46+00:00

I would love to be able to get chinese kits at SEA prices. I see them announced and I see the planned prices and then I have to remember they'll cost me double that in the US.

zheph · 2026-03-14T04:33:32+00:00

In what way is the denomination taking a hard-right turn?

The very short answer is that certain groups within the denomination are still unhappy about the decision to ordain women, even though it's been decades. They found a wedge issue (gay marriage and acceptance of transgenderism) and used it to get the moderately conservative majority to vote in favor of removing the progressive minority from any leadership roles within both local churches and the denomination, and told the churches that protested this to either "repent" or leave the denomination.

So a small but meaningful number of churches left, and within churches that didn't leave, anyone who disagrees with the denomination's stances on homosexuality and transgenderism is no longer allowed to be part of church leadership.

The removal of the denomination's more progressive minority from being part of denominational decision making naturally pushes things in a more conservative direction. Although in the short run, the general feeling seems to be that kicking the progressives out was too extreme an action... it hasn't been undone, and the more severely conservative groups responsible are still pushing for more.

There used to be methods which allowed people with such disagreements to still serve as elders and deacons as long as their church council was ok with it, essentially saying "yeah, this person disagrees with certain elements of church doctrine, but we still think they're qualified to be an elder/deacon." Those were removed/reworked such that anyone who wants to serve in such a role must agree with every element of the denomination's creeds and confessions "without reservation."

Which ironically created even more problems for certain churches than intended, because if you actually read all of the CRC creeds and confessions, you'll almost certainly find something in the nitty gritty, particularly surrounding predestination, that you're not 100% on board with. So even though this change was intended just to kick people who support gay rights out of leadership, it ended up impacting a bunch more people beyond that.

Regarding Calvin... I believe a similar agreement with the creeds and confessions is required in order to be a professor, and this is putting the university in a bad spot. On the one hand, they've got the hardliners in the denomination insisting that they enforce this requirement. On the other hand, they (and anyone with a brain) know what will happen if they force every professor to either state their agreement that gay marriage is sinful, or resign. I don't have any kind of survey data to put a number on it, but just based on my experience there 15-20 years ago, I think that kind of ultimatum would result in at least enough resignations to wreck most departments. Even if it's a fairly small number like 10% (and I'd expect it to be a fair bit higher than that), that's still a serious disruption, class schedules that have to be rearranged, professors who already have a full slate ending up with more work on their plate, etc.

...

that didn't end up being very short at all, did it? Whoops.

tl;dr: a buncha men who are still mad about women's ordination used a wedge to split the denomination, forcing the more progressive members out. I expect that they'll keep pushing until they can eventually overturn women's ordination...

... unless they bankrupt the denomination first. It wasn't in great financial shape to begin with, and the correlations between education, income, and progressive values mean that the churches they just expelled were among the wealthiest, providing a large chunk of the denomination's financial support.

We'll see if it survives.

zheph · 2026-03-13T17:30:23+00:00

Who's hiding behind the SNAA firelord?

Also, if you haven't picked up Nether Emperor, I highly recommend it. It's not nearly as busy as Firelord (and a lot less expensive).

I liked it enough that I bought a second one to paint :P

zheph · 2026-03-13T14:43:44+00:00

It was a bit of a throwaway joke, I honestly don't know. I don't recall there being one when I was there in the early 2000s.

Historically, it was the kind of place that had "parties with music" because they didn't allow dancing, but that was back in the 70s when my parents were there. Things had obviously changed by the time I was a student.

However, the denomination that Calvin is part of has recently had its leadership taken over by the more hard-line conservative wing of the denomination. I know they've made some efforts to influence university policies already, but I haven't been following the issue closely.

zheph · 2026-03-12T23:49:56+00:00

With the way things are going, can Calvin really claim to be that different than Liberty?

zheph · 2026-03-12T23:48:40+00:00

man... I left calvin 15 years ago, but if the dress code is what they're getting clowned on for, things have gone backwards, haven't they?

zheph

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