No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
Yeah, skin deep writing. Pretty much. The concepts are fine, but the quests and the unit lore is just .. ugh. Just not to my taste. Almost tempted to rewrite that stuff to be less cringe. Starsector has relatively decent writing that doesn't feel insulting, but that's probably because the game devs are clearly SF readers.
Couple more annoying things: I feel like planes should have fuel / require bases like in SMACX and I just plain dislike titans. Logistically they're just kind of dumb and conceptually don't make that much sense either. And what is even the point where e.g. Praetorians kill various titans without much issue and are air-mobile?
Wonder how hard modding it is.
If roads were cheaper/could be built automatically and supplies were not automatically delivered but depended on accessibility and supply depots/convoys, the game would get a fair amount of depth.
If you could make formations out of units and move them at once, that'd be very good too.
Also, it's nice that each unit has a specific weapon because swapping out those weapons for others same way heroes swap out items would make it much more interesting. I don't get why weapon selection isn't already in the game. Endless Legend had unit builds and it added some depth to the combat..
Nothing revolutionary at all, but it works well enough.
Tbh the combat is a fair bit deeper than in ordinary 4x games, or at least could be with some more options.
No_one
15d ago
Exactly. While there's something mildly pleasant about hot weather, working in it is sucks and it's only really good for going swimming.
But around 15°C is just the best. If you're inactive and outside, a jacket and trousers will keep you comfortably warm... if it's near freezing you need an entire elaborate set of clothes to feel comfortable being out there and if it's >22°C doing anything more strenuous than walking will lead to sweating a lot.
It took a 35°C heatwave for me to understand what sweatbands are for. The only good thing about summer is that working outside and sweating like a horse is the perfect excuse to keep drinking cold beer to replace lost calories, water and electrolytes. Also the beer tastes much better then. I barely drink any in winter myself..
Factions:
There's eight of them in the base game, some of them share a particular native type of tech (so far, three with ~8 units each) but each has different leader and faction abilities. You can in theory mix & match, but as the production facility for each unit type is unique, the gigantic opportunity cost definitely prevents mixing units of the same tier (so 2 infantry types etc, not to mention, in the crucial early game the other faction's units are an era behind) and some resources differ.
Native tech types:
Middle Americans (dudes with body armor & guns, tanks, SPAA, guided missiles, big artillery, nukes, even bigger tanks, brutal air power and of course space marines with antimatter sprinkled blades that cut anything as pinnacle of infantry). Will nuke you if given a chance. Each faction type has several 'operations', basically a sort of spell of some sort.
Silicon Valley Americans (cyborg under-armed infantry, hover-servitors with plasma guns, purely mechanical spider snipers, some time-cheating floating beam weapon using AI drone etc). Will cause a small pseudo black hole to appear over your city or army and stay being horrible for a month.
And the very definitely illegal aliens who introduced themselves by gigadeaths and now claim it was all a misunderstanding or necessary or something along those lines and the various humans who've developed an affinity for said alien's ..deity? Not at all clear what the they do, don't feel like playing them.
The 'Silicon Valley' tech tree is natively had by three factions: 'Emulated Mind'- a partly failed upload who is good at logistics and sort of good with some of the cringiest writing(survived death and cancer and won't let the apocalypse stop her), and 'heartless artificer' who is a strictly 'ends justifies the means' type of person and implausibly represented by a pretty indefinable mocha woman with a slight spanish accent.
Whereas, we know it'd be some extremely intense white or asian autist-psychopath IRL. The special traits for the two are: emulated mind can only build two cities but gets more from random facilities around the map, and the 'heartless artificer' is good at cloning and can also improve production through a 'performance review' called 'fountain of blood' where the lowest performers get the bullet to motivate the rest to work up to 34% harder.
Then there's 'Rogue Operative', undoubtedly an Asian trans cybercriminal who social engineered a little too much and ended up running the remains of a company she was attempting to steal from when the end of the world came. I say trans because it's the 22nd century so I'm assuming gender-affirming surgery has been perfected by then but affinities towards hacking have likely not changed much.
The middle American tech tree is had by three base factions: 'Fallen Soldier' -a robust looking hispanic guy who just won't die, kind of a like a WH40k perpetual. His faction's special power is just rigorously training their units and also healing charms-pieces of his flesh somehow prevent those who bear them from dying. Also somehow fix damaged hardware but I'm going to overlook that for now. Naturally, people love not dying of common wounds and diseases. He doesn't know why he rose from the dead, but if you wear a piece of his flesh as a talisman you're going to heal much faster.
Then there's 'practical romantic' (not actually romantic anymore) - the most normal human faction out there. Special power- get resources from defeated enemies, can buff morale with influence. Looks Iranian I guess.
Then there's the most seemingly implausible human faction, led by a fat German aristocrat (monocled, too) who spent a few decades in a bunker before getting out and becoming useful. A good administrator(can rush production) and diplomat/trader. German aristocracy, whatever is left of it is led by people who are almost invariably tanned jocks, and if not that, reasonably fit and very good skiers. Although, maybe in the late 21st century being a fat foodie will once more be a status mark? Perhaps it's good writing.
Zephon (2024)
Intro:
Is another C-tier(budget wise) 4x game using some crap Unity implementation(I guess, loading time 20s on a PC capable of 4K Cyberpunk 2077) that gameplay wise is easily on par with Civ V or earlier 4x games in most graphic stuff but the combat AI is actually not that bad and will punish you for fighting fair. Trailer here.. I get good frames but I feel a worse PC would probably suffer.
It's by devs who previously made the Gladius WH40K 4x game. This is a refinement of that game with their own post apocalyptic setting, that of a 22nd century some decades after first contacts came in the form of a surprise genocidal attack that was supposedly self defence. So it is a 4x with all the features of a typical 4x games, and is combat oriented. Even if you don't fight any player faction, the unplayable NPC factions will definitely fight you eventually and at quite the scale.
Overall, I like the gameplay and combat, the setting and writing of quests and characters is interesting if not that well executed and overall while I like the outline of the writing and the themes, in execution I am mildly annoyed there's that stench of Netflix/tweet chatGPT over some of it and they could have done so much better. But unless you're a literate right winger you may not even notice the annoying crap, I think. The most 'cringe' part for me is the 'forced diversity' part on which I'll elaborate later in the 'factions' section.
The map/game itself:
Unlike in common 4x games, the 'NPC empires' are an important part of the game and an inextricable part of the story. There's three of them, a retarded Skynet (did not cause the apocalypse, claims to want to help, not that good at R&D), survivors of the of the alien invasion fleet( definitely did cause the apocalypse), and your basic post-apocalyptic barbarian cannibal federation who somehow survived a few decades in a world of constant warfare between said mildly retarded Skynet and the aliens who while looking only mildly disgusting themselves employ biotech instead of most common machinery that looks like something puked up by a particularly sick cat and animated with voodoo.
Aliens and Skynet are perma-hostile to each other, Barbarians try to shake you down constantly. These factions don't really improve and apart from barbarians, don't colonize much and start with relatively strong cities.
Economy:
The economic part is not that complex, mostly standard 4x approach if a bit refined: all facilities in a city are physically visible on the world map and, at 3 per hex, a city of 7 hexes can only have at most 21 of them, though you're going to want multiples of each for later game units of course. Each facility has its own production and its own building queue, so there are large tradeoffs to make. You can't make planes in a tank factory or barracks and so on.
A city good at expanding itself can easily put up military factories and mothball the productive ones.. but building up that capacity means you delay your military production by quite some time. There's sadly no fun strategies based around slaving or causing refugee waves to exploit! All construction costs minerals, running everything takes energy, and people need to eat too. Late game units require stable transuranic elements and antimatter, sometimes in ludicrous quantities.
Combat: There's line of sights, terrain effects on cover, but mostly only for small unites (e.g. tanks or most planes don't benefit from forests or ruins providing cover and concealment much).
Weapons have damage, armor penetration, range and number of attacks, whether they're direct or indirect fire. Most units can overwatch so you need recon to avoid running into enemies and getting hit. Or if you move into a concealing tile (forest), they may not see you unless they're directly adjacent.
Units have experience level, morale, armor value, movement speed, evasion, vantage point (e.g. planes see over most obstacles etc but are also seen), number of subunits in each formation and a lot of less common properties. (e.g. basic human soldiers does 2x more attacks at close range, reflecting the difficulty of hitting anything with a rifle further out)
Most units (infantry) are composed of multiple small entities each with its own HP pool that each attack, so an attrited infantry unit delivers far less damage.
No_one
15d ago
The worst things we know of were done in Canada, the 'straw country' US uses for dirty work bc their judges have no jurisdiction there. Ewen Cameron kept some people on LSD in a coma so long they lost memories.
In the US I know that CIA ran a brothel where they were drugging people and drugged some military personnel in experiments, but I have never seen claims US universities (not just a few individual researchers) participated in this.
No_one
15d ago
You're Indian and raised there. To the British and many central/northern European guys, 15°C is shirt-sleeve weather when doing anything more active than sitting outside. If it's 15°C and sunny, I often just go shirtless because after the bloody winter it feels so nice to feel the sun on your skin once more.
Temperature sensitivity is bound to where you were raised, I think. I have seen black people wearing puffy jackets in a thirty degree weather, the kind of jackets I unzip when it's >10 °C because I'd sweat otherwise.
Autonomic nervous system just gets used to some particular temperature..
No_one
15d ago
What is ideal weather like where you are from?
Scattered clouds, 15°C and intermittent light breeze is the perfect weather. Not hot enough to sweat when walking, not cold enough to need a jacket, just perfect.
No_one
15d ago
There was a treatise and also some horribly smug memoir.
The clown part is that it took years for people to surface that crap even though half a day of effort would have found it back then. But that'd mean someone out there would have to be proactive.
No_one
15d ago
Dunno, maybe autocorrect /word prediction simultaneously enabled for several languages at once?
No_one
15d ago
Man just noticed.. I should have added 'for sexual stuff and profanity' .. It has an impressive vocabulary but for swearing and lewd stuff it's not that great.
No_one
16d ago
” It’s such a clownish statement you would never believe it actually came out of someone’s mouth, but it did.
You live in clown world. A CRS insider published a book bragging how he and his colleagues have been secretly stage managing race riots, race controversies and so on, in confidence from everyone but maybe some senate committee and president since 1962.
Yes, they only tell congress what they want to tell congress, and they're not subject to FOIA. Book was published in 2020 or so.
Most everyone assumed this crap was managed and CRS was even mentioned because they're not that secret, but e.g. knowledge of this book only came up in 2025.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56253400
In short, it's a clown world so I'm not sure why you're surprised people act like clowns.
No_one
16d ago
In case you really, really do not get it, it's what's called 'sexual innuendo'. English has a relatively impoverished vocabulary so people just substitute whatever words seem roughly appropriate and arrange them in a way that's suggestive.
No_one
17d ago
For a system to last young people have to be able out maneuver the old. First past the post makes this hard.
Given the cohort size disparity, no one is ever 'outmaneuvering' boomers in Germany. They'll keep voting CDU till they can't. Clear eyed people I know are saying they can only imagine things changing for the better after the boomers die out as a group.
No_one
17d ago
The Left has individuals with TV, radio, or podcasts, but they really don’t support each other. Raechel Maddow doesn’t tell the same story as Ezra Klein who doesn’t tell the same story as Thom Hartmann.
No? I recall everyone and their mother calling J.D.Vance, the seemingly most normal guy in politics, ever, weird. There is clear coordination. Back during Trump's first campaign, there was a minor scandal that pretty much every major media sent a high ranking guy to some Clinton event to coordinate campaign messaging.
Also, the TV and newspapers pretty much belongs to the democrats. Not that anyone except those who await death pays attention to legacy media (, but the left has something like 75% of the TV and 90% of the paper market, at least.
No_one
18d ago
Dunno, trying to farm some quotes you could lob at DNS registries to try to get this place banned? Seems excessive for that, who would care that much?
It is odd behavior.
No_one
19d ago
overthrowing a US-backed monarchy
The monarchy was overthrown because the US under Carter refused to support it. (or at least Nixon thought so and blamed Carter for it) They were told if they cracked down on the revolutionaries US would not back that decision.
Making my way through "Suicide of the West" ,a 1962 book by James Burnham. It's a book about liberalism, or more specifically 'liberal syndrome' - Burnham doesn't think liberalism is coherent enough to be called an ideology.
The book aged very well, perhaps the only exception is that back then liberals were typically for freedom of speech for communists -Burnham was basically cancelled for supporting McCarthy, presumably because as a CIA connected guy he knew more than the average left-winger.
Now it's generally true that they're usually soft on islamists.
No_one
20d ago
I read Gibson-Neuromancer and a related book but didn't like it. All style, no substance.
No_one
20d ago
I'm pretty sure I saw someone talking about this and the author is from Singapore.
Ofc, you may think "just how bad could military service be in a city state" well the answer is they do military exercises in Northern Australia in those swamps full of salt-water crocodiles and other Northern Australia goodness.
Yeah, checked it out. https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/completed-sublight-drive-star-wars.1095425/all/reader/
'City of Lions' - that's Singapore.
No_one
20d ago
Well, exercise could always speed it up although that'd probably be incredibly unpleasant I guess.
No_one
20d ago
There's some guy out there who was losing like a pound a day bc his doc gave him some combination shot of several anti-obesity drugs and ended up going almost blind and with severe nerve damage and now is suing.
Really put the scale on a firm surface and make sure you're losing it at a fast pace, not something you want to risk. How do people even get that big, food is quite expensive and not needed in excess anyway.
Living on the top floor of an apartment building I've come to appreciate heat waves intimately. The building is well insulated and barely needs heating if it's >10°C, but the roof volume is not ventilated at all, so during heat waves, that whole part of the building accumulates heat and temperature in my apartment gets to slightly above shade temperature and barely dips during the night.
I am now wondering if 2 months of slightly uncomfortable temperatures (27-29°C) and, on average, one week of really uncomfortable (32-38°C) are worth installing AC.
Or how much difference ventilating the building roof thoroughly could do. A single 100W fan would exchange all the air in the attic twice in an hour. That should be vastly cheaper than AC and depending on how much it'd cut the need for AC, neighbors might even help with funding that.
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