Obsidian
3yr ago
I feel like it's time to stop and think about the nature of your relationship if that's where it's going.
Decide how much you trust/distrust him without external help and go from there. Social intuition is a wonderful tool, and if you get it wrong you'll learn from the experience and get better.
Obsidian
3yr ago
If you haven't read The Expanse, give it a go. It really is exceptionally good. Comparable to A Song of Ice and Fire, but tighter, and it sticks the landing. The worldbuilding is very strong, the plot is intricate and internally consistent. There are a few weaker points around characterization, particularly female characters, but overall one of the better works of fiction I've read.
I haven't played Factorio in a while, but I'd like to submit my pitch for Industrial Revolution 2. It expands and improves on vanilla gameplay in a number of ways.
IR2 inverts a crucial dynamic from the original game.
In vanilla, science costs are everything. The cost of your actual base - in material, in assembler throughput - is a rounding error compared to the titanesque costs of making hundreds of little colored bottles.
In IR2, science is cheap, or at least comparable to vanilla. But infrastructure is 5-10x more expensive and complicated. So the dynamics of the game shifts away from giant buses and towards big beautiful malls.
In vanilla, there is really only one power distribution medium: electricity. There is the embryo of a second power distribution medium in the form of coal lines feeding furnaces, but the final solution to the furnace question is easy to work out, and indeed everyone is using the same design. Steam trains are a curiosity and mostly unworkable.
IR2 keeps coal lines, but it also adds a new early-game power distribution story in the form of steam, carried through pipes. Designing with colony-wide steam distribution brings a number of new problems and solutions that you wouldn't encounter just in vanilla refinery design.
In vanilla, there is one way to smelt. IR2 has three, with accelerating efficiency: vanilla smelting, crushed ore smelting, and washed ore smelting. Crushed ore is available fairly early; washed ore coincides with the time you want to centralize your smelting. (I've designed a poly-ore washing and smelting setup with rate-limiting before, it was a great challenge.)
The IR2 recipe graph has byproducts.
The vanilla recipe graph also has byproducts, in particular from oil refining. And that makes for interesting designs! But the IR2 recipe graph has many more, and some of the byproducts participate to cycles in the recipe graph, leading to integrated multi-product lines. It's neat.
The average well-designed vanilla base looks like a main bus with long production lines sticking out on either side (or on only one side in some designs).
This is by necessity. When you need 10+ assemblers for every product to get decent scale, an orderly rectangle of stacked production lines is the only way to get anywhere.
IR2 by and large does not require long production lines. I am a big fan of Seeing like a State, so I appreciate that spaghetti is actually a competitive design strategy all the way into purple science.
This extends to trains, by the way. One or two cargo wagons is all you'll need until fairly deep into the game. This enables designs using e.g. dense city blocks, a design I'm fairly proud of.
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