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Southkraut

Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.

3 followers   follows 4 users  
joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

All alliterations are accidental.


				

User ID: 83

Southkraut

Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.

3 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

					

All alliterations are accidental.


					

User ID: 83

No submission statement, not reading.

I have no idea what you're talking about and a quick googling only tells me something about a hacked cryptocurrency platform. What does that have to do with rationalism or EA and why should anyone care?

Do you believe that every human, no matter how unviable, has to be kept alive at any cost?

We're post-scarcity for the most hollow, superficial, devoid-of-meaning kinds of beauty. I get that my view is mine alone and others needn't share it, but when I look at AI art I feel cheated - there are the visual cues of an artist taking care to weave meaning and presentation together, but in truth it's just a surface-level regurgitation of previous works and lacks all sense or intention.

It's like being presented with something resembling, at a glance, a meal, only to discover that the taste is all artificial flavoring, there are no nutrients whatsoever, and the whole thing is a uniform sludge that falls apart at the fork's first touch.

Is this beauty? I'd say we're still a long way away from it. Making beauty may be the last thing the AIs learn to do rather than the first. So far all they are capable of producing is mimics, and a closer look just leads to disgust.

No submission statement, not reading.

IMO a Bare-Link-Repository is preferable to bare links being the majority of top-level threads.

False imprisonment? Please explain.

True, I shot from the hip there in assuming that it would be exactly someone self-advertising their blog, without even considering the who or what.

A submission statement would still be nice though.

Pretty sure the anti-feminist case here manages to blame women for it in some roundabout way, just like the feminists will lay all the world's ills at the feet of the patriarchy. Let me try: Low-status men are dissolute and violent because women restrict access to sex and marriage in favor of building harems for a small number of high-status men. Isn't that a common argument?

My personal view differs somewhat: Both men and women are dissolute, but only men are violent because women are physically weak and vulnerable. The cause for the dissoluteness is classic civilizational decline - we morally decay because, at our peak, we could afford to, and it was pleasant to do so.

One copy-pasted very negative and entirely subjective, making-no-attempt-at-fairness steam review that may or may not be mine coming up.


tl;dr: Heavily overrated, actually a mess.

Aesthetically it's ugly, garish, tasteless. Fans of the setting will be unable to notice this, but all that I see is random colors and nonsensical designs. The setting is shit and it's mildly depressing that CA/Sega made three installments for it instead of giving the Thirty Years' War a shot. But people like it and buy it and review it positively. People who hate history. People who watch superhero movies. People who are many, but have no taste.

As for the setting itself, what's even to be said? It's trash. Trashy trash. Worthless. Unsalvageable. Do you need an explanation why? Then stop reading, reading is not for you.

Mechanically, to be charitable, it's functional. It's also by far the least enjoyable Total War title I've played, and I've played most of them. The TW formula hasn't evolved at all, you're still playing the same basic game as back when, but now it has a bunch of Warhammer-related additional systems slathered on top that don't really add to what the game is actually about. The actual tactical battles are perfunctory, messy and poorly manageable, with none of the elegance and legibility the series had at its peak. The UI has degenerated as well and looks worse than ever. UX is unpleasant.

Strategy layer:

  • Armies now cannot exist without a leader, so no good leader with his full stack of twenty units followed by additional leaderless reinforcements - you will always have multiples of twenty units fighting multiples of twenty units.
  • Logistics, usually largely neglected in TW games, have been completely deleted. You can now just summon new units all over the map. Sure it costs some additional money to hire them, but that's a small price to pay for keeping your force behind enemy lines supplied with top-tier troops.
  • Attrition seems like a major issue, until you realize that you can completely negate it by just going a little slower, or by going a little faster and skipping past dangerous terrain.
  • Autoresolve is far too reliable. You're even told in advance which units of yours will be destroyed. Yes, this is how war works: Perfect information and predictability. Sun Tzu had no idea. You're almost always better off autoresolving a fight, which distributes damage almost evenly across your units, then recovering your losses within a turn or two, than to play a battle manually and risk losing entire units that you would then have to replace with raw recruits. What's more, the autoresolve formula doesn't seem to take unit composition into account at all, so battles that you could not realistically win given your troops and the enemy's will often be easily autoresolved in your favor.
  • Winning a fight usually drowns you in pop-ups and TODOs. You found half a dozen magic items, your commanders gained five perks each from having fought a battle and having been the attackers and from the specific enemies they fought and from having been personally in combat, also your heroes would like you to distribute the skill points they just gained, oh and don't forget to check your inventory to see whether you can do some crafting with the items you found.
  • Quests. Yeah, this is what every strategy game needs: Quests. Quests so misplaced and irrelevant to the game at large that you can just let the relevant army teleport to the quest location. This alone should tell you how stupid an idea having quests in this game is.
  • Forget about large-scale geographic concerns in strategy, because random events will just teleport multiple enemy armies right into what you assumed to be the pacified heartland of your empire.
  • You can no longer raid trade routes. Yeah, that was far too intuitive, interesting and realistic. Instead of the practical limit on trade being your ability to protect it, which neatly interfaced with all other systems in the game, there is now simply a diplomatic penalty to new trade agreements based on how many you already have.

Tactical layer:

  • Do you remember when TW was about infantry, cavalry, and ranged troops, and a general being nearby to provide moral support? That was nice. You could apply a little real-world logic and make like Napoleon, outflanking, picking good terrain, maybe even threaten the enemy general, have little fights for valuable locations like hills or escarpments.
  • Now it's about Infantry, Cavalry, Ranged Troops, Flyers, Giants, Spellcasters, what items you have equipped and what active abilities you've levelled up and which of a million passive bonuses you have picked up during the campaign.
  • Get ready to manually cast those abilities as rapidly as as possible. What, you don't like MOBAs? Get with the times, gramps.
  • Fuck your artillery because flying units will just bypass any defensive lines you have.
  • Spellcasters have no counterplay at all. Yeah they only get a few shots per fight, and it's more spectacle than effect. But given that and that you can't automate your own spellcasters, the entire existence of spellcasting is just a major annoyance on both ends and it doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the game at all. It's slapped-on and stupid and adds nothing of value to the game.
  • If terrain matters at all I haven't seen it do so.
  • Maps are tiny funnels on which you don't get to position and manoeuver, you just have the two forces crash into each other right from the start.
  • The option to automate some troops on demand, present in older TW titles, is still not back. Given that this game is micromanagement hell, I miss it sorely.

Eh. It's not worth going into the details of it. The Total War series has gone to shit.

I regret giving them money for this. Everyone who recommended this as "well if you want to play a strategy/tactics game set in renaissance Germany, just play this!" was wrong to do so and should feel bad about it.

Anything deviating from the obvious principle of

"the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must"

would do better to justify itself very well.

Was this actually weakmanning? It seemed flippant, but accurate. And that's with me being very on the supposedly weakmanned side here.

I had a phase like that.

Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West, by Cormarc McCarthy.

Best book I ever read.

  1. Rightful German Clay, had to protect the German minorities.
  2. They attacked us first! Remember the radio station!
  3. Had to be done to push the starting positions of the inevitable anti-bolshevik war further East.
  4. Lebensraum. We needed space to live.
  5. It was just an anglo puppet and we had to call them on their bluff.

Alright, alright, I'm just fooling around here.

Arguments? Spew your disgust at him. Chances are that'll have more weight than any attempt to reason him out of something he didn't reason himself into.

When has such a thing ever happened?

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Please explain.

If you are gay, then I'm fairly certain your experiences are not very relevant when discussing the modal man's gender relations. No offense intended, but obviously you are wired differently and thus not a suitable example to study.

When people are overly sensitive in reacting to your posts, why grow sensitive yourself? Just shrug it off.

That sounds complicated and open to a hundred angles of attack that you can be sure the very active pro-immigrant elements will find long before the sluggish anti-immigrant side patches the holes. Trying to be clever seems risky when the other side has proven consistently more capable and subversive.

Yemen/Red Sea war we're now fighting? Iran and the US are fighting a proxy war in Iraq

War? I guess there aren't exactly any fixed and universal criteria to consult, but is it really a war, outright? That seems to me to imply higher stakes. I'm not saying you're wrong, mind you, but I'd expect to have heard more about it if it were more than some foreign-shores-coast-guarding with occasional naval gunfire exercises. In other words: Please inform me.

Congratulations, you now understand the concept of a "cost-benefit analysis". Please apply this concept to lockdowns, social distancing and so on.

And they did, and they reached the conclusion that pubs, schools and offices don't need to be open because you can do all that via Zoom.

You can call that wrong, or motivated reasoning to justify their compliance, but in my recollection it wasn't as simple as pointing out that costs exist either way.

Please provide links.

Edit: I just noticed that the title is a link. Sneaky.

Preferable to the scenario in which we don't get any potential newcomers at all.

I'd say the Bottom is in agreement with what middle management is doing here. My point is that everyone is more-or-less equally swayed, and that it's not a handful of key players pushing their agenda. There's simply no need for a conspiracy - when many push and nobody openly resists and the masses cheer because all groups consume the same media and absorb the same memes and know what the right thing to do is, then of course town halls are going to fly rainbow flags and whatever else, entirely without a shadowy organization needing to manipulate anyone.