site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2532 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Video game thread.

I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.

There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.

Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.

Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.

The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.

Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.

Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.

Apropos of nothing, your comment triggered something and I did a dive back into the original Moria roguelike. Oh boy... the memories. How does a casual ASCII game from the early 80's provoke that kind of emotion. How could a modern developer recapture it?

Meta-gaming question I have is: what are some game stories that can only function in the form of a game. Archetypal games that were bound to happen at some point.

Games have art, music, story as components. The unique part is the interactive component with the player. A game like SpecOps:TheLine could function as a book. Spitballing a few famous tropes.

  • game has no story. pure skill expression.

    • tetris.

  • gameplay making sure the player understands the story.

    • Detective games sort-of?

  • games that setup difficulty as an exclusive club:

    • trophies and achievements in general. getting over it summit experience.

  • games where the entire main story is a lie that the player can optionally uncover

    • dark souls has a major one, and it's old enough not to be a spoiler

  • morality where being evil makes the game easier

    • bioshock sacrificing littler-sisters. PapersPlease sort-of. Requires interactive medium to make it Easier for the player not just the protagonist

EDIT: actually, I'm going to generalize this a bit: "Science Sandbox" is a unique video game genre. Kerbal Space Program is the obvious one, but it also works for the soft sciences, as below.

It would be really difficult to do something like "The Interstate Anarchy model of international relations is true. Discover (or blindly follow) the constraints this places on a country and win, or miss (or defy) those constraints and lose.", as described in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts.

Choose your own adventure books exist, but I think that whole genre just fits way better with a game. Multiple ending options based on how you played just makes sense within a game.

Any stories that play off the actions of the player are going to be more powerful in game form. Bioshock is a good example here, but far from the only one in the genre. Dishonored is another one where choosing to be non-violent, or staying completely hidden will change minor details in the following levels.

More power and game changes depending on choices is the thing I'm pointing at. Because choose-your-own-adventure books can't change the experience depending on the choices.

Dishonored is a great example too. The game offers the player all these fun powers to brutally murder enemies, which makes the decision to endure a stealth low-revenge play-though aligns the player-as-human and player-as-morality-in-game decision making. Someone playing blind might not realize that the action-fight at the end is a consequence of their actions in the game.

Dishonored also has a unique video-game feature of choices that take creativity to recognize as a choice at all. Like the mission in Dishonored where Corvo signs up to duel a party-goer, and first to death wins. But the player can use sleep-darts instead of lethal-darts to win the duel without killing the other person.

games where the entire main story is a lie that the player can optionally uncover

You can do this in a book, like Pale Fire - many postmodern authors have tried with varying degrees of success. What makes Dark Souls unique is the minimal information you get and the diegetic storytelling (Silksong take inspiration from the latter and really ramps it up).

I think the question of difficulty and slogging-through as an emotional experience is closer to the core of the question, but that's also in books and films - look at Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below or Bela Tarr's adaptation of his novel Satantango, or Twin Peaks: The Return for TV. IMO the slam-dunk in this list is branching paths, like morality choices changing the game.

A notable difference I see between Pale Fire and Dark Souls is that there's a real possibility for a reader to miss the content of the underlying story as a medium.

When reading a poem like Pale Fire the reader can experience the story differently depending on order they read the poem and the footnote-narrative. But because the medium of the book presents all the story in the same up front manner there's no opportunity (at a medium level) to hide a second story underneath such that someone exploring every nook and cranny is going to find a new character that they couldn't even perceive without some skill/knowledge/exploration checks in the interactive domain.

A novice reader can simply open up page 140 of Pale Fire and plainly observe the words of Kinbote's commentary, whereas a novice Dark Souls cannot observe Gwyndolin's story or even know it's there ahead of time.

question of difficulty and slogging-through as an emotional experience [....] look at

I probably should, but cheeky answer is that I probably won't go the first-hand experience. While I enjoy the idea of it I probably won't walk the walk in this kind of thing.

branching paths, like morality choices changing the game

I full agree on changing the game itself, the way of interaction, more than the branching morality paths.

Choose-your-own-advence books have branching paths based on choice to experience, but because of the medium can't give a difference experience depending on the choice, only different words.

But there is a second story! Who is Kinbote, really? Did he kill Shade? Where are the jewels? Are the index cards of the poem actually in the right order? Is Zembla even real? I recommend this frankly brilliant and insane paper to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, and it's not at all apparent from simply opening the book any more than Gwyndolin's story is from looking up the description of his crown.

You're welcome to avoid that, I honestly wouldn't ever consider watching Satantango again, but for anybody interested in Seiobo, the first chapter is available free here and has bitten quite a few of my friends with the bug.

Choose-your-own-adventure books have some similarities but are too limited. You could, in theory, write one that kept track of variables, had branches that intertwine deeply, etc., but nobody actually would. It's a huge difference, I'd say bigger than that between a comic book and a movie. I'm not sure what you mean by "experience" - if you mean words aren't an experience, I recall people experimenting with choose-your-own adventure DVDs, but those have even worse capability issues than the books.

But because the medium of the book presents all the story in the same up front manner there's no opportunity (at a medium level) to hide a second story underneath such that someone exploring every nook and cranny is going to find a new character that they couldn't even perceive without some skill/knowledge/exploration checks in the interactive domain.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here, but isn’t that just the entire field of literary criticism? A reader who isn’t perceptive enough or doesn’t put enough thought into what they read won’t be able to fully uncover all of the implications of what was written on the page. For a non-academic example, consider the painstaking work that Gwern put in in order to show that a certain enigmatic short story by Gene Wolfe is actually about a town in which vampires “won”. And that’s just the most literal example of how new information or “lore” can be discovered in written stories by those who have superior “skill” in reading, to say nothing about higher-level concerns (i.e. rather than merely understanding what the work is saying, can I understand what the consequences of what it’s saying are, and whether or not I agree with them, and why?)

I was thinking that a game could present more author Text, while literary criticism can only offer alternatives through ambiguity.

I've had trouble understanding literary criticism before, so I intuitively see the additional text of a video game as more real (and therefore different) from literary implications. On reflection seems there's less difference than I thought

I've started Clair Obscur. I like how you can tell it's French even without a giant mangled Eiffel Tower. I also like how it's not another generic fantasy/sci-fi/post-apoc rehash, but something completely original. I haven't seen a setting this weird since... Death Stranding, I guess.

What I can't enjoy is the combat. The controls are all weird, the QTEs are annoying (even though I didn't mind similar QTEs in The Stick of Truth). I would seriously pay for a mod that adds a generic Final Fantasy/RPG Maker menu.

I find something about the...Frenchness?... off-putting. Uncanny. It's hard to describe entirely, but a lot of it is in the characters' facial expressions. Sometimes they smile and give each other weird looks and it feels very weird given the setting and the tone of people dying and the apocalypse and what not. But here they are rolling their eyes and giving each other weird French smiles like they're on vacation in Paris.

Reported for racism.</joke>

What's your beef with the controls? Maybe I'm just comfortable with the Persona 5 layout, or are you using keyboard controls instead of a gamepad?

Of course I am using KB&M controls, do I look like a console peasant?

Inventory management is a pain, worse that Skyrim without SkyUI: there's a perfectly fine character screen for managing your materia, but no, there's a separate screen for this and you can't just drag it into a free slot.

The confirm button in dialogue and combat is "move right", not "interact", so if you want to switch your target, you have to cancel the skill, select it and select the skill again.

You can have six active skills per character, but you have to split them into three banks.

If FF/RPGM Attack/Skill/Item arrows/confirm/cancel menu is bad because you want the player to keep one hand on the mouse for free aim and jump counters, why not use a radial menu that can be controlled from the mouse alone?

Wtf. Get a controller. You don't play third person games with kbm.

I hate controllers. I tried to play Hades with a controller and realized that I couldn't. With KB&M I can dash and attack without adjusting my fingers instead of having to move my thumb between A and X every 250 milliseconds.

I also can't adapt to controlling the camera with a thumbstick. I find FPS-style (forward is up) unintuitive, but flight sim style (forward is down) is even worse, as both regular and inverted X-axis feel wrong to me.

I hate controllers.

I also can't adapt to controlling the camera with a thumbstick.

I picked up this habit back when you had to enable mouselook in Quake console.

Very interesting.

I see that Quake was released in 1996. Personally, I was first introduced to keyboard/mouse-controlled action-focused video games by Claw maybe around year 2003, and quickly adapted to gamepads when my father bought a GameCube with Bush II's 2008 stimulus check. But I guess different people have different preferences.

I bought my first gamepad a couple years ago to play BotW and hated it. My son uses it to play Dead Cells now, so it doesn't feel like wasted money.

Input Deviceus 20:3-5:

Thou shalt have no other Input Devices before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any gamepad schema, or any input of any thing that is in joystick above, or that is in d-pad beneath, or that is in the console under the telly.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to developer's recommendations, nor serve them, for I the Keyboard thy Input am a jealous Input, visiting the iniquity of the peasants upon the controllers of the third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth console generation of them that hate me.

And lo, PCsus spoke, and asked:

Didst thou play Dark Souls with KB/M? If so, hatest thou thyself? Let him who is without joystick sin among you cast the first controller down. Also play Persona.

Okay, silliness aside.

The confirm button in dialogue and combat is "move right", not "interact", so if you want to switch your target, you have to cancel the skill, select it and select the skill again.

No it isn't? I've got it pulled up right now, confirm is F, QTE is space, and you can switch targets with A and D while you have a skill selected.

You can have six active skills per character, but you have to split them into three banks.

Not really new to me since I'm familiar with skill management from Persona and Clair Obscur's skills have more stuff going on, so it makes sense to me to break your skill view into pages for easier reading.

If FF/RPGM Attack/Skill/Item arrows/confirm/cancel menu is bad because you want the player to keep one hand on the mouse for free aim and jump counters, why not use a radial menu that can be controlled from the mouse alone?

I haven't hadn't used the KB/M controls until a minute ago but this sounds reasonable to me. That said, I don't know what the deal is with your confirm button issue but it's not part of the default KB/M controls. What keyboard layout do you use?

While I've got you, how do you feel about the diagonal party interface?

Pics related.

No it isn't? I've got it pulled up right now, confirm is F, QTE is space, and you can switch targets with A and D while you have a skill selected.

Yes it is. I play with ESDF, and there's no key binding that maps confirm to F that I can rebind.

Why hast thou strayed from WASD orthodoxy?

Because I picked up this habit back when you had to enable mouselook in Quake console and WASD wasn't a standard it has become.

I dunno, it feels like shifting your hand 1 key column to the left would feel better than coping with the nightmare of a control scheme you currently ended up with. When I played Dota 2, I used SZXC to move the camera rather than my usual WASD, and Clair Obscur is not so demanding on the precise execution of movement.

Started it this weekend too. I like the weird, but I am very disappointed with how mediocre the writing is. Pacing problems, basic facts (~known by the heroes) obfuscated likely only because they had no confidence in filling it out properly.

Bodies of previous expedition members all share same uniforms (so far) and the numbers on their armbands are missing - how do you screw this up so hard? Predecessors you are expected to feel camaraderie with, reduced to very liberally sprinkled props, literally denied their place in the history of the expeditions.

Still, I will definitely finish it.

Maelle is a bae, though. She's one of these heroines that promises to marry you when she's a kid and everyone dismisses it as a childhood crush and then she turns legal and proves everyone wrong.

No no no, she's like a sister, she would never.

I was rather glad you get that outfit from the intro so early for her.

I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.

Yeah I played it alone and it was kind of lame. Idk I got stuck at the part with the orcs in moria and just got super bored.

I picked up Return to Moria a while ago for free on Epic Games Store (who are still giving away free games weekly btw).

I first played it a bit solo (up until the tentacled lake lurker or whatever it was) and then restarted to play with a friend. While it was kind of fun to explore Moria alone and gave me a feeling of isolation, the game seems to be designed for Multiplayer. I eventually dropped the game because it didn't hold my interest. I don't think I'd go back unless I could play it with friends as the content itself feels kind of samey after a while.

Steamrolled Fixfox, a moderately clever take on the standard adventure game. A little less on the endless pixel-bitching, a bit more puzzler. Downside's that your AI helper makes Navi look like a latchkey parent, the pacing's a little slower than it needs to be, and the writing aimed for cozy and hit twee-as-fuck instead. I kinda wish it had leaned into the main gimmick a little harder -- there's a real strong theme about "you can just do things" that the game just barely grazes before swerving into You Must Identify This Toothbrush Before Use -- but it was still decently fun.

Been playing Valheim (colonialism simulator)

Super fun base builder, decently challenging combat, tons of biomes ahead of us.

Very much recommend.

People are salty about what seems to be very slow development, but I just started playing (I've learned you always want to be a patient gamer with flavor of the month early access games) and it isn't an issue for me

(I've learned you always want to be a patient gamer with flavor of the month early access games)

This is probably good advice. I hate ruining EA games for myself by coming to the end of the content, and not feeling motivated enough to ever return to the game in it's final form.

I've done it many times myself!

I always wanted to do a kerbal space program story run but got bored long before they added research and funding and missions

Maybe I'll fire it up this winter

My Steam library is like an Elephant's Graveyard where EA games go to die.

With my girlfriend

Alone would be a grind

I played that one! Very pretty, but the grind put me to sleep.

Yeah realizing there was a setting to be able to bring metal through portals was huge

Also realizing I could turn loot up to 1.5x (I'll probably go up to 2x, I'm so sick of mining) has been a huge win too

I found that multiplying the resource drop to x1.5-2 from all sources struck the right balance between grind and gameplay. It didn't trivialize everything, I absolutely needed to go dungeon delving on the regular for iron, but not an absurd number of times.

I think iron actually isn't effected by that setting lol, due to how is generated

I played that a little while back, definitely enjoyable game. Can't remember if I even got to all the biomes they had released at the time.

I might have eventually gotten a mod that allowed portaling metals. I remember travel just sucking up a bunch of my time in the game.

Portal-ing metals is a world setting now thankfully, I get the idea behind the tension of having to get the mine home (or build more established bases to smelt on site) but it's just all so tedious

I'm already doing so many chores to keep us alive, let alone all that travel with such a terrible carry weight

Copper+tin is the worst too because you lose metal at a 3:1 ratio on the way to bronze

I've still mostly been playing Silksong. It is fantastic. It is a great followup to Hollow Knight, a great example of a sequel: more content with just enough of a new spin to keep things fresh while still staying true to all the things that made the first one great.

The thing that most confuses me is: why aren't more games like this? At this price point. It was made by 3 people. Yes, it took 7 years and probably re-used a lot of development assets from Hollow Knight but... why aren't more games like this? This level of quality to price ratio. Why can't more studios make similar games on similar budgets? You wouldn't need to charge $60 for your game if you only needed to pay 3 salaries. And on the other side, there are lots of cheap indie games that are crap in comparison. Why can't all of the 3 people studios produce games of this quality?

Obviously there's talent and inspiration and stuff that varies and this might just be an outlier of 3 geniuses who are disproportionately skilled at what they do. But what are they actually doing differently that all of the other indie studios haven't been doing?

Lucky thing for us is that Slay the Spire 2 and Hades 2 are going to come out this year too.

It does seem crazy that Silksong is $20, which seems to me like it is mainly a reflection of Team Cherry becoming fabulously wealthy (surely, right?) and not caring at all about money anymore.

Slay the Spire 2 got delayed. 😕

It could be. It could also just be economics and consumer psychology. They have a lot of good will from how high quality Hollow Knight was at $15. If they bumped Silksong up to $30 it might have generated a lot of backlash at the perceived greed of a price doubling, and halved their expected number of sales, especially after factoring in the number of people who are discovering and buying Hollowing Knight for the first time as they see everyone else getting excited about Silksong.

It could also be a combination of both. Maybe they could have had 60% as many sales at double the price and earned 20% more total profit, but didn't care enough to squeeze out that last extra bit.

Yes, it took 7 years and probably re-used a lot of development assets from Hollow Knight but... why aren't more games like this?

Lifestyle business vs MBA business on one side: there are overhead costs to managing a business. It's easier to have one massive company (or a group of companies) that you put money in and it spits out a sequel each year than it is to manage 100 companies that produce a good game once every 5 to 10 years.

Indie life is hard on the other side: you need at least three roles to make a good game (sound and music are often done as a commission):

  • game designer
  • programmer
  • artist

That's up to three people that have to dedicate a lot of time and effort to developing a game. You can combine some of the roles, but then you really need to quit your day job to work on the game full-time. And if you succeed, your success won't scale: you'll be able to make another game in 5 years, but you won't really be able to make games faster or make two of them in parallel. If anything, you'll hurt other indie studios by earning all this money.

I hope you value information over good writing, for I only have the former.

I'm quite sure that the product of Silksong was the goal, and not the money it made. A lot of old games were made by intelligent people who loved video games. Many newer games are made by soulless corporations who only want money, and I bet only the programmers that said company hire likes video games. The managers and CEOs probably don't know much about games at all. I'm also very confident that these programmers aren't given a lot of freedom over the product, nor time to make it. If the end product is chosen by somebody who doesn't know video games and who wants to make lots of money, then it will be a generic copy of something which has been proven to work. It will deliver the minimum gameplay, and be designed to use every exploit to get players hooked to it (gambling, log-in rewards, loot-boxes) and make money (always-online-model, selling user data, requiring an account, DLC), and minimizing moderation costs (bad servers, no voice chat, strict rules, no user-created content, no mods, no private servers, rootkit anticheats, poor support). Such a game will never be great, for it will would be released before it could ever be polished to that degree; past the minimum viable product, ever new update would be dedicated not to add additional value, but to milk the current value. I'm not sure how Candy Crush and Angry birds squeezed billions of dollars out of two games which are actually clones of old, free flash games (which didn't even become all that popular, look up Crush the Castle and Bejeweled), but a lot of companies seem to think that they can do it too.

Arjin is correct, too, programming is pretty hard. And programming has this interesting property where bad code makes all the future programming vastly harder.

So, why don't we have more good indie games? From what I can tell, people who make Indies aren't doing anything wrong, they just stop too early. Most games I have on steam can be completed in 10 hours or less. It feels like I'm buying demos. All the legendary games which has existed so far (TF2, Garry's mod, Warcraft 3, Terraria, Minecraft, Factorio, Diablo 2, Roblox, and The Sims come to mind) are ones you can play for 1000+ hours. Notice how all these games have communities and user-created content? They have custom servers and modpacks. They basically allow the users to create more content, and content created by users has soul. Games which are merely good or great still have 100+ hours of content or a lot of replayability (Pokemon, older GTA), and multiplayer (Monster Hunter, Fortnite, newer GTA). By the way, if your mix all the traits of a popular game but lack programming ability, you get games like 7 Days To Die :P 11 years of early access! And despite being "released", it's clearly not finished.

You wouldn't need to charge $60 for your game if you only needed to pay 3 salaries. And on the other side, there are lots of cheap indie games that are crap in comparison. Why can't all of the 3 people studios produce games of this quality?

I'm not in the industry so my impression might be off, but there's a few reasons I can think of:

  • Programming is hard. For as long as I remember there was some gray-suit asshole that tried to come up with a paradigm that would make it work like all other forms of engineering - you get one guy that sits at the drawing board for a while, you pay him relatively well, and when he's done you send off the blueprint to an army of worker ants, that get paid peanuts. This had several manifestations like trying to ship IT jobs to India, or trying to ship India into the west, I think now they're hoping they can hand it off to AI. For whatever reason this has always been a disaster. I can't explain why, there's just something whimsical about the entire field, that makes it resist cookie-cutter solutions, and ends up requiring talented people who are quick on their feet. It's actually counter-intuitive for me, I'd expect IRL engineering would be the thing that would keep falling flat on it's face, due to the inherent dirtiness of the physical realm, but somehow it's the opposite.
  • Programming games is even harder. All the things I said apply to your run-of-the-mill, boring-ass, web applications. Games are insanely complex systems where a tonne of stuff is interacting with a tonne of other stuff in unpredictable ways (and that's before the user input is taken into account), in real-time. Every paradigm that was invented to make the boring forms of software engineering a little bit more legible, go right out the window in game programming - at least if the code from games that ended up open sourced is any indication. This makes it even more resistant to standardization.
  • You know what else games need? Art. That other thing that doesn't go quite well with soulless, standardized, production pipelines.
  • You know what big organizations really like? Soulless, standardized, production pipelines. This one is the actual core of your question, and I now realize I don't actually have a good answer. Why? I don't know, but companies will literally eat massive costs if it buys them a sliver of predictability. In theory it should make no difference, if you have a lot of money, you can just throw it on thousands of creators, and more than make up for the money with the few good hits you get. Maybe it's because the good ones start acting like divas? Once they make a name for themselves, you need them more than they need you. No self-respecting industrialist wants to be in that position, so they prefer to throw half a billion dollars at a game with a list of credits longer than a Holocaust memorial, and get a billion dollars back, and rely on a million mindless drones, than to get the same amount of profit for a fraction of the investment, and risk your drones getting uppity.
  • Why do all the other indies suck? Well, see all the "this shit is hard" points. Yeah, this one might have been made by 3 people, but I'll bet blindly that each of them is in the top <= 0.1% of their respective field. On top of that, finding 3 talented people is not enough. You need to find 3 talented people that get along well, and can work with each other.

For whatever reason this has always been a disaster. I can't explain why, there's just something whimsical about the entire field, that makes it resist cookie-cutter solutions, and ends up requiring talented people who are quick on their feet. It's actually counter-intuitive for me, I'd expect IRL engineering would be the thing that would keep falling flat on it's face, due to the inherent dirtiness of the physical realm, but somehow it's the opposite

I think it's the thing where, if you have a cookie cutter solution to a problem, that problem is now solved and your engineers should no longer be spending an appreciable amount of time on it. If you're a civil engineer, and you get really good at determining how to design supports for a bridge on certain kinds of soil, you can (I think) make a career out of it. If you're a software engineer, and you write substantially the same code more than twice, you have almost certainly done something wrong.

Yeah this is a good point. From a certain perspective, the computer takes the place of the grunt worker and does its job for free. Programmers are the guy at the drawing board designing something brand new, and then bam you copy/paste it to a million different people's computers across the internet without having to hire thousands of grunt workers to physically build a million copies in a factory. So we're comparing different levels across industries and then wondering why the hard to automate level (design) is hard to automate.

It took me until the last paragraph to figure out you're talking about a recent game, and not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_(1983_video_game)

Summer 2010 I decided that after done with everything for the day, I'd to listen to two new-to-me metal albums a day, drink yuengling, play 2-3 hours of Angband until I got good. I didn't get good, but I don't regret that wind down ritual.

Funny idea for a Victoria 3 mod:

  • Change the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence from nonnavigable lakes/rivers to a navigable sea zone. Change the Mississippi and the Illinois from nonnavigable rivers to a navigable sea zone. Add to Chicago a canal connecting the two new sea zones.

  • Change the Rhine from a nonnavigable river to a navigable sea zone. Change the Danube from a nonnavigable river to a navigable sea zone. Add to Neumarkt a canal connecting the two new sea zones.

Even funnier idea for a Victoria 3 mod:

  • Problem: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland overshadows the entire game as the world's sole superpower.

  • Solution: Recreate the empire of Charles V as an ahistorical balancing force. Make Nederland, Spain, Sardinia, and the Two Sicilies into <del>personal unions</del><ins>crown lands</ins> of Austria.

Having never played Victoria, what effects do you think this would have?

I actually haven't played much Victoria 3 either—I've just made mods and observed what the AI-controlled countries do with them in "hands-off" campaigns. But, from watching YouTubers play Victoria 3, I imagine that adding sea access to the interiors of North America and Europe would significantly increase those regions' economic output by alleviating infrastructure bottlenecks that otherwise cannot be overcome until railroads are constructed and expensively (due to the high cost of engines) maintained.

In the vanilla game, these navigable inland water bodies are represented with a flat +15 or +20 bonus to infrastructure. This is equivalent to getting a blockade-immune level 5 or level 7 port building for free, which IMO is a bit extreme.

Two things off the top of my head: that would result in AI Great Britain now teleporting 100k regulars (plus their endless tide of Indian peasants) into Missouri or Budapest every war.

And if anything, the +20 infrastructure bonus currently in game is laughably underpowered. That's one basic railroad, and says more about how little infrastructure ports provide, which off the top of my head i believe is 3. It also does nothing during a blockade. Blockades only have to block market capitals off from the world market to fuck over the whole country. I think it can try to reroute, but even the US or China only have two or three nodes to block anyways. The Brits start with like 5 fleets each bigger than anyone else save France anyways.

I agree with the great lakes canal, but I don't believe you can actually close canals you control like Panama during war. I could be wrong though, I despise the Vic3 war system and avoid anything resembling a fair fight if I can.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats