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.
- 124
- 1
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
- Courtesy
- Content
- Engagement
- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
- The Wildcard Rule
- The Metarule
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm almost done with it and all in all I've been very pleased with it. There are several design choices Earendel made for SE that I much prefer over SA though, mostly related to ships and platforms.
Reaching the derelict platform in SE is both a really cool moment. But it also serves as a good introduction to working in space as you can very quickly see which buildings you might want to rocket up. Its also provides a very tactile and satisfying experience of scavenging for new toys. In SA you launch your first platform and you get a popup about building out your platform. It's not particularly well explained, noob traps abound and unless you had the foresight to build a lot of rocket silos you will be waiting awhile before you even start building out your platform simply due to the time it takes to launch stuff into space.
SE's focus on doing research on your space platform also makes SE feel very distinct from the vanilla experience of working on terra firma, and it acts as a focal point to your interplanetary activities. You go planetside, you build a base, you rocket your new widgets back to your platform to do more science. SA has you shipping all your science back to Nauvis, it's the vanilla experience but more so.
All that said most of what I haven't mentioned is lightyears aside of SE. SE's planetary outposts felt like setting up mining outposts with 10-20x the busywork. Each planet in SA provides fresh and unique challenges that require novel approaches to factory design, especially Gleba. Interplanetary logistics mostly just works compared to the SE's which despite my best efforts I never managed to master.
I'm pretty iffy about quality, it's too good not to use, but simply unlocking introduces UI frustrations, never mind actually trying to design and deploy it at scale.
SE logistics gets a lot simpler once you get antimatter since you can make a minimalist shuttle design, copy/paste it a bunch of times, and then send them back and forth like super large expensive trains. (technically you can do this with rocket fueled shuttles, but then you have to worry about producing and refueling and having enough fuel capacity to get there and back). But that's late enough to unlock that you've already spent a few hundred hours dealing with the more complicated and expensive. methods.
I actually haven't played SA yet because I'm still in the middle of Pyanodon and am not allowing Factorio to update and break my mods. But I am very excited for what happens when some of the mod people take the new infrastructure and ideas in SA and then combine them with their crazy mod expansions.
Leave Nauvis and settle on the smallest non-dry, non-vitemelange moon in the system. You need to build a ground base somewhere, but the planet with a deep gravity well, no special resources, and many biters isn't that good of a choice.
Biters in vanilla are nothing, nothing. Just build walls and minefields. You've got robots for that. It's a set of pretty simple blueprints you copy & paste. Terrain is flat, rocks dynamited.
Finally knuckled down and put together an actually good item quantity balancer (no mods, loads a train car with ~30 different items in specified quantities. Pretty simple. Subtracts what's in the buffer box from what's in the train, turns every negative smaller than -10value into 1, and puts that to the filter inserter. Inverse filter inserter on the other side, with smaller stack, and it does the job.) If you spam this and segment the logistic network (using the same algo) to push non-train stuff out networks and push normal items in, you can expand endlessly.
Hell with that you could expand endlessly even with Rampant as with nuclear shells cleaning up what's actually 'Deathworld squared' becomes a possibility, your wall just has to be high firepower enough to deal with inevitable massive attack Rampant loves to spring at you. Once you have nukes, blasting the entire area around your base with nuclear fire feels so, so satisfying. (have to do this manually, It's way too much of a waste, algo isn't made for nuclear shells).
The only downside is the UPS drops to 10 for 3 minutes every 45 minutes when Rampant is busily moving the kill counter into the half a million range. But the fireworks are epic.
More options
Context Copy link
I actually think the no special resources is a point in Nauvis' favor for the main ground base, because it means the core miners give an even distribution of resources instead of overloading you with one thing for export (which is what I want my mining outposts to do, not the main base). But the gravity and biters are points against it. I chose it anyway and tolerated the downsides partly for sentimental reasons, since all my pre-space stuff was already there, but mostly for the respawn. If I make spare space suits for each planet then I can return home by stripping all my stuff, sticking it in a warehouse, and then suiciding and respawning on Nauvis. Makes it way easier to go exploring and building outposts if I don't have to budget for a return trip. I could be mistaken, but I don't think you can do that effectively with other planets, since if I recall correctly, the respawn options are something like (Nauvis, nearest space station, nearest occupied planet) or something like that, which will only work reliably if your chosen base is near (or you have shuttles from Nauvis to the new base I guess).
I chose to move to a moon just to see what happens rather than any well-considered reason, but I think it worked well.
The lack of core miners wasn't an issue given the ease of importing materials (I ran out of local copper and uranium, and local oil was very very insufficient) because the other planets had nigh-infinite amounts of ore. I got copper from the belt, uranium and oil from the oil moon, and all of the advanced materials from around the system. Low gravity is extremely important for using spaceships, as it allows you to use just one fuel tank for a full set of chests (to 300 integrity) and still have enough range to make a round trip.
I hadn't thought of the respawn trick, but I'm not sure if I would use it if I had. It feels like an exploit IMO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link