site banner
SubstantialFrivolity  I'm not even supposed to be here today  2yr ago (text post)   2535 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022

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.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Didn't LW1 actually have elements of dynamic difficulty? It's been a while so I don't recall the datails, but I'm sure there was something.

Dynamic difficulty is something that I wish more games would attempt. Steamrolling and getting steamrolled after having invested hours into a campaign is always a very disappointing ending.

That said, IMO TI gets some things about it right and some horribly wrong.

The good: You can almost always come back from losses. You can always hire new councilors, take over small countries and work your way up, start a new space program.

The bad: And sometimes you can't, or the AI can't, and then there's still a very, very long game ahead of you. Sometimes the factions just run the Earth's economy into the ground and there's nothing to be done about the alien invasion. Sometimes you manage to unite all the Earth's nations into a few superblobs and retain control of all of them and all the other factions are now unable to do a damn thing. Sometimes you accidentally annoy the aliens prematurely and they lock down space forever, GG.

I stopped playing after the .12 nerfs, and didn't follow 1.0 at all, so they might have added it. But the mid-dev versions had a fixed difficulty curve timetable you could get ahead of: cheese an early supply ship and the Zhang missions, get early mecs & laser intis, and the rest of the game was just smashing endless UFO crash sites and milking exalt missions for meld.

Edit: I only just remembered that there was a reverse difficulty scaling mechanic in Alien Research, which made the aliens harder the poorer you were doing, and vice versa. If you were smashing it the aliens would fall behind on their tech curve and get even easier (even losing the ability to do terror missions). If you lost soldiers or failed to stop UFOs they would start showing up with 60 HP mechtoids against your basic rifles.

It was retarded and a big reason I burned out on the game.

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