Bay 12 Games Forum

What about a reason for the falling sea levels? Like an advancing ice age? Could be another reason for the expansion to new lands since they're getting pushed out by advancing glaciers.

I don't know how much we really want to delve into the why of the setting; the whole concept sacrifices a degree of physical/meterological accuracy for the sake of style anyway, so trying to force it to make sense beyond what's player-facing is probably going to end in frustration.

So why not have the trappers trap penguins and walruses and polar bears all at once, and maybe train seals to act like sheepdogs to herd the hydrokine (or whatever "sea cows" end up being called) around, all in service to settling a receding ocean that's curiously slow to warm?

Coverage of the Cortez election is outright alarming. The news is acting like this is a major failure for the Democrats, when this sort of shift is exactly what the party needs to move forward.

It's exactly what the party needs to move forward in a direction you like. Right now there are as many confidently asserted visions of the future of the Democratic Party as there are Democrats and most of them are mutually exclusive.

If they die, they die.

If there's no risk there's no point even bothering with combat.

You erroneously conflate a lack of PC death with a lack of risk. Provided you can make them care about something other than their own lives, threatening that thing gives you a motivating risk without the attendant paperwork and player idleness of PC death.

Quote from: Trekkin on June 25, 2018, 05:27:48 pm

As a quick and lazy first-order approximation my general approach is to write a little Python script that randomly populates each age bracket (usually I use one-year bins), kills some fraction of them and ages the rest, then takes the sum of all animals of breeding age, multiplies half that by an effective clutch size, and makes that the new zero age bracket. Run that out for ten years and see what the distribution looks like for different death rates and clutch sizes, maybe?

As a first year biology student, this is the correct answer. Though you don’t need python for that, you can just use excel. Also, I wouldn’t recommend calculating the starting population with an RNG, that requires too much work. Instead I recommend you enter the starting values randomly yourself. You only have to do it once after all.

One thing I would like to add though is to give each age bracket their own unique death rates. That way you simulate high infant mortality which is very important if you want to give your dinsosaurs a high clutch size without causing a population explosion.

Man, I remember when having a year of undergraduate biology meant I thought I knew things. Cherish that confidence; it wears off early in the PhD.

There is more circumstantial information to support a very radioactive forest, than there is to support an overhyped forest.

That's not a binary choice, though; not only do different kinds of radioactivity affect tissue differently, but different dosages do too in sometimes counterintuitive ways, to say nothing of how the general mobility of the radiation source (I'm lumping several more familiar parameters into one blanket here) can affect what the actual radiation exposure of organisms at the site looks like, particularly over time. If we're going to talk about mutation rates and so forth, that matters.

It is perfectly acceptable to make broad estimates, provided they are explicitly qualified as such in a statistically rigorous way; it is even sometimes necessary to do so. The problem comes when people authoritatively claim things for which the data does not exist to support such certainty, and is compounded when they get defensive and start throwing out tangentially related citations, making spurious claims of bias and demanding other people prove them wrong. That doesn't help anyone learn anything; it's just noise, and noise doesn't reflect well on anyone. If it carries on long enough, people just learn to ignore their claims out of hand, on the assumption that they are similarly ill-founded. That's not a productive way to discuss anything either.

Not that reviewing this yet again is much better, but hope springs eternal.

What, how many sources do I need to cite before you guys are satisfied here?

Just one with the Sv/hr recorded in the relevant areas of Pripyat in 2007 would suffice for Il Palazzo, I think.

Not quotes, not anecdotes, not warnings. Just data.

Chernobyl populations have more. Because they do indeed accumulate in isolated population groups.

To be more precise, they fixate more frequently in smaller populations, because the probability a neutral allele becomes fixed in infinite time is equal to its frequency in the population (and selective pressure acts on that baseline). Since they all start in 1/population individuals, that probability increases as the population gets smaller. The actual rate of drift is another matter entirely.

Quote from: smjjames on June 22, 2018, 08:03:05 pm

Seems like it resulted from one person who was diving too deep and was an actual serious conspiracy theorist and it just got too serious for peoples and hanslandas liking.

More like a poster who appears to be suffering from schizophrenia started posting about his persecutory delusions. There is really no right way to deal with such issues on a forum, so I think the OP made the right call.

This, yeah. I tried to help, but there's not much to be done, frankly.