Bay 12 Games Forum

"Move along, nothing of value to find here"

Finland and Sweden are already EU member states.
EU member states have an obligation to help each other when attacked.

Provisions on the Common Security and Defence Policy - article 42 (7) of the TFEU

7. If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defence policy of certain Member States.

So doing so would drag basically all of Europe in, which at that point *would* be WW3 so give the USA and UK no reason to stay out either.

There's a reason Putin wanted the EU to collapse beyond the economical.

For the in-house voting itself you do have to factor in the effect of the political ideologies on voting motivations as well.

A conservative right is supposed to emphasize a small federal government, as such it's going to be a more frequent occurrence amongst them for members to argue on whether a bill goes too far and so rebel and vote against it.

A liberal left is going to more often be in the situation where they don't think a bill goes far enough or a bill does enough to solve the issue, and in that situation you're going to get a lot more votes for the bill from those people because they'll adopt a "take what we can get for now but push for more later" mentality.

So for aid bills in particular you can expect the lefter ones will tend to have more public disagreements on policy but more consistent voting when it comes to the table, whilst the right will have more 'one-off rebels'.

The beholder called them "mom", so I'm guessing it's one of those "created them from their own dreams and raised them" scenarios? Or from a friends dreams, but they 'raised' them?

Also a 'ooh totes evil creature by nature' like a beholder not being completely evil fits with OoTS style.

Pretty sure most sensible countries do it so that if your employer requires you to work a bank holiday, they have to give you another holiday day to make up for it. So you just get to take it some other day.

But apparently in the USA ideas like "paid annual leave" are considered either a bonus or communism, instead of like...a basic right, like they're viewed as in every industrialised nation but the USA.

I mean, there's mods like StarNet AI and StarTech AI that make the AI work pretty well, so it's not like Paradox couldn't easily take those mods as a basis and make the AI immediately human-competitive.

I think part of the issue and reason they can't just take what the mod does or contract out the mod developers is that mods like Starnet AI balance the AI so that it's competitive with humans who have played the game before even on the lowest difficulty that doesn't give the player buffs (player buffs risk teaching players bad habits, hence restricting them to the very lowest difficulty).

From a game design balance pov, the perspective they're taken for AI in Stellaris is balancing it to keep the game appealing to new players, so they'd ideally want an AI that on lower settings a new player can survive against, whilst is competitive on higher difficulties with more experienced players. Otherwise you risk players getting steamrolled when they don't know what they're doing and giving up rather than learning (think most people who try Dwarf Fortress).

The 'best' way to do that is completely AI behaviours for different difficulties, like Starnet-style being used for higher ones and 'current vanilla' for lower ones. That's a testing and maintenance nightmare though, which is why most games go the buff/debuff route for AI difficulties.

So it's definitely more complex than just "make AI good", because you can't make AI too good to always beat new players whilst also making AI good enough against older players. Hence the hack of giving a crapper AI buffs games use.

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As for Planet/Sector AI, something they've expressed interest in before to reduce micromanagement is to let you create a 'template' for the different planet types it can follow. So you tell it what a Agri-World should look like, and it'll build each one up to look like that. The issue is just getting the time to design and test that, since it'd to be a UI/System able to take into account all the different sizes and modifiers a planet could have in some way.

Pretty sure "a global federated democracy" is like...the opposite of divine rule by a khanate?

As technology develops and supply chains become more complicated, ever increasingly big regions by neccessity need to work with other regions and specialize their outputs to fulfil those supply chains. That's been the historic trend, I don't see why it wouldn't/isn't currently continuing to scale to countries as bigger regions.

And then you hit a point of scale where it becomes prudent to have a position whose main concern isn't the needs of individual regions only (and so puts those needs over other regions) but the overall system.

Maintaining each region adequately is still part of that decision making process, but it allows for oversight whose mental arithmetic doesn't seek to only maximize one area and for the decisions to be made that can only have an impact when made at a system-wide level.

A federated system allows each region a degree of autonomy, whilst still allowing a democratic process to hold accountable those who need to make the decisions for the overall system.