Bay 12 Games Forum

Why Vanu?

Because purple is best color.

I have no idea if other voters thoughts were more complicated than that. I just went purplelaserspurplehovertankspurplevote. More or less.

Ahahahaha, several years of the stuff and I've still got good odds of stepping out of the driver's seat shaking.

Add all of that on top of what would be a crippling phobia of driving (because there is just about absolutely nothing more dangerous than driving, and the mechanics of the act drives my brain into a gibbering terror) if it weren't for over a decade of meditative practice, and you have me! At least forcing your muscles to stop trying to tense for extended periods is good practice.

I'd ask who you have to murder to get a decent public transport system, but not only do I know the answer to that, the feasibility of bring able to get enough 'em and still be able to enjoy said system afterwards is nil. Ah well.

Yeah, I can't exactly play the game, but theory crafting from watching a bit makes me want to suggest aiming a bit more strongly for industry boosts over most things, at least insofar as that FISD stuff goes. Aiming research at static industry boosts for your smaller/less I capable systems might be a thing.

The big thing I've noticed with ES industry is that it's very versatile, which makes it a good go-to resource. Being able to swap it at 50% efficiency for dust or research just makes it very easy to adjust to needs rather than be stuck with a specialized resource and, naturally, having a nice huge chunk sitting around means you can produce ships or improvements more or casually. I'm not too sure how useful dust is, except for countering upkeep and those cards, which is useful enough but not exactly overtly game winning at first blush. Food and science are what they are, but food's benefit seems to mostly cap when the system's full and science's benefits are less... immediate. Industry is the gift that keeps on giving, and there seems to be some easily accessible early research for it.

More isotope refineries where possible, basically, and then that administrator if it shows up. If it doesn't... can you just invest in the +labour ability and be able to sink some ability points into the static bonii industry/food abilities? If so... maybe. Supercharging early colonization would be a major benefit, and +25 industry in an early system is tremendous, from what I've observed.

Other than that... maybe some fleet consolidation? Efficiency is good, i.e. using one defender to take out multiply pirates, but a little more lopsided odds in your favor might help reduce attrition. Not sure how effective passive repair is, though, or what active methods are available (outside that card, anyway).

Still. Can't play the game, so actual perspective is lacking. Only other thing that tempts my neurons is nabbing up more strategic/luxury stuff -- empire wide bonuses are kinda' nice (and expand their effect going forward!) and I noticed there's a few colonizable systems left saying they've got somethin' in them.

Anyway. Interested in watching going forward. Only 4x I've really got access to right now is star ruler, and it's kinda' kicking my ass (but oh, how sexy build astroid mining fleets is!), heh. ES looks a lot easier, which makes it relaxing to watch

If I thought she was still alive, I'd totally try to send her a letter to ask. Maybe find out a name, too, to go with the line. Can't remember if one was mentioned...

I imagine folks'll still be dropping that line after the questioning dude's name has been lost to the annals of time, too. Famous, indeed.

Until they hit the turtle layer and get eaten, anyway. Cycle of lifethe sub-atom.

Ah... possibly I was watching an earlier version, then. What one fellow was doing was nabbing one of the labor heroes and snapping up that +25 industry on around the third hero level (+3 to labor talent, then the 25 flat), which looked like a pretty hefty boost in the early game, then stacking on other things (guy had a twenty/thirty percent industry boost at around maybe level five -- before turn twenty, iirc? On top of the other stuff.). Presumably there was similar stuff for other fisd categories. Fellow's heroes also only had a one dust/level upkeep, though, which points to an earlier version. Guess balance has shifted around. Carry on, carry on

If the existence of any non-empirical entity is irrational, how do you decide what the right thing to do is?  When you get to a fork in the road, how do you decide which way to go?  (In philosopher-speak, how do you derive normative statements from exclusively positive empirical statements?)

Faith is a lot trickier than religious belief and can include untested but not untestible propositions (such as "I believe going right will get me to place X more effectively"). It's still a faith claim, but of quite the different sort. A number of scientific theories and axioms fall under that umbrella. One of the larger issues with a great deal of metaphysically motivated faith claims is that they tend strongly to fall under the latter category -- you have no means of testing (and perhaps more importantly, communicating or replicating the tests you do make). So, you don't need untestable faith to decide which way to go, you just need have prior knowledge of, say, a map and extrapolate from that which direction to take.

There's also plain random chance, or simply choosing without sufficient justification for discrimination -- in the former case, you let some (sufficiently) random principle (coin toss, RNG code, whatev') choose for you. In the latter case, it's a simple principle -- if you have no reason to favor one choice over the other, either will do. The old philosopher's example is with an animal set before two piles of food, of equal size, quality, and distance from the animal, with no other influences on the animal's choice. Tellingly, the animal will not starve because it cannot choose between two choices in all ways equal, and neither will humans. You choose one and go along.

Just as the parallel postulate (or its negation) lets you make lots of interesting conclusions about space, belief in god (or any other normative principle) lets you make lots of interesting conclusions about the rightness or wrongness of certain behavior.  Unless you are willing to adopt some faith-based belief (christian god or no) how can we know how to act?

Belief in god isn't a normative principle -- belief in a particular religion's moral doctrine (Particularly regarding the implications of that god's existence) might be, though. 

As for normative beliefs, my preference is aiming for whatever has the least metaphysical burdens, if for no other reason than that less moving parts means less chance of breaking. Moral good does not require divine mandate, and can be rationalized by an appeal to social structure or self-interest (or a few other things as well, really). The simple answer is that there's not many conclusions reachable through religiously motivated normative beliefs that can't be reached by ones that aren't so motivated (and certainly none I've thus far been interested in holding)-- and in which case, why complicate things needlessly? Especially when there's a historically repetitive occurrence of needlessly assumed metaphysical burdens contradicting or interfering with themselves

I just kinda' like to start and stop my normative belief formation with "Be awesome to one another as much as possible," basically. Because I'd like you to be awesome to me, and assume that's reciprocal. When folks don't let their burdens get in the way of that, well, we're cool, y'know? We don't actually need more than that if everyone'd stick to it.

Talking about religion on the net never goes well, but believing in god myself, it's interesting to see why others lack faith.

I'm just going to leave a note here-people say the church has done so many terrible things in its past (crusades, inquisition, etc.) but what about all those benevolent services done by religious institutions? The Salvation army is a good example, or the smaller charity activities done by local churches.

I think the same about those as I do about non-religious charities, m'self. Good works are good works, regardless of metaphysical burden or lack thereof. Some of them are discriminatory based on religious beliefs, though, which kinda' highlights the interfering metaphysical burden thing.

I didn't say that.

Then I'm not sure how else to interpret this:

We lock people up in tiny concrete rooms with other people who may or may not be violent, giving them all nothing but the basic supplies to stay alive, for years and years and years. If you did that to someone who wasn't a criminal people would find you abhorrent. Indeed, we find it so abhorrent to do that to an innocent person that if it does happen the level of money they're usually compensated with upon release could be lived off of for many years.

But we don't think it's bad to do that to people who are actually criminals.

Unless, again, you're for a system which doesn't allow the acts implicit with that set up to occur -- which isn't our system. I'm with you so far as that goes -- like I said, that position does not bother me nearly as much.