Bay 12 Games Forum

Pretty sure I said it somewhere before, but it makes perfect sense if you consider him to be talking about the ISPs when he says consumer. Presumably whatever the bastard's getting kickbacks and bribes from is the business(es) that they're buying from.

Hum, I've been struggling to seal the deal on the corrupt via infiltration strategy.

I think the time or two I've managed a plain enshadow via diaspora type win, I did it primarily through refugees and intentionally getting the cities of my enthralled lords conquered, preferably faster* than anything can manage to suss out the lord was the problem... and even if it isn't, after much of the lower nobility has been fairly well shadowed. If you can basically get the shadow chain to self-propagate, you're in good shape. Making small nations into what amounts to corruption bombs for larger ones, as they conquer cities and integrate parts of the leadership, seems pretty effective. You don't so much directly infiltrate as lace the world with hotspots and let things spread from there, and the fleeing refugees that spill out while a particular city is heating up just helps things (especially if you're using tranquility or dribblers, from what I've noticed).

... I guess basically, what I'd say try is, instead of stopping the small nations from banding together, take some time before you start in on the big one to make them a source of corruption. Hard burn sequential enthralls (getting them killed before moving on, to keep costs down) to make yourself a mess of messes. If they're spreading shadow, it doesn't really matter if they've banded together and are taking chunks out of your nation, 'cause that's still a net win for you

*There was one fun bit where I had a single lord end up getting like three separate nations destroyed/conquered, by repeatedly ruining the city they were in and being subjugated, the promptly working their way into another leadership position and doing it again. People knew the guy was working for the darkness, even, but their nations didn't tend to last long enough to vote for an execution, or were small enough the enthralled's vote could split the execution decision :V

A continent or two ended up getting mostly burned down trying to kill that guy. Was kinda' hilarious.

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... though I do have to admit, I've used the interpersonal/political stuff basically never, usually just focusing on enthralling/enshadowing one or two city lords and then beelining for population conversion. After that, the passive effects of that seem to work fairly effectively -- if you aim straight at it, even if you spike evidence through the roof and get the entire world to jump you, the damage will already be done by the time the armies arrive. Oddly enough, if fleeing refugees and conquered populations aren't exactly human, the shadow seems to have a relatively easy job of spreading, heh. Or in other words, infiltrating an already compromised population is a lot less trouble.

Doesn't work very well in practice.

Seriously. The worm swarm things are ruddy flimsy, and the nests reproduce so slowly they might as well not. Tried blowing up multiple 90+% infested cities at once, tried blowing up the most isolated city on the map, tried blowing up cities sequentially as nests began to get suppressed, tried a buncha' stuff, all for naught. Armies roll over the worms like they're barely there, most of the time, and the rest take losses but still reinforce and kill off the nests and their defenders before anything substantial can take root.

It's kinda' weird the worms can reproduce and infest a city of tens of thousands faster than they can pop out a single nest or swarm all on their own, tbh.

The only problem is, that nobody is saying that he ever mentioned Israel.

Hey now, trump said he never mentioned israel. That's got to be at least as good as someone else saying he did :V. _{no, no, somewhat terrifyingly I can't actually figure out if that sort of thing is appropriate to append to a statement that is entirely too capable of being read seriously}

*shrugs* Physical tender's already cheerfully dropping in use in plenty of areas. It probably won't entirely disappear, sure, but it will be very much unsurprising if it marginalizes to a very significant degree.

Though the hack proof thing is a bit of a red herring, really. There's no such thing as theft proof, either, but despite loss of who knows how much legal tender, people still invest their savings in something someone can just walk up and walk off with, with little to no barrier to re-use.

What'll decide it isn't security, but convenience, and there's largely a lower logistics and effort footprint for the consumer side on just about every front with digital. Same is true for the producer and distributors, far as I'm aware... the accounting et al issues involved with digital are approaching farcically lower than currency stuff. Companies are already looking at man hours and resources involved and trying to cut down on paper transactions, from what I recall. With all sides of the economic arena coming out ahead time/whatever wise, you can pretty much guarantee digital's going to win out, eventually.

Still going to be a while, though. Infrastructure to settle into the necessary channels to make the setup effort trivial, more cementation into social norms to use non-cash mediums, that sort of thing.

I would fairly cheerfully stab someone trying to replace paper money with coinage, tbh. Stuff's clumsy enough to use when you can fold it up and stuff it somewhere, no need to make that both functionally impossible and weigh enough to pull pants down.

It'll probably end up mostly digital in the near-ish future, though, even moreso than it has now. Stuff could probably occasionally kneecap your grandmother and the convenience of it would still win out in the end.

Given that Kushner is family, kind of hard to make a scapegoat out of that person.

Kinda' hard to cut off your kin's medical care, too, or screw with wills to cut out relatives, but it didn't exactly stop trump. To all appearances trump doesn't really give much of a shit about his family, particularly anything more distant than his own kids and maybe his current wife. And the last one's pretty damn questionable, considering the "current" is there for a reason.

If trump ends up feeling like burning kushner at the stake for some reason or another, there's not going to be hesitance or concern about dousing his son in law in lighter fluid and setting the guy on fire. Metaphorically. _Probably.