jaycifer

I think it would be tough to nail down one thing. There are the clear comparisons to Victoria 2, which I haven’t played, but my understanding is that 2 is more “detailed” in it’s simulation of some things. There will always be people who don’t like changes from the last game. The military aspect is a lot less engaging than something like Hearts of Iron, but I think the intent there was to keep the focus on the economic and political sides of things. Warfare received a minor overhaul when I first tried the game that I’ve heard made things better, but it can still be a little frustrating at times.

Most of the complaints about the economic side that’s meant to take center stage is that your economy’s success boils down to how many construction points you can have going at once. That’s true, but I do like that you can’t pour everything into that without balancing the foundation needed to support the increase of construction, and just doing that could limit growth in other areas, like improving citizen lives, which could complicate your political affairs.

I feel like I’ve gotten a little lost in the weeds here. Overall, I think it has mixed reviews because Victoria 3 is still a work in progress. It’s a work in progress that I enjoy very much, but there is still room for improvement. I kind of fell off Stellaris between the Nemesis and Overlord expansions because it felt kind of bloated and repetitive, and I wasn’t wondering what kind of civilization I could play anymore. Victoria 3 has been successful at making me contemplate how I can manipulate the mechanics to achieve a specific outcome, even when I’m not playing.

With menu games like Paradox make, you gotta learn by playing the game. And by playing the game, I of course mean pausing the game every minute or two to spend way more minutes reading the tooltips, the tooltips within those tooltips, and then finding your way to a new menu you didn’t know existed referenced by those tooltips so you can read more tooltips!

It’s a beautiful cycle, and Victoria 3 has sucked me in as much as Stellaris did 7 years ago. If you have any questions or thoughts, I’d love to hear them!

With menu games like Paradox make, you gotta learn by playing the game. And by playing the game, I of course mean pausing the game every minute or two to spend way more minutes reading the tooltips, the tooltips within those tooltips, and then finding your way to a new menu you didn’t know existed referenced by those tooltips so you can read more tooltips!

It’s a beautiful cycle, and Victoria 3 has sucked me in as much as Stellaris did 7 years ago. If you have any questions or thoughts, I’d love to hear them!

Hey now, I understood that reference and I’m.. only.. 27.

30 years draws ever nearer.

You have some perplexing examples there.

I can agree eating something based on a desire to eat it and neglecting the thought of not eating it leading to being overweight.

When people lie, they usually do it to avoid negative consequences they foresee. Are emotions capable of predicting the future? I would say no, logic is, and it’s typically logic that determines lying to be the best way to avoid it. There may be emotional acting at play, but not emotional thinking, unless your lie gets found out.

What makes a relationship bad? Typically experiencing bad emotions such as anger, frustration, pain, and stress. These emotions would presumably push someone to leave, but if they talk themself into staying that’s logic keeping them in that situation, poor logic as it may be.

There is no interesting conversation to be had regarding religion here.

How is something being hard an emotional response? Sorry, since it hasn’t happened yet, how is calculating that something will be hard emotional?

I don’t understand how understanding another person’s emotional state is a moral response or how subjectivity is arbitrary, or how either could indicate that emotions are wrong or not useful.

You mention faulty logic being used to justify initial emotional responses but if a person is acting on their initial response I would say they’re not applying logic in the first place, though I do agree that logic is fallible and no person is capable of perfect reasoning.

Ultimately, and based on your first paragraphs you may agree to some extent, emotions aren’t something to be controlled or repressed, they are something to be acknowledged and understood, and often in that understanding the best response can be found.

When you want to eat, is it a feeling of genuine hunger or boredom? If the former, you likely won’t get overweight if you eat, but if the latter what would be leading you to be bored and is there something that could make you less bored? If you just really like food because it makes you feel comfortable you could exercise frequently to enable that emotion in a healthy way.

When a person determines lying to be the best option to avoid trouble, and they feel guilty, would that negative feeling push them to act in a way to better avoid thinking they need to lie going forward? If they don’t feel guilt, would you say there is something emotionally wrong with them?

If a person is in a bad relationship, would negative feelings not be what tips them off that something is wrong and prompt them to understand why they feel that way, giving them the understanding to express what they need to end that feeling?

What they didn’t mention is that Baldur’s Gate is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise. DnD is magnitudes more popular than it was when BG2 released, to the point of being at worst nearly mainstream. What has sold people on BG3 is being able to play their tabletop game in video game form.

I do think Larian’s pedigree and the Baldur’s Gate name were contributors to its success, but if there was one driving factor it’s the brand recognition of DnD with the marketing of an AA to AAA game.

Hell yeah, welcome to Lutheranism, where our motto is “sin boldy!”

If you end up liking Dungeon Crawler Carl, I'd also recommend the Completionist Chronicles by Dakota Krout, the first book is Ritualist. Based on what I know of DCC, they are both fairly silly LitRPGS.

There's a sentence in the article I linked to in another comment that, in the city the article was about, there were data centers for Microsoft and similar companies that had required high-speed internet infrastructure be built in town despite its small size. I suppose, based on what you said, that speed wouldn't be too essential but you would want stability to maintain a connection. Satellite internet probably wouldn't be great for that (maybe Starlink is?) in which case you still want to run some kind of cable.

I’ll concede there’s probably something to miners footing the initial capital to build the infrastructure, and if it’s in a remote area it may be prohibitively expensive for public utilities to extend the grid to it. But mining setups still require high internet speed connections to use the network, and I just have to wonder if installing that is a better use of resources than installing power lines to take some load off non-renewable power sources.

I dug up the original article: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/

In this case, they already were exporting 80% of the hydro-energy generated, about enough to power Los Angeles in 2018 when it was written. Maybe there are some cases for your suggestion on a small scale, but if a site is generating enough excess electricity to make mining worthwhile, why would it be less worthwhile to connect it to a larger grid?

There is a caveat to this. It’s been a few years since I read the article, but oftentimes the reason Bitcoin miners run on renewables is because they set up shop in places that have established local cheap electricity.

The example in the article was a town with ideal geography for hydro power, to the point electricity was cheap enough to sell it to the next town over. Crypto-miners set up in the first town and quickly began using more power, driving up the cost and eventually causing serious issues for the second town as there wasn’t enough electricity leftover to send their way anymore.