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.

But who will they find to play Norman Reedus?!

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.