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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure I’d trust modern CA to do Med3 justice. The new style of Total War is just a different beast from the sublime RTW/Med2 era.

    Lots of little things changed, and it just ‘hits different’. Probably the biggest difference is just that every single fight after the first 20 turns will be a 20 stack vs a 20 stack, and every single battle is life or death for that army. It makes the campaign much faster paced - declare war, wipe stack, capture cities for 3 turns until the AI magics up another 20 stack.

    In the original Med2, since there wasn’t automatic replenishment, there were often battles between smaller stacks, even in late game, as they were sent from the backline to reinforce the large armies on the front. Led to some of my greatest memories trying to keep some random crossbowmen and cavalry alive against some ambushing enemy infantry they wandered into. The need for manual reinforcement led to natural pauses in wars and gave the losing side a chance to regroup without relying on the insane AI bonuses of the modern TW games - and I do mean insane; they’ll have multiple full stacks supplied from a single settlement.



  • They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don’t play.

    Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.

    Other than that I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.

    Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.







  • No, that’s not a real problem either. Model search techniques are very mature, the first automated tools for this were released in the 90s, they’ve only gotten better.

    AI can’t ‘train itself’, there is no training required for an optimization problem. A system that queries the value of the objective function - “how good is this solution” - then tweaks parameters according to the optimization algorithm - traffic light timings - and queries the objective function again isn’t training itself, it isn’t learning, it is centuries-old mathematics.

    There’s a lot of intentional and unintentional misinformation around what “AI” is, what it can do, and what it can do that is actually novel. Beyond Generative AI - the new craze - most of what is packaged as AI are mature algorithms applied to an old problem in a stagnant field and then repackaged as a corporate press release.

    Take drug discovery. No “AI” didn’t just make 50 new antibiotics, they just hired a chemist who graduated in the last decade who understands commercial retrosynthetic search tools and who asked the biopharma guy what functional groups they think would work.






  • Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

    I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

    The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.