anyway, here's me bullying an onslaught while his scrappy little friend attempts to imitate my strategy against me

(context: the industrial super-tech has requirements like "no atmosphere," "hot planet," or "soil without rare-earth deposits," so if you find a bunch of optimal garden-of-eden planets that's not actually optimal; you want the variety of inhospitable hellworlds, too)

sunk my myriad domain-tech treasures into this little four-planet system and it's absolutely thriving

Starsector!!

it's in long-haul early access but the combat, exploration, and econ-sim parts are all very stable & feature-complete (1.0 will probably have a lot of additional story)

an absolute steal at the $15 or $20 price point that the creator is charging for it right now

fractalsoftworks.com

anyway, i literally bought disposable tankers for some of the academy missions. (when the fuel gets lower you just scuttle the ship and keep moving)

even with an exploration-tailored fleet you see a lot of this (objective at the very edge of the larger "one way trip" circle)

(again, this is 175% normal map size)

i like it, all these distant expeditions you're following now actually *feel* far away, like they probably had stages and anchorages

playing with the upsized map (175% size) really forces you to think about your movement

like, this is 4:1 supports per warship and the range quickly dwindles if you start surveying every system you touch

"make your own slipstream from a black hole" very quickly became my new best friend

This particular exchange though – there needs to be a blacklist for these dudes.

the man would be absolutely in tears about "roll your stats in order" or whatever

he'd be sending you grok-assisted paragraphs about how a man of elon's genius needs good character stats to allow him to really express himself via roleplaying, &c.

we seriously need to re-establish a baseline for making fun of people with shit taste. like there are all kinds of problems with a canon defined by a stuffy in-group but we can do better than that and in any case the way the culture is right now is so much worse

demented toddler doing all this shit without looking even one half step down the road at inevitable consequences, then sitting there looking dumbstruck at the response everyone saw coming

I am certain there is a straight, bolded line between the government's anemic response to the causes of the Great Recession and the rise of blockchain/crypto bro/AI sloppers