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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.





  • 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.






  • AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all

    No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.

    Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.

    Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.

    Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.


  • ‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.

    They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.

    They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.

    Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.

    Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.


  • They aren’t the good guys. A lot (too much if you ask the community) of the fiction is told from the perspective of the imperium/space Marines, but that doesn’t make them the good guys.

    They go around saying things like “The rewards of tolerance are treachery and betrayal.” They clearly are not meant to be the good guys, even in their own stories.

    The problem is media literacy is so poor that far too many people look at quotes like that and think “that’s a good point”. Even the creators have put out press releases about how all the fascists are missing the point.