u/DonQuigleone

My parents family home comes with a large back garden that frankly none of us makes use of, the whole plot being 3/4 of an acre. Based on some back of the envelope math, I think I could get in 1000 square meters of solar panels into the garden, which I roughly calculated based on figures from government websites to potentially yield 400 euros a day in summer if it's 100% converted to feed in tariffs.

Putting aside legal considerations, is this kind of project practical? I read online that Solar panels have a 4 year payback time, would it be considerably shorter if deployed at this kind of scale in an open field?

For information, I live in Ireland.

What are your favourite allied units to add to your armies? Which can make the biggest difference or shore up a significant weakness?

My picks:

1. Zhangu Wardrum: Not a strong unit per se, but critically doesn't really benefit from research or red line stat buffs. Meanwhile the aura over a wide area significantly improves your ranged and melee damage output of all your units.

2. Dwarf Warriors/Longbeards. If you're playing Empire these guys make for a much better frontline and most importantly your handguns can fire over their heads due to their... height.

Greetings. I am a person who doesn't have dyslexia, but I have been interested in the condition for several years.

I have been theorycrafting a method that might assist people with dyslexia to read by altering how the English language is written with different letters and spellings, and syllables arranged differently. Interestingly, I have not come across any previous attempts to use an approach like this to assist those with reading difficulties.

I am looking for volunteers who have moderate to severe dyslexia, You should be able to read, but it takes you a very long time or a great deal of effort, to read eg taking 30 minutes to an hour to read a page from a standard paperback book. Speakers of standard American English are preferred.

Please reply to this thread or PM me if you, or someone you know, is interested.

If you volunteer, I'm looking for a few hours over videochat where I'll teach you my method, teach you to read a few words and sentences using the method, and see if it works (or see if it is complete nonsense). I'd also like to experiment with different variations.

I'm 50/50 on whether this method will be successful, but I'm curious to try.

Given there's going to be big changes related to end game crises, I think certain factions are going to become much "spicier" to play. My personal picks:

Kislev: You're right on the edge of the Chaos wastes and Norsca. Right now, Kislev playthroughs almost feel "chill" once you get past the early game blitz of enemies. But I've a feeling the Chaos wastes are going to be a lot more dangerous. Fortunately you also have the most tools to deal with it and mount a full invasion.

Empire: I think even more is going to be invading from all sides. Fortunately with the addition of Toddy, Karl Franz should have a bit more manageable of an early game.

Dwarfs: the world's edge mountains are going to be a LOT more dangerous, first there's neferata in silver pinnacle, and then there's Nagash coming from the south. And of course the skaven crisis is going to have a lot more teeth (and fur... And warpstone yes-yes!).

On the flipside, I don't see Lustria, Naggaroth, or Cathay being especially more dangerous. Cathay in particular does not feel like it's besieged on all sides, and generally needs more enemies, though I suppose the great bastion might see more action.

I find Grand Cathay's generic lords some of the most interesting that any faction has access to. Most other factions have a predictable pattern: A melee lord, a Caster lord, and *maybe* a support lord.

Grand Cathay's I think are a bit more varied, and their generic lords are a highlight of the faction. I'm going to give my thoughts on each:

1. Lord Magistrate: Probably Cathay's best generic lord, and in my opinion the most fun generic lord in the game. While tissue paper in melee, it provides a wide array of different buffs, and the blue line is the best blue line in the game. Buffs the combat ability of heroes, cuts upkeep, gives a bunch of banners, gives a modest buff to chaff units, and the tactician buffs are significant. Gives significant MD and Reload speed across your army, and whistling rounds allows you to debuff the MD and MA of any unit. This guy, in combination of Alchemists, a zhangu wardrum and maybe a Beast clawspeaker, can cause a peasant spearman to outfight a unit of wrathmongers. Also, provides for by far the most flexible army compositions as you can feasibly ignore the red line buffs due to how good the yellow and blue line buffs are. Absolutely nuts, and tons of fun. Oh and he gives your entire army vanguard deployment.

2. Celestial General: I've never really found a reason to use this guy. Sure, he's a good melee damage dealer, but his sweep ability isn't available mounted and his army buffs are just 25% charge, 10% weapon strength and +10 armour. Given that Grand Cathay is much more geared around having a tight formation and holding, so these charge abilities don't feel like they mesh well with the army list, though they combine well with the new Tigermen units, but I feel like the Lord Magistrate is giving more value. Still, Grand Cathay lacks strong melee heroes, so if you want that capability in your stack, he's probably the best option.

3. Tigerman Sawai: I haven't played enough to figure out if this guy is better or worse than the Celestial General, however part of me feels he achieves the same thing better (albeit, you're locked in to one set of units with this guy). Certainly, if you want lots of Tigermen, especially Iron Claw Tigermen, this guy is the way to go. Probably has the best anti-large capability of any Cathay lord, and given Cathay has a lot of other tools for dealing with infantry and generally struggles with single entities due to a lack of duellists, this is a good thing.

4. Shugengan Lord (Yang): The buffs received in the last update are welcome, however it's mostly targeted at two late game units (Dragon Guard and Longmas), neither of which are top tier in the roster. The lore of magic however is great, Dragon's breath and especially Wall of Wind and Fire are great spells, Jade shield is a decent spell when a Chimera attacks your backline, and Contellation of the Dragon is a fantastic Nuke, while Might of Heaven and Earth is the rare Buff that affects a wide area (and given how effective stacking buffs is for Grand Cathay, this is a potent spell). On top of that you get a choice of some quite good bound spells (harmonic convergence and life blood both being excellent). However, Grand Cathay has so many casters among it's heroes, it's unclear to me if you really need one as a lord. Nonetheless, this guy is really good early game, especially against Skaven. This guy has single handedly won multiple battles against Clan Eshin for me.

5. Shugengan Lord (Yin): I generally prefer ranged play, and Cathay is very much a ranged faction, however, I've always found this lord a bit underwhelming. She buffs celestial dragon crossbows (though by the time you have that unit you've probably already won), but the lore of Yin is just not useful compared to the raw damage of Yang. Cloak of Jet because it only affects one unit feels mostly like a novelty with no practical use. Storm of shadows is great, but Blossom Wind is extremely difficult to target (and as likely to end up damaging your own units as the enemy). Missile Mirror also feels like a novelty. While Talons of the Night and Ancestral Warriors are useful. However, other casters can probably provide the same utility.

For me, the order feels like Lord Magistrate>Shugengan Yang>Tigerman Sawai>Celestial General> Shugengan (Yin), however I feel like it's very hard to justify taking anything other then a Lord Magistrate.

I've read a lot of reports about members of the Japanese royal family finding it suffocating to be part of the monarchy, with several of the women who married into it suffering mental health problems. I also read an older distant relative saying that no adult in the extended royal family would agree to be adopted into the family due to the massive loss of freedom.

My impression is that other monarchies might have their share of drama, but none of them seem nearly as miserable as the Japanese royals. European and middle eastern royals seem to live luxurious jetset lifestyles and enjoy the status of being a constitutional monarch or prince/princess.

That doesn't seem the case with the Japanese royal family. Why is this? Why don't Japanese monarchs seem to enjoy the perks that other monarchs do?

I've tried this mission 10 or 20 times at this point, and I just can't get anywhere with it. I've gotten pretty good with the faction's economy, but by the time I'm able to field an army and attack I'm being ganked by three armies all seemingly allied with one another, either alternately or all at once. I can defeat the waves of enemies, but they can replenish fast enough that I can't push through at all, let alone reach the center of the map and mine the Rimesteel. I've tried some other factions in conquest mode and none of them are this difficult.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is this map broken?

So I decided to start a game on x100 space elevator parts, and it's clear to me that I need to go much bigger in scale, and hence do lots of micro factories. Managing this once I've got access to trains should be easy enough, the trouble is before that and using trucks/tractors.

It seems my only choices are coal (which is only available in limited locations) or solid biofuel (which can't be automated), and compressed coal (which is even more limited then coal). But regardless of biofuel or coal, both are burned fast, at about a rate of 6-12 seconds.

In theory, the approach should be to have a separate vehicle refueling all of the stations, but this feels quite convoluted, and it implies setting up secondary truck stations to fuel the primary truck stations, or cleverly using smart splitters while preventing the station inventory being overloaded.

Anyone have any advice? Especially I suppose to bridge the gap until I get trains fully operational?

Otherwise I think my best bet is to set a location with coal/compacted coal as a hub, and run every route through that.

Also, any other advice for vehicle route planning would be helpful, as it's subtly different from trains.

It's well known that multiculturalism, despite the devs making it very hard to pass and other nerfs, remains among the most powerful laws in the game.

I had an idea for nerfing Multiculturalism: Army losses should create BIG radicals.

Basically, if we think about the rationale for restrictive nationality laws, a lot of it was driven by nationalism, and that nationalism was necessary to get soldiers to be willing to "die for their country".

In my view, Multiculturalism should then make it waaaay harder to sustain army losses as in a theoretical multicultural state there wouldn't be that "nationalism" to motivate pops to put up with the losses.

I also think following the research of nationalism/pan-nationalism subjecthood should have a similar but smaller version of this penalty.

If you're on multiculturalism, if you sustain big military losses you should get a big "pacifist" movement which lobbies for a "defensive only army" law, where you're barred from initiating diplomatic plays and can only have conscripts (like a worse more limited version of national militia) but does counter the penalty.

The only other way to counter the penalty should be to be a revolutionary state of some kind (vanguardist, anarchist, etc.), or to have a "state religion" law.

It seems that according to many this company is a meta pick. However, lately I've been having second thoughts.

The main reason people like it is the 5% pop growth bonus. However, is this really so important? The best ways to get more pops is conquest and immigration. For the latter then what really matters is boosting your *economic* growth as high as possible, and on that point the grocery company is weak with only so so industries covered.

I don't see it being better than steel, basic tools, glass/furniture, motors, paper and the mining companies, all of which do a great deal to boost strategic industries.

The basic food company has to be taken early to yield significant numbers of extra pop, but that means you're delaying much more useful tools or mining companies, which would grow your economy faster and hence get you to the point where you're drawing immigrants from across the world that much sooner.

I just had a game as Russia where I grew my economy to 3 billion, 500 million + people, running Laissez Faire, and I had only a few weeks of income in my investment pool.

I think to keep the investment pool from building up like this you need to do the following:

1. Have access to LOTS of raw materials. Basically you have to keep industries profitable for the investment pool to be willing to buy them.

2. Have the ability to build a lot of construction sectors. Obviously if you're playing tall this is a significant problem.

3. Probably what people miss the most: PASS SOCIAL WELFARE/MINIMUM WAGE LAWS! I think a lot of players are avoiding this as in the past you could wreck your economy. However the devs changed how this is coded, it now changes the *wage target* which is much more flexible. This has the result of making buildings less profitable, creating less investment pool income, increasing wages (which you can tax) and raising demand for a lot of different goods (which ups profitability and makes the investment pool more likely to buy them).

So it absolutely is possible with the right laws to deal with this problem.

Recently I tried some new shenanigans while playing as Japan, and happened on a new strategy you can use to make big profits in the early game as many different countries.

The key is trading with China, though in theory this can be done trading with other GPs as well, China is a bottomless market, and it doesn't trade with the world market, so it's easier done with them, though Russia is a close second.

This comes down to making smart use of good transfer agreements. According to a goods transfer agreement, you buy it from your home market, and sell it in the target market. You can also have the AI do the opposite.

China is fortunate in that it has persistent surpluses in the following goods: Fabric, dyes, grains, tea, silk. it also has persistent deficits in the following goods: Opium, Fruit, meat, luxury clothes, basic clothes, paper, tools.

Russia also has persistent surpluses in the following: grain, wood, fabric. It has persistent deficits in the following: tools, clothes, furniture, paper.

Trading with just these two countries, you can get them to transfer to you most of your basic needs (fabric, grains, wood), and then sell them back other goods that you create in your market. Doing this I'm earning about 40k net (and probably about the same again from my industries earning extra income and employing more taxpayers), giving me a nice surplus to spend on charging up my industrial development.

Later in the game, as you get strong enough to enforce treaty ports, this becomes a less useful strategy. Nevertheless I think this is a very useful way to do well in the early game.

In the past, the easiest way to exploit the AI was through money transfer treaties, now I think the best way is through goods transfer treaties. Get them to supply you with goods that make your government costs cheaper (wood from Russia is a great candidate) while supplying them with goods you have the ability to maintain artificially low prices on within your home market, ideally those that don't make them "stronger" (so supplying the AI with textiles is better then supplying them with iron or wood).

My impression is that a delta is where a river splits up just as it enters the ocean, usually being triangular shaped and shaped like the Greek letter delta Δ.

The Mississippi delta region is called a "delta" despite being nowhere near the ocean. Why is this? If there's an alternative meaning for delta that can be implied to the inland portion of a river, are there any other examples of similar "deltas"?

EDIT : For context, the city of Memphis Tennessee is often said to be within the "Mississippi Delta", but according to the more typical definition of a river delta, we would say the city of New Orleans (400 miles south) is on the river delta. I want to understand why the region where Memphis is located is called the "Mississippi Delta", and not just the region around New Orleans (also called the Mississippi River Delta).

After a few games I've noticed a repeating situation where I ended up going into significant debt in the early/midgame, where suddenly my investment pool stopped investing in construction or buying the buildings I want.

After some investigation I figured out the cause: repealing the guilds law.

The issue is that guilds forces you to have a significant number of worker owned buildings, and once you get yourself off of this law (and it is an awful law), your investment pool will start buying those buildings, which essentially vaporises the investment pools money for a period.

As a result, if you happen to start with guilds, you should approach reforming it with caution.

My personal thought is that you can take 2 approaches:

1. If you're a GP with laissez faire you can just power through it. You'll take on debt but it's not difficult to deal with.
2. If you're anyone else I recommend a *controlled construction pause", basically you need to build up enough trade centers (or alternatively do good transfer agreements) such that your construction industry will remain profitable while you reduce construction, and keep a large budget surplus. At this point you can use the budget surplus in 2 ways. First, you can build some bits and bobs. Second you can use your budget surplus to buy out those worker owned buildings, thus shortening the period where the investment pool is out of action.

Either way, if you have a lot of buildings, be careful before reforming the guild law.

In my games as Japan one real pain point is that I've found it extremely difficult to build any kind of power bloc short of brute forcing countries in through war. The only countries I can manage are *maybe* Vietnam, Siam or Burma (if any of them are even still alive).

I think the problem is the large penalty due to "lacking acceptance for primary culture pops" combined with only arriving on the world state in the 1850s or 1860s compared to European countries. Actually getting a recognised country in your power bloc, like perenial favourites Brazil or Mexico, feels nearly impossible.

The "easy" options would be either korea (but you can claims on their territory, so you're going to annex them), or states you force china to release (but usually their populations are too massive to ever be willing to join your bloc + they usually are released with isolationism as their trade law, making it necessary for you to attack them again 5 years later)

Anyone had any success in this area?

So I've played Japan a bunch of times in 1.13, and I think I've figured out the *optimal* way to do well.

First, it's actually a bit counterintuitive, as the key is to side with Tokugawa Yoshinobu and take the Taikunate route (if you don't like black sun Japan, you can just switch to a different power distribution law and it will be gone, but in the short run it's potent), which requires some skill to pull off, in that you need to have high enough legitimacy in 1850 to make him your heir.

As a result, my advice is, counterintuitively go conservative in the early game. You actually want the landowners to be as powerful as possible. It also follows a bit of a counterintuitive reform path (I put off repealing Serfdom for a long time).

Firstly, in any events you want to nab as many sources of free legitimacy as possible. However, this guide in my experience is not RNG dependent, in that by resolving the Tenpo crisis in the right way you can get 10 free legitimacy by taking a Balanced approach to reforms, this is not that difficult.

For Tenpo reforms, the shared reforms are all easy and should happen automatically from good play, so I won't address them. For the others I think your best bet is to get Rigid social structure (I had no trouble with qualifications) & Shinsengumi from the hardliner side, and on the reformer side get 3 level 3 urban centres and clout 10 Petit Bourgeoisie. In theory repealing hereditary bureaucrats from the reformer side would be better, but you need to get intelligentsia or PB in your government and I find that impossible.

Firstly, before unpausing do the following: Raise taxes to MAX. Keep it as high possible so long as you're over 50 for whatever laws you need to pass. Initiate a treaty with Qing for as much grain as possible and fabric as possible. Also, initiate a treaty with Russia for as much lumber and grain as possible. These two trade agreements should make it dirt cheap to build construction sectors and you should be able to get to about 50-60 CP. For these trade treaties make sure you set the length to 25 years otherwise they'll cancel after only 5 years.

For research, start with Romanticism, followed by stock market and then empiricism. After that, do whatever you like.

For law reforms, you'll proceed in this order: Shinsengumi (landowners + army) -> Rigid Social structure (landowners + Priests) -> Agriarianism (Peasants + Landowners + Priests). Passing rigid social structure just before will make landowners very happy making passing agrarianism pretty simple. At this point, start repealing serfdom and then passing public schools and later public healthcare, however there is no rush, once you pass the Taikunate it will be very easy to pass whatever laws you like. You should have Agrarianism by 1842, putting you in a good position to build.

For construction, invest in Kanto, Kyushu and Osaka (Kyushu has great resources, and Kanto and Osaka get a big temporary tax/decree boost from the Tenpo reforms).

For authority, Road building in the 3 above states, along with +literacy in 80% of your states. Use the remaining authority for consumption taxes.

With the above, I was able to build out a wood based construction industry in Kanto Kyushu and Osaka, and had enough financial headroom to start building up universities in the early 1840s.

Build yourself up until 1850. At that point, the event for instating Tokugawa Yoshinobu as heir will appear, and so long as you've kept the landowners pretty strong and took the middle ground approach to the tenpo crisis, it should be easy to put him in charge. At this point Tokugawa Yoshinobu will be 13 years old. You'll also most likely at some point gotten event allowing you to repeal Sakoku. Once Yoshinobu is heir, press the button and repeal Sakoku. This will start the Bakumatsu, piss off the Sonno Joi movement (who are extra pissed off because of the conservative laws you passed) and they should start protesting. After a while between civil war events tanking the current shogun's popularity, or their radicalism getting high enough, it will be possible to force the shogun to abdicate in favour of Yoshinobu. Yoshinobu should become shogun in 1853, by which point you can immediately get the Taikunate by first deciding the proper reform strategy and then petitioning the emperor (NOTE, when the emperor is restored your legitimacy will initially plunge, remember to put in place a legitimate government quick otherwise taikunate won't trigger).

With the Taikunate in place, after the first election you should easily reach 90%+ legitimacy with a modernizer in charge of the landowners and a bunch of other IGs in government making it easy to pass any laws you want. On top of that, the Sonno Joi will probably still be pissed off, which means the Bakumatsu modifier will still be there, which gives a massive -50% to law enactment time, which means you'll be able to pass a bunch of laws with each tick being under 40 days. In terms of ending the bakumatsu, passing all the laws Sonno Joi likes, and banning immigration should resolve the JE (it's a bad law, but later the industrialists will get super powerful making it easy to repeal).

Then, you can look forward to playing for the next 50 years with a modernizer in charge of the landowners. Once you've passed all the modernizer laws, you can dump him and switch to technocracy.

I think it goes without saying that by far the most consequential law category in the game is the economy law. While I think it's good these laws are so consequential and allows playing the game in really different ways, I think it also causes some problems that this category is so consequential:

1. It means much of the early game revolves around getting off of traditionalism ASAP. Nothing else matters to nearly the same degree.

2. It makes reforming the economy waaay to fast. It's absolutely possible to go straight from anemic growth under traditionalism to boom boom laissez faire.

3. It reduces player choice and gameplay variety by only having a small number of "fixed" economic setups.

I'd like to start a discussion as to what a better way to split this law up might be.

First I think the electoral confidence mechanic could be coopted to be used for economic matters. You could gain short term political gains by doing "crony capitalist" actions or gain long term advantages by being more "just" in how the economy is managed. This means the long term benefits of certain laws could be placed behind building up confidence in a given institution.

Otherwise, here's my way of splitting up the laws:

A) Central banking. Laws here would determine how easy it is for the government to take on debt. Perhaps there could be a mechanic for corporations to use part of the country's credit limit to pay for construction, which would correlate with how independent the central bank is (and with no central bank at all it's extremely dangerous to go into debt) which could provide an alternative way to use your credit limit. companies that borrow too much could require bailouts. Certain laws could also add a "debt multiplier" increasing the size of your credit limit.

B) Currency law: gold standard vs bimetalism vs fiat currency. While a really important debate in the period, given Victoria 3 doesn't have real currencies, I'm not sure how this could be included.

C) Extraterritoriality : whether the state can expropriate foreign owned assets, also whether domestic laws apply to foreigners. The most extreme laws should make it really appealing for foreigners to invest in your country (and maybe even give all countries automatic investment agreements), but it should generate LOADS of radicals and push your population towards radical politics. If you have a high foreign owned % certain IGs should get something like "imperialist lapdog" which makes them favour this law and make it hard to remove. It should also be possible to force it onto other countries like treaty ports.

D) Property laws: This would determine how pops can own buildings (the worst most backward law prevents any capitalists from existing), how easily property can be seized by the state and whether coops are favoured. It might be possible to add certain institutions like public stock. Countries where the state can easily seize property might see their investment pool prefer to invest overseas.

E) State planning: This would in some cases (eg Central planning) add an institution, and would determine how much bureaucracy is required for buildings, how efficiently government dividends are retained, how much regulation there is and how much the state can influence what is or isn't built and where.

Thoughts?

With how computer performance seems to have leveled off in the last few years, I think it's easy to miss that there are clearly massive possible gains to be made in computing efficacy, especially when it comes to thinking of the creation of future autonomous robots.

Consider the following physics quantities:

1. A human brain consumes 20 watts of energy. A modern top of the line gaming computer consumes 2 kilowatts, or 100 times more power.

2. Each eye captures maybe 100 Gigabyte per second. If you add all of the senses together it's likely able to process terabytes of information EVERY second.

No contemporary computer can achieve such a feat, and high powered complex robots struggle with seemingly simple tasks like walking or picking up objects, let alone understanding the world around them well enough to navigate around obstacles.

This to me indicates that the upper limit for the information a computer can process, for a given power consumption is far from being reached. We have not yet exceeded the capabilities of even an animal brain, let alone a human one.

Driverless cars in relatively controlled environments (roads), is probably the limit of what can be achieved given current computer architectures being used.

(Note, you can't make a 1 to 1 comparison between a brain and a computer, obviously, you can't use a human brain to play call of duty or do thousands of complex mathematical calculations in a second)

Anyone have any notion of what the next computer architecture that could be developed? Is it feasible that a human brain could be exceeded by a machine in our lifetime?

From watching the streams, I've spotted the following for Japan :

A grocery company with soy sauce (groceries) as a prestige good, and reduced mortality by 5%. I'm inclined to think this is better than the default grocery company (also has rice as a bonus industry:

Mitsui and mitsubishi look about the same but they seem to have a wider variety of bonus industries. Both remain excellent picks. Mitsui now seems to give production research and trade advantage, which is really good.

Sumitomo : lead, fertiliser, steel, produces prestige steel, also has tools, coal and iron as bonus industries. So so bonus (construction throughput). Good pick.

Yasuda: fertiliser, ports, sulfur mines, swift merchant marine, bonus is lower interest which is extremely good. Bonus industries are tools, textiles and coal.

Of the 4 zaibatsu, my sense is mitsubishi, Mitsui, sumitomo then yasuda is the order of priority.

The Manchurian rail company is the same but now has groceries and fertiliser as bonus industries. A interesting company but still overlaps with other, better companies.

There is also an electric company.

Anyone spotted any others?

EDIT:

Here's some others I've spotted:

Switzerland gets a Motor/Tool company that has bonus industries of Guns, Artillery and Automotive and produces PRESTIGE MOTORS. 1337 level.

UK Gets White Star Line: Just ports with shipyards as a bonus, but gives migration attraction, trade advantage AND a unique prestige merchant marine. Very nice, but I suspect the canal companies remain better picks.

UK also gets Ferranti Radios: Electric/Power + Tools/Motors as bonus and Prestige Radios. Gives extra innovation and textile industry throughput. Great company.

Malaya gets Guthrie and Co: Tea/Coffee + Tools/Wood/Rubber as bonus goods, giving trade advantage. Not bad. Doesn't require Malaya to be incorporated.

Netherlands gets: Tools/Motors/Shipbuilding + iron/steel/Autos. Great alternative to John Cockerill

Dutch East Indies gets Sugar/dyes/tobacco + Coffee/Opium/Tea as bonus industries. Has prestige coffee as a bonus good, that coffee isn't a base good seems like a mistake. Gives modest trade advantage, a good pick if you're playing DEI.