u/Rtyeta

So as I recollect, in The High King Taran gets the magic sword Dyrnwyn back, hits a Cauldron Born with it, and that immediately destroys all Cauldron Born because that's something the sword's enchantment could do. Great!

But Gwydion had and constantly wielded that magic sword for ~3.5 books covering multiple years in-universe, right? He got it at the end of The Book of Three, used it against Arawn's forces multiple times in the ensuing books, and then lost it near the beginning of The High King.

Is there an explanation why the sword didn't just destroy all the cauldron born at some point during those years? We know Gwydion was using it, we know he was repeatedly fighting Arawn's forces, etc. And I don't think all the cauldron-born were hidden away for those 3.5 books or something. Even if they were, Gwydion did at least 2 raids into Annuvin as I recollect and could presumably have sought one out and destroyed them.

So I'm playing in my first game in which I wasn't able to stop global warming, and I'm quite confused about how building Pressure Domes works and what the timetable is. And I can't find information on the Alpha Centauri wiki so far, and what I've read online in people's comments seems to be at least partly false.

Here's what has happened:

Speed Building Pressure Domes

8 years ago, I got the global warming announcement. I read in someone's forum post that that meant every 4 years for the next 20, the sea would rise. So I painstakingly checked all my cities to see which ones said they were in danger (Is there a less time consuming and annoying method than right clicking each city to check info on its terrain individually? I have ~80 cities and that was really tedious).

And then I started building pressure domes in all of them, set my economy to 80% energy so I would have enough money to speed buy a lot of them, disbanded units when needed, and got the domes built within 4 turns in about 20 bases. Leaving 2 unimportant bases which were small and had been captured from an enemy with bad terraforming still working on their pressure domes when the 4th turn arrived. So I figured those 2 bases would be lost, but it had been impossible to get domes built there in time, and they were bad bases anyway. So I just evacuated all troops out of them on the 3rd turn and then ended the turn.

Nothing. No sea level rise.

I'd also been monitoring some enemy bases that were building pressure domes and had been pleased to see that they weren't going to finish in time and were thus going to lose those bases. But... that didn't happen.

Turn 7 Sea Level Rise and Free Domes?

The game went on. Then SEVEN turns, rather than 4, after the initial global warming announcement, the sea did rise. It ruined tons of terrain and wasted hours of terraforming improvements and everything sucks now, but... my two-undomed bases suddenly have domes?

Somehow, inexplicably they had domes created for them, but were still working on their domes and now hadt he message that one couldn't build another pressure dome because there already was one.

This seems to have happened to the AI too. All their bases in which they had failed to legitimately build domes suddenly DO have completed domes, and are still working on unfinished domes too.

So... maybe if you're TRYING to build a dome, the game just gives you one for free rather than the city being destroyed?

In which case I wasted a huge amount of effort and money speed building domes when I could have just been lazy and got them for free?

8th Turn Sudden Wave?

But then also on the 8th turn suddenly a base was destroyed by a tidal wave. It was some random enemy base. No idea why that one didn't get auto-domed or why that didn't happen on turn 7 when the sea level rise had actually happened?

Furthermore, that didn't happen at the beginning of the turn when forests and other terrain stuff happen/when the sea level rise had been announced at the beginning of the previous turn. No, it happened during the middle of the turn. I move a unit on one continent and suddenly I get informed that an enemy base on another continent has been destroyed by a tidal wave.

Nothing makes sense

So in this game I have random events turned off, therefore there shouldn't be any random destruction of buildings.

And this base has a surplus of +26 energy per turn, and my overall net income is hundreds of energy per turn so I don't think the base should be losing facilities due to lack of energy...

So why did a base just have a HAB Complex destroyed by a power surge at the start of the turn and tell me to increase my energy?

Seemingly out of nowhere, Deidre just called a meeting and wanted to melt the polar ice caps.

And everyone said yes, overriding my veto.

I have absolutely no idea why Deidre would want that, she has plenty of coastal cities that have no pressure domes.

This will be absolutely catastrophic for me and ruin all my terraforming and make me waste my whole economy for 20 turns trying to save cities from this stupid idea, etc.

Is there any way to know in advance when the AI will suddenly decide to do something stupid that will ruin the entire world and undo half the game's worth of progress?

Or if a council meeting is called, to get my vassals to actually vote the way I want? Given that I have two people under my thumb and I'm the governor, I should be able to block anything, but apparently I need to call them all up in advance and coach them on every single possible stupid thing the council could ever do?

Edit: I just checked and I didn't even have the option in previous turns to tell my vassals to vote against melting the polar caps. So apparently the instant the melt caps council action unlocked, Deidre immediately called a meeting and everyone voted yes. Is there a way to force a vassal to change their vote?

Notice here that the bottom view shows the city as having two super drones and about to riot, whereas in reality the top view shows that it has no drones at all.

One problem I often run into, which wastes a ton of time and forces me to micromanage bases more, is that the quick view of a base's happiness at the bottom of the screen is completely wrong. Again and again and again I find that it tells me drones are about to riot, whereas actually the base is perfectly content in the correct view if I go to the Psych page.

Is there any way to fix this and get the game to stop lying to me and making me waste time and Psych trying to pacify bases that are already fine?

A challenge run I've wanted to do for a while, because most Cataclysm Ironman runs I've seen disappointed me by trivializing the game with perfect stats or cheesing things. Or just made things too easy by using the super powerful classes and subclasses added in the DLC! I'll be tackling the game's toughest challenges without any of those advantages and showing that it can be done with just the base game's options.

In this episode. I'll talk strategy about my builds and how to optimize equipment and actions in the extremely difficult parts of the early game, and then we'll get through Caer Lem's infamous gauntlet of no-rest fights!

My whole life I've heard about how bad American bread is, and how much better bread is in [insert country here]. Often with exaggerated hype about how mindblowingly delicious and life-changing and enlightenment-inducing some particular country's bread is. But the more I've traveled over the years either in the U.S. or various countries in Europe (and a few countries elsewhere too), the more I think it's just nonsense and hinges on apples-to-oranges comparisons.

Is grocery store wonderbread terrible compared to what you can get in a European bakery? Yes. Duh! It's worse than what you can get in an American bakery too!

European grocery stores also have some terrible breads on their shelves. And for that matter, both U.S. and European grocery stores have non-terrible brands of sliced breads available.

The U.S. has bakeries too, and they make a wide variety of fresh breads and other baked goods. And I find good bakeries to be comparable. For that matter, mediocre bakeries (such as the bakeries within grocery stores) in Europe and in the U.S. are also comparable to each other

Bad brands of grocery store bread are comparable on both sides of the Atlantic. Better brands of grocery store bread are comparable to each other. Mediocre bakery breads are comparable. Artisanal bakery breads are comparable. Restaurant breads are comparable.

So I'm curious if there's a lore explanation somewhere that explains why mind worms (or even locusts of chiron or whatever) are actually any threat at all to a society that can make robots or make any kind of remote controlled or automated weapon system or whatever.

We're told that mind worms psychically incapacitate and terrify people so they can't fight back as the worm (presumably) crawls up their entire body and then chews into their skull and so forth. Sounds nasty and dangerous if your military is just human infantry walking around with guns or driving tanks in-person or something, sure. On the other hand, we're told that the worms themselves are not particularly tough and you can just burn them all up with a flamethrower as long as you don't panic, etc. We also see both from how Sensors work and also from several of the interlude blurbs talking about monitoring mind worm and fungus activity that it's possible to see mind worms coming and monitor them remotely.

So basically if you can just make an automated weapon system with no human mind to incapacitate or send out a remote controlled fighting vehicle or a robot or whatever, it seems like the mind worms should be trivial to destroy and pose no threat at all. And all of those things already existed to some extent even when this game was developed, let alone in the far-future setting where we explicitly develop AI technologies that should perfectly counter these worms.

Is there a lore explanation why they are still considered an existential threat in-universe even when human society is so advanced that people are about to transcend, instead of having become trivial to deal with centuries ago?

I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong, because while I can consistently beat the AI to most/all secret projects on Thinker difficulty, I often find it's difficult or impossible to beat them to the early ones on Transcend.

Last game, the Gaians got Weather Paradigm on turn ~25. I used the map editor tools to figure out how they did that so fast. Turns out they had one city with four mineral resources right around it, so that plus their transcend bonuses was just unbeatable.

But even when the AI isn't ridiculously lucky like that, it seems like two different AIs will always build Weather Paradigm and Human Genome Project by turn 50 or so. If I had decent luck with Unity pods and got a bit of money or an alien artifact, I can usually beat them to 1 of those projects. But there's no way I can beat them to both of those projects without ridiculously good luck.

This is a problem because I hate playing on Transcend without HGP, it just becomes boring and frustrating to be grow cities. And I don't like playing on any difficulty without WP since terraforming is the entire point of the game. If I can't get both of those, I usually find that I don't have fun at all, and I'd rather just quit than spend ~100 hours on a tedious run of things.

My current approach is something like this:

1. Play as Santiago. This seems to be basically mandatory on Transcend with aggressive AI. Otherwise I always run into an enemy Santiago within 10 turns and immediately lose to her powered up early units (or have to waste my precious early game production on military units and thus end up way behind). Santiago seems extremely useful anyway, since she can do population booms and has big boosts to 2 useful stats and a small penalty to one. Admittedly that one is useful for these early game secret projects, but that's a tiny factor compared to her other perks.

2. Don't build scout infantry, skip directly to colony pods. Get out at least 2 colony pods for each of my starting 2 bases before building anything else. I might get a scout infantry after that if my starting rover has gone off really far in one direction.

3. Research Biogenetics -> Social Psych -> Secrets of the Human Brain, which then lets me grab Centauri Ecology as my free tech. I find going Centauri Ecology first to be a bad idea on most maps, because I want to make more colony pods first, and it's useless to unlock Formers before I'm actually building them. The timing usually seems to work out very efficiently with this order.

4. I don't let cities grow beyond size 1 at first. I try to have them get to size 2 just before producing their colony pod. And have someone be a Medic for one turn to avoid a Drone Riot that turn.

5. After Centauri Ecology, I start getting Former -> Colony Pod at most bases, but sometimes am mixing in scout infantry or extra formers or an occasional recycling tank if that makes more sense for that city.

6. Formers usually make forests, prioritizing resource tiles followed by rivers followed by arid ones. Occasionally I'll clear annoyingly placed fungus or build a solar collector if I have a rainy tile with 1000 elevation or whatever

7. I research Industrial Base -> Industrial Economics.

8. I nerve staple all my bases at once and then switch to Free Market, so I have 10 turns of them being able to grow and produce more money and research.

9. When the 10 turns are up, I switch back to Simple for 1 turn, Nerve Staple them all again, and then Free Market again. This costs 120 money up front, but it seems to more than pay for itself on average. The extra Energy from all tiles for all bases gets me about 1 money per turn per base for 20 turns is something like 120 right there, plus the value of the bases being able to get larger and produce more due to nerve stapling.

10. Relatedly, I'm not putting my research rate above 50%. It feels like I need to prioritize getting money to have any chance of rush-buying secret projects in time.

11. Somewhere around turn 30, I'm starting to build secret projects in whatever 2 bases I can get the most production in. It's usually possible to have two bases from 5 to 7 minerals with a couple of forests and maybe a recycling tank.

12. I try to research Information Networks -> Planetary Networks. I'm not in any rush for that. I want to be able to switch to Planned for 1 turn later though.

13. Around turn 50 I hopefully have made enough progress on my secret projects plus have enough energy plus have found some alien artifacts plus have unlocked Planned. I switch to Planned to reduce the cost of my secret projects, and try to rush buy one.

14. Usually I'm able to get ONE of them. And then an AI grabs the other one I want and I'm not even close.

I'm looking for one more player for a character-driven campaign set in a low-magic, dark fantasy setting focused on exploration, mystery, and intrigue.

New players are welcome! What's important is that you enjoy

• creating characters with personal motivations
• engaging with the setting and the other characters
• roleplay and exploration alongside tactical combat

A few words about the setting and premise:

It is a time of tension and tumult. For years, the seasons have grown colder and the harvests leaner. The old order is beginning to crumble under the pressure.

There is resentment between the folk of the cities and the farmers who feed them, and between the Republic of Belvaras and its subjects here in a distant land separated from the mother city by a roiling abyss of smoke.

There are rumors of war in the north, and of strange creatures slinking among ruins where men dwell no longer. The night sky is lit by crimson falling stars which some say forebode the end of the world.

A boiling point has come in the village of Escalin, where a rumor of strange spirits called Ash Wraiths is spreading among folk already alarmed by poor harvests, political tension, and dread omens.

If interested, please send me a message with a little about yourself and what kind of character you would like to play.

I was recently laid off and I'm trying to figure out where and how to properly apply for benefits.

I live in Washington state and I worked remotely for most of my time with this company. Some years 100% remote, some 60% remote and 40% in their office in Oregon.

While filling out the application, it turned out that they don't seem to have reported my wages to WA, they reported them to Oregon. Which is weird to me since I lived in and worked from (a huge majority of the time) WA.

Since I currently show 0 hours worked in WA, my unemployment claim there says $0. I'm not sure whether I need to do some sort of appeal process, or whether I should actually apply in Oregon instead, or what. I've been trying to call repeatedly to ask about that, but it just says they're busy and hangs up, so I haven't been able to ask anyone.

I sometimes like to change my faction leader name and titles to some different version that amuses me like Computer LAL 9000 if I plan to go cybernetic as Lal. Typing that out at the beginning of every game is a bit of a nuisance, especially if I'm restarting to get a starting area that doesn't look boring to play.

I'm wondering if there's a way to save that as the default set of titles, at least for when I'm playing the characters?

This was probably the hardest mission of the night elf campaign to do deathless, though there was some stiff competition!

The Game's Rules and Character Goal

I'm going to be joining a game which is starting at level 3 (intended goal is to go to 20, but obviously I think it's unlikely to get anywhere near that far), using standard ability scores, but has two notable changes (and one minor one):

1. We all get one bonus feat

2. Multiclassing has no ability score requirements

3. Crits max out your damage dice instead of doubling them. (Which is a nerf to crits, albeit a minor one)

I have a character concept that I think fits well as either a wood elf or shadar-kai, so I'll go with one of those. Probably taking shadar-kai unless no one else in the party has access to Pass Without Trace, in which case I think Wood Elf would become a better option

I'd like to play a melee-focused bladesinger (I'm aware that being a control caster is stronger, but I've played too many other control casters lately).

I'd like some other people's thoughts and input about which multiclass dip to take, and the ability scores and feats and spells that will be effective in the levels that are actually likely to see play.

Current Build Thoughts:

Multiclass Dip: This is a very rare opportunity to play a paladin-bladesinger at all, or a ranger-bladesinger without needing to sacrifice a bit of Con for a bit more Wis. Both provide weapon masteries for Vex+Nick, and both advance spell slots. That'll be very helpful for damage later since several of the effective bladesinger damage boosts like Shadow Blade and Conjure Minor Elementals upcast very well. Plus of course having more spell slots does also boost my utility and my defenses and so forth too. So I definitely plan on taking a 1 level dip in either Paladin or Ranger.

Defenses: I can't actually be a bladesinger till next level, so for one level I'll rely on wearing medium armor and a shield and weapon juggling to draw and stow shortsword and scimitar. Then next level I can switch to bladesinging properly.

Paladins have good saving throw proficiencies, wizards do too, but rangers have awful ones. So if I go ranger, I'd actually start level 1 as a wizard in order to have good saving throws. Which means I'll have 2 fewer total HP with that route than if I go paladin. A bit of a nuisance now, though trivial by the higher levels. I guess there's also a trade off of Int saves vs Cha saves. Both somewhat rare but important when they happen. I don't really have a strong preference there.

Smites: The DM also said that since Tasha's Cauldron had given Searing Smite to Rangers, I'll be allowed to take Searing Smite if I do go Ranger, even though it doesn't have Searing Smite in the 2024 PHB. So I'll have a smite option with either the paladin or ranger dip. However, although smites as a bladesinger sound very fun, I'm not sure how often I'll actually want to use them in practice. They take a bonus action, and bladesingers infamously need a fair number of bonus actions to set up in combat. Plus if I take Dual Wielder (which I think I'll want to eventually), that's another thing that requires bonus actions and thus blocks smites.

Spells from the Dips: I'll have bad Cha and at best mediocre Wis, so I certainly won't want to prepare something like Command if I go paladin. Bless would be good at the early levels, but after that I'll need to concentrate on things like Shadow Blade more often. I'd have access to the other Smite spells, which would be kinda fun in theory, but I can't make foes fail saves against things like Wrathful Smite or Thunderous Smite. So probably not useful in practice. Divine Favor could be fun at later levels... IF I have time before battle to spend yet another bonus action to power up. A big if. Shield of Faith superficially sounds good defensively, but it'd basically just be inferior to the Blade Ward cantrip in practice I think.

So as I see it, paladin compared to ranger would mostly get me Bless at the early levels and then Divine Favor later. Nothing else very good.

Ranger would get me Absorb Elements, freeing up a wizard spell preparation slot. Entangle is... maybe ok sometimes. Even if enemies succeed the saving throw, there's still difficult terrain and sometimes that's pretty good. Speak with Animals is great utility. Zephyr Strike is fun and feels bladesinger-y but I think it'd be terrible in practice most of the time since it eats concentration and a bonus action. And then there's Hunter's Mark. Very strong here at the beginning, and then falling off later. Maybe not quite useless later on though! Since it doesn't cost a spell slot I think I could do something like cast Hunter's Mark and then an upcast Spellfire Flare to do ok ranged burst damage. Not great, but I can imagine it being an option I'll want once in a while since I have higher level spell slots to spend anyway.

Leaning Ranger over Paladin: Overall, it seems like Ranger's spells are likely to be more useful. Especially since I need to heavily weight the early levels where Hunter's Mark is good . Ranger also gives me +1 skill and a much better skill list. So that'll give me much more utility than paladin. Thus, I'm currently thinking Ranger is overall the way to go.

Origin Feat: Lucky is banned at this table, but I usually would prefer either Alert or Tough anyway. I'm leaning toward Alert. I think it's particularly good for a bladesinger because I really want to go first to activate bladesong if a fight breaks out suddenly, and if I do want to use a control spell it's great for that too. Or I could use it to let a specialized control caster take my initiative count to go first or something. I think it also fits the elven character a bit better than Tough anyway. I didn't see any other options that looked appealing for this character, but maybe I missed one.

1st Level Feat: Things get tricky here and of course it needs to go hand in hand with my ability scores. Currently I'm leaning toward picking Elven Accuracy. I have lots of ways to generate advantage with a familiar, Vex, and later shadow blade for starters. And I have good early game damage boosts like Hunter's Mark that benefit from having high accuracy to land them. And perhaps most importantly it doesn't cost a bonus action or something to use! Crits being a bit weaker in this game is a minor downside. But this character does still decently profit from crits since I eventually roll a pretty good number of damage dice.

Ability Scores: I'm thinking of Str 8, Dex 17 (then 18 with Elven Accuracy), Con 14, Int 16, Wis 10, Cha 8

Later Feats: I'm thinking Dual Wielder at character level 5 and taking Dex to 19. That's the point where Shadow Blade would be upcastable and suddenly become a great option with Dual Wielder, so good timing. Two 3d8 shadow blade hits, plus a nick. Very bonus action hungry though, so I'd want to do something else in fights where I either can't set up in advance or expect things to end fast.

Then Mage Slayer at character level 9 to get Dex to 20. My mental saves are not bad but they're not great either and mental saves are certainly getting more important then.

The one downside is that I'd spend a fair amount of time with 19 Dexterity, which feels a bit inefficient. I do lean toward having a build that works well at the levels I can guarantee I actually get to play, rather than one that is perfect at high levels I may never see.

Spells: Ranger covers Absorb Elements, free Hunter's Mark, and then I'd probably take Searing Smite to use when I have free bonus actions occasionally. Maybe swapping one of those out on days where I don't expect to need to block a lot of elemental damage but do expect to need to provide food or talk to animals or something though.

For cantrips I'd go with Minor Illusion and Message for their great utility, then maybe Blade Ward to spam-cast every minute if I think a combat might break out suddenly but I don't know where. That or Mind Sliver if there's a good control caster in the group I could support with that. I think at this level Booming Blade or True Strike or something would be mostly useless since I can't use them with Nick. I'll swap something out for booming blade around bladesinger level 6 when I can use it more effectively.

For wizard spells for now I'll of course take Shield and Silvery Barbs and Find Familiar. Utility Rituals like Detect Magic, Unseen Servant, Identify, etc. I'm leaning away from control spells for this character and am not impressed with the new level 1 wizard control options anyway. I was thinking of taking Spellfire Flare to use sometimes with Hunter's Mark since I have level 2 spell slots to spend and few other things that upcast well. And with elven accuracy advantage on the first blast from a familiar and hunter's mark on the damage and so forth, that's a decent ranged attack at this level.

I don't think I'll take Shadow Blade next level since Hunter's Mark would be superior to it for a bit longer. I'll probably take it at character level 5 when it can be upcast and I can pair it with Dual Wielder. From there, things will probably shift toward more conventional gish picks I think.

Suggestions? Thoughts?

I've been doing a deathless run of the Frozen Throne campaigns and have now recorded enough videos that I thought it was worth sharing one. This is one of my favorite missions nowadays, since the dual goals of protecting your base while also advancing the runner across an amphibious map filled with secrets is really unique and cool.

I've been having a frustrating time, in that it seems that (regardless of map size), I absolutely always encounter another faction within the first 10 turns. With the more aggressive AI turned on, I'm always at war within 10 turns. (I'm not even exaggerating about that. I mean I literally have not gone more than 10 turns without being at war in any game I tried to start over the last few days) I don't even have time to produce a single military unit that isn't a scout infantry before I'm under attack.

And it feels like early game combat is 90% luck. Particularly since I always seem to be next to the high-morale Spartans and never anyone else. (One time actually on a Large size map it was both the Spartans AND the University encountered and at war within 10 turns)

This, as I said, happens whether I'm playing on a normal size map or a huge map.

Is there a setting to force people's starting locations to actually be more than 5 squares apart? I'd kind of like to be able to actually research a single technology and build a single military unit before the fighting starts.

So I recently updated to a new version of Da Vinci Resolve (version 21), and the new interface seems to make it much harder than the one I was used to to efficiently change the speed of audio clips. I'm wondering if I'm missing an easy way to do it.

My projects often have two audio tracks accompanying the video one, and I frequently want to slow a few seconds of it down by, say, 10% to make spoken words sound clearer. Or conversely, sometimes I want to fast forward through an unimportant section.

It used to be that I could just select the 3 clips, go to the Audio tab in the Inspector panel, hit the checkbox for "Ripple Timeline" in the Speed Change section and then change the speed to whatever I needed.

But now Ripple Timeline no longer seems to exist there, so that's no good.

Instead the only approach I've found so far is to go to the Speed section in the main portion of the window, under the video. If I change the speed of an audio track there, it still won't ripple anything. But if I change the speed of the video track, THAT will ripple and push back the rest of the timeline. Then I need to separately change the speed of the audio tracks and THEN manually stretch them out to fill the extra space left by the previous ripple. This is all very inefficient and I'm sure there must be a better way, so I can do it quickly like before?

I've been trying to learn more about the mechanics and strategy of atrocities and nerve stapling in particular. Unfortunately the Alpha Centauri wiki about atrocities is pretty brief and has a dead link to a non-existent page with more info. Likewise I don't think the in-game datalinks had much of the info I've been looking for. Although I'm playing the game unmodded, I did find a little bit of info here on the Thinker mod documentation about the original game rules: https://github.com/induktio/thinker/blob/master/Technical.md#atrocity-details

If I understand correctly (more on some contradictory results later though), it's a huge problem if you commit a major atrocity. Every other faction will supposedly declare vendetta on you (Permanently?) and you'll (supposedly) be booted out of the planetary council, which seems strategically awful since I assume that means losing the benefits of being governor, not being able to deploy solar shades to stop global warming, and other problems if it happens. Plus the planet will get mad at you and your eco damage will go up by 5 at one step of the calculation, requiring you to build 5 more tree farms to fix your eco damage I think for every major atrocity.

There are 2 major atrocities: Using a planet buster, or committing more than a certain number of minor atrocities. On Transcend, that number of minor atrocities is more than 12. On Thinker difficulty the critical number would be more than 16, and so on increasing by 4 per difficulty. Notably, once you get beyond that threshhold, I've been able to verify that EVERY minor atrocity counts as a major one as far as the planet and eco damage are concerned. It's not 1 major atrocity per 13 minors, it's every single minor atrocity beyond 12 counts as a major.

However, it seems like some minor atrocities don't actually just add up one by one in the way you'd expect. Per that documentation and my tests, some minor atrocities only count once: using nerve gas on non-base tiles and nerve stapling in "bases that are assimilated".

Testing:

I was uncertain what "bases that are assimilated" means. At first I thought it might mean bases you've taken from another faction and which have in that sense been assimilated into yours (the ones that have that Captured Base status. I've never found any way to get rid of that and make captured bases ever achieve normal happiness...). Thus I thought this documentation was saying that you can nerve staple captured bases as many times as you want and it only counts as 1 atrocity, but if you nerve staple your own original bases, then each of those would count as an atrocity and push you toward the critical number. However, I just tested it and nerve stapling your own bases is perfectly fine. I just nerve stapled more than 12 of them on Transcend and all I got were the usual sanctions, no major atrocity.

Conversely, I loaded up a save where the U.N. charter was in effect and I had a bunch of captured enemy bases, and then nerve stapled them all. There was no notification from the game about that being a major atrocity or anything, and I wasn't kicked out of the U.N. but my eco damage absolutely spiked. WAY more than the +5 I was expecting, it was +22 or so in various bases (which is part of what tipped me off that every single atrocity past 12 counts as a new major one). Also even though I had random events off, a volcano erupted?! I have no idea what that's about.

But yeah it seems like each instance of nerve stapling a captured base counts as a separate minor atrocity.

Bizarrely, the fungus itself apparently cares whether the U.N. charter is in effect. Nerve staple a bunch of enemy bases with the U.N. charter in effect? You get a bunch of eco damage and mind worm attacks. Do the same thing with the charter repealed? The fungus doesn't care.

Anyway, I can confirm that nerve gassing enemy troops outside of bases is fine and counts as just 1 atrocity no matter how many times you do it. I did that hundreds of times after that game I recently memed about where the AI factions had overridden my veto and had insisted on repealing the U.N. charter. No problem there, so nerve gas troops in the open as often as you want.

Ultimately I'm left very confused as to why I committed enough minor atrocities for the planet to count it as several majors and give me a pile of eco damage, yet I wasn't kicked out of the global council or anything. Is that a bug or is the documentation and the wiki wrong, or what? Or can the governor not be kicked out maybe?

I'm also confused why a volcano erupted even though random events are off and there was no mention anywhere I could find that eco damage would make volcanoes erupt or anything like that?

Strategy:

It seems to me that the only minor atrocities which are useful to commit are

1. Nerve Staple a captured base which is too large and too precarious on food and short on energy to just fix with police or Doctors or Psych

2. Use nerve gas on enemy troops that are out on the field (this only ever counts once)

3. Nerve staple your own bases if you need to (this only ever counts once).

Obliterating bases, using nerve gas on bases, and using genetic warfare against bases seem like they'd almost always be counterproductive since you're ruining something you could capture and use. The situations where you want to do that seem so rare that I wouldn't want to build a strategy around an assumption that I'll need them. Maybe if an enemy base is at size 1 and I already have a colony pod in the area, I might want to obliterate the enemy one and build my own if it really is impossible to ever get rid of the 'captured base' detriment?

So it seems to me that you can plan on having 10 allowed nerve staplings of captured enemy bases on Transcend. That allows you to also use nerve gas on enemy troops as often as you want, and nerve staple your own bases as often as you want and still not exceed the critical number of 12 minor atrocities. 10 nerve staplings of enemy bases is probably plenty I would think, since it's unlikely there will be more than 10 enemy bases of such large size and poor food supply that you can't just make the drones content via other means. So you can probably splurge on a luxury atrocity or two by nerve stapling a medium-sized base where you just don't want to go through the expense of making the drones happy. Just make sure you never exceed 10. That's your atrocity budget until the U.N. charter is repealed.

Once it's repealed you can nerve staple whoever you want whenever you want, etc.. But I still wouldn't want to nerve gas bases or oblierate them because then the war stops being profitable.

Nerve Stapling Your Own Bases?

I'm wondering if it's a worthwhile early game strategy to just nerve staple your own bases at the beginning on Transcend.

Seems like you can do it as much as you want and only have it count as 1 minor atrocity, so it's not going to deplete your atrocity budget for stapling captured bases later.

The downside is sanctions negating any Commerce with you (first 10 turns, then another 20, then another 30, etc. However, in my own limited experience, Commerce is pretty useless. The amount is tiny compared to my economy, enemies are benefiting from it too, and since I'm playing with the more aggressive AI setting everyone declares war on me pretty soon regardless of what I do and that ends any commerce. Furthermore, in the early turns before you've met anyone, Commerce is literally worthless when you haven't met anyone and so there seems to be no downside to having sanctions then whatsoever.

This would also block the base from having any talents, but I don't think that matters at all unless you're going for a golden age, which you'd presumably coordinate substantially later in the game after getting some Secret Projects like the Human Genome Project and whatnot. So as long as you've let the nerve stapling wear off before the golden age, there's no downside there either.

I've read that sometimes you can't repeat nerve stapling on a base, with the drones becoming immune. I'm not sure what causes that to happen or not happen though. And the wiki says there's a possibly bugged behavior where you can actually just immediately nerve staple them again with the drones never becoming immune?

In any case, the upside of nerve stapling in the early game is that you wouldn't need to spend your precious early turns and early support slots building police or whatever. You could focus on just colony pods and formers. Furthermore, you could potentially grow a city to larger size in order to allow it to have more mineral production for racing to Secret Projects or just deploying more formers faster, and more energy production for research. Even just delaying building police for 10 turns seems like a decent benefit. And if you can make it 20, that seems massively valuable in scrambling for territory.

Anyone have any answers to these unanswered questions, or strategic thoughts about whether this early stapling makes sense?