u/ssj890-1

Someone is always fighting a war somewhere

+5 society tech and +5 unity doesn't seem quite enough.

For strength through acquisition and integration, would expect to get some set tech options/progress too, proportional to how much of their empire was assimilated.

Just realized how everyone else kinda became Pathetic after that 16k beast entered the chat with my 3 early game 1.2k fleets.

“I swear by my life—and by the mind that is its only engine—that I will never live for another’s sake, nor ask another to live for mine. But what does that oath truly demand? Not merely a moral stance, but an understanding of how wealth itself is born.

You have been taught that wealth is a thing—a pile of matter to be mined, hoarded, or redistributed. You have been taught that the economy is a machine, and that some men must turn its cranks while others dictate its speed. Both are lies. Wealth is not a stock; it is a flow. It is not a lump of ore; it is patterned information. And the economy is not a machine—it is a living, evolving, ever-creating complex system, driven by the only force capable of generating genuine novelty: the human mind acting freely.

Look at any market. What do you see? Billions of experiments, each one a hypothesis about value. Every entrepreneur who launches a product, every worker who chooses a skill, every consumer who spends a dollar—each is casting a variation into the vast fitness landscape of human needs. Most fail. Some survive. A rare few transform the world. That is the evolutionary algorithm of wealth: variation, selection, amplification. No central planner could simulate it. No committee could replace it. Only the uncoerced choices of independent minds can navigate that landscape, because only they possess the local knowledge, the private judgment, the relentless drive to discover what works.

And what is the fuel of this algorithm? Reason. Not reason as a dry logic puzzle, but reason as the active, creative faculty that imagines new combinations, tests them against reality, and learns from failure. Every tool, every technology, every institution that lifts human life above mere subsistence is a recombination of existing ideas into something that had never existed before. The wheel was a recombination of rolling logs and a carrying platform. The computer was a recombination of binary math and electric switches. The corporation itself was a recombination of legal trust and joint liability. Each step required a mind that refused to accept the given, that dared to say, ‘What if…?’

But your moral code has declared war on this process. Altruism—the doctrine that your life belongs to others—is a command to suppress variation. It demands that every mind serve the same predetermined ends, that no one pursue a path unless it benefits the collective. Yet evolution knows no such charity. In nature, diversity is not a flaw to be corrected; it is the precondition for adaptation. A species that eliminates all variation dies when the environment changes. A society that suppresses all dissent, all ambition, all self-interested exploration, will collapse under the weight of its own stagnation. You have seen it happen. Your factories idle, your farms barren, your brightest young men fleeing to the mountains—because you tried to run a complex adaptive system by decree.

The mind cannot be commanded to create. It can only be invited to create, by the promise that its owner will keep the fruits of its success. Property rights are not a bourgeois convenience; they are the amplification mechanism of the evolutionary process. When a man owns his output, he has a signal that tells him his experiment worked. When he suffers his losses, he has a signal that tells him to try something else. Without those signals, the system goes blind. Without the freedom to keep what you earn, the incentive to explore vanishes, and the entire wealth-creating engine stalls.

Do you understand now why I stopped the motor of the world? I did not destroy industry. I exposed the lie that had already paralyzed it. You thought that money was the root of evil. Money is a tool of communication—a token of the knowledge and effort that one mind has traded with another. To demonize profit is to demonize the feedback loop that tells a creator, ‘Yes, you have served human life.’ To worship sacrifice is to praise the destruction of value, the burning of the very information that makes cooperation possible.

There is no conflict between self-interest and the common good, because the common good is nothing more than the sum of individuals pursuing their own rational interests within a framework of voluntary exchange. That framework—the rule of law, property, contract—is itself an evolved institution, a set of rules that emerged from centuries of trial and error, not from the edict of any king or philosopher. It is fragile. It requires constant defense against those who would replace spontaneous order with imposed design.

So I say to you: Reject the morality of the looters. Embrace the morality of the creator. Recognize that your mind is the ultimate scarce resource, and that its freedom is the only source of lasting abundance. Let a thousand hypotheses bloom. Let a million ventures fail. Let every man seek his own advantage, and in doing so, unknowingly weave the tapestry of progress. For that is how wealth originates—not from the soil, not from the state, but from the restless, ungovernable, evolutionarily creative power of a single human brain, connected to others by nothing but consent.

I am John Galt. And I choose to live.”

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Always thought Atlas should have been iterated on again and again, like Lord of the Rings, etc. Trying out using AI to combine with new economic schools of thought.

When your Monthly income (not annual) drops to zero, you are now eligible for Medicaid - starting the MBA and leaving your old job is a 'change of life status'.

Best insurance ever - the closest thing we have to national healthcare. No arguing over bills - basically everything is covered.

Use your state's website and call to confirm.

This is such a weird narrative.

Scope insensitivity is the official term.

Playing an Inward Perfection empire.

Have gotten in wars and conquered planets - and all xenos are kicked out/displaced.

When conquering Synthetic Ascension planets, the pops stay - they just become robot servants. No rights, no recognized sentience.

What did we do to them? Did we destroy their uploaded personality and memory cores? Or are they living in a sort of slavery state?

What an amazing game. Rated E - for Everyone 7 & up

Can't see anything when using them

Which is better for an Atlas pilot - Atlas Affinity or AC20 Affinity?

Precise seems to be the god stat - that guy picks heads - saving lots of firing cycles.

How did they tune it? Haven't tried 4.3 yet.

The GC gave me the no term limit, all the buffs, etc, but never always reject the Declare AE Crisis - even when they are getting mauled. (Even the main maul-ee votes no).

Is the cost of Declaring Crisis that high? Or are they waiting for me to do it myself?