Yes, life was so dangerous before the telephone. It’s amazing anyone survived decades without them! 991, phaw, we had a bucket of water and a shotgun.
… in summary. The point should be that the next generation has an advantage over the previous, in all things.
Well, by their teenage years, why not all the reasons adults need smartphones fully accessible? Looking up information from authoritative sources? Emergency contact? Coordinating schedules for office hours?
Schools often simultaneously demand more from children than workplaces do adults, and give them less opportunity to excel.
I’m not saying work-inappropriate phone use should be accepted, but taking them away entirely is downright irresponsible. Just like schools who still demand students write on a notebook instead of using a laptop. Raise your hand if you had RSI-related issues for a decade or more after high school? We old people tend to forget how bad school used to be (and can be) for physical and mental health AND for learning.
I’m not sure I agree with how you’d be able to execute on that level or organized construction safely, but I think we’re also reaching the “impossible-to-be-sure hypothetical” territory, so I’ll concede the point for now.
I think my problems of cost and time still stand. It looks like adding rooftop solar with batteries to every building is still cheaper (on startup, and likely per MW) than nuclear plants. Regions that cannot support solar, onland wind, geo, or hydro can justify nuclear (at least unless shipping batteries or hydrogen conversion becomes cheap enough to compete), but I don’t think they amount to nearly 15% of the power needs in the world since they represent fairly distinctive regions with low energy demand.
I’m approaching that, but I have to admit I take my time and revisit towns a lot.
I’ve only gone to a dozen dungeons so far that were hand-crafted. There were literally hundreds of them in Skyrim. I’d love to get real numbers.
So far, I am enjoying the hell out of the game, if my lack of twitch reflexes is hurting that a lot. I keep having to juggle between ship upgrades (my Mantis keeps dying to small fleets more than 10 levels lower than me) and face-to-face. Usually by now in other Bethesda games, dying is rare. I’m too stubborn to drop the difficulty, though, so I suppose that’s on me.
There’s a pirate fleet in orbit around the planet I want to build my first output. Last 5 times I tried to go there, fleet keeps showing up and killing me. That’s somewhat annoying.
Some folks say there’s only about 25 hours of handcrafted stuff. I’m not late enough in to know for sure.
I had agoraphobia growing up. I know exactly what it is. And I had moments of it exploring the planets. I found myself hugging to keep buildings in range and not wanting to stray out into the great wide open. For some odd reason, I got more of that in Starfield than in NMS.
I’m also still fairly early into the game, so perhaps I’ll spend more time indoors than I have so far.
EDIT, also, it kinda is the opposite of claustrophobia in some ways. There are some overlaps and nuances (both fears sometimes include fear of crowds). I had a grandparent with really bad claustrophobia who never used an elevator in her life. Ironically, we could relate on a lot. But they were still opposite issues.
While I agree, I’ve been saying that about NMS for years. Not that we want to be comparing Starfield to NMS, of course.
So far, Starfield is exactly like Skyrim in space to me. There’s as many carefully crafted cities, and quite a few carefully crafted locales. There’s just a lot more space in Starfield (estimated about 500x more. Skyrim is 15sq miles, and those 1000 planets are each a couple square miles ingame). Sounds like there may be less hand-crafted content in Starfield than Skyrim, but that’s hard to tell.
I’m definitely not finding Starfield to be claustrophic. On the contrary, a bit agoraphobic.
Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).
That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you’re right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can’t, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world’s construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems “10x increase world construction capacity” was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.
Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can’t find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it’s dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.
I won’t bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I’m still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones…
As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.
My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.
Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.
I agree re: coop. They seem to be the way of the future. Some people I game with get really frustrated being less competitive than the rest in games like Dominion, where taking your time and planning out your turns has huge return but makes everyone have to sit and wait (and don’t talk to me, I’m figuring out whether I’m going to play my Laboratory or my Sentry first!)
For some reason, though, Pandemic goes over like a dead weight to most people. So much so, I’ve never bought Pandemic Legacy as good as it looks. Arkham horror is too crunchy for some, but just right for others. Spirit Island, surprisingly, has been a sweet spot for some recently. It’s a little hard to get good at, but the sliding difficulty scale is really granular.
Comparison with Kingdom Death? Interesting. I made a point of watching a few let’s plays of Pathfinder the Adventure Card game, and it seems to me as similar as Catan and Pandemic (which is, not at all)
The comparison I see is Townfolk Tussle, which I intend to someday buy for a faster/easier campaign.
Kingdom Death: Monster plays incredibly well solo, possibly better than any multiplayer variant except 4-player. It’s one of the reasons I bought it.
Eldrich Horror is on my to-buy list. My wife got really burned out on board games so I’ve leaned into my ultra-crunchy solo-friendly stuff, but she enjoyed Arkham horror for quite a while.
But yeah. Last time I played Catan I wanted it to stop by round 2. I have horrible dice-luck, so a game’s gotta be fun when I roll worst-case 5-10 rounds in a row. In Catan, it means I get all nerdy placing my towns on strategically sound intersections, and then watch everyone else play and I pass as numbers like 6 and 8 never roll for an entire game. My record is like the first half of the game getting no resources. Then getting one or two. Something about seeing the 3rd or 4th 2 roll give someone resources before you’ve gotten anything just makes you want to flip the table.
Interesting. Because you were doing too well? The only way KD:M gets a little boring to me is if I’m trying to min-max and only fighting the most appropriate monster for maximum return at each twist or turn. All those underleveled lions for 15 rounds, then all those antelopes, avoiding phoenix and any unique monsters, etc. I did a playthrough where I suicided extra population against most bosses instead of risking my better ones. Ok, that can get boring.
But throw all those in? Nothing quite like going for the overpowered unique phoenix and trying to land his death bonus on my character with Immortal disorder. Also nothing quite like that character making it, then constantly being targeted with “instead of damage, roll on critical injury table” and having to blow my party’s rerolls to save her. (For the record, no she didn’t make it to LY30)
But honestly, to each their own. I really enjoy it. And adding a few more hunt or showdown monsters (when you really “know” your base prey) is enough to keep an entire campaign fresh. And if not, PotSun and PotStars is a blast (said in Tabletop Simulator because I can’t afford all that)
I couldn’t agree more.
KD:M may have its imperfections, but I don’t think I’ve ever played another game quite so beautiful (if you’re into that existential dread type of beauty).
It’s incredible, and a blast. A full campaign (assuming you don’t lose halfway through) runs about 60 hours. So I get it :)
The digital version might be more accessible. I really wish they’d sell it without the minis. I just don’t have the time to paint minis, which means I don’t get the value worth in minis.
A lot of board game geeks hate Catan. I also hate Catan, but my reasons probably aren’t their reasons. So there’s that.
But I don’t entirely disagree. It’s complicated. I bought multiple games to find ones I’d love more. I find most people with board game obsession still have a favorite.
Like me, I’ve spent more time playing KD:M and Spirit Island than the next 5 combined.
Weird. I haven’t heard of that one yet.