For Sci Fi, one thing that I see lacking a lot is: Use diversity alongside scale. The Klingons are a great example of this. At some early point, Riker notices, that most Klingons laugh unlike Worf, who he thought to be the typical Klingon but still throughout the Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager, Klingons were increadibly monolythic. There was the adjective "Klingon" and individuals who conformed better or worse with this archetype. A better written universe would have introduces much more sub-sorts of Klingon, both physically (because the Klingon offshots who settled on a low-g world with a thin atmosphere and strong UV-radiation exposure would have divered after 500 years allready) but even more so culturally. But this later is a problem, when you have rubber-forehead aliens: If the Alien culture is basically human culture, then haveing lots of aliens with lots of cultures just means, that there are no culture-species connections and we don't want that either. Thus to properly map an alien species culturally it's useful to have their cultures be truely alien and then also high variety that is really important for them within this alienness, so when you first see them from a distance, they are all alien but once you get to know them closer you realise the differences. The Warhammer Fantasy Elves are a good example of this (for as much what I know of them through the Total War Games), With High-, Dark- and Woodelves all having something essentially Elven to them but besides this being very divided.

Bro. This is the best analysis of two of my favorite games. I had to subscribe!

To me, the Imperium reflects ancient and historic human behaviours, and so their situation is sympathetic and tragic. It is a civilization falling victim to historical cycles and crumbling asabiyyah. It is easy to judge the authoritarian state of the Imperium as we are 21st Century enlightened liberal people, just like it is easy for us to criticize ancient Rome or China. What I think is far more interesting and saddening is recognizing that their situation could not feasibly be improved given their historical conditions. Authoritarianism is a necessity for the Imperium because it is fighting corruptive and subversive forces, and anything less would mean destruction. That doesn't justify it, but it contextualizes it as something that isn't done simply as cruelty. As it comes to the general thematics of grimdarkness and what it contributes to a narrative, I find that a grimdark backdrop serves to accentuate the power of virtue. That is, because victory is either impossible or pointless, the focus can be left on the heroism and virtue of the individual characters. The Fall of Cadia is emotionally moving, not because Cadia is an "important planet", but because the Imperial Guardsmen who fought on that planet demonstrated extraordinary courage. Or when a Kaskrin draws a combat knife to fight a daemonhost, when you and I both know that course of action is surely suicide, the point is that he is brave enough to confront evil no matter how disadvantaged he is, and the price he will pay. That is where I find meaning in the meaningless world, where there is only war. The T'au have exceptional potential to contribute to the setting in their own way. Many others have mentioned that their good guy thematic fills them precisely in the role of being the naive optimists. The good guys who lose, because they don't get how much the world sucks. I would prefer this role for them, than for them just to be secretly mind controllers. I also just love their designs. And that's why Imperial Guard is my favourite faction. Well, that, and I am always rooting for regular army dudes to defeat the supersoldiers, aliens or demons. Because they deserve it.

Have you tried the tabletop systems GURPS by Steve Jackson Games or Heavy Gear by Dream Pod 9? The former is a universal simulationist tabletop game which makes tactical combat far more interesting than D&D-likes, The latter is a straight up tactical wargame with mechs. I think you might enjoy one or both of these.

The Syndicate just reminds me of the same faction from Space Station 13

I noticed this problem in my own worldbuilding work and made it a priority to fix it. Studying economics and history helped a lot in understanding the scale of production and human society.

You know what the easiest way to disprove the "extremely high damage" idea is? Look at other weapons in the setting. If a huge axe or sword wielded by a walking mountain of muscles is only doing between one and twelve damage (plus strength), then a tiny piece of lead that goes really really fast probably shouldn't be doing all that much damage either. And much like we can handwave arrows getting stuck in the body and being crippling to remove, we can ignore the whole concept of bullets embedded in the flesh causing wounds to go septic. The only reason that people think that guns are these godly, instant-killing weapons is because of Hollywood. In real life, even getting shot in the head isn't a guarantee of death.

should give battletech a try

best game ever made

There's a lot of people correcting the "mistake" at 1:04, but... yes that *is* a flintlock. The games refers to them as "miquelet", but the lock mechanism is extremely similar to that of a flintlock, and essentially just denotes that the mechanism is exposed compared to later designs which kept all but the hammer and frizzen internal. ...though 1:22 is very obviously not a flintlock. Kinda confused how that error got into the video XP

This a video of a guy only having fun cause he found a mod that makes the game easy. I finished both XCOM EW and XCOM without expanding my squad, and was quite fun.

I think most people miss the point entirely. He summed it up perfectly it's sammy. Every game feels the same. Since 1.9 Paradox overall has turned into a bloated company that makes passable games. If you play other paradox titles 90% of the game is sammy and boring.

rewriting is alright if done correctly like with the dumb "gray knight / battle sister blood incident."

Ngl a lot of these come out as nitpicks and heavily personal preferences. Which is fine but i mean, maybe instead of saying "Risk of Rain 2 bad", you could have went "Risk of Rain Returns is good you should play it". But i haven't tried RoRR maybe it's the definitive version... And it appears to me that you're really cracked at the game or been using too many mods, RoR2 is hard, at least for me on monsoon or eclipse Idk I'd go in a long story about how impressive Mithrix whole introduction and fight was for me but im tired of writing

Uuuuhhhh DEMOCRACY OFFICER!!!!

I just got this game, how did I not find it earlier is crazy to me.

as much as I want to play more XCOM i think ill stick to vanilla until i can reliably finish it without saying fuck it and reverting to the easiest difficulty midway through the game

Small world i remember beagle from watching Arma videos.

tbh what i personally hate the most ab red dead 2 is that it's a linear game pretending to be this big rpg experience

personally i gesses 5000 or more im suprised you kill this few people in a video game tbh when ur avrage game gives you 100s of enemies per stage

You win me, whem you put battle brothers in the background, great video.

nice.

Just found the super secret assault build video dlc by pausing during that section of you refusing to believe you wrote praise for rapid reaction into your script.

As much as I'm all for narrative games, changing how wound rolls work simply doesn't make sense, I agree that missile launchers using krak missiles should have a better strength stat, maybe a 10 or 12, but making it so that a Guardsman's punch has a 33% chance to pierce the armour of Titans simply because at worse you have a 5+ to wound roll? 16,5% is already unrealistic but hey, it's only on the best result possible on a d6, the only other thing they could do to make it better was what The Old World did and you need a minimum strength to even be able to wound some targets

Just looking at Coruscant and the engineering that went into it, it is no wonder that the generals on the Deathstar considered Vader and his witching ways to be outdated and ridiculous. Because they would be ridiculous compared to the the scale of the Galactic Empire.

I’m writing a book with magic and there are guns in it. But a reason why guns are not as commonly used with other weapons (unless you combine them like they’re from RWBY) is because they’re extremely hard to enchant with only a handful of people knowing how to make enchanted guns. To enchant something, you need to enchant it while forging and crafting, not afterwards, with guns that are more complicated having to enchant every part down to the screws and springs and the exact enchantment or it won’t work properly. While a regular one would be used in wars, they’re only really useful when in large groups (excluding the big guns which can be a bit of concern to most magic users in most scenarios) compared to enchanted guns and ammunition. And because when characters that can just deflect bullets with their weapon or have aura that protecting them from multiple shots, you either need a lot of firepower or something special like elemental ammunition to trip them up. Also magic ammunition has a high probability of just exploding in non-enchanted guns, excluding a one family that know how to make them.

08:32 Yeah, collectevism was tried many times before and it always sucked (🇨🇳 🇻🇳🇨🇺🇰🇵).

03:56 The Imperium isn't really fascist. It is a totalitarian state that no sane person would ever want to live in, but not fascist or nazi. Since the the defeat of the Emperor, the Imperium was almost never under the control of only one man. Speciesism is not racism 🐄. The Emperor had dark skin and Vaulkan is black. The idea that all humans have to be under the control of one international state is pretty much the complete opposite of what nationalism is. Eagles were used thousands of years before the nazis and fascists. Double headed eagles 🇷🇸🇲🇪 weren't really used by fascists and nazis (as far as I know). They are more associated with the Byzantine Empire, Orthodox Christianity and Easter Europe. Also, I like Krieg and don't make fun of the flags in my room 🏳️‍🌈!

05:10 💀 Depends on which Overlord you want to talk about. Not all Necrons are slow in combat. The Nephrekh Dynasty Necrons can literally turn to energy and fight at light speed ⚡️. The Silent King 🤫👑 and Trazyn ❤️ are definitely open minded to the idea of coexisting and collaborating with other species (even though they see themselves as superior). Vitokh simply wants to enslave other species and not exterminatus them.

02:27 The Great Rift that Cadia's fall PROBABLY ushered in? PROBABLY?

One thing I always felt missing in XCOM was vehicles.

What was that Visual Novel?

I'm commenting this midway but I just wanted to mention that Star Wars' "basic" language is translated for our benefit. The idea is that in universe it's a mish mash of comprehensive sounds that sounds differently depending on who's saying it but is generally understood due to everyone following the same speaking rules. It's an immensely low complexity language and is just able to convey super "basic" ideas for interspecies communication.

Back to ROCK AND STONE

It's wild how validating this video is, it's like you've pulled the ideas out of my head and put them out into the world. Also a huge advocate for flintlocks in fantasy; my setting also has some magical/artifice components that increase the arms race between weapons and armor to make guns part of a broader wartime strategy that's heavily inspired by Pike and Shot + additional factors. Magic guns can also extend beyond just handheld stuff and become things like siege weaponry, too, or get around problems of the time period - for example, some magic implements that let officers pass orders to each other on the battlefield - that can change the rules of the world fundamentally without going full high fantasy and having people teleport all over the place or something. There's also so much worldbuilding potential. Which cultures or species developed firearms first? Was it access to resources or functional need? Maybe guns were developed as a dragonhunting weapon because it could pierce dragon's scales (but is terrifying because, you know, black powder and dragons). Or maybe one of your sapient species is exoskeletal, so they invested in armor-piercing technology far sooner than humans actually developed their armor technology. Pressure around technological advancement is such a wellspring of worldbuilding ideas. Thanks for putting more of these ideas out into the world!

i stayed away from this game because of the "haha genocide" 12 year olds in an xbox live lobby commentary.

0:32 I don't know how there's anyone talking about that fleet

55:31 we did find his son, he’s the last guy Bain murders during Hell’s Island (and the guy who looks at you at the end of Henry’s Rock)

boosting this channel

Cadia important because it was main citadel between Eye of Terror (previous location of Eldar capital, where sex Cthulhu was born, made hole between Warp and material world and it become main operational base of Chaos) and Earth. And if Earth fall then Astronomicon with it, and its a thing that allow warp travel with any reasonable degree of precision. So if that happen, all gazillion of planets that Imperium have will be in deadly trouble Of course, Imperium can't actually lose because you can't sell new space marine figures if their faction is ceased to exist, but still, counteracting of scale-related factor of inimportantness of everything is done by such infrastructure of galaxy-wide importance. And planets of Imperium are incredibly diverse, locally they have all and any kinds of societal and economical orders, Imperium officials have nowhere enough time to micromanage all of this so most planets just send goods and recruits for (sometimes even not awfully late) protection (but mostly to not be burned by revenge Imperial fleet) and thats it. There wastness of setting play good role, as it allow to write any kind of places for your Warhammer 40k stories and they all have place in big big galactic Imperium, and degree of Imperial official services being involved in local things are regulated by how important this planet or how close to important places. If it far enough Imperium could tolerate any bullshit as long as it isn't Chaos worship or direct prolonged collaboration with alien factions. And bulk of Warhammer 40k stories is how every faction is bad but people is not. People are fighting for each other, not out of being proud citizens of faschist galactic spanning shithole that, nonetheless, secure existence of humankind much better than divided, if better managed, planet-states. And many big shots also geniunely good people that look to improve imperium, its just very hard in the state of constant paranoia because of all magical and biotechnological means that enemies use to corrupt destruct Imperium from within. Motto "in the grim future there is only war" is incredibly stupid as its obscures most precious and interesting part of the setting - everything BUT war. Cultural and social differences between planets and how people work around them, everyday struggle of common people, intrigues between branches of overcomplicated imperial society, this is all much interesting than just wargame plot of "dudes blasting each other". Thats why i consider TTRPG Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader (Chaos Crusade too, as it allows to play same guys but fallen to the Chaos, while two other games of the series centered around space marines and imperial guard so they also much more fight-centered) best thing that ever happened with Warhammer 40k, highlighting all of its strong points. But be wary that it needs some homebrew tweaking, because as it happens with percent-dice systems, chances of success are just too small, even for experts in given task. (or you could just ask dice rolls more sparingly and auto-success simple, non dramatic things)

Fun fact 2: gunpowder is not an explosive _per se,_ it's a propellant. Getting a proper explosive shockwave out of gunpowder is harder than you think.

Fun fact: back in the day your musket/rifle would come with a mold for casting your own bullets.

Thoughtful video that i enjoyed much and last gunpowder take is music for my ears people like "oh no, gunpowder counters armor so it means all this knights will disappear, elves extinct, forests deforested and it become industrially dystopian like real life instead of beautiful ancient fantasy" meanwhile: everyone run in the full plate armor and with european two handed greatswords, both things are younger than fucking cannons in Europe full plate knight cavalry disappeared because of economy and decay of feudal system, not because it completely ineffective, in fact, cuirassiers existed much longer while being discount version of the same thing, by its equipment. Gunpowder means your world is getting into wonderful age of pike&shoot that can employ all medieval fantasy tropes while also presenting bunch of new ones, and magic and other custom stuff can intermingle societal orders whatever you like, if put some thought in But i think D&D as most popculture ttrpg isn't really want to be logical or grounded in any way, it wants to reflect as much Tolkienesque fantasy movies and computer games as its can so new audience can pick up more easily and gather to "play [like] Lord of the Rings/Braveheart/Warcraft" Pathfinder (aka DnD 3.5.5) on the other way have gunslinger class as well as other holepathings (and insane powercreep) so presumably all nerd gone here i'm personally Chronicles of Darkness' guy but shitstorms around classical fantasy settings can't miss me as all my friend have different preferences towards ttrpgs

just picked up Xcom Enemy Unknown for $3 and enjoying it more than games released today.

I think anyone saying “guns are overpowered” has never seen what medieval guns were like, because they were NOT great. For example the Hussite pistols were so inaccurate their main purpose wasn’t even to hit anyone it was the scare away horses.

DD 1.5

Invalid already for not using the polar patriots scout armor

The thing noone remembers about the clone wars is that palpatine was the leader of both sides. A quintillion battle droids is worthless scrap is your leader's telling you to deploy a few dozens of thousands here, another 50k there, at most, for a battle. Which is exactly what sidious does; he's playing an game of total war against himself, deciding every outcome and engineering every battle. Of course the clones won. He'd decided that long before.

Guys like you are why the xcom 2 plot to use the commander’s intelligence for the alien invasion was so successful

I do a lot of writing and my fantasy world has lots of guns. Not just black powder muzzle loaders either, but like, straight up fully automatic, 30 round magazine, rifle caliber guns. Also they are magic. Because having a massive mechanical spider rocking a rotary cannon loaded with arcane shells and controlled by a pissed off wizard high on meth with grenade launchers, is too fun to not include.