I just think we should start setting fire to politicians' homes and keep doing that until maybe they pick up on our hints that we're not happy about shit.
me, finally getting a chance to say something I’ve thought about for twelve days straight: oh, hey, that reminds me, funny thing, this just came to mind but
Fr though If you’re not staying up to date on the meme fall of Twitter, follow my page
so true
reblog to give a trans woman a yummy burger
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Stellaris is a fascinating mess of systems that I could talk forever about. For those unaware, it’s a grand strategy game that takes place in a galaxy filled with different alien nations. If you don’t know what a grand strategy game is then google it or something I’m not your mother.
Anyway one of my favorite little tidbits is one of the fundamental underpinnings of how diplomacy works, which is the relationship score. Your relationship with another empire is the sum of two numbers, your opinion of them (on a scale from something like -1500 to 1500 or something like that), and their opinion of you. These two numbers are themselves sums of several different factors such as diplomatic arrangements you’ve made, compatibility of political ideology, frequency with which you bathe, etcetera.
Now the part I want to talk about *specifically* is the basic diplomatic action you almost always have available to you: “Improve Relations”. It’s the most basic idea: you ship over a diplomatic envoy to shake their least slimy tendrils and say nice things about the way they’ve decorated the place. This improves their opinion of you, which as you may remember, makes your relationship as a whole go in the positive direction. Pretty simple.
Now the funny part is that. Well. The developers decided that obviously you need the opposite option. You need a way to say “I DON’T want to be friends with that alien empire, they bathe far too frequently for my tastes”. And what’s the opposite of Improving Relations, of course? Why, Harming Relations! So you. You send them an envoy. Whose entire job is to just… piss these people off. To shake the incorrect tendril and insult their aesthetic senses just because they happen to be a race of sentient cubes. You make them hate you, because you already don’t like them, and I guess you feel awkward about it not being mutual? And the funniest thing is that AI-controlled nations will, of course, use this option! If you’re trying to butter up the powerful, belligerent warmongering star empire next to you because you’re a race of peace-loving snails and you’ve spent this entire time building megamalls in fucking space instead of, like, military installations, that empire will go “oh no you don’t” and send one of their envoys over to start calling you a poopy stinky slimeball, resulting in a net zero change in your relationship score with them. Of course, this means that, technically, they have an extremely high opinion of you after a while, because the envoy you’ve sent over is affecting their opinion, and the one they’ve sent over is affecting yours, but you know, let’s not think too hard about that.
Oh, and there’s uh, already another mechanic for lowering their opinion of you. It’s the “insult” diplomacy option. So you can like, ring up the Borg or whoever, ask them if you can speak to Hugh Jass, and then hang up on them when they yell at you. So the whole system is redundant but nevermind.
Stellaris, everybody!