The ring is very explicitly a cheating bitch.

Honestly, the built-in cheats in the steam version improve it.

It’s the one that needs it the most, because it has many problems that are entirely fixable.

So many Draculas and not one of them has the canonical mustache!

He is returned!

I may have motivation to continue my own moloch of a ironworks…

I like a point made by acoup.blog about Gandalf’s use of magic: he states the effect as fact.

He tells the Balrog: You will not pass. The Balrog huffs and puffs, steps on the bridge and in the ensuing fight even (more or less) kills Gandalf. But you know what he doesn’t do? Pass.

He does the same thing later with the witch king (book only, the scene in the move is quite different): he tells him “You will not enter here”. The witch king taunts and postures, but you what he doesn’t do? Enter. I guess it’s a testament to the increase in Gandalf’s power that he didn’t die that time.

He is returned!

I’ve been slacking myself, seeing your posts will probably motivate me to pick it up again, too 😅

We use a similar rule at our table. We play whenever there is no more than one player missing.

The metaphor I use to describe it is like from a TV show: sometimes, a character is inexplicably absent from an episode and it’s often because the actor has other obligations.

So the character is simply not on-screen. It is not talked about, no reason is brought up and the character isn’t being played by anyone.

Nice looking factory my dude!

I’m currently building mine (also for HMF) quite close to that spot.

Not even a contest. Sadly it’s still a bit messed up on controller, because it conflicts with the (undocumented) button for slight nudging.

Scrolled by and immediately asked: “Is that a Supreme Commander T3 reactor?” And was delighted to see that it is! Great work! The game had some really cool visuals when you put the camera to ground level. Air transports in ferry mode were always my favorite, dropping off dozens of units without micromanaging.

It’s worth mentioning Return to the Tomb of Horrors here. It frames the Tomb in a whole campaign. Although so far, I think the tomb itself is the weakest part of that book.

Great to hear!

Build that vastly oversized monster factory!

That sucks. Is it tanking the framerate only when you look at it or all the time?

You can try lowering all settings to potato and use photo mode for the money shots, it will render at a higher quality.

You know the factory is good when it tanks your framerate.

Interesting writeup.

The tracking of how much of a resource node goes where was supposed to be removed by everything going to the big smeltery, so I only need to track how much is going in and out of the central smelter.

I noticed the locking thing when turning on the factory. Unfortunately this would mean that there is way to get two full belts of output out a train stop all the time. If the downstream machines always consume two full belts, there is never a chance for the container to fill up. That sucks.

Trains are very cool in any game that they are in, but their infrastructure, especially the stations, is so huge and unwieldy in this game, that I will rethink organizing my factory around them, especially since there does not seem to be a huge need to move large quantities of items over long distances. I could see them on a point-to-point basis when a particular set of resources isn’t close to each other.

Also Re: Aluminium: I’ve seen the recipes, seems like a good time. I’ve played Gregtech, so I’m used to worse.

How do you use trains in your setup?

I considered it. There is no shortage of iron ore on the map, it would just mean a few more trains coming in. By the time this thing would be at capacity, I would have Mk.3 Miners and then 9600 ore is just 8 pure nodes, fully overclocked.

I didn’t check the difference in power consumption, maybe that would be enough to tip the scale. Mainly I didn’t want to deal with head lift in such a vertical build.

Maybe I should note that to me, more machines and more machines are not downsides, but upsides. I like lots of trains and I like huge Arrays of machines :)

If you want to see some wild cringe, check out the inauguration of the Weltraumkommando’s (then) new headquarters: https://youtu.be/xzsxN4HNrNw

An actual Major General of the actual military enters to the imperial march, flanked by Star Wars cosplayers, two of which stay in shot the whole time during his speech. Clearly, nobody told them that the guy in the black suit is the bad guy…

The official march of the space command starting the first bars of the Raumpatrouille theme is actually the least cringe in that entire showing.

I only have the OSE SRD to hand, not the actual B/X rules, although I understand that they are largely the same: https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Dungeon_Adventuring#Traps

Searching a 10’ square takes 10 minutes, you have 1-in-6 chance of finding the trap (elves and thieves have more) - whole not written there, I would say this is for a generic search. If you’re doing something particularly appropriate for discovering the trap, the chance should be higher or automatic.

When you trigger the trap, there is a 2-in-6 chance it actually goes off.

Re: Needle trap: my point was exactly about skill based play: The Tomb of Horrors is targeted at experienced players, who would almost certainly see the needle trap coming, given how prevalent they were in those days.