It’s a mix of strategy and role-playing. Sure if you want to survive on higher difficulties, you probably need a build that is meta. But on medium difficulties or lower you can pretty much roleplay your empire as you like and there’s many mechanics in the game that help with this. Your empire can be a democratic haven for all, a mega corporation, a machine hivemind forcefully assimilating organics into its network…and much more.

There’s also a great exploration aspect of the game. Your exploration vessels regularly find anomalies that tell a neat little story and provide bonuses to your empire (which can range from a small resource bonus to making one of your leaders immortal).

Of course, there’s also the power fantasy. You start with just one planet, but you will quickly expand throughout the galaxy. You can then wage war against other empires, build a federation together with them or convince the galactic community to crown you as Emperor of the entire galaxy. But the game also regularly throws adversaries at you if the AI empires are starting to become no match for you, may it be one of the space fauna suddenly becoming extremely hostile or a Great Khan uniting a marauder horde and demanding everyone to become their vassal.

It is also rare that a bad outcome leads to a straight loss. Losing a war (usually) does not doom your empire but you only lose a bit of territory or get vassalized, both giving you ample opportunities to build up your strength again or make allies to stand together against an enemy.

Stellaris. I’m almost at 1400 hours in the game and while I now play it a lot less often than in the first 1000 hours, I still get the itch to play it again a few times a year.

USA didn’t vote for a female president for the first time but at least you now have a male first lady for the first time.

Signs and stuff I can kind of understand. Our world is chock full of things (ads) that try to get our attention at any point. At some point you develop an internal adblock and since 98% is irrelevant it is a reasonable drawback that the remaining 2% gets filtered out as well.

Barrier of entry is marginally lower. With mastodon you’ll have to make a decision on what instance you’re creating your account. With Bluesky there’s just Bluesky.

Obviously, Musk wants to be the shadow president of the USA but I don’t think it’ll play out as he hopes.

Nah, there’s a pretty huge list of “woke” video games and they include titles that have an optional 1 minute scene of homosexual romance.

Bitte bitte lasst es erfolgreich sein.

Trump and Vance hold no actual power. Musk is now the shadow president of the USA.

Na klar, müssen ja nur so weiter machen wie bisher. Nix produktives machen, weiter gegen Grüne und die kleinen Paschas hetzen und die Gesetze die sie umsetzen sollen kriegen sie sowieso von Lobbyisten fertig zugesendet.

There’s a third.

That’s been going on since 10 already at least.

I guess we now know who will really hold power in the oval office. Spoiler: it’s not Trump

Soso, der Jugendliche landete auf der Motorhaube?? Na dann ist die Schuldfrage ja direkt geklärt! Ich hoffe, dem Auto geht es gut und es kann dieses traumatische Event verarbeiten!

Sprachvorschriften? Hab ich eher bei den Konservativen gesehen die gendergerechte Sprache einfach verbieten wollen.

I guess there will be many people thinking that, driving up demand->increasing prices before any tariffs even exist.

Life works differently for the haves than it does for the have-nots. This has been pretty much a constant in human societies…

I feel we could collectively do with fewer obstacles though.

fuck

Bad News…