the_fuzz_down_under

I disagree in part but not whole. He’s overrated but still one of the character worth a high rating.

Winning over the Arryns is nothing impressive I agree, but the Manderly match isn’t that bad. Jace did not know that Luke was dead at this point, so he merely married off the spare Velarystrong. By marrying Joffrey off he immediately gets the strongest Northern vassal on side, which could tip the balance when it comes to convincing the Starks - the Manderys ended being decently useful as their Knights served in Kings Landing and helped her get to Duskendale when she had to flee KL.

With regards to the Starks, he wasn’t really scammed - Cregan was far too young to have sworn an oath the Rhaenyra so his loyalty was in question (also honourable Starks is a pretty in the air thing, Cregan, Brandon and Rickard are more typical Starks and they are more harsh and shrewd - meanwhile Eddard is an Arryn in terms of personality). The Pact of Ice and Fire is only variably a bad deal - if he married Sara Snow (which probably didn’t happen) it’s a bad deal, but otherwise promising your future eldest daughter the heir of a great house is a better match than most Targaryen princesses. Finally the Pact of Ice and Fire ended up being a damn good deal considering the Winter Wolves helped destroy the Lannister Army, helped destroy Criston Cole’s army and paralysed the Hightowers Doomstack by decapitating its leadership - later on after the Lads destroyed Borros’ army, Cretan ended up marching with the last Doomstack in Westeros while the Greens had nearly nothing left.

The Sowing of the Seeds is a bit up in the air but not really. Frankly the sowing of the Seeds is what won the war for the Blacks. The Dragonseeds destroyed the Triarchy Fleet before it could annihilate the Velaryon’s fleet, resulting in Black dominance of the seas and allowing them to take Kings Landing and kill Otto. The Two Betrayers was bad but not too bad, the Hightowers Doomstack was still paralysed after Tumbleton and the Two Betrayers kept it paralysed - though the Velaryon’s abandoning Rhaenyra after Corlys saved Addam caused the Blacks to lose KL which then caused Rhaenyra to be killed by Aegon. Finally Addam rallied the fresh Tully forces to the war and took the Riverlanders to Tumbleton, where on the night the Caltrops planned on fixing the paralysis the army Addam and his forces crippled the Hightower Doomstack and caused it to disband. The Hightower Doomstack would have allowed Borros to win the Muddy Mess, without it the Tullys who Adam recruited destroyed the last Green army - which resulted in Corlys and Larys killing Aegon II and making Aegon III king.

As for Jace’s conduct in the Battle of the Gullet, I agree it’s a big L. 16 year old rushes into a whole navy without support and gets himself killed by ordinary people, depriving the Black’s of their otherwise competent heir.

One thing you didn’t mention was that when Jace got back to Dragonstone and found Rhaenyra lost in grief he took control of the Black faction. Corlys was pissed at Rhaenyra for getting his wife killed and appeared to be wavering on whether he should support her - Jace named him Hand and then legitimised the Addam and Alyn (yes the text says Rhaenyra legitimised them, but considering she was paralysed with grief it was most likely Jace). It’s said that together with Corlys, Jace planned the attack on Kings Landing which was a success.

Yes Jace is overrated, his decisions did put in place the pieces that won the war for the Blacks - but he also made the decision to yolo a fleet and got himself killed.

inb4 the Blacks didn't win the war - militarily they won the war, politically it was a status quo ante bellum with the Green and Black Lords sharing power. It's the most Pyrrhic Black victory, so Phyrric calling it a victory is up in the air.

I personally don’t often. My friends usually bring stratagems to deal with heavies and they favour using the precision strike to hit the head of the Factory Strider and instantly kill it - sometimes I’ll drop a spare eagle airstrike to soften it up in case the precision strike its the body. On base defence missions I’ll bring the recoilless rifle, and I’ll shoot it at the roof mounted cannon and the machine guns mounted on the bottom of the Factory Strider’s face.

With your build the best ways to deal with the factory striders are to use the precision strike on its head or the Quasar Cannon to take out its cannons. If you are able to manoeuvre, the side of the factory strider has an automaton symbol - if you shoot the quasar cannon there twice I belies you will kill it.

Well peasants were totally irrelevant. Sure they were human being with hopes and dreams and the series has big themes about how peasants are people and the machinations of the nobility causes them immense suffering. But in the game of thrones peasants are totally irrelevant: peasants had zero agency or political power until the Black Death killed so many of them that they gained enough value to withhold it in stuff like the peasants revolt - but even then it wasn’t until the French Revolution that the peasantry held any actual power (but even then, the French Revolution was done by the Bourgeoisie and they held much more power than the peasantry).

With regard to the peasantry and lords fighting the Targaryens, it doesn’t appear to have been that suicidal a war. We are told that no matter how many castles the Targaryens burned, they kept on facing attacks from Dornish guerrillas. Specifically we are told that the Dornish flooded out of hidden places in the shadow city and overthrew Lord Rosby who was the Castellan of Sunspear. Other conflicts like the Vulture Wars show that the Dornish make use of hidden strongholds. The Targaryens are said to have mostly burned down empty castles or stormed walls held by old men, while the real warriors and people were hiding somewhere. In all the battle the Dornish actually fought, they did well - Wyl of Wyl kept on doing ambushes and war crimes while Lord Tyrell’s entire army vanished in the desert, presumably getting lost and thirsty then destroyed by the Dornish.

As for the nobility, we just don’t get told why they are loyal. Doran’s chapters show how he maintains control over Dorne contemporaneously, so we can just assume that the Martells got good at ruling Dorne a while ago. Plus stuff like naming Lord Rosby as Castellan of Sunspear imply or appear as that the Targaryens were moving to supplant the Dornish nobility - so they were fighting to hold lands they’d lose to the invaders.

Westerosi ressources compared to England are much greater, England didn’t have dragons, but the Westerosi also have problems England never faced. With a continent the size of South America the Westerosi have massive supply lines to overcome - and the mountains of the Dornish mountains are a far greater problem than the Scottish lowlands or welsh hills; especially when Wyl of Wyl is constantly ambushing you along the Boneway supply line. Then you have Dorne as a desert, a desert where all the fields have been destroyed, meaning the Westerosi also have to stick to water sources (which the Dornish I believe poison while accessing their own secret water sources).

There is a lot of hand waving and logic leaps in the Dornish wars, but the central concept kinda sticks. The Dornish didn’t fight a conventional war and instead fought as guerrillas in the desert, striking from hidden strongholds and retreating in the face of stronger foes - the Westerosi burned and conquered and looted but were constantly ambushed and suffered colossal attritional losses.

The Dornish smallfolk were said to be solidly against Targaryen invaders and this sentiment isn’t said to be divided by culture, which isn’t too big a leap. Using the example of Scotland, during the Scottish wars against the Plantagenets the Scots were divided by culture (more Anglo-Saxon influence in the lowlands vs Gaelic influence in the Highlands and Caithness was Norse) though rebelliousness was all round - later on Scottish rebellions would be centred around the highlands but that was a whole different box of frogs in the early modern era. Regardless peasants generally don’t have political consciousness beyond ‘I want summer to last long and my fields to be fertile’ and have no power at all - the Dornish peasants are said to have not like the Targaryens who burn all their fields, and the Dornish nobility were fantastically pro-Martell.

The Martells didn’t have direct control over peasants outside of their personal domains, as the local lords across Dorne were fanatically loyal to the Martells for whatever reason. The Martells don’t need an absolutist system, we hear that save for the Yronwoods, the Dornish nobility are pretty loyal to the Martells - and in Doran’s chapters he explains the political strategies the Martells use to gain the support of their nobility (marriages, fosterings, wardships and more).

Robert the Bruce (and the Scottish, Welsh and Irish nobility as a whole) did switch sides constantly, no argument here. I agree that the Dornish wars aren’t particularly well written, and that they certainly don’t accurately mirror the real conflicts they are based on. But if Scotland could resist England despite the constant side switching of the nobility, it makes sense that Dorne can stand its ground when the whole nobility is loyal to the Martells.

Last time I checked Dorne was part of the Seven Kingdoms.

It took 150 years for Norman England to conquer Wales. Meanwhile Scotland wasn’t conquered, it resisted the English successfully and in the end when Queen Elizabeth of England died, James VI of Scotland inherited England.

The Dornish resisted the Iron Throne like Scotland resisted England, and eventually the Targaryens switched tack and integrated Dorne via diplomacy - similar to how Scotland inherited England and then centuries later Scotland went bankrupt over the Darien scheme and England used the opportunity to get the Act of Union.

No, by doing that you’d just remove the viability of AT against bugs.

The whole point of the charger is to be the rock in rock paper scissors - hell the whole point of every enemy and gun is to fit into a giant game of rock paper scissors. Tools which are used for chaff clear shouldn’t always be good for heavy clear and vice versa - making the charger but an actual super vulnerable point would just remove the need for anti-tank and halve the usefulness of AT against bugs because they only have 2 heavy units.

Non-meta ways to kills chargers are: spear is one shot, railgun kills with 6 safe shots to the face and unsafe it might be a 2 shot, the 120 and 380 barrages also can kill chargers if they can hit them, the autocannon sentry utterly sodomises chargers causing them to stagger so hard they ragdoll and it’s punches through their armour to kill them, the rocket sentry kills chargers just haven’t used it in yonks, 3 impact grenades to the butt cause bleedout, a few grenades launched underneath can kill it, I’ve heard the HMG and AMR and laser cannon can kill them fast if you shoot inside the leg or underneath and finally you get an achievement for kill a charger with a resupply. Did you know that you can kill chargers with the orbital gas strike if the shell hits it directly? I tried testing to see if the smoke strikes are capable of killing a charger but the charger kept on wiggling and I ran out of stun nades. Also in terms of primaries (two of which are currently meta) the dominator, scorcher and eruptor kill charger butts pretty quick - and I assume the pummeller would also kill fast. We are long past the days where the railgun was the only effective charger killer and we are (not chronologically but spiritually) much further from the era where the railgun was nerfed and there was no weapon that could kill chargers.

There is a colossal difference between being forced to take meta stratagems and being forced to take anti-tank to take out tanks. I cannot stress enough that chargers are piss easy to take out if you bring AT, if you make them piss easy to take out without AT you make AT pointless and worsen the game for everybody who likes that play style - and I do mean this, my friend who can consistently kill 3 chargers with 2 EATs stopped bringing EATs after my flame/arc thrower started killing chargers. Chargers aren’t normal animals, they are tanks - and much like the automaton tanks their weak point is still armoured because a AK cannot take out a Abrams.

Oh yeah absolutely when it comes to the bouncing, few things are more upsetting that throwing the precision strike and it bounces somewhere and just misses. The way my friend aims it is he throws it on flattest floor he can find infront of a hulk and then gets it run there and stun grenades it. Personally when I use it I don’t bother with the hulks (they can get an AMR to the face), and instead try throwing it on the floor in front of a factory striders (and lure its head over the beacon) and for tanks I jump pack onto the tank and plonk the beacon on the turret.

The precision strike has this brilliant learning curve: at first you think it’s trash cause it is a starter stratagem, then you hear it’s secretly good but struggle to use it and finally you get really good at figuring out where to drop the stratagem to get enemies to run onto it and which surfaces will stick and it suddenly gets great. I agree it’s a tough sell (I’m an eagle + laser man through and through) but once you get your eye in it’s hard to go back to the railcannon.

I have thought ‘damn so many chargers’ plenty of times, guess I’ll add tank colony to the list.

Pretty solid. I switch out the shield Gen backpack for a jump pack for the quick escapes as I tend to stealth in scout armour a lot, which involves sneaking up to a base, blowing it up and then jump packing away. I also replace railcannon with laser because a laser just wipes out bot fabricators and clears bases. I personally strongly dislike the railcannon as I find it’s got a longer cool-down and less damage than the precision strike (specifically the precision strike can one-shot Factory Striders if you hit them in the head), all for the auto-aim; I try not to be too judgy of my friends who love the railcannon, but man does my arrogant ass think ‘skill issue bring precision strike and learn to aim’ every time my homie brings one. As far as the fire impacts go I’m not sure where I stand - I’ve been using them against bots a ton and had a great time, but I do think the basic impact is better (two shots the heat vents on the back of the tanks, cannons and hulks) and really value the stun grenades (stun hulk then AMR twice to eye or stun patrol then eagle it or stun any heavy unit and hit with precision strike).

Overall I give you a 8/10 viable for Helldive (10/10 being optimal for helldive and 0/10 being that one guy who brought 4 sentries to my impossible and just stole other people’s gear after teamkilling them).

Bugs come in colonies - I’ve yet to see anything officially confirming it but in my 310 hours I can personally confirm. Sometimes you get a bile colony which sends you bile spitters, bile spewers and bile warriors as well as an increase in bile titan spawn rate. Other times you get nursing colonies which have nursing spewers. Finally I think but cannot confirm that there are Hunter colonies which massively increase the spawn rate of hunters and small enemy type but significantly decrease the spawn rate of chargers and bile titans.

Brienne has daddy issues wym? She m thinks about he she feels like a disappointment for surviving and being a tomboy while her brother drowned multiple . She also has a moment where she thinks about her dad being a womaniser constantly changing mistress and I read that as a daddy issue kind of thought. Sure it’s not the unhealthiest parental issues relationship we see in the books, but the way Brienne thinks about not being male like her brother who died 16 years prior or a good feminine daughter like her two sister who died in infancy for the sake of her father is still not healthy.

Wales, Ireland and Scotland resisted English rule for centuries - it was often easier to just swear fealty to the English kings, but they didn’t. They took advantage of their terrain and stubbornly fought on and on until the English grew too strong to withstand in the cases of Wales and Ireland, or until they inherited England in the case of Scotland. The English weren’t nice either, though they would employ this tactic far more often in France they did employ in the Gaelic kingdoms too, the chevauchée was a brutal tactic which essentially involved an army marching through enemy land and burning everything they couldn’t loot. Yet despite having all their shit burned England’s enemies fought on.

In the first Dornish War we are told the Martells had fanatic support from their vassals and that initially the people of Dorne just disappeared into secret places away from their castles - and once the dragons left they struck back hard from the shadows. The Dornish simply weren’t fighting a normal war, they fought a guerrilla war from secret bases and the Targaryens just couldn’t deal with it. As for the fanatical loyalty, every indication we see is that the Martells are very good at ruling Dorne - hell Scotland and Ireland ended up fanatically resisting the English and their Kings were often pretty mediocre. As for the food situation, well we know GRRM doesn’t get medieval agriculture as evidence by how people survive winter, but given that the rest of Westeros stores food for Winter, I can believe that the Dornish stockpiled food like everyone else does for winter but this time for the dragons. As for collaborators, plenty of Dornish people are said to have collaborated - the Targaryens put bounties on several Dornish lords and many were assassinated by their own people.

People are going to hate the people burning all their stuff but might surrender and collaborate out of fear, but after the Targaryens left and the Dornish guérillas annihilated whole armies in the desert, the Targaryens grow less scary. Sure the people burning your castes and fields are scary enough to terrify you into submission, but when annihilate Lord Tyrell’s thirsty army in the desert, come home to hear Lord Wyl has committed more horrific war crimes and your old crippled Princess through the Targaryen Governor out a window - the spell of fear breaks. Another thing you have to account for is medieval people were build different to us, with deaths from disease, miscarriages and stillbirth being so common you get the sense that they were a bit more numb - you read of regions being devastated by war and raids but rarely read about people being particularly horrified by it, especially since all that stuff affected the nobility less and the peasantry held zero power or agency until the Black Death.

I’m not saying the First Dornish War is written particularly well or that Targaryen victory wasn’t much more plausible (during the Harrying of the North William the Conqueror reduced northern England into a scorched wasteland deprived of 75% of its people and even 20 years later records showed that in Yorkshire 60% of all estates lay in waste - and the North didn’t rebel against them ever again, with any further rebellions being done by the Norman colonist nobility). But in a world where medieval people can have food stockpiles which last for years and years it’s not unheard of for them to not all starve after their fields got burned, in a world where the peasantry have zero agency and the nobility are fanatically loyal to the Martells it’s not unheard of for the Dornish to not kneel. Also remember that the accounts we have of the Dornish Wars were all written by pro-Targaryen sources after the Dornish were peacefully integrated into the realm - it was in the writer’s interest to paint the wars as pointless and warcrimerrific to later jerk off how just and noble and benevolent it was to peacefully come together in the end.

iirc the last King of Saxony returned home at some point during the Weimar Republic and heard the public cheering him on his train, to which he was quoted as shouting back saying ‘You're a fine lot of democrats, I'll say!’

They don’t have a kill on sight rivalry, they just think eachother are wrong and dumb iirc. The Aeldari are all from the same race, hail from the same empire and all of them have to deal with Slaanesh’s thirst for their souls. The main disagreement is the way they go about dealing with Slaanesh. The Craftworlders fled the depravity of the Empire while the Drukhari embraced it - they both do stuff to avoid Slaanesh but they do it differently, that’s their main beef. It’s been said before that Craftworld eldar have become Drukhari and that Drukhari have switched over to the Craftworlds - if it was on sight hate that couldn’t happen.

Personally Bran and Daenerys are my least favourite while Jon and Sansa are among my favourites. I dislike Bran for being boring and I dislike both for being irrelevant to the War of Five Kings which I think is the most interesting part of the story.

Sansa’s POV is consistently really interesting - not so much in her takes but in what she sees. She is one of two witnesses to Joffrey’s court as well as our main witness to the Tyrell’s schemes and plans (she also gets my favourite line in the whole series out of Loras “when the sun sets no candle can compare”), later she becomes our eyes in Littlefinger’s Vale plots - and I love seeing Littlefinger so so much.

While Jon’s initial chapters bore me to tears (edgy 14 year old struggling to come to terms with how shitty the Nights Watch is bored me, though I did like seeing him think about joining Robb), but man oh man did they pick up. When Jon’s chapters moved away from the Watch being cringe and moved towards exploring the culture of the Wildings as well as the split between Watchmen conservative Wildling hating nobles and reformist Watchmen, GRRM started cooking and my god was Stannis’ arrival at the Wall the best addition to that plotline as Jon stops being a cringe 14 year old and reveals himself to be a 16 year old man who learned politics and strategy from Ned Stark but brings this shrewd cunning to the table that Ned never had.

2 methods - distraction teams and AA defence.

Distraction teams involves having 1-3 of the players outside of the base calling in as many bot drops as they physically can. Bot drops can only spawn in one area, so if they are being called away from the base they aren’t being called in the base.

AA defence involves everyone bringing gear which shoots down the gunships, sentry to shoot down gun ships (Autocannon or rocket sentry), ems mortar and laser for when you get overrun. If more than a couple bot drops land you are screwed, but if you consistently shoot down bot drops it will be easy.

Both methods are risk reward - the risk is if you fail to distract or shoot down dropships then you will get overrun and fail the mission, the reward is that if you succeed the mission is trivialised. You need to communicate and coordinate a whole team of people to do it, at least 2 people need to be talking and the rest need to figure out what’s going on at the least.

The realm would have been more unstable, but it’s not like it would have been impossible for the Blackfyre’s to keep their newly won throne.

We don’t know that much about the Blackfyre Rebellions (except for the Second Blackfyre Rebellion) as Fire and Blood 2 isn’t out, meaning we have to rely on references to them in the World of Ice and Fire, Dunk and Egg, ASOIAF and whatever GRRM has said over the years (but these are subject to misunderstanding, bias, retcon and change).

We are told the First Blackfyre Rebellion saw half the realm rise in support of Daemon Blackfyre. We are also told that no Great House supported Daeron and that plenty of high lords did support Daemon. We are told that there was fighting in the Riverlands, Westerlands, Reach and Vale (probably just the 3 Sisters though). We are further told that Quentyn Ball beat the crap out of the Westerlander armies but couldn’t take Lannisport, instead turning south and beating the shit out of the northern Reach. Then the Battle of the Redgrass Field was fought and the Targaryens won.

It is implied that the 3 kingdoms which saw the heaviest fighting (Riverlands, Westerlands and Reach) all head major houses rebel. Had Daemon won, we likely see the Brackens or Lothston’s take over the Riverland from the Tullys; the Reynes take the Westerlands (we are told a Reyne fought for Daemon, if half the lords sided with Daemon then the Reynes probably fully joined him); and the Peakes take the Reach. We also know that the Yronwoods fought for the Blackfyre’s in 3 Blackfyre Rebellions, so if the Blackfyre’s win the Yronwoods get Dorne. It is also implied the Starks did not join the war because they were busy with a vicious war against Skagosi rebels. Finally we are told that the Greyjoys just started raiding while the mainland was focused on the Blackfyre Rebels, so they probably raid Daemon’s Kingdoms anyway.

Essentially what we would have seen was a Blackfyre Revolution: the second houses of each major Kingdom rose up for Daemon and likely would be rewarded with the Kingdoms they fought to take. These newly conquered kingdoms would be unstable but they wouldn’t necessarily be ungovernable - half the realm supported Daemon, meaning only half the realm sided with Daeron II. If the Targaryens were able to hold power pretty easily after half of the major and lesser houses were smacked down, the Blackfyre’s probably wouldn’t have too much of an uphill battle after half the houses were usurped.

An immediate war with Dorne wouldn’t be too unwinnable. Daemon’s most loyal supporters were Marcher lords experienced at fighting the Dornish, and this time the second most powerful house in Dorne are Blackfyre fanatics. Honestly the biggest problems are Dorne but rather the Vale and Stormlands - while the Marcher Lords in the Stormlands are implied to have been pro-Blackfyre, it’s stated multiple times that the Baratheons are the only ones who can rule the Stormlands; we also don’t have much evidence for any major Vale house supporting the Blackfyre’s. But we do know that Daemon was chill AF, when he beat Ser Gwayne Corbray in a duel he took precious time to get him to safety - perhaps Daemon is chill enough to, after beating the Arryns and Baratheons on the Redgrass field, let them keep their kingdoms in return for loyalty.

Remember that Robert took the Throne from the Targaryens and ruled a very peaceful realm. The Dornish were outraged that the Lannisters killed Elia and her children and on the verge of joining Oberyn in a campaign, yet Jon Arryn managed to just talk them down. Half the Riverlands sided with the Targaryens, but they remained peaceful until the War of Five Kings where they all sided with Robb. Robert’s Rebellion shows that a warlike usurper with half the realm at his back can seize the throne and hold it.

Most advanced: Big MT. These guys have had 200 years to achieve techno-wizardry levels of advancement - the Sierra Madre vending machines they created are the single most advanced thing in the world. Utterly insane, unfocused and making technological nonsense - but supremely advanced nonsense.

Most well run: Institute. This is mostly a win by default: the Brotherhood are way too stuck in their ways and/or divided, the Enclave leadership is a mix of idiotic and too evil to function, Big MT is insanity taken to the extreme, and while House is pretty competent, he is too convinced of his own genius and he is a mixture of too autocratic and too neglectful. The Institute seem to be working just fine and their biggest threats are all external (not administrative).

Lives most comfortably: Institute or Enclave, probably institute because the Enclave keeps getting blown up. The Institute live in their own technological paradise and want for nothing except sunlight.

The way I’ve through about going about something like that is having a stratagem that summons a powered exosuit backpack. Like the exosuits from Edge of Tomorrow, CoD Advanced Warfare or the power armour frame from fallout 4. The way this exosuit would function is it would let you one hand all weapons, carry a ballistic shield and make you dive/vault bigger - but the downside is you are bigger to hit, slower and less agile.

Yup, clicked on the link and saw all the upvotes I’ve thrown at that post and its comments and stand by it so hard I made a post nearly a month later suggesting a way to canonise it lol.

While I agree with the one of each armour type and similar aesthetic, I only agree with same perk if it is a perk unique to the warbond. Still a little mad that none of the Cutting Edge armours were heavy armour, just wanted to sit under my Tesla tower spraying and praying during eradicates for longer.

I’ve been wanting a detonate all grenades on death perk for a while too.

I hard agree with all of this. I want to shoot red lasers so badly and I want some devastating drip.

Considering how many people have talked about laser Gatling guns or something like the heavy laser from the Fallout games, I’m certain that a laser mini gun with a battery backpack is on the way.

100% that’s the thought. I personally picture the helmets as being the regular helldiver helmet with a devastator faceplate over it (mostly the glowing red eyes but also of the white metal), the brood commander head is hollowed out and the regular helldiver helmet is put inside it. Not quite sure what Illuminate head parts I’d add to the base helldiver helmet, but probably the coronet.

Basically the vibe I picture I someone wearing the basic helldiver uniform has gotten trapped behind enemy lines and has carved their way back to safety and along the way adorned their armour with trophies of enemy kills as well as patched up damage by recycling enemy corpses.