#Combat Strategy

[fogaminghub]

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[fmp2rubix1786]

Warrior Mind Map.

This is the mind map for my first companion character in my game. Its going to be a warrior because that is one of the most prominently featured character trope in RPGs alongside Heroes. So I am going to make the first companion character a warrior whom the hero meets through their journey and follows and you can play in battles.

[darthkote]

hell nah star wars got me researching military tactics for creative purposes (fanfiction)

[formosusiniquis]

steddie relationship reveal coming not from the kids walking in on them or accidental pda but because Eddie's combat balance suddenly gets better and they realize it's cause Steve (the better strategist) is helping him with the combat prep. They know it's love cause Eddie threatened to shave Tews and blame it on Dustin the one time he picked up the wrong notebook/no one gets to see Eddie's DnD planning

[hetheymerrill]

Insane how many problems are caused by the fact that "RPG" can refer to a game with certain gameplay mechanics and to a game in which you roleplay a character and how the overlap of people who are fans of these 2 things is getting smaller and smaller and also now both these groups hate each other.

[chaos-enchanted]

POV: you're an NPC, and a group of main character looking b*tches have just walked into the room and closed the door behind them:

Bonus: The funky wizard with the great hair has just cast Arcane Lock

[fogaminghub]

https://www.fogaminghub.com/post/complete-the-last-wishes-mission-in-rise-of-the-ronin-a-guide

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[huggywuggysuppy]

Notes on Scott’s Wild Life 3 POV

In summary: our gaslight king controlling the narrative as usual, what an icon.

Scott has very economical editing, having one of the shorter POVs, yet takes care to include several instances of being nice to Pearl (noticed this when he left in giving Pearl food, both at the beginning and when they were building the new castle together). However, he left out the session routine of chastising Impulse and Pearl for picking fights with Gem/Joel (seen in Pearl’s POV), only including warning a freshly yellow Pearl to not try to kill them.

Scott doesn’t die this episode. Notably, his main contributions to base building are simply moving materials from one chest to the other — a very safe activity when being pursued by a snail. Gem and Joel who also avoided snail death built in a wide open area, and the other no-snail-deaths generally forgoed building and dangerous activity altogether (although, RIP Lizzie for surviving mining only to be Skizz’d). All this to say: Scott wasn’t playing sweaty, he still took risks, but they were very small and calculated.

Scott doesn’t include a lot of the Spanners antagonizing GGGG. Partly because they failed and it’s not very interesting to just see Scott looking at the dirt for Mumbo and Grian digging, or warily watching Skizz from 15 blocks sway. But I also think he’s building a villain narrative for Pearl and Impulse and having other groups wrong GGGG would upset that balance. Though, this point is my most tinfoil hat theory.

Scott, Cleo, and Impulse half-heartedly warn Etho of an approaching creeper, sort of totally 100% causing his death. They all celebrate, Cleo and Impulse both breaking into delighted cackles, however Scott calls Impulse out on taking more glee from Etho’s death than the other two. He’s taking care to point out any villainous behavior in Impulse/Pearl, justifying his own negative behavior towards them and painting himself as a long suffering yet loyal teammate. He does this every season, and I eat it up every time — although he’s particularly negative towards Imp and Pearl compared to, say, Martyn.

Related, Scott is stressing how put together and connected GGGG is. He’s complimenting all of them and turning to the camera to gloat about how they’re not gonna fall apart. This session didn’t leave a lot of room for Impulse and Pearl to prove him wrong, but even then he’s doing the prep work to make it their fault if/when the divorce happens. This is made easier by his reputation as a good and loyal teammate combined with Impulse’s and especially Pearl’s fandom reputation as instigators. (And to an extent, yes, they are both consciously approaching WL with a “cause problems on purpose” mission.)

But I can’t ignore every time Scott badmouths their decisions to other people and denounces their actions as suspicious/villainous. That sort of behavior only makes him look better instead of strengthening his whole team: if he really believed in GGGG, he’d be lying on their behalf and definitely not calling them out for picking fights. Just as Cleo didn’t back up Pearl when she tried to poison Gem, Scott is actively making his teammates look worse. And I fear he might get away with it.

I love Smajor and watch his perspective as a fan! I think he intentionally plays “the social game” like this: partly to make it more interesting, and partly because he enjoys the chaos. And really, who doesn’t?

[quibbs126]

I’m noticing that the Decepticons in g1 are actually pretty intelligent, at least when it comes to engineering feats

Like they’re constantly building new bases, temporary or otherwise, unlike the Autobots who don’t even build out from the Ark’s place in the volcano. They make so many elaborate machines to extract energy, of which need to harness countless different energy sources, and they almost always successfully create Energon from them, the Energon only being unstable when the source itself is, not their process

And on top of energy machines, they build other impressive machines to hinder the Autobots in whatever way, and it’s not just one person who makes them, they all do. Like, Megatron on his own created a machine that successfully clones other Transformers, outside of having a working brain. And he’s made other things too, that’s just the one I remember. I know Starscream’s had his own scientific contributions, but I can’t remember them at the moment other than rigging an experimental energy source to explode the planet for infinite energy

Edit: I actually do now have an example for Starscream, namely the episode where they accidentally time travel to King Arthur times, in which Starscream invents a working electricity generator to power him and the other stranded Decepticons with technology and materials from the 500s, and creates gunpowder at least 300 years or so before it’s invented in China. I know Transformers technology is far past that, but the fact that he knew how to do this and was able to with incredibly archaic technology by their standards is a feat all on its own

Like their machines almost always work, it’s just that the Autobots destroy them or they tap into an energy source they didn’t fully understand the consequences of (or just didn’t care)

And you can’t even say the Autobots have the leg up by creating new Transformers, because I’m pretty sure the Decepticons made the Constructicons as well, who are also fairly skilled builders. And also have the ability to combine, and were the first I know of capable of doing so

Like I guess the Decepticons just all have degrees in STEM or something. Shame that seems to be where all their intelligence points went

[kirbyfigure]

LESBIANZ ... and luka ig

[airjemsfandump]

What Asura wants 99% of the time:

[jinxed8]

Vro they got me doing maths formulas in this bitch 😭

This ain't no daymn maths test vro 😔

Loving the game so far ❤️

Don Quixote is so me fr fr 🔥🔥

[rockalillygirl]

Mamma mia here we go again…

So I have more thoughts because apparently there’s no bottom to the murderbot mindhole I’ve fallen down.

(Spoiler warning- minor stuff from several of the books, pls check tags etc.)

I’ve been reading a lot of things recently exploring Murderbot as an unreliable narrator, which I think is a cool result of System Collapse (because we all know our beloved MB is going through it in this one). There’s also been some interesting related discussion of MB’s distrust of and sometimes biased assessment/treatment of other constructs and bots.

And I’ve been reading a lot about CombatUnits! And I want to talk about them!!

Main thoughts can be summarized as follows:

We don’t see a lot about CombatUnits in the books, and I think what we do see from MB’s pov encourages the reader to view them as less sympathetic than other constructs.

I’m very skeptical of this portrayal for reasons.

The existence of CombatUnits makes me fucking sad and I have a lot of feelings about them!

I got introduced to the idea of MB as an unreliable narrator in a post by onironic It analyzes how in SC, MB seems to distrust Three to a somewhat unreasonable degree, and how it sometimes infantilizes Three or treats it the way human clients have treated it in the past. The post is Amazing and goes into way more detail, so pls go read it (link below):

https://www.tumblr.com/onironic/736245031246135296?source=share

So these ideas were floating around in my brain when I read an article Martha Wells recently published in f(r)iction magazine titled “Bodily Autonomy in the Murderbot Diaries”. I’ll link the article here:

(Rn the only way to access the article is to subscribe to the magazine or buy an e-copy of the specific issue which is $12)

In the article, Wells states that MB displaced its fear of being forced to have sex with humans onto the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. I think it’s reasonable to assume that MB also does this with other constructs. With Three, I think it’s more that MB is afraid if what it knows Three is capable of, or (as onironic suggests in their post and I agree with) some jealousy that Three seems more like what humans want/expect a rogue SecUnit to be.

But I want to explore how this can be applied to CombatUnits, specifically.

We don’t learn a lot about them in the books. One appears for a single scene in Exit Strategy, and that’s it. What little else we know comes from MB’s thoughts on them sprinkled throughout the series. To my knowledge, no other character even mentions them (which raises interesting questions about how widely-known their existence is outside of high-level corporate military circles).

When MB does talk about CombatUnits in the early books, it’s as a kind of boogeyman figure (the real “murderbots” that even Murderbot is afraid of). And then when one does show up in ES, it’s fucking terrifying! There’s a collective “oh shit” moment as both MB and the reader realize what it’s up against. Very quickly what we expect to be a normal battle turns into MB running for its life, desperately throwing up hacks as the CombatUnit slices through them just as fast. We and MB know that it wouldn’t have survived the encounter if its humans hadn’t helped it escape. So the CombatUnit really feels like a cut above the other enemies in the series.

And what struck me reading that scene was how the CombatUnit acts like the caricature of an “evil robot” that MB has taught us to question. It seems single-mindedly focused on violence and achieving its objective, and it speaks in what I’d call a “Terminator-esque” manner: telling MB to “Surrender” (like that’s ever worked) and responds to MB’s offer to hack its governor module with “I want to kill you” (ES, pp 99-100).

(Big tangent: Am I the only one who sees parallels between this and how Tlacey forces the ComfortUnit to speak to MB in AC? She makes it suggest they “kill all the humans” because that’s how she thinks constructs talk to each other (AC, pp 132-4). And MB picks up on it immediately. So why is that kind of talk inherently less suspicious coming from a CombatUnit than a ComfortUnit? My headcanon is that I’m not convinced the CombatUnit was speaking for itself. What if a human controller was making it say things they thought would be intimidating? Idk maybe I’ve been reading too many fics where CombatUnits are usually deployed with a human handler. There could be plenty of reasons why the CombatUnit would’ve talked like that. I’m just suspicious.)

(Also, disclaimer: I want to clarify before I go on that I firmly believe that even though MB seems to be afraid of CombatUnits and thinks they’re assholes, it would still advocate for them to have autonomy. I’m not trying to say that either MB or Wells sees CombatUnits as less worthy of personhood or freedom- because I feel the concept that “everything deserves autonomy” is very much at the heart of the series.)

So it’s clear from all of this that MB is scared of CombatUnits and distrusts them for a lot of reasons. I read another breathtaking post by @grammarpedant that gives a ton of examples of this throughout the books and has some great theories on why MB might feel this way. I’ll summarize the ones here that inspired me the most, but pls go read the original post for the full context:

https://www.tumblr.com/grammarpedant/703920247856562177?source=share

OP explains that SecUnits and CombatUnits are pretty much diametrically opposed because of their conflicting functions: Security safeguards humans, while Combat kills them. Of course these functions aren’t rigid- MB has implied that it’s been forced to be violent towards humans before, and I’m sure that extracting/guarding important assets could be a part of a CombatUnit's function. But it makes sense that MB would try to distance itself from being considered a CombatUnit, using its ideas about them to validate the parts of its own function that it likes (protecting people). OP gives what I think is the clearest example of this, which is the moment in Fugitive Telemetry when MB contrasts its plan to sneak aboard a hostile ship and rescue some refugees with what it calls a “CombatUnit” plan, which would presumably involve a lot more murder (FT, p 92).

This reminds me again of what Wells said in the f(r)iction article, that on some level MB is frightened by the idea that it could have been made a ComfortUnit (friction, p 44). I think the idea that it could’ve been a CombatUnit scares it too, and that’s why it keeps distinguishing itself and its function from them. But I think it’s important to point out, that in the above example from FT, even MB admits that the murder-y plan it contrasts with its own would be one made by humans for CombatUnits. So again we see that we just can’t know much about the authentic nature of CombatUnits, or any constructs with intact governor modules, because they don’t have freedom of expression. MB does suggest that CombatUnits may have some more autonomy when it comes to things like hacking and combat which are a part of their normal function. But how free can those choices be when the threat of the governor module still hangs over them?

I think it could be easy to fall into the trap of seeing CombatUnits as somehow more complicit in the systems of violence in the mbd universe. But I think that’s because we often make a false association between violence and empowerment, when even in our world that’s not always the case. But, critically, this can’t be the case for CombatUnits because they’re enslaved in the same way SecUnits and ComfortUnits are (though the intricacies are different).

There was another moment in the f(r)iction article that I found really chilling. Wells states that there’s a correlation between SecUnits that are forced to kill humans and ones that go rogue (friction, p 45). It’s a disturbing thought on its own, but I couldn’t help wondering then how many CombatUnits try to hack their governor modules? And what horrible lengths would humans go to to stop them? I refuse to believe that a CombatUnit’s core programming would make it less effected by the harm its forced to perpetrate. That might be because I’m very anti-deterministic on all fronts, but I just don’t buy it.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel so strongly about this. Of course, I find the situation of all constructs in mbd deeply upsetting. But the more I think about CombatUnits, the more heartbreaking their existence seems to me. There’s a very poignant moment in AC when MB compares ART’s function to its own to explain why there are things it doesn’t like about being a SecUnit (AC, p 33). In that scene, MB is able to identify some parts of its function that it does like, but I have a hard time believing a CombatUnit would be able to do the same. I’m not trying to say that SecUnits have it better (they don’t) (the situation of each type of construct is horrible in it’s own unique way). It’s just that I find the idea of construct made only for violence and killing really fucking depressing. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of their day-to-day existence.

@grammarpedant made another point in their post that I think raises a TON of important questions not only about CombatUnits, but about how to approach the idea of “function” when it comes to machine intelligence in general. They explain that, in a perfect version of the mbd universe, there wouldn’t be an obvious place for CombatUnits the way there could be for SecUnits and ComfortUnits who wanted to retain their original functions. A better world would inherently be a less violent one, so where does that leave CombatUnits? Would they abandon their function entirely, or would they find a way to change it into something new?

I’ve been having a lot of fun imagining what a free CombatUnit would be like. But in some ways it’s been more difficult than I expected. I’ve heard Wells say in multiple interviews that one of her goals in writing Murderbot was to challenge people to empathize with someone they normally wouldn’t, and I find CombatUnits challenging in exactly that way. Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve felt differently about these books if MB had been a CombatUnit instead of a SecUnit. Would I have felt such an immediate connection to MB if its primary function before hacking its governor module had been killing humans, or if it didn’t have relatable hobbies like watching media? Or if it didn’t have a human face for the explicit purpose of making people like me more comfortable? I’m not sure that I would have.

Reading SC has got me interested in exploring the types of people that humans (or even MB itself) would struggle to accept. So CombatUnits are one of these and possible alien-intelligences are another. All this is merely a small sampling of the thoughts that have been swirling around in my brain-soup! So if anyone is interested in watching me fumble my way through these concepts in more detail, I may be posting “something” in the very near future!

Would really appreciate anyone else’s thoughts about all of THIS^^^^ It’s been my obsession over the holidays and helping me cope with family stress and flying anxiety.

[gammaraydeath]

idk how all of you guys are writing mass effect fic this shit is hard

[fogaminghub]

🌌 Dive into the world of Rise of the Ronin with our guide to the Midnight Revenge Walkthrough! 🎲 Join Yoshinobou Tokugawa on his mission through Kyoto, face off against the Kurosu Clan, and master your combat skills! Check out the full post for all the details! 

[haarute]

i was having a chat with a friend about videogame bosses and i came up with this designation for personal preference and seeing that we had different answers now i ask thee