I don’t personally use this feature, so I don’t honestly know if this would solve your problem, but there’s a firefox addon that might add the functionality you’re wanting.

If it doesn’t, then this issue

except that links clicked from within them will open in Chrome intead of FF, which makes for a confusing experience.

could possibly be solved with a chrome extension

To elaborate further on grand strategy games, pretty much all Paradox games can be played… sort of cooperatively?

Generally the maps are large enough that you can kind of just pick your corners and only rarely interact.

In a single game of Europa Universalis 4 one player might conquer all of Asia, while another consolidates Europe and a third player is in Africa. You can’t generally actually disable PvP, you can just not go to war. Same is true for Crusader Kings 2/3, and Stellaris. You can coexist and mutually stay out of each others way while possibly helping each other out.

All the Total War titles that support multiplayer (so everything past Shogun 2 in 2011) are coop friendly afaik. I’m particularly fond of the Total War: Warhammer games.

Also, I’d add some of the survival crafting/sandbox titles to the list of stuff you can play cooperatively. They don’t all work for it, but some of them are definitely friendly to a coop group play style. 7 Days To Die works brilliantly like that, though it will be absolutely trivial with multiple players unless you turn the difficulty up. Ark: Survival Evolved can be pretty fun coop (especially with the Primal Fear mod- you will need friends.)

OP seems to want a very competitively focused tightly balanced experience, and Stellaris is absolutely anything but that. I enjoy the game, it’s fun, but I can’t imagine anyone considering it to be particularly balanced or enjoyable as a PvP/Versus experience.

I’ve never seen some specify that they want different second person pronouns, but hey new things every day. Man that is confusing to read, though.

I’ve sort of generally moved over to coop games in general nowadays.

Or even if I’m playing something that’s a versus sort of multiplayer- like Civ- I just try not to focus too much on winning. I’m there for the journey, not the destination. If I end up winning, cool. If I don’t, that’s also cool as long as I had fun along the way.

That GPU shortage absolutely blew. I used a 1650 the whole time, just sitting on my hands waiting for something to be vaguely affordable. Ended up snagging an RX 6600 right at the very very end of the shortage- caught it on a steep sale and paid $220 for it, and my exact model is $200 now so I did pretty good I think lol

If the most resource intensive thing you’re looking at is BG3 @ 1080p/60fps, you definitely won’t need to spend a few grand. Now is a great time to build. You can get pretty great price/performance at the moment.

Here’s a link to a build, I’d suggest buying the SSD in that list, and replacing your hybrid drive. You can keep the hybrid as a spare, if you want, but you don’t have to. If that solves your issue and gets you the performance you want, cool.

If it doesn’t solve your issues, you can just buy the rest of the parts in the list and build a new PC. It’s a PCPartPicker link for the UK, so it’ll tell you the best places you can order each part in your country. Alternatively, you can buy a prebuilt- probably wanna aim for $1000 USD or so for a prebuilt. I can’t really help you with that, not my thing.

If you do end up building your own there’s an extremely helpful very long Linus Tech Tips video that breaks down how to assemble the whole thing.

What’s your budget look like? Because if you don’t have much to spend, you’re best off just tossing an SSD in as your boot disk. That’ll help significantly. After that, I’d grab 32GB of matching RAM(make sure it’s DDR4, not DDR5) and try that.

After that, you’re basically building a new PC because to significantly upgrade your CPU- which is the next thing you’d want to- you’d need at minimum a new motherboard as well and probably a case since prebuilt cases can have proprietary layouts and be weird.

If you wanna build your own PC, but can’t figure out what parts would be good/what you actually need feel free to reply with a budget and your general location- country is good enough- and I can send you a link to a part list. I used to hang out in /r/buildapcforme and I kinda miss it lmao

and at least 8gb additional ram.

Honestly, I’d suggest getting 32gb of RAM with a decent speed and just tossing the rest of that mishmash.

I disagree, I think it’s funny as long as this is all theory.

If a player was actually serious about wanting to do this as more than a meme, and was arguing this hard for it I’d be mad as hell. In this context, though? It’s fine. I think it’s amusing how hard people can stretch the rules. It’s similar to the peasant railgun. Hilarious concept. I’m still not okay with someone trying to actually use a peasant railgun.

I pay for a single streaming service, and that’s just because it directly supports the people running the service and making the content.

Nebula?

I greatly appreciate your old man mode. Sounds like a fantastic job.

Hell I ran the processor (450MHz P3) without a fan, just a passive heatsink.

They still make passive heatsinks that work for modern CPUs, but they’re fuckin massive and not incredibly effective compared to just… putting a quiet fan on it.

it can be used separate from a “flame”, which is a term for the very flamboyant gay men regardless of their presentation or physical appearance.

TIL. I’ve heard people being called, usually in a derogatory way, “flamers” or “flaming” but never just “flame”, nor did I understand the context.

The ones that would travel for shows carried all the news and culture with them, like fabulous bards.

So just your average bard, then?

Yeah, sure. I’m not saying the epilogue was too long, just the game overall.

Consider it: did they really need every scene in the game? Are you honestly gonna tell me that every. single. mission. was plot critical or would’ve made the game lesser in any significant way?

There was a lot they could’ve trimmed down or removed.

Which, to clarify, it’s not like I think the length is a great crime or significantly detracts from the game. I just feel like it would’ve been better if it was a bit shorter. I’m not trying to compare it to something like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey where it’s a 100+ hour game and 70hrs of it is narratively irrelevant.

Yeah kinda my take.

I would’ve been fine with RDR2 being a bit shorter, frankly, I was kinda dragging along by the end.

I can explain a few terms, if you’re interested. I’m simplifying so nobody murder me:

Retroarch is basically a program that lets you emulate (basically make your computer mimic a console to play the games from it) a bunch of different videogame consoles. Mostly old ones, but some newer things like the Switch.

Shaders are complicated to ELI5 but it’s easiest to think of them as a filter you can apply to a videogame in real time, like you would apply a filter to a photo or something. You can get some absolutely crazy effects with filters- generally the simpler the game the more shaders will accomplish. Here’s a minecraft screenshot of the same thing with and without shaders.

And just in case, CRTs are those old school tube tvs.

He’s basically just asking if shaders for old games intended to make things look more like a CRT are just nostalgia bait or if they actually make things look better.

I remember I had a CRT as a kid that had the deepest button press to turn on. It felt like it was a whole 3 inches of travel- realistically I’m just remembering it like that cuz I was 8- but that was the best button. You could feel it actuate at the end, and even hear it. And CRTs had a presence about them. In hindsight, I was probably just hearing the whine and didn’t realize it.

Idk CRTs had their own vibe. Objectively, the crazy resolutions and crisp screens we have todays are better but in some less definable ways they feel lesser.

Agreed completely. I have an S23 rn, but my previous phone was a mid-tier android with a fingerprint reader on the back. My natural resting grip on my phone would just unlock the thing. It was amazing. My current phone is a clear upgrade in every way except the fingerprint reader. My new one has it in the screen and I fuckin hate it.

There’s definitely memorization, but there’s just a ton of tricks that aren’t explicitly memorizing the images themselves.

They can sometimes narrow down the area based on the car that’s taking the images, or how wide the lens is. As a made up example, if they see a red toyota corolla is the car taking the photos- which they can tell based on the mirrors appearing- they know it’s specifically mainland Malaysia.

Very small context based clues a lot of the time.