Recent content by formerdc81

The primary purpose of organized religion is to ensure social hierarchy, to justify the elite having more privileges than the masses, who did not own the means of production. However, a religion has no power if the masses don't believe it, and the only way to get the masses to believe in a...

China, as a sovereign state, has no need to observe US sanctions on our trading partners. If this subjects our citizens to targeted kidnapping from the Five Eyes, then we will escalate accordingly. The talk from both sides of "this arrest is not related to..." is just plausible deniability...

I want to help, but I don't think I'd fit in with VP's "community" ethos. I have a distinctly robotic sense of aesthetics and game design that most people do not share and from my previous experience on modding communities, I have a bad tendency to politicize my disagreements over game design...

I made a mod that added one extra local variable to Player.cpp (a count for the number of free caravansaries not yet granted [because the player may have fewer cities than the specified number for free buildings] by my modded version of Legalism). I did my due diligence (or so I thought) and...

What is "meaningful way"? That it was a "personal choice" and not a "hand-me-down" or imposed by societal prejudice? Or are you saying because I don't live and speak the same as my ancestors, I am as much a pretender as you (who also don't do these things)? I believe that the liberal concept of...

I think the problem is a lot of vanilla players actually can't beat the game even on the hardest difficulty. There's still plenty of things for them to explore that VP isn't really the target audience. Others want the game to be made stupidly easy with OP civs or their favorite anime waifu. They...

181/55/~3000...I just don't gain weight. I have no idea why.

Stop trying to "prove" this to each other. The evidence from sense data does not logically imply either theism or atheism because a philosophical axiomatic assumption is needed to make sense of the data. Just let each man and woman decide for themselves. The world most likely is not a...

Why would this hypothetical frighten anyone besides the fear of dying? I don't care if my paradigm of the world is challenged, if I'm wrong....then I need to learn what's true. It's very likely I will be wrong in some way or another my whole life because mankind does not know everything and...

As a Chinese person, I regard myself as the descendant culturally of the Yan and Huang Emperors. My ancestors (as far as I know) were never were ruling class, but the glories of the Warring States, Three Kingdoms, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, and Ming/Qing are things I can pride myself in. Of course, I...

Mathematics are indeed arbitrary in the sense that the axioms can be chosen however you wish. HOWEVER, once a set of axioms is chosen, all the logical consequences of it follow and it is not possible to then wave your hands and say "it's just a theoretical construct and I can believe whatever I...

Your UB is impossible given current mechanics because a building can only contain one type of Great Work, and not all 3.

The problem with the idea of "deleting" history is that most medieval kings and emperors DID NOT HAVE THE MEANS to do so completely, regardless WHAT was the subject. Qin Shihuang wanted to delete all previous mention of mathematics to prove himself was the originator of knowledge. That didn't...

I might include this in my mod (which is intended to rebalance the game under one set of rules for both PvP and PvE) but your current proposal seems a bit bad... A) From a design perspective, if any civ's gimmick makes them suck, you should buff the gimmick, not give general buffs because...

The problem is not merely that Japan was war-torn, China was too at the end of every large dynasty. The difference is that China's philosophical tradition establishes the Emperor's right to rule is not "eternal" but dependent on the "Mandate of Heaven". If enough natural disasters and military...