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The Curious Case of Mongol UUs

The Mongols have four unique Ranged Cavalry units: the Nomad (II), Steppe Nomad (III), Horde (IV), and Golden Horde (V). Their listed benefit is that  “they’re particularly effective against enemy Light Infantry” and “effective against enemy Musket Infantry”. The game confers these advantages by giving all four units a +60% damage bonus against Light Infantry and a +45% damage bonus against Gunpowder Infantry.

In reality this ends up being a really weird bonus to have. Not only do they still normally lose in fights against those units, but those same units are supposed to be counters to Ranged Cavalry, making these bonuses unintuitive for both the attacker and the defender.

Yes I know the units aren’t quite centered, please don’t bully me.

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PC of Theseus v2

Quoting Wikipedia, “the Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object that has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object.” The PC of Theseus is a system that had almost all of its components replaced, and we just gave it another round of upgrades to dial the existentialism up even further.

As before, the cool PC building photo isn’t mine — we aren’t even doing any RAM or storage upgrades here. Image credit: Heliberto Arias via Unsplash.

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Michael’s Gaming PC v2

In December of 2016 I helped Michael put together a build I dubbed The Silent Whisper: a high-end gaming PC that had SPCR-level acoustics.

Towards the end of 2022, Michael was looking to upgrade the entire system, so I put on my PC building hat once more and gave him a hand.

If we wanted the best photo we would’ve taken this from the other side of the table for more natural light.

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PC/NAS Upgrade: OS Reinstall, 71TB of Storage, and Setting up an Unraid NAS

Also known as the part where we fix all of the storage and storage-related things.

  • Primary storage: 1TB SATA SSD -> 2TB NVMe SSD
  • Secondary storage (data): 2x3TB -> 4+1x4TB parity array
  • Secondary storage (backup): 2x3TB -> NAS
  • NAS: doesn’t -> exists
  • OS: fucked -> not
The 68TB money shot: all the NAS and non-NAS drives (plus my spare testing SSD). Not shown are the other 3TBs in the “71TB” title: a new NVMe drive (2TB) and my old SATA SSD (1TB).

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