Best products from r/Stellaris

Hm, okay. It seems like your above the recommended specs for the game, but still seem to have trouble running it regardless which is interesting. From what I've read you clean the dust out of your PC regularly already, so my only suggestion would be to download a utility such as CC Cleaner or IObit's Advanced System Care 11 and a defragmenting tool like Smart Defrag 5 which is also from IObit. I would try using these programs first before diving into buying a new PC and see if they help at all. I'm assuming you have anti-virus software so I would run that as well just to be sure.

If that doesn't work then I found a few pre-builts with pretty good specs for a reasonable price.

Option 1 $840 [NEW]

Option 2 $869 [REFURBISHED]

Option 3 $900 [NEW]

Option 4 $934 [NEW]

[Option 5] (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA65C6WA5644) $1450 [NEW]

The 5th option is only if you want to go balls-to-the-wall, the cheaper options I've included should run Stellaris without a hitch.

> they were solved by the threat of mutually assured destruction.

That most certainly explains why we didn't go to war with the Soviet Union, but the MAD theory doesn't explain why countries became democratic (and wealthier as a result) overtime. MAD was also aimed at countries with huge arsenals, of which non-nuclear countries are excluded (in other words - rest of the world). MAD isn't a driving factor in foreign policies currently.

>Not all of the countries we overthrew were authoritarian communists, Chile's only crime was democratically electing a marxist president

Right, and it would most certainly be a negative implication of the United States to purposefully install authoritarian yes-men in its pursuit for world domination, but that wasn't the case. There's important context you're omitting. For one, the United States feared Marxist governments (even democratically elected ones) would gravitate towards authoritarian systems, so it is better to have a friendly authoritarian country than a hostile Marxist one. It's a rational choice and still in line with Democratic Peace theory. Fidel Castro used democracy as a rallying cry until he got control of the state. Later, the Cuban missile crisis happened and America was fearful the Soviet Union had nukes so close to the United States. To this day Cuba is still authoritarian.

As for Chile? It is one of the best and most developed countries in Latin America. Pinochet would eventually cave into pressures from the people and the United States to create a democracy. You gotta remember, America wasn't thinking in "nows" only, they were in it for the long game. You can dispute it could have happened differently or America overstepped, but you cannot make the argument it is not in line with the Democratic Peace theory.

South Korea had a similar path. The United States wasn't about to jeopardize its geopolitical strategy and cause havoc while the country is turbulent in democratization. It kept the authoritarian regime in power. By the time the Soviet Union crashed South Korea was well on its way to democratization.

> I think of what America did in West Germany post WW2

Heavily occupy and change its politics until we knew it was a proper democracy? Indeed, but thinking every single country will be like that, or that America has the resources to occupy and democratize every single country is a foolish pipe dream; if not colonialism. America did what it had to with the resources it had to make tough decisions it'll be criticized for regardless of the outcome. The world isn't perfect. You don't just wave a wand and pray countries will become democracies. There's nuance, context, difficulties, opponents. You gotta create norms, you gotta create laws, institutions - it's a very difficult process. And I'm not arguing America was perfect. Vietnam was most certainly botched - but that isn't a good example disproving American's commitment to the Democratic Peace theory.

I don't mean to be rude, but I don't believe you have a grasp of proper context behind US foreign policy. I recommend you buy and read this book It uses first hand documents (relating to foreign politics of the United States) from history in chronological order to explain what politicians, people, or even opponents of the United States thought when they made decisions. It includes letters, speeches, political cartoons and goes into detail explaining, for example, why America planted authoritarians in countries like Greece or Chile. It's all very much in line with the Democratic Peace theory (or Democratic Crusaders in stellaris). Nothing you've said so far suggested at US being an imperialistic hegemony. Even opponents of American policy (the only people who really call America an imperialist country) admit it's trade at best and doesn't get to actual imperialism of land grabs and such (which is what Stellaris imperialist hegemony is really about).

Then the best thing you can do is make sure it is cooling as well as it can.

Some suggestions.

• Turn down the resolution to the lowest setting. Even if only temporarily. See if that makes a difference.
  
  
• Make sure the fan is clean and the heatsink fins are clear of hair and other debris. You can do some of this just by running a vacuum hose over the air intake. The better way to do it would be to take the laptop apart so you can clean all the debris and dust off the fan and heatsink fins. (Don't use compressed air to spin the fan. You could damage it.)
  
  
• Use a [laptop cooling pad]
  (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NNMB3KS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_dp_T2_ODOqzb0FC4D43)
  
  
• To take this a step further, you could also reapply the thermal paste between your CPU and heatsink. That requires some new Arctic Silver or other thermal paste and the willingness to take your heatsink off.
  
  
  
  

Is it? Looks blue to me as well. I have an uncommon form of color blindness, however, so my hue differentiation ability is screwy in the blue/purple areas as well as some of the reds.

For example, we have some of these Ziploc cups from when our kids were younger. (I'd post a link to Ziploc instead but they seem to be discontinued now.) Anyhow, my family assures me these are blue but to my eyes they are a deep purple color.

Oddly, it wasn't even until only a relative few years ago that this made me realize that I even am color blind! Tritanomaly, the form I have, is pretty rare so it's very rarely diagnosed at all. My opthamologist, who finally formally diagnosed it, says it's at most something under 0.5% of the population. The main issue with coming up with a good number is apparently it's so rarely diagnosed at all and often only late in life that the numbers we have now make it something like 0.008% of the total population. Since they know it's rarely diagnosed, they're pretty sure it's at least somewhat higher than that.

Still, since it rarely affects folks in any meaningful way it's just not likely to get noted in screening. The normal color blindness charts just don't work well for this since there's some variation among even those diagnosed. (Tritanomaly has a mutation in one of the cone cells as opposed to missing it entirely which would be tritanopia.)

Weird, huh?

I'm only 2/3's through the 1st book but I'm enjoying it. It's slow to build but the story is really starting to develop. If you enjoy a game like Stellaris I doubt you'd struggle to enjoy the book

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Renegade-Spiral-Wars-Book-1-ebook/dp/B0138YJ3WA

• Alastair Reynolds tends to yield polarized reactions, but I enjoyed House of Suns. Granted, there isn't much in the way of alien life, but it has the "destructive faction in the galaxy" sort of feel.
  
  
• Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton, as mentioned by another commenter. If you can get used to the author's wordy prose, it's a pretty cool story and creative setting involving humanity's expansion across the stars and eventual encounter with an alien race.
  
  
• Also seconding the Babylon 5 TV series recommendation by another commenter. A galaxy filled with various alien races, with their own inter-empire political histories and wars. After all of that gets set up, a mysterious threat looms over every civilization, and...well you'll just have to watch, haha.
  
  
• I know you weren't asking about video games, but I highly recommend the Mass Effect series. One of the best threat-of-extinction space opera stories of our time, in my opinion (a lot of people hated the ending, but I thought it was fine, so YMMV).
  
  
• Star Wars. Of course.
  
  
• If you're okay with amateur fiction, go to /r/HFY and sort by top/all-time. Have fun.

You may like JF dubeau's Life Engineered, similar concept, was pretty fun for a fresh Author.

This concept was actually a really big interest of mine in my graduate career (though specifically as it related to the Roman Empire). Peter Turchin has written some good and approachable books on how political instability rises as populations approach their maximum possible density.

​

His first book on the subject that reads very nicely: https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/0452288193

​

A short (though fairly jargon-y) article on these effects on Roman instability: http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_SDEAS_2005a.pdf

The computer is a bit dated. The CPU is very weak. You followed my instructions, but doing the msinfo32.exe method only shows the Graphics Card family rather than the exact graphics card, so I can't give an accurate assessment of performance. You have the recommended amount of RAM.

Unfortunately the AM3 socket CPUs are old. They still sell them on places like Amazon, but they are either absurdly overpriced or you would need to find a used one. These will make the cut however. If you are willing and able to upgrade your computer, otherwise you might be better off with a new computer.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003FVI2KQ
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003FVNC0Q

I can point you in the direction of some good graphics cards once you find your exact graphics card model. Look at stickers, use Google, backtrack orders, just whatever. Otherwise with that CPU it's not going to run the game well even on low settings.

>Mhz really doesn't matter at all
>
>CAS latency

How does that even fit into the same message? You're completely wrong.

TL;DR. No, the RAM clock means a lot. Detailed explanation with examples and math below.

Your comparison to cars is also completely off the mark. To even bring it to something remotely correct, you have to account for the different cars, where slower RAM is an industrial truck running in higher gear, whereas the faster RAM is a sports supercar running 1 gear below the truck, so a truck in 4th gear with medium RPM against a supercar in 3rd gear with high RPM, going in a straight line on a completely flat asphalt road. Want to take a guess which one would win?

I'll even ignore the fact that higher-clocked RAM often has same CAS latency than lower-clocked RAM for the sake of argument.

So here's an explanation of how Mhz and CAS latency really work, which illustrates this point. First off, CAS latency is literally measured in memory cycles, which are measured in Mhz. I'll operate with nanoseconds in my calculations, so Mhz will be translated to Ghz (1Ghz is 10\^9 hz, while 1ns=10\^-9 sec) for easier-to-read numbers.

Say you have a typical 3200Mhz RAM stick (16gb, 75$) with 16 CAS latency. Keeping in mind that the bandwidth for memory commands operate at half the spec clock, we come to 3200Mhz for data transfer, but only 1600Mhz (1600 million per second, or 1.6 billion) for memory commands. Time for one full cycle is thus 1/1600000000 = 0.625ns. Then we multiply that value by the CAS latency number to translate cycles from latency to seconds: 0.625 * 16 = 10ns. This is the real latency of such a stick.

For comparison, let's take this G.Skill memory set (16gb, 70$ - I couldn't find faster) with 2666Mhz and 15 CAS latency. Doing the same procedure, we get 1.333Ghz clock for command interface, full cycle time of 1/1333000000 = 0.750ns, and finally the real latency of 0.750 * 15 = 11.25ns.

If you take RAM with even higher clocks, the difference will be even bigger, for instance RAM with 3600Mhz and 19 CAS latency (10.6ns) would still be faster than 2666Mhz 15 CAS one (11.25ns).

Not only is the first set clocked higher, which brings additional advantages with certain CPU models, especially Ryzen, it also has lower actual latency despite having higher CAS latency. It is literally better in every single aspect that concerns performance. To match that at all, the slower 2666Mhz stick would need 13 CAS latency (that would bring it to 9.75ns), and I couldn't find memory like that. Or in reverse, to make the higher-clocked memory run as slow as the lower-clocked one, you would need 17 CAS latency (would bring it to 11.33ns), which would make the real latency only marginally bigger (we're talking about fractions of a nanosecond here) while having significantly higher throughput, so it would still be faster overall.

So yeah, I would say Mhz of the RAM means a whole lot, while it is actually hard to find higher-clocked RAM with CAS latency bad enough to make it slower than lower-clocked RAM.

This is essentially the scenario that takes place in one of my favorite sci-fi novels ever, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Would definitely recommend people check it out, it's considered a classic.

Here's the synopsis from Amazon:

"The gods are a starship crew who subdued a colony world; developed godlike--though often machine-enhanced--powers during successive lifetimes of mind transfer to new, cloned bodies; and now lord it over descendants of the ship's mere passengers. Their tyranny is opposed by retired god Sam, who mocks the Celestial City, introduces Buddhism to subvert Hindu dogma, allies himself with the planet's native "demons" against Heaven, fights pyrotechnic battles with bizarre troops and weapons, plays dirty with politics and poison, and dies horribly but won't stay dead. It's a huge, lumbering, magical story, told largely in flashback, full of wonderfully ornate language (and one unforgivable pun) that builds up the luminous myth of trickster Sam, Lord of Light. Essential SF reading."

Yes. That will be more than adequate to run Stellaris, lol. Get him a good mouse and some nice headphones to go with it, the Stellaris soundtrack is phenomenal. Audio Technica make really high quality headphones for a reasonable price. Sennheiser, too, but they are more pricey.

And if you enjoyed The Expanse, novelwise I could recommend some of the Elite books. Similar aesthetics in terms of a "used" looking universe, and the struggle of independent pilots trying to make a living among the stars.

Specifically, Wanted or Reclamation are two stories I'd recommend.

You'd be a lot safer with one of these

https://www.amazon.com/Snarem-Pet-Capture-Noose-4-Feet/dp/B001VP52Q0

So the Facehugger doesn't think you might need good oesophageal impregnation.

Sounds like a Turtledove novel: https://www.amazon.com/Balance-Worldwar-Book-One-ebook/dp/B000FBFOQY

Amazon has them in kindle format Not Kindle Unlimited, though.