Best products from r/paradoxplaza

Invaluable web sites:

• Dickinson College Commentaries — Select classical texts with vocabulary and very helpful commentary.
  
• Perseus Digital Library — If you have trouble locating a word in the dictionary, enter it into the Word Study Tool to identify it.
  
  Some helpful Latin schoolbooks on Google Books and the Internet Archive (with many more to be found, especially if you read the publishers' advertisements):
  
  
• Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar — If you can't find the information you need in Allen & Greenough, look in this book.
  
• Fabulae Faciles by Frank Ritchie — Four very easy retellings of Greek myths.
  
• Eutropius, edited by J. C. Hazzard — Eutropius' history of Rome is easier to read than any Classical author, and his style is remarkably close to the Golden Age.
  
• Cornelius Nepos, edited by Thomas Bond Lindsay — The easiest Classical author. His surviving works are a book of Lives of the Outstanding Generals of Foreign Nations, and portions of Kings of Foreign Nations and Roman Historians.
  
• Caesar's Gallic War, edited by Arthur Tappan Walker — Traditionally the first book of real Latin read by students because of its combination of simplicity of style, purity of style, and intrinsic literary interest. The received text of the Gallic War is in eight books, but this edition lacks the eighth because it was not written by Caesar.
  
• Select Orations of Cicero, edited by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge — "The Citizenship of Archias" is not too difficult.
  
  A few helpful books you can buy:
  
  
• Vergil's Aeneid, edited by Clyde Pharr — With vocabulary and notes on the same page as the text in a similar format to Walker's Gallic War. This book only contains the first half of the Aeneid, and nobody has done a complete corresponding edition of the second half, but by the time you're through with this, you shouldn't need quite that depth of annotation.
  
• Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes by Richard A. LaFleur — A collection of easy unaltered sentences drawn from ancient Roman graffiti, inscriptions, and various literary sources.

I have a Dell G5 5587 (i5-8300H, GTX 1060, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD) and when it's running at full power it runs pretty much anything. It was around $1000, but you can cut a decent amount of that if you go for a build with a 1050 or 1050ti and 8 GB of RAM, as neither the GPU nor the RAM need to be that great to handle Paradox games, the most important thing for performance on these games is the CPU. Here's a Dell G3 build with a 15" screen, a 1050ti, an i5-8300H, 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a 1 TB HDD for $740 on Amazon. If you can spend the extra $40, that would probably be perfect, and I'm sure you could find it a little bit cheaper to get it in your price range if you wait for a sale or find someone selling it refurbished.

Trail and error, really. I have around 1600 hours logged for HOI3 and I've tried several strategies.

I learned right away that BC and CA (heavy cruisers) to be useless. They take up valuable leadership points and are redundant. Battlecruisers are fast but are powerless against battleships (as we learned irl in WWI). The armored cruisers they were built to hunt didn't even exist in WWII and any that existed were usually upgraded leftovers of WWI (HMS Hood). I have yet to find a good use for heavy cruisers. Initially I had them used for hunting down convoy raiders, but I find a light cruiser and a few destroyers to do a better job while being able to run from a more powerful force. Heavy cruisers slow down the rest of the flotilla and are quickly sunk.

/u/CarloTheCurious below advocates a larger carrier force, which I also find effective. It is also more historically accurate with Imperial Japan's naval doctrine (A great book on this subject is Kaigun, but I digress). However, I find my method to be more flexible. I can still concentrate my squadrons when facing a superior force. Plus, I can deal with more than one threat at a time, which is essential with Japan.

It sounds like you had formal education with multiple years studying the language. Everything worth achieving takes time and effort. You have put in a ton of 'mental reps.'

Good for you. Don't discount your achievements. I tell my daughters the same thing, just because you can do something or know something doesn't mean it easy and it doesn't mean that someone who cannot do it or doesn't know it is lesser or put in less effort. It is easy for you (now), because you have mastered or are on your way to mastering it.

There are native speakers who don't understand or properly use the subjunctive. That doesn't even get into the whole argument that helping verbs aren't necessary and appear to be slowly falling out of use.

If you are interested, and it sounds as though you might be the type of person who would be, a great read is https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

I don't know if it still is, but for the longest time it was Free on Amazon.

EDIT: Still is free on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/1632-Ring-Fire-Eric-Flint-ebook/dp/B00BEQLQNE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

Download the kindle app somewhere and get reading if you don't have a kindle.

Well, I paid $170 for the 240GB SSD I put into my computer two weeks ago. Amazon Link

SSDs are a lot nicer to use now that Steam lets you designate a secondary Library folder on a different hard drive to install games onto. So for me, I keep my important games (Paradox Games!) on my SSD and put less important installations onto a larger, regular hard drive. The OS goes on the SSD as well for sweet, sweet bootup times.

They didn't allow electronics, you can take notes with pen or pencil. Reason is some kids will literally watch Netflix in class in the auditoriums. I go to one of the biggest schools in the country population wise. Obviously this doesn't apply if you take computer related courses but gen eds especially the smaller sized ones laptops are a no go a lot of the time.


For that price hard pass imo unless the two in one feature is a hard requirement for you in which case that's probably the best for you. Might as well get something like https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01MS14CQH/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile or
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N0V9QP3/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile imo since they'll be far more future proof and are just much better in general.


Edit: I'm exaggerating a bit they're "allowed" most of the time in bigger classrooms but again I've never actually seen more than one person take notes on one

I recommend reading this:

https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492224969&sr=8-1&keywords=1493

if you are interested in a counter-argument. Europe got a massive leg up from exploiting the Americas' natural resources - it gave them a huge advantage sometimes inadvertently (like flooding China with silver, which demolished the Chinese economy) and sometimes unexpected ways (the potato and many other plants from the Americas made Europe's nutrition much better than the rest of the world, or access to rubber, etc.)

A friend of mine got this model, but they make a 1060 + 16gb of ram version. Although with your budget, you could definitly spring for something beefier like this

Remember that for Paradox games, the CPU is super important

With the victory of the Grancius River, Alexander's Macedonians were in bouyant moods, yet the cities of Asia Minor stood in their way and soon the Great King himself was looking to respond.


Follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/ApocHistory

Sources for the Episode.
By the Spear: Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire (Ancient Warfare and Civilization) By Ian Worthington
A Companion to Ancient Macedonia by Joseph Roisman and Ian Worthington
A History of Macedonia by R. Malcolm Errington
Alexander the Great by R. Lane Fox

Here is a link to said sale.

I definitely recommend just going for that, then deciding if you want TOG (probably, it's really good despite some balance issues in 867).

Absolutely. There are a couple of things going on. The first thing I'd like to link about this is the letter sent back to the UK in 1793 when they tried to set up trading relations. My favorite bit is

>Our dynasty's majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.

The thing is.. at the time, the Emperor wasn't just being a douche. He was absolutely right. China already had muskets as good as 1790s muskets. China had mass silk production, which was way nicer than the mass linen production that was kicking into gear in Europe. They already had porcelain that was much nicer than European ceramics. So on and so forth.

The only reason the opium trade kicks off is because there is literally nothing the British traders can bring that the Chinese want. Before the British start bringing it, they're literally just paying for all of the things I listed above (that are in very high demand in Europe) with straight silver.

Here's where the trouble starts. The Qing dynasty's taxes and treasury were all based on silver. However, silver was suddenly being pumped into the economy at very high rates. This caused pretty severe inflation--since there were more taels of silver around, each one was worth less as prices of goods and services rose, and the flat tax assessments that had been established centuries ago suddenly generated much less real income for the state. The Qing were too slow to respond to this and when they eventually tried to raise taxes to compensate, it caused widespread unrest. This was happening at the same time as a population explosion. The reasons for it are somewhat undecided, but which may have been in part influenced by the West in the form of the humble sweet potato, which had arrived in the early 1700s and (similar to regular potatoes in Europe) unlocked the farming of tons of semi-arable land and drastically increased available calories.

As a result, the Qing dynasty was already facing huge issues. It was at this point that Europe, for the first time in world history, began to surpass China's sphere of influence in production, population, and practical military power. (This is something I think a lot of people forget.. they just assume western hegemony and technological superiority is an eternal given, when it was a very recent development). The Opium war happens and China just gets clowned. This makes the people even more pissed than they were at the tax increases, the vastly increased number of people competing for static government jobs and only suppressed by a static army.

Now the Qing is in a super precarious position. Remember, the leaders aren't actually ethnic Han Chinese--they're Manchus whose ancestors had claimed the throne 150 years previous, when the Ming government was experiencing its own internal strife and thought they could invite the Manchus in to work for them (this backfired). As a result, nativist sentiment had already been simmering under the surface, especially among the landed, educated gentry that formed the backbone of the Chinese government's administration. Reform efforts by the Qing were seen as foreign meddling, and the educated landowners would often stir up the peasants to resist all foreign ideas as more Qing-invented nonsense created to destroy the greatest culture on earth. Telegraph lines were cut, railway lines would be sabotaged. People echoed what has always been conservative sentiment.. "Why can't it just be like it was before?" Most people in China had no real conception of how or why Westernizing was practical or desirable and merely saw it as an assault on their way of life.

The Qing (specifically, the Dowager Empress; there were factions that wanted to go full-Western, including her son who was technically supposed to be in charge, but she and the Eunuchs shut that down pretty hard) essentially had to play both sides against the middle; the only way to survive themselves was to redirect the nativist anger against the REAL foreigners from the West, rather than the foreigners in the palace. Unfortunately, this makes it a lot harder to implement reforms or spread technology that is visibly from the people you're saying are ruining the country. In the end, the Qing failed to play either side; they were completely dominated by the West and their practical rule of the countryside broke down until it was entirely in the hands of warlords, setting the stage for a period of disunity and unrest that wouldn't be resolved until Mao wins the civil war nearly a century later.

So, uh, yes.

For sources: Hsu; Rise of Modern China

Hucker: China’s Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese history and Culture

Clunis: Superfluous things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China

My friend has the previous version of this laptop:

Acer Predator Helios 300 Gaming Laptop PC, 15.6" Full HD 144Hz 3ms IPS Display, Intel i7-9750H, GTX 1660 Ti 6GB, 16GB DDR4, 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD, Backlit Keyboard, PH315-52-78VL https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QXLFLXT/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_QwqUDb2Z2KKY1

It’s worked out pretty well for him. He did get a bundle that they had which included an additional 1Tb HDD that you could install manually but I don’t see that available with this laptop. I’m not sure if this one has a spare drive bay. It should be enough to run PDX games,