Triforce! - Triforce! #62: Travel Stories

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

Triforce! Episode 62! Pyrion gets very sick from China, Lewis becomes a hobbit and Sips has been streaming alot! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Please play responsibly. 3, 2, one, go! Good to have you back. It's always such a great contributor to all of you. Having to restart really filled me with energy there as well. Yeah, I'm fucking super energetic now. I wasn't before. I'm just going to run outside.

Welcome back, everyone, to the Shroud Force podcast. I hope you enjoyed that little bit behind the scenes. So we've been away since December. We haven't done a podcast since Christmas, which is nearly, which is actually, it's the first of March today. It's the first of March today. It's a snow day as well. But it kind of reminds me of the very first podcast I ever did with Simon, which was Snowcast.

It was done on a snowy day. We were trapped indoors everywhere. Britain was like locked down. We were kind of in a day and we were trapped indoors everywhere britain was like locked down um we were kind of in a bit we were we were i was living in sticks definitely and he was living in sticks and so it was a bit more you know like like because we're in the center of bristol now and you're in the center of london uh pflax look the snow isn't really too much of a problem is it around where you are you're not too bad i mean mrs f hasn't got into work today because i mean in london the trains and the tube all shuts down if there's a whisper of snow.

Yeah. Well, any excuse, right? Oh, exactly. Anyone, anyone, everyone loves to get a snow day. But school is on, thank God. It's one of the perks of living in England that you get snow days. My schools are all closed here today. Everything is closed here today.

The whole island is shut down. Jesus. This is snow. Excellent. Are you going to go and build a snowman? Are you you gonna go and throw some staples or have you already done it there's not enough that that's the stupid thing everything's closed but there's not enough snow to even do a snow angel like there's like little tiny tufts of snow everywhere it's really not that it's just really wispy snow and it's not it's not enough to actually bring anything to a grinding halt but everybody

is always just looking for an excuse to shut everything down and in some ways it's exciting right my kids are like really excited because they've never seen snow before also everything's closed and they get to stay home all day in their pajamas and stuff so they're pretty excited but you know it's kind of i suppose it is a little bit dangerous i mean i walked down today um into just just down to the office today and there was a lady in front of me who was clearly not wearing the right shoes and neither was i uh because i left my walking shoes at the office and she sort of slipped but didn't fall over but she she definitely like slipped and it was one of those moments and um i cracked a smile and that was the karma that got me and then i fucking slipped as well um and just

you had you have that moment where your heart like beats out of your chest and you think oh fuck um but then you're like okay and then i walked like an old gran the rest of the way into the office so that's why we're late and that's why this podcast is going to be a little bit short today um it's going to be because of because of today. Truncated. It's going to be truncated. Because of the snow and stuff. Trunk force. But we've been away. We've all been away.

You've been to China, P-Flex. I went to Shanghai. Shanghai, yeah. It was for a Dota tournament. China. I went to Shanghai for Star Ladder. And I'd never worked with Star Ladder before. I'd never been to China before.

I had to get my visa sorted and everything. I've got a two-year visa to China. But as amazing as China was, and I had some get my visa sorted and everything. I've got a two-year visa to China, but as amazing as China was, and I had some great food out there. Shanghai is like a city of something like 30 million people. It's absolutely insane. I mean, I've lived in New York. I've lived in London. I've been to lots of big cities around the world. And I thought I'd seen the scale of what human civilization can look like. I had not seen anything until i'd seen shanghai it's endless city like you keep going and you think we've been driving for an hour in

like the heaviest traffic and you come out and you think well this must be like the suburban area nope still all high-rises massive buildings you go past like what would be the equivalent to canary wharf and the city in london go past that like 18 times. There's just huge stacks of buildings everywhere. It was nuts. It is another level, isn't it? There's always people everywhere, night and day. But there are some strange things about China, like cultural things. Number one is...

I'm so excited for this. I've been waiting for this for like two months. I'm just like gripped okay i was just they they don't they don't open late stuff doesn't open late so like at the hotel we were at if you tried to get dinner past like seven or eight they were like huffing and puffing and like folding their arms and scowling at you while you ate and stuff and they tell you a bunch of stuff on the menu the hotel bar didn't get in at once didn't get in there it literally was like no no it's shut i was like it's 5 Didn't get in there. It literally was like, no, no, no, it's shut.

I was like, it's 5.30. It's like, yeah, shut, shut. I was like, Jesus. When does it open? I don't know. Like, I couldn't figure this out. And there was like, just when you go out for, if you go out for a meal to like a restaurant, they'll generally be open pretty late.

But there was a lot of places that seemed to shut pretty early. The other thing they have, and I'd heard this before, is that in China, it's not uncommon if you ask someone to do something for them to delegate. And then rather than check up on the situation to be like, well, it's someone else's problem now. No one wants to take responsibility for stuff. There's a kind of reluctance to do that. So if you say to someone, we need some food in here because we've been working for like 15 hours. Can we get some food?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll look into it. And what they mean is they'll say to someone they want food and then they're done like hands off it's not my problem anymore because and i feel like my that might have come about from having a very authoritarian government for such a long time is like i do not want to be the guy that they go to and say hey did you kill those peasants yet uh no sorry you know i didn't then it's like your fault but if you say i told general so and so to do it oh really i'll go talk to general so and so you know so it's like someone else's problem

so they keep passing it around it's a whole society of modern office culture then yes so and so here no no he's just popped out oh okay is anybody doing anything today no not my problem i delegated it all to someone else. I mean, I'm sure if there's anyone from China that watches this, I apologize if I'm wrong, but that was certainly what I felt. And from talking to other people, that's the impression that I got, was that it's not uncommon to have people hand work off and say, not check up on it.

So it's like, you know, not my problem sort of thing, which is kind of interesting. That's a weird little thing to pick up on from basically one of the biggest most like up and coming like shanghai it's it's the new the new wealth the new world right everything's going east like china has this it's the it's massive it's huge it's the it's the second biggest economy in the world shanghai but the showpiece city right yeah it's like a kind of it's just it's just it's just it's just vast wealth and new stuff too. Like new things being built. Everything's so modern.

I'm really interested in other things that you picked up while you were out there, actually. I mean, the food was really, really good. I'll say that. People were like, oh, you're going to show, oh, the food's going to give you, you're going to get a mud butt from that in no time. But the food was no problem. I did not get a runny bum at all. I loved it.

And I ate the spiciest food I have ever eaten in my life. I was on another planet. It was so spicy. It was amazing. And yeah, it was really something else. But there are little things like... You know the way when you go to a foreign country in Europe or whatever, and you say to someone, do you speak they'll say oh no no no english sorry

if you ask that question in china they don't even understand the question do you speak english like that's how big the language and cultural divide is between us is that you say okay like i went out for a smoke we were in the restaurant i went out for a vape and there was nowhere to go apart from this little hallway that was like the fire exit and so it was like a big concrete stairwell and all the staff there was like three or four waiters and chefs out there also having a smoke because they all smoke like crazy in china and i'm out there and they look at me like who the fuck is this guy and i was like uh anyone speak english and they were all like looking at each other like what did he just say like it was literally they didn't even understand the question do you speak english any more than i would understand

if they said to me in Chinese. Maybe I'm a bit ignorant, but I always figured in China you could just smoke inside. I thought it was like that episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Frank gets all of those Asian guys in and they're playing cards in the back room and the whole room is just full of smoke. All of them are smoking and stuff. And I just imagined that everywhere in china was like that but maybe no i mean there's lots of places you can't smoke but i mean it's not uncommon in china for them to just ignore that so there was some some of the some of the other customers in the restaurant they went for a cigarette and they literally just stood like next to one of the tables like not next to their own table they went and stood next to someone else's table and smoked there and no one said said anything. It was just like, yeah, that's how it is.

I like that. But we went on the underground. The underground over there is pretty cool. It's all very wide, very efficient, unbelievably busy. It's not dissimilar to the London underground, honestly, in terms of how it all works. How it feels. Yeah, it's not insanely complicated or anything.

But it was incredibly busy. Everywhere was was incredibly busy all their stations are vast like if there's a stairway it won't be like a stairway like you get here at like a little district line station it'll be like wide enough for eight people to walk down here it's like everything is bigger bigger bigger all the roads are massive a lot of their stuff has been built recently though yes it has i guess the big difference with the london underground has been around forever that's true every every station has like some rich history of when it was bombed and how people had to live there during a bombing and stuff like that but like i guess a chinese metro station was built like two years ago yeah no it's all very

clinical that fresh city smell to it you know yeah it's kind of funny but i mean we went down to the bund which is like the old european quarter because i think shanghai used to be owned by or operated under or something something to do with europe you can look yeah i think we we um it was part of the concessions in the great open the first opium war i think so i think there's a couple of movies about that with Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan in them. I think you're right. It sort of covers those in detail. Was there like a German influence there or something?

Yes, there was. That's why it's called the Bund. I think it was called Shanghai Nights actually. Yes, you're right. It was. Did he go there as a cowboy? I can't believe this place. It's like another planet.

Wow. Yeah, that was the one. So the Bund was, you could have been in been in europe like genuinely it was like the style of buildings and the you know there's like the promenades and stuff to walk on and everything but the smog in shanghai although it's nothing as bad as beijing it was properly bad like there were quite a few days we just couldn't see past like you know a couple of couple of roads it was that thick and we went down to the river to look across to see this tower, this Pearl Tower, I think it's called. It's the biggest tower, one of the biggest towers in the world.

It's this huge, ornate structure. Sort of like the Eiffel Tower, but bigger. It's just this huge thing with this big ball halfway up it. I assume you can go up it, but you can barely see it across the river. It was super misty and smoggy. We were looking down the river, and luckily we had a local guide with us, if you like. A girl called Jofie, she's a Dota 2 manager for Team Newbie. Lovely girl. She showed us

around, she explained everything. She learned English from watching Netflix. Okay. That's amazing. I know. So, she's literally, she's like, thank you, Netflix. And I was like, how did you learn English? She's like, Netflix, just watch netflix just watch a lot of netflix i guess it could kind of happen yeah you know i mean and i said did you just have the subtitles on or something but yes i've been watching a lot of gamora lately and i feel like i'm pretty much italian at this point yeah but she was still if it hadn't been for her we would have been completely screwed like she took us out to these good restaurants and everything and and really looked after us so

shout out to her she was fantastic do they learn english in school because i know in japan um most japanese people have done like three to five years of english but it's very much focused on grammar and some of these other things so it's not really conversational and so yeah i didn't find that many people spoke english when i went to japan i don't know maybe i was unlucky or whatever but we found that a lot of the places we went into if we asked people if they spoke english they just like flax was saying just literally had never heard a word of it before in their lives i mean that might be a generational thing because i find the same thing when i went to germany a lot of the older people

like my mom's age or maybe slightly less than my mom's age and up don't speak a lick of english like the the they but all the younger guys that i know in germany they all speak english like really well yeah um well i guess it's like a lot a lot of media like you know like young younger guys especially probably watch a lot of movies watch a lot of tv shows play a lot of video games but they dub everything they dub everything in germany every tv show every movie but i mean i think the internet has helped um in a big way and also i just think they may be learned learning it in school more but i don't know if they do teach english in china but uh no i mean i find that japan is quite deferential i think because of the war they're kind of obsessed with western culture in a way so i think that might be a part of it i don't think china is uh as much um i think there's definitely a cultural thing i think the japanese

with the american influence coming in and kind of but also i think japan is much more open to the world than china i mean china still they have their own they don't they have their own stuff they have their own search engine they have their own you know like companies their own car companies around everything companies it's kind of it's hard to sometimes get western stuff into china because they're very much like well why would we want to buy anything we can make it ourselves we could own ourselves you know and that's that's i guess part of part of the strength but also keeps them a bit more isolationist i think it is very much like that the internet over there was very strange um so for instance uh there's like ministry of truth stuff over there it is a bit yeah i mean i was very concerned about what i searched for so i mean for instance if i was on the hotel wi-fi i

couldn't use whatsapp google like you just cannot access google at all um any any of the major western sites or anything you just can't get to them but if what what is and i'm sure everybody else at home listening right now is is thinking the same thing what is whatsapp their point of like oh my god couldn't find it it's all chinese characters oh fuck yeah like i went to their web i think it's called baidu b-a-i-d-u i think it's a search engine um couldn't understand the look of it there's always chinese so you know as you would expect if i typed something in western characters into the box it would it would return search results but they were all in chinese so i couldn't

really understand what was going on so i was like all right never mind the internet i'll just watch tv um because they had like a movie channel on in the in the room but uh the selection of movies was very poor mostly chinese movies obviously and then the Western movies were not good ones So but we didn't spend much time indoors and I see we were either out about or we were working and then I was like Knackered because it's the time differences really fucks you up It was it was a it was not the good way to travel going east is like really bad in terms of hours ahead Yeah over there. isn't it? It's tricky. We had the same situation. So we went out to Australia for RTX. We spent

a day in Singapore on the way. Because I thought like, you know, traveling for 27 hours, flying for 27 hours is kind of AIDS. So the stop off halfway. But that kind of was a good idea because we got to see Singapore for a day and it was kind of a bad idea because it just made you just prolonged the hell of jet lag at least once you're there you can properly sleep and start working on fixing your your your your sleep pad but because we were there very jet lagged for a day and then off on the plane again it was kind of a bit yeah that's a bit messy we had one day to get used to it i just woke up at

4 a.m every day that was it 4 a.m every day i'd wake up and and then we'd work the shifts were pretty long they were about like 12 or 13 hours long because it's a dope how long were you there for uh i think five or six days so not that long it's not bad no no but it's still better than exactly but i wouldn't want to be there for two weeks so you were just sort of on were you you were ready to be casting when no well i cast a series with od which was great i hadn't cast we'd never done an all english cast before that was the first all english cast in dota believe it or not um at an event um that i know of no one pointed any out to me so me and od cast one of the early series of games that was kind of a stomp and then i was on the panel but it

was always like like this is the way event organizers think. They think we'll put them on in the morning panel, then we'll give them a break in the afternoon, and then they can go along in the later panel. But you want to do back to back. Like no one ever wants the break. You want to get the work done so you can go back to the hotel, or you want to start later for both your shifts so you can come in later.

Like that's what you want. Take note, organizers, please. So generally speaking, it'd be like, right, right everybody in we want call times like 8 30 we'll go straight there you gotta like makeup um and the makeup girl didn't speak obviously any english so when you're trying to say to her please don't put so much makeup on she's like spatula like just covering you blusher she's got the eyeliner on you. All over your entire head. She was like putting eyeliner on my eyebrows and like brushing them for ages and getting them just right.

So they were like pitch black eyebrows. And then my face was like ghostly pale. It was kind of funny. But yeah, so, but she was nice enough. So that took forever. And then we'd wait around for a bit and then we'd have to do the panel and then it takes forever to do the panel and then

dota takes forever like the draft stage takes like 15 20 minutes in in alone you know and then you've got to throw to the casters then you have to watch the game then you come back and talk about it and talk about the next game so it's like a lot of a lot of downtime but then you've also got to watch the game like because you have to talk about it right so you have to watch the game like a hawk so it is it's kind of it's kind of um the days do feel long but also if you like dota you don't mind because you get you know you'll enjoy the drama of it and everything and you're just sitting around watching video games for christ's sake you can't complain that much no yeah you're not cracking rocks open or fucking hauling you know video games for 10 hours and get paid for it oh it's like

jesus god that's terrible. But I did get horribly sick. That was the one downside that actually will live with me forever. It's the illest I've ever been. So hang on a second, though. You said you didn't get sick. I didn't. I didn't.

On the plane home, I started to get a mighty headache, and I thought it was just a jet lag or whatever. Oh, no. I actually upgraded to business class because I thought it's a 14-hour flight or whatever the fuck it is. It was dead cheap. It was post-Christmas. It was like 300 quid to upgrade. I actually upgraded to business class because I thought it's a 14-hour flight or whatever the fuck it is. It was dead cheap. It was post-Christmas. It was like 300 quid to upgrade.

I was like, fuck it. Yeah, it's nuts. You get the airport rates, and if you're lucky, you're on a flight that is kind of empty. It was not a busy flight. Yeah, you can get a really cheap upgrade. Business is really worth it. What did you fly with? BA.

BA business is fantastic. It was nice. I mean, it wasn't first class, but it was BA. BA business is fantastic. It wasn't first class, but it was nice. It was very nice. I had the bed that lies down. I had all the good movies, big screen and everything. For me, that's what it's about. It's about the actual bed that actually goes vaguely horizontal.

It's a game changer. I just can't sleep sitting up. Me and Terps did the same when we went to LA we did this Hearthstone thing in LA we were only there for like two days and it was a good trip but we upgraded to business because it was super cheap we were on Air New Zealand

they're good, they're really good yeah yeah, on board the plane there was a chef okay, and he like he came over to each of us and he's like hey guys I'm the chef on the flight today we're like what, there's a chef okay and he like he came over to to each of us and he's like hey guys i'm the chef on on the flight today we're like what there's a chef on the flight he's like yeah you guys want anything to eat he's like uh yeah i guess so he's like i can make this that this is like uh can i

just have some pasta or something yeah no problem could you get some peppers and some oh my god and the food was so good too it was really it was just like eating in a restaurant it was fantastic yeah it wasn't all like you know like the you know they have like the um it's all wrapped up and they just shove it into the incinerator and serve it to you it was all like you know prepared properly like really good food it was awesome but so five minutes into the flight the ladies come around giving out the champagne and i was feeling great at this point and she promptly spilled a full glass of water like all over me like Like my trousers were soaked through. I was like, she was like so apologetic. Would you like some pyjamas from first class? I was like, yes, I would. So I got changed

into these nice pyjamas from first class. I left my trousers on the empty seat next to me to dry. And then I had a nap. I watched some movies and then I started to get this awful, awful headache. And I thought, like I said, it was must be jet jet lag And then the next day when I woke up a home I was the sickest I've ever been like these things I've ever been I could like my chest was I couldn't cough It hurts so much that I was like in tears just trying to get one cough out So I was like in bed sick, which I never happens to me for like a whole week And then the next week after that was just feeling like shit nothing tasted right It was snot pouring out of me and then i took like another it's only like

the last couple of days i've actually been myself again so that was the longest i've ever fucking had to endure sickness so that sadly is my lasting memory of china is what was it you had flu actual flu just flew but like chinese flu which is like your body is completely unprepared for foreign flu, right? And they all wear masks in China, like not just for the smog, but for the germs. You got that many people, you're going to get sick. Like I should have worn the fucking mask. Next time I go, I'm wearing a full headset like the guy in E.T. that goes into Elliot's

house to retrieve E.T. I'm wearing the full radiation suit next time because, oh man, it was bad. If you really like snorting cocaine, and that's the only way that you'll do your cocaine, what do you do when you have a cold? Do you think that that's the best time to kick the habit? No, I think you inject it into your penis at that point in liquid solution.

I would use that as an opportunity to get off the off the wagon i think i mean yeah i got a cold i can't i can't snort anything right now that's how i quit smoking going in it's all coming out that's a good way to quit smoking this is how i'm this is how i'm gonna kick cocaine you feel like shit anyway so yeah you can't smoke when you're definitely ill like especially you got really bad lungs you go like two weeks without smoking you could just stop and that was how i did it i was like i had a bad cold and i was like you know what this is actually a good opportunity to actually just

stop and it does when i was when i was in my teens i used to smoke a lot and i had to quit smoking when i got pneumonia i had to quit smoking for like a month and then after when i was feeling better i was right back on yeah well you know you could have smoked when you're young i was like 15 or something so oh you gotta smoke when you're 15 come on yeah your rebound after sickness when you're 15 is nuts though you're just like i'm back i'm back baby so talk talk baby talk about flights we flew back from new zealand on emirates business via via um dubai which was quite an interesting airport to go around. I saw this thing just before you continue. They're building a building or it's a hotel in Dubai that the floors can revolve around.

So the whole building is just constantly morphing around and stuff because it's like built like in a stepped fashion or something it looks crazy so are you supposed nuts to decide which i think i think you each room you can swivel you want yeah you can swivel it around and so the whole building just looks like uh it it looks like it looks like somebody doing pottery but leaving the wheel just going and like you know like like it looks like it looks like somebody doing pottery but leaving the wheel just going and like you know like like the whole thing turns into like a long dick shape and just starts flopping around everywhere that's what the building looks like yeah it's crazy so i mean i don't think it'll go that fast but so it basically is the idea that like you wake up in the morning

to the sunrise coming through your window but then you can rotate your room round yeah to to have like when the sun goes down you can have the sunrise out of your sunset out of your window is that the idea it's like a natural yeah like a like sleep trigger and wake up thing i thought it was super interesting so i thought i'd mention it but carry on sorry i mean the alternative you could just do if you wanted that without having to buy it, you could just literally have your bed on wheels, right? And just like wheel it across the other side of your house, right? And then it would be the same. I mean, that's like...

I kind of like that there's periods of the day where the sun comes in and then other times where it doesn't. I'm happy with that. Like, I don't feel the need to rotate, but... Well, no, but I'm just saying that if you wanted to have a rotating house to do a cheaper way would just be to have all your furniture on wheels wouldn't it you know you could

just like push it yourselves yeah well we went to this flipping um we went to one of the places we stayed in in new zealand was up the top of this massive terrifying cliff and um we got all the way up there and and we thought, how the fuck are we going to get back down this horrible path to this place? We have to reverse all the way up this horrible winding mess. But at the very top, there was...

Did you feel like you were in Middle Earth the whole time you were there? Yeah, it did feel a lot like that, actually. Nice. And we got to the top, and the hobbits were... No, and then it had like a turntable, right? So the idea was that you push your car, I'd never we got it had like a turntable right so the idea was that you

push your car i've never seen this before onto a turntable and you literally push the car 180 degrees and then drive it back down it was madness are you sure it wasn't the beacon of amundin lewis calls for aid come to think of it it was the beacon of Edmonton it was Duncan taking off his top actually that was the beacon the beacon is lit he's up there and takes his top off

neon white torso on a distant hilltop a fire is lit nerd skin rippling in the sunlight send a sunbed send a sunbed yeah send a sunbed to Gondor now

we had a lovely time actually you guys were gone forever jeez I forgot about you guys you know what I got to the point

where I was like you know what I've moved on I just I actually classed you guys as dead and that was it just wrote us off yeah i just

moved on to other things and just completely worked you you guys out of my schedules and stuff and you know just like that's it but now you're back and i gotta i gotta read yeah you gotta you know what day it is today and tomorrow kind of today kind of tomorrow definitely it's world book day we're recording this near-ish to World Book Day. So my kids, I don't know, your kids would have had the same thing probably if they'd gone into school. They had to dress up as characters from their favorite book or their favorite characters from a book. They did theirs already. I think they did it like a week or two ago.

So it's obviously not World Book Day. It's like World Book Day-ish. Like it's around this kind of time. It is. I think it's like they do it over the course of a month. Yeah, I think because the schools are going to find a time when it works for them as well, right? Yeah, right. So my eldest is going in tomorrow as Alice from Alice in Wonderland,

a book she has not read, but she likes the character. And my youngest is going as a character from Harry Potter, also a book she has not read, but she's seen all the movies. And her favorite character, as I may have mentioned before, is Ron Weasley. So she has gone as Ron Weasley. A.K.A. Duncan Jones. We're just flaming Duncan.

Duncan cosplays as his own Weasley brother. Oh, right. He cosplays as a slightly older Weasley member of the family. Yeah, like Duncan Weasley, basically. But she's got like a little red wig, like a red, it comes with a red wig. So she really looks like him and a little Hogwarts cloak.

And I lent her one of my old ties and she's so fucking happy. It was hilarious. Ron Weasley, of all the characters, Ron Weasley, he's like the punchline of the entire trilogy. Or not trilogy how many books it is oh god he does get the girl though eventually you know god that's that's gonna

be a tick mark true why he gets the what's her name again hermione grangers uh and and uh and and ron it's i thought that i thought that it's okay Luna Lovelace is Harry's Harry's girl right so he gets Luna Lovelace Lovegood whatever I don't think it's

Lovegood is it you're thinking of Ada Lovelace oh yeah you're right who is I believe dead long time ago

the first computer programmer she's dead yeah that's right yeah holy crap so I mean I've got so much to talk about

I feel like i want to play a game of hearts of iron four and just pick new zealand and oh you know what we should do we should play a game of stelaris that the new expansion is really good i was playing it the other day oh my god that game i love the expansion for stelaris i've been playing it a lot fantastic it is so good so they really streamlined a lot of like the stuff that just didn't feel great like like originally so now you know like how influence used to work lewis you know like yeah you'd colonize a planet then influence would slowly creep out sometimes you'd be lucky enough to maybe like nab a good system within your sphere of influence or whatever they've changed it all now so that it's only hyperlanes okay which is

great i think that's really good and each system if you want to claim the system you have to build an outpost okay okay the so the outpost is like a mini star base okay and it costs energy to maintain it but if you want to make it bigger you can upgrade it into like a bigger star base and has all these modules that you can add on it and stuff. So they've taken a lot of like the sort of star base stuff out of like, you know, planets. You know, when you build the planets and then you can build like a star base, you used to be able to do that. Now you can build star bases anywhere. And if you want to create ships from them them you have to add like a shipyard module

you can increase your fleet capacity with other modules there's like money making hubs and stuff it's really really good it's really streamlined like a lot of the annoying shit about the game yeah so so that it's a lot more sort of strategic in the sense that you can actually create a choke somewhere like if you know where there's like one system that maybe like another faction would use to get into your system if they were going to attack you those become like important strategic points to capture yeah and they've introduced the casus belli sort of stuff like claims so you can so wars aren't that just these massive long-winded attrition fests now you can have very specific goals for like a small war you can

just like claim make a claim to a system that you want and and fight over that and literally resolve the war in like two seconds and take the system but those claims cost um cost influence so you can't just claim their empire and take it so they you will notice you're right like you declare rivalry with someone to get a bit more um sort of influence and stuff and then they know that you're not on their side and you start to build up your fleets and and you claim their systems and they're claiming some of yours then you have a big war but there's like there is a war weariness mechanic but it's actually a good thing because if you're in a defensive war and you're losing you actually want to have to force them to the peace table and say look we've been fighting for 30 years we should probably knock this on the head and then you get 10 years of

peace borders are changed they might get a system of yours or whatever it's it's really it's really good and the megastructures are good you can build like all the it feels a little bit more like like crusader kings now in a way sort of thing like yeah i think without the storyline element the crusader kings brings but i've found that and i'm sure you have too chris is that the story develops from the game as you're playing it right like you're playing that's right this fallen empire i don't know how you feel about it lewis because you haven't played the new stellaris but you need to get on it buddy i will i'll maybe update it on the um my laptop we can we should do one at some point because it's it's a slow enough game where you can chat a lot as well.

Absolutely. I really want to get back onto the wagon of playing these games with you because I think it was so much fun playing Crusader Kings and Stellaris and these games. I'm going away, though, to America for another two weeks. So I've got GDC. And this is a big thing now for us. March and April are not going to be great. You're like an international playboy these days.

I'm going away for a week in March and a week in April as well. Oh, my God. I'm away in April too, boys. Wow, we're all just away all the time. Maybe summer is the time we'll be back. Triforce we can do, that's for sure. Everything else. Triforce can be done, yeah.

It's tricky. I've got loads of things to say about Australian TV. I'd love to tell you about it, but you'll be streaming so much, Sips. You'll be streaming really, really amazing. I've really enjoyed some lot recently as well I'd love to tell you about it you'll be streaming so much Sips you'll be streaming really amazing I've really enjoyed some of your Skyrim stuff it's been great, god it's nice to just get stuck into it and play it because I can just play it for like 8 hours a day

so I'm in 5 days of streaming it, I'm already probably past where I was in my original YouTube series which took months and months and months and months to do so it's great it's such an awesome game even

it's old but man it's so fucking good so Sips has been streaming a lot I guess my 10 hours a day of streaming is just nothing just nothing to you oh yeah Sips you've been streaming a lot fuck that other bald idiot. He never streamed.

Yeah. There's only room for one bald idiot in this team. That's me, baby. Fine. Oh my god. All right, well, I'm sorry I have to cut this short, but I actually have to go because I've got to walk over to this meeting and it's going to be 15 minutes. And it's a snowy day out there so sorry about this everyone

we ease ourselves back into a Triforce podcast we can't rush it we'll be back next week like all guns blazing we'll do a proper length one and it'll be great and we'll make sure we make a lot of fart and dick jokes and stuff

all the good stuff that everybody I know it's a real me let me just i've made up a joke i'm pretty sure i made this joke up someone will have to tell me if i didn't i'm very proud of this joke everyone tells me it's terrible but i know they're wrong all right are you ready okay i'm right yeah yeah right what is lionel richie's favorite musical instrument uh cello oh amazing i think that's a great joke I made that up I'm pretty sure I made that up

What is Lionel Richie's favourite dessert? Jello See it works It works Amazing Alright you guys Thank you so fucking much See you next week

Bye Thank you so fucking much. We'll see you next week, everyone. Bye.