Timberborn is a good idea, terrible execution, and feels unfinished. At least as a "City builder". It feels closer to a sandbox or "casual" game.
You can build robots to take over work, but the robots use the exact same fuel as the normal beavers (food and water) so the benefit is their lack of need to sleep, but that's just not that great a benefit for how much they cost? Also you have to micromanage them, choosing which buildings use robot labor and the setting is exclusive which makes them a pain in the ass to use. Not a very rewarding endgame system. It really should be automatically preferring robot labor and require zero settings changes.
The research/science section of the game makes itself completely redundant extremely quickly, and then you have no reason to run the science buildings. The progression of it also means you start and it's a serious pain to unlock any new buildings, but after you get your first 1000 science points you can unlock the science building that will generate more science than you ever need really quickly. So the pacing is utterly broken.
The UI has odd choices. Why do I have to go back and forth between different menus for building the tree planting shack, and then a separate menu that lets you set up which tree to plant where? And the "select which tree to plant" menu also plants "Bushes" which for some reason includes "dandelions", which are not at all a bush. Because of this, you cannot see the size of the area the planting shack can reach at the same time you can actually place tree planting plots.
The two "Blocks" you can build, the levee and dirt block, are in different menus than the path and stair building menu, so any nontrivial amount of bridge or scaffolding to get anywhere requires you to go back and forth between those two menus constantly. This sucks, because you need to do this kind of nontrivial building because your beavers cannot build anything that is more than two tiles from a connected path. Your beavers are also dumb enough to trap themselves.
You constantly have to build paths through resource zones, but as far as I can tell, there's no option to allow you to automatically build paths over a resource, so you constantly have to mark resources for destruction manually while expanding.
The "Districts" feature used to be way way worse, because it was required. You could only build within a certain range of each district. It was so terrible they dummied it out, and now districts just kind of exist as this barely useful appendage.
Waterwheels, to extract power from the main point of the game, function on water flow rate in a way that kind of disconnects from gravity potential energy, so half the point of really engineering a big damn or something is gone.
Water soaks into the ground so fast that artificial lakes are useless. I was hoping to build a big one to be able to weather a long, end game drought or badwater, but even a huge one would drain so fast you could maybe last an extra cycle before dying.
IIRC, there used to be a building to revitalize the land around it so you could plant, like a water sprayer, but I guess it was removed? I don't understand why. The maps were not updated, so there are large plains that were meant to be watered for crop growth but now you have to channel rivers through them instead.
Also, it takes absolutely forever to load for zero reason. There's a button to click to see the "wellness" of all your citizens, which freezes the entire game for 10 seconds and that also seems absurd.
Like it's still fun at what it is, and I've played hours lately, but it is bad in weird ways otherwise.
I've commented this many times, but I definitely want to see more isometric grid games like SC3k, RC2 or TTD.
They were less-realistic, yes, but is so pleasant how everything ties together and you can neatly fill out the whole map.
Meanwhile, while I like Cities Skylines or Planet Zoo, it is always incredibly awkward to build roads and paths to the point where I find it frustrating.
We probably do need laws to prevent people watching movies in an Apple Vision Pro whilst driving.
We have harsh laws on using phones whilst driving, a Vision Pro (if configured in a specific way) could entirely block your vision with a Movie or Show and this is dangerous.
This might come as a surprise to some, but most people sitting in a moving vehicle are not driving. Trains and buses exist. Even in cars you usually have multiple seats and the ability to transport passengers.
Also, in what country is it legal to drive around with a VR headset?
serious_angel is not contending with you that the design is bad, or that it is bad because it is unoriginal. In fact, they are not even specifically calling out the design.
They have noticed the design, recognized it as the output of an LLM, then proceeded to discover that an LLM was involved in much of the creation of the project. This is an academic project. Whatever the pedigree of the researcher is, this implies to the grandparent that the final result of the work may be amateurish or worse, to an extent generated. Therefore, he's concerned that it puts the legitimacy of the research outcomes (e.g. completeness, contents of letters, classification, maybe even hallucinations in the thesis proper).
Preemptive arguments:
1. "The author's a researcher, not a programmer; therefore it's fine to use an LLM. It is preposterous to ask each researcher to learn web development to publish their research." You are right, but given the amount of vibe-coded websites we see, and them all having the default (Astro?) style, the grandparent all the same has the right to associate that style with untrustworthy crap. I'm not saying that this academic website is necessarily crap. However, I think it's useful for the grandparent to share their sentiment, because the researcher might not know.
2. "A lot of pages have links to sources; you could verify the legitimacy yourself". perhaps, but doubting the veracity of research is a bad first impression, isn't it?
It's a bit sad, because the website is non-trivial, and would have taken quite a bit of effort without an LLM. But it is difficult to separate webdev enablement with the rest of the LLM baggage.
Thanks for the feedback on this. I'll note that I am not an academic nor a researcher. I'm a hobbyist who wanted to bring together data from different letters and read them for myself. I don't aspire to be a researcher nor publish academic work.
The primary goal is to provide access to these letters to non-academics who would like to read what Romans were writing in language they can understand.
I take all the points about research outcomes and the quality of the data itself. That is going to be an ongoing process to continue to improve it alongside LLMs. I have a day job, and this is just a side project, but where it can provide value, I want to lean into that side of things.
Anthropic profits from the PR, for one. And they likely hook these institutions on their products in the long term, for two – much like I was "stuck" on Azure until recently, thanks to their free startup credits pointing me to it a decade ago.
There are ways one can engage in financial engineering (is "accounting engineering" a term yet?) where despite not making a profit, you segregate a tax break, tax credit, charitable deduction, etc. into some other entity and then can sell that off as an asset that some other business that is making a profit buys and writes off against its own profits.
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