What are you playing at the moment? 2011 - September 2017

[arathain]

A lot of the Empire and Dwarf strengths come down to making the most of your combined arms and ranged advantages, and there are some non-obvious things you can do to set up better lines of fire or support attacks (like letting your lord gets surrounded on purpose in front of your direct-firing artillery or gunners, or defending at the bottom of a hill so gunners can fire over your front line). Youtubers like Party Elite have lots of tutorials. It’s helpful to see a veteran demonstrate things or explain nuances the game doesn’t directly teach, and especially handy UI features like alt+click to drag (+ctrl to rotate) selected units in formation instead of making a locked group, the J turnaround/disengage, dragging curved paths, and guard mode.

Those Party Elite Youtube tutorials are excellent. Well explained and demonstrated, while still being quick and concise. No time wasting. I’m learning a lot. There are a whole bunch of unit controls I didn’t know about or understand well. I also took a lot from his explanations of unit width and depth.

[riesje]

Ok I’m done with XCOM2-War of the Chosen. I’m not going to finish it, I think I saw most new content and I’m just done. They made late game even worse by adding swarms of lost on most missions. It was already a pretty boring part of the game in vanilla without the zmbies, now its even more boring because de facto you’ve already beaten the game (it’s *impossible *to fail at this point, your squad has just way too much survivability, mimic beacons for everyone!) and missions are a slog. Now you also have to kill hundreds of zombies who just slow the game down without adding any real danger (at least on commander ironman) to the mission. Hell they even make it easier because they occasionally help you with ADVENT. But you have to mop em up. And its easy. Just slooow.

didnt realise it was an requirement to kill all Lost. Im currently halfway a playthrough and I for the most part ignore them and just focus on the mission objectives. They can be outrun, and their damage (if you get hit) is neglible.

[theantmeister]

And then there’s Mario + Rabbids which I’m increasingly growing bored of. I bought this instead of the new XCOM 2 expansion totally because I wanted a portable strategy game, but now I’m finding myself wishing I was playing more XCOM 2 instead of this. It’s cute and actually better than I expected, but at the same time it’s also totally simplified and just doesn’t give me any real satisfaction. Would much rather be shooting extraterestrials with a big squad.

Heh, I made the same choice, but I don’t regret it…yet. I suspect it is ruining any skill I had at XCOM though. Given that 1) you get so much health back after each encounter and 2) shooting doesn’t end your turn, I am really playing it fast and loose. Often leaving characters out in the open with zero cover!

[Bobtree]

Those Party Elite Youtube tutorials are excellent. Well explained and demonstrated, while still being quick and concise. No time wasting. I’m learning a lot. There are a whole bunch of unit controls I didn’t know about or understand well. I also took a lot from his explanations of unit width and depth.

Zerkovich and Heir of Carthage are good too, and they all have other playlists for faction guides, magic, replays, etc.

[coldvvvave]

didnt realise it was an requirement to kill all Lost. Im currently halfway a playthrough and I for the most part ignore them and just focus on the mission objectives. They can be outrun, and their damage (if you get hit) is neglible.

Maybe some dark event happened or something anyway I had lost zombies on all recent missions including blacksites and convoys. Strictly speaking you don’t have to kill them but they are a threat (in theory) and an inconvenience, maybe they won’t eat your favorite ranger but even 1hp damage is somewhat significant. XCOM jsut doesn’t really work when there are 10+ enemies in range its problems with line of sight become way too visible even for me (I love the base game and I know its flawed). It slows down 15 min missions into 30+. And there is no good reason for it.

[alms]

Samorost 3 was definitely worth the price of the Humble. It’s exemplary for an adventure game:

Exemplary? I guess in a way it is: the first area is back track galore, no fast travel, no fast clicking on exits. Just walking around the same five or six screens pixel-hunting stuff and clicking on stuff, waiting for whimsical animations to play out, sometimes pretty long, too, and listening to silly sounds.

The non-textual cues look cool but are not intuitive, both for the UI and the puzzles, to the point there is a pretty popular guide on their forum that explains what the menu options do (!)

It is pretty and it is whimsical. But as an adventure game it gives me nausea: it is stuck half-way between the desire of having puzzles, and being a toy that you touch and stuff happens, and it does well neither thing.

Since it was making roll my eyes so fast, I pulled out a walkthrough and made it to the second area, but I’m not sure that I want to continue. I recall John highlighting the backtracking and the bad puzzles, too, though he felt that they were minority, it’s bad enough to make me want go play something interesting, instead.

The hint system also is pretty bad as far as I can see, it’s just two pages of drawings. That’s not a hint system. **The Inner World **has a hint system. Click four rocks in a certain sequence. Great puzzle design?

The music is good, though.

Caveblazers explicitly separates ranged attack direction from movement direction, allowing you to shoot in eight directions, and doesn’t bother to add mouse aiming. Shame on you, Rupeck.

Sounds to me like you’re making things complicated for yourself: there is a strongly recommended control scheme, so unless you totally hate it, it’s probably less hassle to just get used to it?

As for 8 directions, I think Viral Frog hit the nail on the head. With continuous aiming you run with accuracy problems because of the stick, whereas with 8 the catchment areas are larger and it’s easier, for a smartly coded game, to figure out what direction you’re pointing in.

Are you on an TKL that you don’t have arrows close together?

Fez (…) What a wonderful game. Every new screen amazes me with how incredibly beautiful and unique it looks. I love how a simple level can provide you with multiple rabbit holes to venture into and get lost in yet another pretty part of its world.

It is, enjoy!

[ToomuchFluffy]

TomxJ:

Hit Chapter 3 of Risen 3 and the po-faced Caledor area has reduced me to tears of boredom. The experience has been a lot like hitting a tequila bar in Soho on a Thursday. Seemed like a fun quirky thing to do at the time but now its 3am, I have nothing to show for it other than wasted hours and should probably head off, but I’ve left it too late and now the last train has gone to East London.

I’m assuming you are nearing the ending? Just going from how Gothic 1 and Risen 1 turned out for me. The ending turning into a boring combat-grind seems to be par for the course with Piranha Bytes.

In other news, I finally managed to get back to Pathologic. Looking at a playthrough of Day 4 after finishing my session for today, it turns out that the game isn’t quite as difficult as it seems for me. I’m just incompetent in regards to side-quests. I also realized a few more things about the barter system and I’m pretty sure I ate or sold off a good number of items which would have been much more valuable for bartering… At least I’ve managed to solve my food-problem in the morning of Day 5.

[Gus_Smedstad]

I finally got around to looking at Sword of the Stars 1, and bounced pretty hard off it. While I’m generally in to games like this, the strategic layer felt too simple, too abstract, and in some areas decidedly lacking in information.

For example, “climate hazard.” It’s a number. The bigger the number, the less hospitable the world. That’s it, no flavor beyond a number, and no way for a new player (such as myself) to grasp whether the number is good or bad. Master of Orion 1 may have been a relatively simple game, but at least it had names for inhospitable planet types, like “Tundra,” “Dead,” and “Toxic.”

Then there’s the sliders on your worlds. There’s a Civilian / Imperial slider. What does it do? Why would I want to move it one way or another? There’s no information, and the SotS Wiki I found didn’t explain it beyond it being a feature introduced in one of the expansions. There’s a Construction / Trade slider, and no information about what that does either.

There are some linked tutorial videos, but I gather they’re out of date. They don’t mention the Civilian / Imperial slider, for example. And they say “there’s no morale / taxation in the game,” except that apparently now there is a morale effect. The videos mention the Construction / Trade slider, but give no hint as to why you’d want to, for example, shift it all to Trade at a world. They just talk about the negative consequences of zeroing out trade.

The user interface has some unpleasant quirks. For example, there’s a ticker at the bottom showing a list of events from this turn. There appears to be no way to pull up this list and rapidly scroll to an event I care about, like a newly explored world. No, I have to wait for the event to scroll by and click on it. You can’t just scroll around the map - you have to progressively double-click on worlds to change the camera focus.

It just feels old in its overall approach.

[Heliocentric]

It’s funny, because before it’s expansions it was absurdly modernist. Then they slowly made it like other strategy games.

Progression Wars is still the best campaign, turning a RTS/TBS hybrid into a rogue(ish)like was genius.

[arathain]

I finally got around to looking at Sword of the Stars 1, and bounced pretty hard off it. While I’m generally in to games like this, the strategic layer felt too simple, too abstract, and in some areas decidedly lacking in information.

For example, “climate hazard.” It’s a number. The bigger the number, the less hospitable the world. That’s it, no flavor beyond a number, and no way for a new player (such as myself) to grasp whether the number is good or bad. Master of Orion 1 may have been a relatively simple game, but at least it had names for inhospitable planet types, like “Tundra,” “Dead,” and “Toxic.”

Then there’s the sliders on your worlds. There’s a Civilian / Imperial slider. What does it do? Why would I want to move it one way or another? There’s no information, and the SotS Wiki I found didn’t explain it beyond it being a feature introduced in one of the expansions. There’s a Construction / Trade slider, and no information about what that does either.

There are some linked tutorial videos, but I gather they’re out of date. They don’t mention the Civilian / Imperial slider, for example. And they say “there’s no morale / taxation in the game,” except that apparently now there is a morale effect. The videos mention the Construction / Trade slider, but give no hint as to why you’d want to, for example, shift it all to Trade at a world. They just talk about the negative consequences of zeroing out trade.

The user interface has some unpleasant quirks. For example, there’s a ticker at the bottom showing a list of events from this turn. There appears to be no way to pull up this list and rapidly scroll to an event I care about, like a newly explored world. No, I have to wait for the event to scroll by and click on it. You can’t just scroll around the map - you have to progressively double-click on worlds to change the camera focus.

It just feels old in its overall approach.

No argument that the strategic layer can be a tad opaque. I hate all the sliders.

On climate hazard, which is the important one: the ideal condition for your race is a hazard of 0. When you colonize a planet hazard costs you money each turn, and slows your population growth. For a developing world there’s one of those lovely sliders which I think is terraforming/infrastructure, terraforming being the reduction of hazard and infrastructure applying a multiplier to your income from the planet.

When you have destroyer-sized colonizers I’d avoid colonizing anything above a hazard of 200, and try to stay below 150 unless the world is really good, otherwise you’ll be paying too much for too long, and you’ll cripple your early economy. The higher the hazard the more colonizers you should try to use. Keep the slider all the way to the terraforming side until the hazard falls below 100. Then move it a bit towards infrastructure every few turns. No, I don’t know why this is a thing you should do. There’s no interesting choice here.

Once you get cruiser-sized colonizers you can tackle higher hazard ratings. These carry a good number of colonists and each one drops the hazard by a chunk and brings some infrastructure when they land.

In the early game its OK to spend half to two thirds of your income on terraforming. If you scout and colonize sufficiently aggressively your economy will slow down quite a lot, but things will turn around quite quickly when worlds start becoming profitable.

The population slider stuff even I found a bit confusing. I know that each world has a population limit based on size. Once you hit that you start taking a morale penalty every turn that needs to be offset somehow. You can adjust a slider up to allow your population to grow over the limit, but if you do this you’ll take a permanent hit to the planets resource stat every turn as if you were overharvesting, shrinking production rates over time.

If I remember right construction/trade allows you to allocate more of your production to building ships, at the cost of tax revenue? I might have that one wrong.

Ultimately once you grasp this stuff the strat layer becomes fairly simple, as it is quite streamlined. Scout and colonize good worlds, and make fleets to defend your planets and push other races off theirs.

[Gus_Smedstad]

On climate hazard, which is the important one: the ideal condition for your race is a hazard of 0. When you colonize a planet hazard costs you money each turn, and slows your population growth.

I got that, what peeved me was that it was extremely abstract, and there’s no obvious way to derive the “100 to 150” rule of thumb you give from what I was seeing as a novice player. Nor had I any idea that the size of the colonizer had an impact an the return on investment for a high-hazard colony.

Is the “imperial / civilian” slider a way of imposing a population growth limit, then? I’d never have guessed that.

[vinraith]

There’s a Construction / Trade slider, and no information about what that does either.

Controls whether you want the industrial output of the planet to go to trade or construction, and in what proportion. In other words, if you’re not building anything there, put it all to trade. If you’re trying to rapidly construct a fleet, put it all to construction. If you don’t actually have any trade yet, it doesn’t actually do anything yet.

The user interface has some unpleasant quirks. For example, there’s a ticker at the bottom showing a list of events from this turn. There appears to be no way to pull up this list and rapidly scroll to an event I care about, like a newly explored world. No, I have to wait for the event to scroll by and click on it. You can’t just scroll around the map - you have to progressively double-click on worlds to change the camera focus.

Click any event in the scroll and you can page through the events at the top right. Once you’ve done this once that interface will always pop up in the top right.

It just feels old in its overall approach.

You’re not wrong, but it’s still easily the best in its genre IMO - nothing since has worked remotely as well for me. That the sequel was such a trainwreck is one of the great tragedies of modern gaming.

[arathain]

I got that, what peeved me was that it was extremely abstract, and there’s no obvious way to derive the “100 to 150” rule of thumb you give from what I was seeing as a novice player. Nor had I any idea that the size of the colonizer had an impact an the return on investment for a high-hazard colony.

Is the “imperial / civilian” slider a way of imposing a population growth limit, then? I’d never have guessed that.

The population growth limit is imposed automatically. The slider allows you to lift it. I think there’s some other related stuff you can do if you end up with a multi-species population? That’s late game stuff, mostly.

I agree with you, the way planets got colonized is the clunkiest part of the game, and one you mostly just need someone to tell you how to perform correctly.

That said, it’s still one of my favourite strategy games, so I think it’s worth overcoming the hump.

[alms]

It is pretty and it is whimsical. But as an adventure game it gives me nausea:

Since this came out stronger than I intended, let me add that I’m glad that you are enjoying the game, but rather bitterly disappointed by Samorost, so reading your post was like a cold front and a warm front walk into a bar, if that explains my reaction somewhat.

[Internet]

Oops. Wrong thread.

[The_JG_Man]

Knuckles really is hard mode in Sonic Mania. I think I said that previously, but the low jump ceiling really kills his ability to take on some bosses. The boss of the first act of the final zone (that’s a mouthful) requires you to essentially run up from the edge of the screen, jump then immediately glide to make sure you have enough clearance. Who cares if you get hit by anything protecting it at that point, you can get your scattered rings back, the boss can’t get back its lost hit point.

So I did the Knuckles and Knuckles run. The AI doesn’t help you really, but that’s part of the charm of this stupid run. Your reward for charging through it is to play against the Very Final Boss and if you beat that then your acclaim for beating this run is a jpeg with a remixed tune. I knew it was a jpeg, but not what it looked like and the fact it’s a joke on the mode you’re already playing seems fitting. The run took about 2 hours, which given Knuckles is ultimately slower than Sonic or Tails, that feels fair, even if I did cheese most of the zones by going Super when I felt like it just to get a bit more oomph.

Fact remains though that the first level of Mirage Saloon on the Knuckles route is incredibly fun and if you get that far as Knuckles essentially treats you to a fairly paced challenge sandbox to play around with him in.

[Serenegoose]

sonic 2 and knuckles was always made super hard by the fact that sonic could jump over robo-robotniks spike arms and knuckles kinda couldn’t, so had to wait for when he jumped and landed, which was usually followed up by him shooting at you which is harder to dodge if you’ve just got in close. It wasn’t that the fight got ‘difficult’ per se, but because it took so much longer, you ended up getting greedy.

Especially if, like me, you played this on a megadrive, and were about ten.

[The_JG_Man]

You know, I’m really not sure if I ever did beat 2 with Knuckles. I think 10 year old me probably played it the same way though.

It’s funny you mention that though because when I just did that run through I got to the Final Boss (not the Very Final Boss) with Super mode on having poorly managed my rings and ran out of it just before the boss went down. And I got greedy and got myself killed. I think that’s something I do like about the Sonic games though, they embrace your confidence, but punish your arrogance. Wanna fly through the level in Super mode? Great, but you best make sure you’ve got rings left for the fight. Take it cautiously throughout then pop it just before the boss? You got it, this one’s on us.

[LexW]

Especially if, like me, you played this on a megadrive, and were about ten.

It is staggering how much harder being a kid made games. Like, they’re all supposed to have good reflexes and stuff, but it really didn’t make up for our general incompetence. I was 14 when Streets of Rage 2 came out, and it seemed like a pretty hard game, like definitely not easy. We eventually finished it but it took a lot of goes and a lot of coordination and focus and so on. And 14 is barely even still a kid.

I played it a couple of months ago on the emulator on Steam, and like, man what? It was, as they say, “a faceroll”. There were a couple of bosses where I had to learn some fairly paltry attack pattern, but overall, it was a joke - and that was single-player which noticeably harder than two-player back in the day.

Even games from when I was 16/17/18 seem easier than they were (FFVII for example), let alone ones from when I was younger. I recently found out that Marble Madness only has like 6 levels. When I played that at 9 or 10, it seemed to go on forever. 6 levels. Sheesh!

All that said, I played Super Mario Bros (on an actual SNES!) last year and whilst I was good at it, it definitely required a little more finesse than I expected/remembered.

[aoanla]

It is staggering how much harder being a kid made games. Like, they’re all supposed to have good reflexes and stuff, but it really didn’t make up for our general incompetence.

To be fair, I think there’s two kinds of games from that period: the ones which are trivial if you’re not a kid/ have decades of games experience ; and the ones which are ridiculously difficult and unfair (or even broken) by design.