Video Games: Gears of Borderlands

[Rhom]

On 12/17/2019 at 9:41 AM, Ferrum Aeternum said:

You're probably where you need to be, then. Of course, you could also go ahead and do Frozen Wilds before finishing the main quest.  

Put about four straight hours in last night to finish the last of the Frozen Wilds content... or at least I thought I did until I found out there are more firey robot bears out there for me to go kill now!   

I'm level 56 now and the main story quest objectives are level 20ish I think.  This may be a bit of a formality at this point.   

[Mexal]

I'm into Act 3 of Witcher 3 now. Getting there. Very much enjoying the story. Just wish I got to spend more time in more worlds.

[Mark Antony]

37 minutes ago, Mexal said:

I'm into Act 3 of Witcher 3 now. Getting there. Very much enjoying the story. Just wish I got to spend more time in more worlds.

I hope you play the dlc’s if you have the time after you beat the story. Can’t recommend them enough 

[Toth]

That... that didn't exactly go as planned.

So... I am still fighting that Col 70 sector wall. When I scrolled downwards on the galaxy map I saw that there are stars below the Col 70 sector that are accessible, so I had the great idea of just jumping straight down in order to reach them. Route plotting didn't work because they were about 500 Ly away from my position, so I picked stars manually to jump to...

Until I hit a literal dead-end. Every system around me suddenly belonged to Col 70 sector, I couldn't jump downwards anymore. So I doubled back... trying to weasel around the Col 70 sector... and then after some more jumps going in a zig-zag course up and down, west and south, I zoomed out in the galaxy map... and realized that I'm nearly back at the Witch Head nebula.

Are you shitting me, game?

Then I hit another dead-end, realizing that I can't even move west and down anymore and in my frustration ended up plotting a course back to the witch head nebula. And the result made cry out in frustration: I had to go all the way back up before moving west and then down again. This dead-end was just truly ridiculous... Come on developers! This is thousands upon thousands of blocked systems. You can't just leave that there, ruining everyone's immersion in the easter part of the galaxy!

 

[Mexal]

2 hours ago, Mark Antony said:

I hope you play the dlc’s if you have the time after you beat the story. Can’t recommend them enough 

Excellent. I have them and have already picked up some quests for them. So much Witcher, so little time.

[Corvinus85]

Decided to get into Stellaris. Trying to learn it by simply playing on the easiest setting as a Human democracy. I've always failed to get into Paradox games due to their complexity, and the only reason I'm persisting with this one is curiosity + I love that soundtrack. 

I need an expert's help with some game mechanics. Summon @Toth

1) How does the job distribution work? I'm really confused by this one.

2) At what point can I separate my colonies into different sectors? Right now, besides Earth, all I got are the two habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system. I tried to get them their own governor, but I didn't see any options to do that.

3) How can I increase Administrative and Starbase capacities? For Administrative, I increased by +20 with a tradition, but I see no obvious way of going further. For Starbases I'm currently 4/3 and don't see how to increase it. I'm keeping the upkeep under control with traditions that lower the cost.

4) Is there a research tree somewhere? I ask because there are technologies I know I need to unlock, for example the one allows me to upgrade Starbases further, but see no path to get there. I'm just picking research options based on what I think is best, but don't know how to set long term goals.

[Toth]

13 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

Summon @Toth

Hey!

Lucky for that I was just logging in before going to sleep. Well... I can try to help, but I'm not sure I can in many cases, because...

14 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

1) How does the job distribution work? I'm really confused by this one.

... they have completely reworked how the pops and districts of a planet work since I have last played the game. I have absolutely no idea.

15 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

2) At what point can I separate my colonies into different sectors? Right now, besides Earth, all I got are the two habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system. I tried to get them their own governor, but I didn't see any options to do that.

As far as I can remember in the upper screen left side of the screen there is a single top-down menu and somewhere there you can find something to show your sectors. There you can click "Make new sector" and then you are asked to click on one of your systems to make this the home system of your sector. You can then expand it by clicking on surrounding systems.

But... given that you don't get access to all of the income of the sectors and the AI is dumb as bricks when it comes to what to build there, I advise you to control as many planets directly as your cap allows it.

19 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

3) How can I increase Administrative and Starbase capacities? For Administrative, I increased by +20 with a tradition, but I see no obvious way of going further. For Starbases I'm currently 4/3 and don't see how to increase it. I'm keeping the upkeep under control with traditions that lower the cost.

I'm not quite sure there, it seems they have reworked this as well. No idea.

20 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

4) Is there a research tree somewhere? I ask because there are technologies I know I need to unlock, for example the one allows me to upgrade Starbases further, but see no path to get there. I'm just picking research options based on what I think is best, but don't know how to set long term goals.

There is no research tree. Every time you research something you get a random selection of technologies to choose from. They are tiered I think, so you get the low cost ones first, but other than that all you can do is find ways to increase the number of technologies in each selection (which I myself wouldn't exactly prioritize, admittedly).

[RumHam]

On 12/28/2019 at 6:01 PM, Corvinus said:

Decided to get into Stellaris. Trying to learn it by simply playing on the easiest setting as a Human democracy. I've always failed to get into Paradox games due to their complexity, and the only reason I'm persisting with this one is curiosity + I love that soundtrack. 

I need an expert's help with some game mechanics. Summon @Toth

1) How does the job distribution work? I'm really confused by this one.

Basically you just build districts and unique buildings. You get a new building slot on a colony every five pops. You can prioritize jobs on the population tab but personally I never bother. Try not to build districts until you have people ready to work them, cause they do add to your empire sprawl and have upkeep. 

Oh and some pops will be "specialists" or "rules" which means they will only do certain types of jobs. You can also build robots that can do most jobs. Just be aware that researching any red technology could lead to bad things. 

On 12/28/2019 at 6:01 PM, Corvinus said:

2) At what point can I separate my colonies into different sectors? Right now, besides Earth, all I got are the two habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system. I tried to get them their own governor, but I didn't see any options to do that.

If you go to the colony screen there's a "create new sector" button. That colony becomes the capitol and I think everything within four jumps is added to the sector. Then you can give the sector a governor. 

On 12/28/2019 at 6:01 PM, Corvinus said:

3) How can I increase Administrative and Starbase capacities? For Administrative, I increased by +20 with a tradition, but I see no obvious way of going further. For Starbases I'm currently 4/3 and don't see how to increase it. I'm keeping the upkeep under control with traditions that lower the cost.

Some technologies, one of the ascension perk that you get when you finish a tradition tree, and one of the civics when you reform your government. It's not a hard cap. I think you're expected to go over it and just take the hits to research and unity. 

On 12/28/2019 at 6:30 PM, Toth said:

Hey!

Lucky for that I was just logging in before going to sleep. Well... I can try to help, but I'm not sure I can in many cases, because...

... they have completely reworked how the pops and districts of a planet work since I have last played the game. I have absolutely no idea.

Yeah, they've changed just about everything. It was weird playing the console version that didn't have alloys or consumer goods or anything. 

[Toth]

I should just quickly note that I'm back in the bubble. I sold my exploration data for 19 Million at the Federation, immediately becoming super friends with them. That was more than expected, but still an awful payout for being stuck in deep space for days on end. Not to mention having to deal with both this ridiculous Col 70 nonsense AND people trying to interdict me three times when I was within 200 lightyears from home. Yeesh, guys, get a hobby!

Well... I guess that's it for the time being. Got lots of other things to do before the Christmas break ends and don't want to further spend it punching the j-button like a maniac.

[Corvinus85]

On 12/28/2019 at 5:30 PM, Toth said:

Hey!

Lucky for that I was just logging in before going to sleep. Well... I can try to help, but I'm not sure I can in many cases, because...

... they have completely reworked how the pops and districts of a planet work since I have last played the game. I have absolutely no idea.

As far as I can remember in the upper screen left side of the screen there is a single top-down menu and somewhere there you can find something to show your sectors. There you can click "Make new sector" and then you are asked to click on one of your systems to make this the home system of your sector. You can then expand it by clicking on surrounding systems.

But... given that you don't get access to all of the income of the sectors and the AI is dumb as bricks when it comes to what to build there, I advise you to control as many planets directly as your cap allows it.

I'm not quite sure there, it seems they have reworked this as well. No idea.

There is no research tree. Every time you research something you get a random selection of technologies to choose from. They are tiered I think, so you get the low cost ones first, but other than that all you can do is find ways to increase the number of technologies in each selection (which I myself wouldn't exactly prioritize, admittedly).

 

10 hours ago, RumHam said:

Basically you just build districts and unique buildings. You get a new building slot on a colony every five pops. You can prioritize jobs on the population tab but personally I never bother. Try not to build districts until you have people ready to work them, cause they do add to your empire sprawl and have upkeep. 

Oh and some pops will be "specialists" or "rules" which means they will only do certain types of jobs. You can also build robots that can do most jobs. Just be aware that researching any red technology could lead to bad things. 

If you go to the colony screen there's a "create new sector" button. That colony becomes the capitol and I think everything within four jumps is added to the sector. Then you can give the sector a governor. 

Some technologies, one of the ascension perk that you get when you finish a tradition tree, and one of the civics when you reform your government. It's not a hard cap. I think you're expected to go over it and just take the hits to research and unity. 

Yeah, they've changed just about everything. It was weird playing the console version that didn't have alloys or consumer goods or anything. 

Thanks for your inputs. I had gone to the Stellaris wiki and figured out some of these questions. Apparently for the jobs, it's a sort of trickle-down distribution, with the higher tier jobs filled first. Like you said, RumHam, I got to wait for the Pop level to get to where it needs to be before building new districts, which I hadn't realized until recently.

I also realized that I don't need to upgrade starbases all over the place, as the first level (the outpost) doesn't count towards the capacity limit. Of course, at that level they can't fend for themselves, so that's where the right balance between expansion and being able to defend your territory with fleets comes in.

For sectors, a new colony becomes its own sector if it's at least 4 hyperlanes away from the capital of another sector. That automatically happened in my current campaign, when I colonized a planet at that distance, and it became its own sector. Then I could go into the sector screen and give it a name, and pick options for it.

[aceluby]

Picked up the Witcher on the Switch.  Have it on PS4, but never got into it because I couldn't get around the controls (and the combat is kinda bad).  I turned the difficulty down to just the story and am enjoying it a lot more now.

[RumHam]

4 hours ago, Corvinus said:

For sectors, a new colony becomes its own sector if it's at least 4 hyperlanes away from the capital of another sector. That automatically happened in my current campaign, when I colonized a planet at that distance, and it became its own sector. Then I could go into the sector screen and give it a name, and pick options for it.

Huh, I've never had that happen I always have to do it manually. It must have something to do with what kinda government you're using? 

I picked up most of the DLC I was missing during the last steam sale so I'm playing a game now and I might finally actually win a game! Took me forever to figure out how to play well and there are still things I'm unclear about. I've never even touched the ship designer. 

[Corvinus85]

21 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Huh, I've never had that happen I always have to do it manually. It must have something to do with what kinda government you're using? 

I picked up most of the DLC I was missing during the last steam sale so I'm playing a game now and I might finally actually win a game! Took me forever to figure out how to play well and there are still things I'm unclear about. I've never even touched the ship designer. 

I've figured out the ship designer, and had some fun with it. Designed a missile corvette and named it the Rocinante-class.  I'm not a fan of the battles, though, given how you have no control over them. I nearly lost a battle despite having overall superior firepower, because I didn't think ahead of giving the ships the right targeting computers. Now I know.

[Impmk2]

On 12/28/2019 at 4:11 AM, Fez said:

I also got Hades and damn if that isn't fantastic, as are all Supergiant games. It's still in early access, but I think almost done, and, as a rogue-like, the early access restrictions matter less. My only issue is that I think the game might be slightly too easy. I made it all the way to the final boss (who did kill me, but only barely) on just my 6th run; with almost none of the permanent unlocks available yet. Which is problematic because the game is actually filled with dialog and story (which you are supposed to unlock more of each time you die, both through time spent and using collectables from your runs) that I mostly haven't seen yet, and it would be a shame to finish the game so quickly.

Right now there isn't an ending in the game, apparently if you kill the final boss there's just a pop-up message saying literally "Let's pretend that he did kill you there" and you move to the next cycle just as if you'd been killed. But once the ending is in place, I wonder if there would be anything at all that makes it make sense to keep playing (which I'd want to do if there's still so much to see and do).

I feel like the difficulty may be tweaked again in the final release. I played Hades a fair bit earlier in the year, before the release of the current final boss. It was bloody hard in that iteration, took me 30+ tries to just get the 3rd boss and kill him. Then when they released the new content they massively nerfed the game, and it only took me a single run to the final boss kill.

My assumption at the time was this was so people could actually get to the newly released content to give them feedback.

[Fez]

14 hours ago, Impmk2 said:

I feel like the difficulty may be tweaked again in the final release. I played Hades a fair bit earlier in the year, before the release of the current final boss. It was bloody hard in that iteration, took me 30+ tries to just get the 3rd boss and kill him. Then when they released the new content they massively nerfed the game, and it only took me a single run to the final boss kill.

My assumption at the time was this was so people could actually get to the newly released content to give them feedback.

Interesting. That makes sense. If that's the case, I also hope that they rebalance the progression systems and the frequency of the resource drops needed to complete them. The way I see it, ideally, you'd always be making roughly equal progress on all the different systems and that by the time you can beat the final boss you're basically done with them. Other than a few completionist things and having more weapon unlocks for people who want to keep playing just for the combat (which is fun). But that's not the way it is right now at all.

I've done 23 runs now. I haven't actually beaten the final boss yet, but I can consistently get to him; and when I die its from the boss fight before him. I can always get through the 90% of the game before that without much trouble. I have finished a lot of the codex entries out, and I've unlocked and maxed out the entire mirror of night (except the last 4 which are still locked, which are much more expensive, but don't seem like game changers the way earlier ones are). However, I've only gotten enough nectar to give it to each NPC once, so I'm nowhere close to finishing that, I don't even know how much more I need. I've also only done 13 renovations, which were all cheap ones. And I've only gotten 2 diamonds, 3 ambrosia, and 5 titan blood the entire game (I feel like bosses should drop one of those 100% of the time).

So it feels rather imbalanced, with some things almost finished and others only barely started.

[Ran]

Funny, I've been watching a couple of streamers playing Hades. I rather like Supergiant's writing and the voice acting work, playing with the Greek pantheon in amusing ways.

Think it's too twitchy a game for me to play, but nice to see that people are able to create good roguelikes that feature a nice story thread.

[Fez]

23 hours ago, Ran said:

Funny, I've been watching a couple of streamers playing Hades. I rather like Supergiant's writing and the voice acting work, playing with the Greek pantheon in amusing ways.

Think it's too twitchy a game for me to play, but nice to see that people are able to create good roguelikes that feature a nice story thread.

I don't think I'm that good at twitchy games either, but Hades isn't that bad. Also, there's a God Mode you can enable from the options that says it significantly eases the game difficulty for players who just want to enjoy the story. I haven't tried it out, though considering the amount of gameplay in-between the story beats, I'm not sure how much fun it would be.

 

In other news, I got inspired by The Witcher tv show (which I never fell in love with) to go back to Thronebreaker, the single player story-driven Gwent game that CD Projekt Red stealth released on GOG and is now up on Steam as well. I restarted the game since I couldn't remember anything and am in the early parts of the third map now. It's fun, and the writing is just as good as The Witcher 3 I think, but the game is still way too easy; even on the hardest difficulty.

[Rhom]

@Ferrum Aeternum Finished Horizon ZD this morning.  Was a fantastic game.  Narratively, I felt the game peaked about midway through the main quest though with the reveal of what the solution to the robot plague was.  There were cool details after that, but nothing that was a major upshot from there.  Left a lot of good material for a sequel.  If rumors are true and HZD2 is a launch title for a PS5, then I'm definitely going to bump up my purchase schedule.   

[Ferrum Aeternum]

4 minutes ago, Rhom said:

@Ferrum Aeternum Finished Horizon ZD this morning.  Was a fantastic game.  Narratively, I felt the game peaked about midway through the main quest though with the reveal of what the solution to the robot plague was.  There were cool details after that, but nothing that was a major upshot from there.  Left a lot of good material for a sequel.  If rumors are true and HZD2 is a launch title for a PS5, then I'm definitely going to bump up my purchase schedule.   

Yeah, that was definitely the big wow moment of the narrative. Best part of that for me was that all the flavor stuff (found recordings, etc.) took on a much deeper and more tragic meaning, knowing what those folks were up against. Anyway, brilliant storytelling. 

I've never been an early adopter, particularly not for consoles, but given that HZD was easily my favorite game of the past decade I might also make an exception if the sequel launches with the PS5.

[Rhom]

4 minutes ago, Ferrum Aeternum said:

Yeah, that was definitely the big wow moment of the narrative. Best part of that for me was that all the flavor stuff (found recordings, etc.) took on a much deeper and more tragic meaning, knowing what those folks were up against. Anyway, brilliant storytelling. 

I've never been an early adopter, particularly not for consoles, but given that HZD was easily my favorite game of the past decade I might also make an exception if the sequel launches with the PS5.

Agreed.  I was looking at my data files and saw a couple missing and it bums me out because so many of them were so good.  I even delayed finishing the game a bit while the focus was restoring the files of Elisabet's journal so I could read them.  I'm actually about a quarter of a bar away from hitting level 60, I may go back into the file to finish that off.  Otherwise, I'm done.

Spoiler

Those last bits of info you are talking about really left some interesting hooks for the next game.

Ted Faro isn't gone... I just don't see it.  Somehow, he managed to either freeze himself or make a sequence of clones over the years.  Something.  I also wonder if there aren't Lightbringer Protocol clones of the other Alphas that could be floating around?  Or heck, even another Elisabet clone???  I figure there's another APOLLO copy out there somewhere and that will be part of the story somehow and of course reconfiguring GAIA.  Somehow, I assume we will visit Elysium and possibly Thebes (Faro's bunker).  There was a data file that said Elysium was "only a few miles away" so it is somewhere in the American west.  

As to other tribes to interact with, I don't believe we ever actually saw "The Claim" where the Oseram were from and there was an escapee from the Carja jail sidequest who was from a tribe somewhere to the south I think.  I believe Sylens when talking about his travels said he had been to the "forbidden west."  Lots of great questions that are out there.