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Videogames: Spooktober Season


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54 minutes ago, Werthead said:

English longbowmen are pretty ridiculously overpowered though (being able to hit castles from further away then trebuchets), but fun to use. 

Eh, they have their drawbacks too. They fire slower than regular archers and the English lack the thumbring upgrade from the archery range as well. Not to mention that they are a castle unit so they can't be produced that quickly. 

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2 hours ago, Proudfeet said:

Eh, they have their drawbacks too. They fire slower than regular archers and the English lack the thumbring upgrade from the archery range as well. Not to mention that they are a castle unit so they can't be produced that quickly. 

For most civs, you can build castles almost immediately, you just have to food and wood spam for 5 minutes and then market swap for stone. And that's assuming you don't have stone in the starting area or just plain start with lots of stone.

Castles being stone-only in resource costs remains one of the oddest things in the game, it allows you to treat them as glorified watchtowers rather than as the rare super-building they really should be (Age of Mythology has the same problem, exacerbated by structures and walls in AoM being made of tissue paper).

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3 hours ago, Toth said:

 

But damn, I don't care what everyone else says, I found Spore fun, if shallow.

 

 

Yeah, honestly, sometimes you want deep intricate strategy and sometimes you want something simple and quickly learnable. Spore didn't do what it promised, sure, but once you got into it with expectations out the way it was good fun. 

I mean I've still barely got into Stellaris. Like at all. Just cannot find the time to get down and learn it (or Europa Universalis). The days of me having time for that kind of thing are either in the past, or in a future where my job is less tiring and I can do thinky thinky things after work.

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5 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I mean I've still barely got into Stellaris. Like at all. Just cannot find the time to get down and learn it (or Europa Universalis). The days of me having time for that kind of thing are either in the past, or in a future where my job is less tiring and I can do thinky thinky things after work.

Mmh, compared with EUIV or Victoria II I found both Stellaris and Crusader Kings a whole lot more accessible. I guess the trick is to not treat them as Grand Strategy games where you have to min-max your way to total domination, but more as a role-playing game where you are free to play around in a sandbox.

And yes, I also have a job that doesn't really allow for much gaming time...

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Yeah I suspect that Stellaris will be easier once I give it a proper go at some point because you're building into it, rather than just being plopped into the middle of an existing, very complicated situation.

Mind you that approach also works in EU, where the fun I've had with it has come from just seeing what happens rather than from trying to 'win'. 


I actually have a decent amount of gaming time but since I'm always knackered and my other hobbies involve writing, one of them to somewhat deadlines, I just default to games that let me jump around and hit things/explore etc than deep thinkers. Metroidvanias ftw.

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6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Mind you that approach also works in EU, where the fun I've had with it has come from just seeing what happens rather than from trying to 'win'. 

I guess it does. But my only playthrough so far had been with Brandenburg and the beginning there seems to involve a major "Do this one thing or you are fucked" situation according to the wiki. Something that I learned the hard way and therefore had to deal with wasting away a rather long stretch at the beginning where I couldn't expand without getting crushed by everyone in the neighborhood. So... well, exactly what you describe with starting in some kind of situation.

I guess Crusader Kings is similar, but I tend to start as a tiny count and marry my way upwards, so I do spend the beginning of every game in a "cosy" (or helpless) situation where I inevitably have time to adjust to my options due to how limited they are anyway.

But Stellaris has that 4X progression that I find a lot more comfortable there than in any other turn-based 4X game. Exploring the stars à la Star Trek, slowly get adjusted to the resources available in your neighborhood, realizing that your Federation-building xenophiles are surrounded by xenophobic theocracies and then preparing for the inevitable extermination wars to ensue...

13 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I actually have a decent amount of gaming time but since I'm always knackered and my other hobbies involve writing, one of them to somewhat deadlines

Ah yes, writing I have as a hobby as well... unfortunately my job also sucks up all my creativity, which is awesome in itself, but makes you too drained to write as well. So I can absolutely understand that.

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7 hours ago, Werthead said:

For most civs, you can build castles almost immediately, you just have to food and wood spam for 5 minutes and then market swap for stone. And that's assuming you don't have stone in the starting area or just plain start with lots of stone.

Castles being stone-only in resource costs remains one of the oddest things in the game, it allows you to treat them as glorified watchtowers rather than as the rare super-building they really should be (Age of Mythology has the same problem, exacerbated by structures and walls in AoM being made of tissue paper).

No, I mean that you would usually not have that many castles relative to archery ranges, barracks and stables so its harder to get a mass of them. That's in general for all castle units including the trebuchet and except the Malay unit which take up half a population each.

If you're the English player, the English have a production bonus where their ranges work faster, so you can get regular English archers with +1 range from passive and another +1 or 2? range from Yeomen which can also work pretty well at a much faster pace than producing them from castles. Usually I'd have 2-3 ranges at that point, so the bottleneck would be at my resources rather than my production building.

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On 11/13/2021 at 6:18 AM, karaddin said:

I think your friends are the outlier on that, having sunk a lot of hours into both I think 6 is a substantially better game. I'm pretty sure the player stats favour it as well.

For all it was memed on due to bugs, after diving into Cyberpunk 2077 after it's had almost a year I think the PC version at least belongs on there.

I think they covered it upthread already, but Civ4 is best Civ.  Early game can be a little restrictive, and end game can be a bit of a slog.  If they let you set your own domination win limits it would be great.  40% pop and 40% territory should be enough, the rest is just busy work.

8 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Yeah I suspect that Stellaris will be easier once I give it a proper go at some point because you're building into it, rather than just being plopped into the middle of an existing, very complicated situation.

Mind you that approach also works in EU, where the fun I've had with it has come from just seeing what happens rather than from trying to 'win'. 

 

I really like Stellaris but it pretty much comes down to smashing your first rival and then steamrolling the rest of the galaxy.  So you "win" the game after 10 hours or gameplay, but win it after much longer.

Was surprised/not surprised to see FTL on the top 100 list.  I prefer Into the Breach, but both are great games. Started a couple new games with Nessario(?) (glaive been and no shieids- tougher start than most but OP if you last to the mid game ).

FTL is fantastic for a few hour time killer, even after you've unlocked all the possibly starting ships.

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Obviously personal tastes will vary and I'm not trying to tell anyone they're wrong for preferring an earlier version of Civ. I find a lot goes into my feelings about a game including where I was at in life, and I'm in a much better place now during 5&6 than I was during 4 so it's not surprising that I'm inclined to prefer the newer ones.

What I was trying to say is that choosing 6 as the representative of the Civ franchise on that list is not at odds with the majority of the player base. I know 4 predates a lot of people having it on Steam, but the player stats that are available heavily favour 6 and there are a lot of people who do like it.

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So I did a stupid and pre-ordered BF 2042, and paid an extra $30 for the early access. Yup, I get that I’m an idiot. First time doing either so whatever.

Anyways, the game is unsurprisingly totally broken! Day 1 I played a few games in the morning and it was mostly fine. In the afternoon I lost all attachments acquired and couldn’t equip any that I did get(fucking iron sight hell). I couldn’t get on ANY fucking conquest maps. I couldn’t revive teammates despite going through the animation, and I froze up being revived once and had to restart the game. 
 

But some of Dice’s decisions are the most insane ever. There is no longer a scoreboard at the end of the games so you can’t see everyone’s stats. No server browsers so you get kicked back to the lobby after every game, and can play the same maps over and over again. Not being able to join and be in the same squad while doing the normal map rotation. Like wtf? 
 

Gun play seems awful too. I can’t really comment too much on it though because attachments just don’t work for me. Bullet spread and recoil seem obnoxious though. It fees like a total crapshoot in a 1v1 gun battle. Also the maps seem too big but I’ve only played like 3 of them since conquest wasn’t working so what do I know?

Anyways, don’t be a sucker like me and wait a while. Hopefully this is a BF4 type situation and they can fix everything and turn this into a great game eventually.
 

 

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Been getting kinda heavily into Legends of Runeterra, thanks to how much I've liked the Arcane TV show. I refuse to play League of Legends, and this is one of Riot's other games set in that world. It's a CCG that shares some DNA with Hearthstone, but has several twists to make it different. Biggest being that game is divided into rounds, and within each round players alternate turns until both pass; but, unless you do something special, players alternate each round which one can attack and they can only attack once in the round. Overall, it doesn't seem as complicated as Magic, but is more complicated than Hearthstone. Hard to compare to Gwent, the other CCG I've gotten into over the years, because Gwent is just so different from most others.

The game has good card art, every card and every alternate or upgraded version of cards has its own little quote or description to build out the lore. Most of the cards have audio lines if they're played when certain board conditions are met. 

The F2P model also seems far, far more generous 

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8 hours ago, Ramsay B. said:

So I did a stupid and pre-ordered BF 2042, and paid an extra $30 for the early access. Yup, I get that I’m an idiot. First time doing either so whatever.

Anyways, the game is unsurprisingly totally broken! Day 1 I played a few games in the morning and it was mostly fine. In the afternoon I lost all attachments acquired and couldn’t equip any that I did get(fucking iron sight hell). I couldn’t get on ANY fucking conquest maps. I couldn’t revive teammates despite going through the animation, and I froze up being revived once and had to restart the game. 
 

But some of Dice’s decisions are the most insane ever. There is no longer a scoreboard at the end of the games so you can’t see everyone’s stats. No server browsers so you get kicked back to the lobby after every game, and can play the same maps over and over again. Not being able to join and be in the same squad while doing the normal map rotation. Like wtf? 
 

Gun play seems awful too. I can’t really comment too much on it though because attachments just don’t work for me. Bullet spread and recoil seem obnoxious though. It fees like a total crapshoot in a 1v1 gun battle. Also the maps seem too big but I’ve only played like 3 of them since conquest wasn’t working so what do I know?

Anyways, don’t be a sucker like me and wait a while. Hopefully this is a BF4 type situation and they can fix everything and turn this into a great game eventually.
 

 

Agreed. My initial reaction was positive but the more I played the ten-hour trial the more I realized how much was broken or missing. There's not even squad chat on console! 

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On 11/13/2021 at 11:03 PM, Argonath Diver said:

I came back to my old faithful PoE for this league. First night I stupidly tried a weak off-meta build (Armageddon Brand ignite chieftain) that was terribly slow and clunky. I didn't build it right - some folk seemed to be zooming but man I thought it was dreadful. Started a dull minion re-hash that've done in the past and binned that before even act 6. A week in I said screw it and went with an overpowered meta build, a trapper - and hilariously 99% of trappers week one were the same build, the new phys/phys DoT Seismic Trap / Exsanguinate Trap Saboteur. I've a lot of experience with sabos as well, so I was able to absolutely zoom with it.

I'm up to 93 and filling out my Awakening and Maven bonuses to really start farmin' currency, and eventually build some silly off-meta mess of a build as i'm wont to do. Still absolutely terrible technically at the true endgame bosses despite thousands of damn hours in the game. Freakin' Awakener I absolutely can't beat, the idiotic arena is all black ground with red stuff, and his ground effects are black stuff with red flashes. I've tried him probably 30 times and won one, and that's not even on full A8 levels. Hate that god damn fight. I did beat Uber Elder on my second set of fragments, that felt great though I got shit for loot and lost a few ex worth from the fragments. Ah well. I could still put many dozens of exalts into this char but I want to save up for my next build.

That sounds like a really fun build!  I wasn't able to even really start using my build until Act 7, but now that it's up and running I'm having a blast with it - especially now since this is the first time I've been able to really sink my teeth into the end-game content.  The only tough thing so far is the terrible rolls I've had for drops.  The console marketplace is pretty bad, so even in-league the vast majority are forced to play SSF.  So I still don't have a 6-link, my helmet is weak as shit, and I'm relying on rings and amulets for resistance.  Still fun, but not nearly as tanky or has the dmg output I was expecting for the build.  I'm hoping that changes with a few key drops

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19 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Yeah, and the multiplayer is free. The campaign comes out December 8th. 

In two sentences you have convinced me that the game won't simply be bad, I've expected that for years, it'll be atrocious. 

I am grateful.

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49 minutes ago, Babblebauble said:

In two sentences you have convinced me that the game won't simply be bad, I've expected that for years, it'll be atrocious. 

I am grateful.

The campaign might be, who knows? But the first impressions of the multiplayer are extremely positive.

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I started playing Slime Rancher again this week, I enjoyed it several years back, and it was just what I remembered and needed. It's such a wholesome game - the slimes are cute, always joyful, and while they can create some issues for you as a rancher it's never out of malice, just their energetic, chaotic natures. There's quite a lot to do with a fair sized world to explore and lots of things to unlock, and plenty of secrets to find while you search for new species of slime as well as their favourite foods suck up and bring back to the ranch. It's definitely awoken my interest in the sequel that's been announced for some time next year.

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