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I just imagined a world where people felt as invested in the decisions of their local government as closely and passionately as they do to the choices of videogame developers.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:22 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 17:52 |
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Tahirovic posted:It will be interesting to see how much of an advantage, if any, you get from designing ships on your own. If the AI is too good at it, why do it yourself? If the AI is too bad, you have to do it manually. Now I wonder what the colours between black and white will be. Basically the whole reason behind having a full on templating system. If there's actually enough depth in the ship design to have significantly different viable strategies, you'd much rather have templated designs so you don't have to worry about the AI's auto designs being highly suboptimal or whatever. Set up your templates (or download someone's from the workshop if you're really not into that), save em, never think about them again.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:23 |
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popewiles posted:I just imagined a world where people felt as invested in the decisions of their local government as closely and passionately as they do to the choices of videogame developers. You've never been to a city council meeting have you? The worst paradox forums poster enraged about some minor map inaccuracy or supply abstraction is nothing compared to the sort of people who actually attend and speak up at public hearings. You've never heard people on the verge of rage crying over newly relaxed off-street parking regulations potentially leading to a stranger parking on their sacred clay. You've never heard people passionately arguing against a project because it's offensive to the city's history which they've invented from whole cloth.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:30 |
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popewiles posted:I just imagined a world where people felt as invested in the decisions of their local government as closely and passionately as they do to the choices of videogame developers.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:31 |
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My traditional issues with ship designers is that usually ship designers don't auto upgrade my designed ships while the templates do, because THAT one was Laser I and NOW we have Laser II. So if I want to design my own ships every time I upgrade my tech I have to go hand upgrade my new design. Hopefully Paradox will either be smarter than that OR have tech just make existing parts better so I can just click a button to say 'upgrade this fleet with better parts'
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:33 |
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Wiz posted:The ship designer has just the right level of depth for me - there's interesting tradeoffs in power/shields/armor/weapons but you don't have to sit and add every crew waste disposal module.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:34 |
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Baronjutter posted:You've never been to a city council meeting have you? The worst paradox forums poster enraged about some minor map inaccuracy or supply abstraction is nothing compared to the sort of people who actually attend and speak up at public hearings. You've never heard people on the verge of rage crying over newly relaxed off-street parking regulations potentially leading to a stranger parking on their sacred clay. You've never heard people passionately arguing against a project because it's offensive to the city's history which they've invented from whole cloth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng_-HgRfGBY
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:36 |
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Bort Bortles posted:Any idea if the combat will suit playing long range ships that are fast and kite enemies? Is the combat even that involved?
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:36 |
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YF-23 posted:Observer mode games don't count, your play hours are inflated.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 18:47 |
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Tahirovic posted:It will be interesting to see how much of an advantage, if any, you get from designing ships on your own. If the AI is too good at it, why do it yourself? If the AI is too bad, you have to do it manually. Now I wonder what the colours between black and white will be. It seems to me that the benefit of having both systems is in very particular specialisation. I figure 90% of the time i'll be letting the comp design most of the stuff and only intervening when i really specifically want this particular class to have this kind of weapon or defence system to go up against a specific enemy, or specialise a particular starbase or whatever to best tailor it to local conditions that the computer can't possibly recognise. I like having both options.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 19:16 |
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Is there an elegant way to handle incremental upgrades? In most 4Xes, what happens is you keep getting slightly better versions of the same technology. It sucks to have to redo your ship designs every time.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 19:38 |
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I really loved designing ships in moo and moo2 and seeing how they stacked up, but those had hands-on turn based tactical combat. In a system that's abstracted they'll need to have very good and intuitive feedback. With such a high level of ship design detail there needs to be a similar level of feedback that can be quickly understood. It should be immediately obvious that your choice of lasers aren't working so well compared to your missile based ships due to your opponents lack of PD but excellent anti-laser armour. It should never be "uhh I guess this design is working well? I don't know how much of that is down to my design or what ever??"
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 19:40 |
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It doesn't really matter because you're all going to get it and play it for several hundred hours anyway.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 20:21 |
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Westminster System posted:It doesn't really matter because you're all going to get it and play it for several hundred hours anyway. I dunno, I hated Hearts of Iron 3 and only played it for 46 solid hours.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 20:22 |
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i like ship building and am glad there's an auto build option because i also sometimes get tired of building ships or just don't feel like it for a time this opinions is my own and i am okay with other people playing their copy of the game differently
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 20:31 |
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Dibujante posted:Is there an elegant way to handle incremental upgrades? In most 4Xes, what happens is you keep getting slightly better versions of the same technology. It sucks to have to redo your ship designs every time. I really like the system in Star Ruler 2, where the incremental upgrades are just boosts to existing systems rather than new systems. Instead of researching "Laser Turret mk.2", you just research "+20% damage to Laser Turrets". You can research new modules as well, but they are all substantially different from the existing ones, not just straight upgrades that are always better. For example you can research an alternate version of a weapon that has less straight damage, but armor piercing. In SR2 the researched incremental bonuses are just automatically applied to all existing ships as well, so your ships can't get outdated in that regard, but you could just as well require existing ships to visit a shipyard to have the upgrades applied I suppose.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 20:40 |
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PleasingFungus posted:Well, my concern here is that it'll be [1] a bunch of tedious makework that [2] I nonetheless feel obliged to engage in, because the AI will be just incompetent enough at it that I'll want the advantage from doing it myself. Ref.: other ship design systems in 4Xs, e.g. Galactic Civilizations II. The big problem with GalCiv2s customization is that not doing it isn't slightly sub-optimal, it is so far from optimized it is absurd. Most of that stems from being given too much freedom. Need a scout? Nothing but engines and sensors. If you have the right set of racial traits, just build a single scout with nothing but sensors and get a view of the entire galaxy(on a smaller map) on turn 1. Need a colonizer? Strip everything to make it as cheap as you can. And so forth for whatever task you need done. From what I can tell of the dev diary, Stellaris avoids this by limiting how much you can specialize your ships, which is a good thing. After this dev diary, I'm more optimistic about Stellaris than I was before it, as ship design always seems to be something that 4x games gently caress up hard. Even a relatively simple design system like the one in Endless Space is easily broken like a twig because of a lack of limits.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 21:27 |
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Galciv also suffers from a horrendous combat system where you get to play rock paper scissors in space. Endless Space also committed this crime but at least it made it look pretty. They are apparently sticking to it in Endless Space 2 but... Different. Details are scant but hopefully they've realized the old system is dumb.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 22:19 |
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I love ship design in games where that's the focus, like Star Sector, or even moo2 with its actual front and centre tactical combat system. But in Stellaris we've got more of an eu4 style combat system, it's abstracted, it's hands off. Yet the level of detail in the ship designer seems akin to picking the boots, pants, belt, tunic, exact armour, weapon type, spear tip, grip, backpack, belt pouch items of your troops in EU4. If the combat is that abstracted the designer should be that abstracted too. If the ship design is super detailed, then the combat should be based around that too and be a hands-on affair. Maybe it works great in practice, but I have a feeling it's a compromise between the game's overall design of not having tactical combat, but wanting to please ship-design-nerds by letting them specify gas or electric ranges in the ship's kitchen. I'd be happy with one or the other. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jan 19, 2016 |
# ? Jan 19, 2016 22:32 |
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Baronjutter posted:I love ship design in games where that's the focus, like Star Sector, or even moo2 with its actual front and centre tactical combat system.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 22:36 |
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Baronjutter posted:I love ship design in games where that's the focus, like Star Sector, or even moo2 with its actual front and centre tactical combat system. That's a good point. I hope that what it ends up being is more like picking the pikes-to-shot ratio in your infantry units than picking the shape of the musket counterweight or whether your pikemen's helmets have rims.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 22:36 |
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Baronjutter posted:I love ship design in games where that's the focus, like Star Sector, or even moo2 with its actual front and centre tactical combat system. There needs to be a way to differentiate units even in games without tactical combat. It's not an either/or situation. I feel EU4 would be far better if it had more meaningful differences between armies, favorable match-ups, etc. You get a peek into it with hordes vs europeans and even though that's pretty minor (one fields more cav and prefers flatter land) you get interesting differences as as result. As for the level of detail on the ship designer, there's a certain amount you have to have. The ship designer needs enough detail so that ships with similar roles can have actual differences between them. Simply making it less complex because it's not turn based doesn't seem like the solution, and I'm not sure I understand the reasoning. Yes, if the options are cosmetic and irrelevant to the design they are pointless. That's true of any level of detail in the designer though.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 22:38 |
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It really comes down to how the combat works. It's really hard to criticize or laud any of the mechanics in the game until we see them all in motion. But if they're going for an eu4 or even HoI style combat system then the level of design should be at that level as well. In HoI you don't design tanks, you design divisions which then go into your overall design for various armies. You don't sit there picking the engine, gun sights, or exact armour thickness for a tank, you just pick between a few models based on your current tech. Same goes for navy, you just build classes of ships that upgrade over time and can throw a few modules on top, except the system strongly favours some modules over others which is an issue of game balance. Basically the level of detail in the ship designer should match the level of detail (that is readily available and intuitive to the player!) of the combat system. You shouldn't need to read a 20 page forum post on ship design effects full of people arguing the exact math of the combat system to prove if having dedicated anti-fighter ships is better than having a bit of PD on all your ships, it should be very apparent within the game, if not it should be abstracted out with the assumption that both the AI and player are making the "correct" choice.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 23:03 |
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Baronjutter posted:It really comes down to how the combat works. It's really hard to criticize or laud any of the mechanics in the game until we see them all in motion. But if they're going for an eu4 or even HoI style combat system then the level of design should be at that level as well. In HoI you don't design tanks, you design divisions which then go into your overall design for various armies. You don't sit there picking the engine, gun sights, or exact armour thickness for a tank, you just pick between a few models based on your current tech. Same goes for navy, you just build classes of ships that upgrade over time and can throw a few modules on top, except the system strongly favours some modules over others which is an issue of game balance. Right, but that all goes back into tying it in the design. For the early phase of the game, how much variation do you want in destroyers? Do you want a slow, fast, and medium one? Because that's not so different from EU4's system of choosing troop variants. Yes there's more options and more choices, but it comes down to the same thing. Do I want defensive infantry and offensive cav or do I want something else? You can abstract that down to having a Destroyer design with a fast and armored variants, and maybe within the terms of the combat system that makes sense. On the other hand, if you want to have different races with different FTL and different ship designs approach solutions differently, then you need more granularity than that. So there's a difference between the two in terms of flavor, even if the gameplay is similar. I think the pre-baked units works well for EU4 because it's historical, based on things that happened, and the players involved are relatively similar. They're all humans with similar tech levels, similar biological constraints, living on the same planet, and covering a period of time that's already happened and is familiar. You can't tech to tanks while your neighbor has tercios. If you want to have a space exploration game where you are actually exploring the galaxy, discovering new species each play through, dealing with different events, taking rather different paths through the tech tree, then you need a level of detail in the ship designer to represent all of that. I don't think having a few variants per class or whatever you are suggesting would give you the granularity you need to make ships, playthroughs, and combat different enough. You need to represent components, constraints, advantages and different approaches to get the differentiation that I think a game like Stellaris really needs.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 23:21 |
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Rakthar posted:Right, but that all goes back into tying it in the design. Troop variants matter very little in EU4, however.
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 23:32 |
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I can't speak to EU4, having never played it, but in HOI3 you can actually set what type of cannon, armour, engine and the like your tanks use. You can also modify most units in the game if you wanted to. In the ~500 hours I've played the game I've never had a reason to change it from what the computer automatically selects (which is the best tech you have at the time you queue up the unit) but the option is there. It's also something they plan on keeping (to some extent) in HOI4 as you use experience to build variants of units that better suit whatever play style you're going for: And no, I don't know why this ship's top speed is 1.3 knots. Seems rather useless. I really don't mind the level of customization you can apparently do in Stellaris, as it currently sits. It allows people to build what they want or just skip the process if they're not interested and have the game put something together for you. And look at it this way, even if the game just generated something for you and you had no option to change it, you'd still be stuck trying to figure out why your ships weren't performing if you kept getting you rear end kicked. And the solution would likely still involve building a whole new fleet and trying again. Until we see how combat works it'll be hard to tell what kind of feedback we'll be receiving. Taking a look back at the second Stellaris DD entry it looks like combat will be a little more flashy and detailed that the usual two giants pointing at each other and gyrating for a bit we've seen in other games.
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 01:20 |
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Psychotic Weasel posted:I can't speak to EU4, having never played it, but in HOI3 you can actually set what type of cannon, armour, engine and the like your tanks use. You can also modify most units in the game if you wanted to. In the ~500 hours I've played the game I've never had a reason to change it from what the computer automatically selects (which is the best tech you have at the time you queue up the unit) but the option is there. It's also something they plan on keeping (to some extent) in HOI4 as you use experience to build variants of units that better suit whatever play style you're going for: Well, you've got 0 Engines, so I imagine that's the rowing speed? Or possibly just how much wind you catch with hanging the sailors' sheets out to dry on laundry day?
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 02:04 |
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Jackson Taus posted:Well, you've got 0 Engines, so I imagine that's the rowing speed? Or possibly just how much wind you catch with hanging the sailors' sheets out to dry on laundry day? Well seeing as how it's an Italian design I can only assume it's based off a quadrireme and you actually use the sailors to row the ship around. But in all seriousness, I think the 0 is actually baseline for the model of unit and by using combat experience to improve various aspects of the design it can perform various roles better when you build newer ones. But that's based on information that's about 18 months old now so it may have changed.
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 02:08 |
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Psychotic Weasel posted:I can't speak to EU4, having never played it,
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 02:28 |
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While EU4 sounds like a well polished and well received game, it really isn't my cup of tea when it comes to setting. I find the Industrial Revolution onwards to be more fun in 4X type of games.
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 02:36 |
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Psychotic Weasel posted:I can't speak to EU4, having never played it, but in HOI3 you can actually set what type of cannon, armour, engine and the like your tanks use. You can also modify most units in the game if you wanted to. In the ~500 hours I've played the game I've never had a reason to change it from what the computer automatically selects (which is the best tech you have at the time you queue up the unit) but the option is there. It's also something they plan on keeping (to some extent) in HOI4 as you use experience to build variants of units that better suit whatever play style you're going for:
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 03:54 |
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Stellaris won't be a real game If I can't scrawl
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 04:04 |
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:I think that this is as far as one would want to take it in a grand-strategy game. The Stellaris level of editing would seem to be not limited to giving me the choice to how much I want to focus on deckspace (i.e. armament on any non-CV ship) vs. armour vs. speed. Rather, it seems to offer a choice closer to if I want to fit 90mm AA guns on the Rome II on top of the 37mm AA guns the game is already suggesting I put on. Why this would matter in a grand-strategy game is beyond me, even if we assume combat is more detailed. Actually the Stellaris model seems to be pretty similar in depth and customization options to the division designer they've shown for HoI4 which actually seems really cool and good, though I would guess land combat (and combat in general) to be more deep in HoI4 than in Stellaris. e: Also with the 3 hull sections each having 6 systems we see from the Ship Designer screenshots it is also reminiscent of how you build spaceships in GURPS, which is kind of funny. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Jan 20, 2016 |
# ? Jan 20, 2016 04:31 |
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Randarkman posted:Actually the Stellaris model seems to be pretty similar in depth and customization options to the division designer they've shown for HoI4 which actually seems really cool and good, though I would guess land combat (and combat in general) to be more deep in HoI4 than in Stellaris. Hard to really say this early but HoI4's system looks spergy and unfun, too. There's no way I'm going to want to care that much about the makeup of an individual division when I have at least dozens of them.
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 05:33 |
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Bold Robot posted:Hard to really say this early but HoI4's system looks spergy and unfun, too. There's no way I'm going to want to care that much about the makeup of an individual division when I have at least dozens of them. That's why you only have to edit one. When you change the template the units cycle in the new equipment as they reinforce.
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 05:40 |
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That's needlessly fiddly, to me. Why can't I just have "Soldiers, Tanks, Planes, Ships"?
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 05:48 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoi5kc8NCsM
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 06:17 |
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DrSunshine posted:That's needlessly fiddly, to me. Why can't I just have "Soldiers, Tanks, Planes, Ships"?
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 06:40 |
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DrSunshine posted:That's needlessly fiddly, to me. Why can't I just have "Soldiers, Tanks, Planes, Ships"? an aircraft carrier is basically the same thing as a submarine
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 07:08 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 17:52 |
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DStecks posted:an aircraft carrier is basically the same thing as a submarine If the game doesn't provide you with intuitive enough feedback to tell the difference via combat results when using a fleet of various ships then this is true.
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# ? Jan 20, 2016 07:50 |