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Thom12255 posted:Stellaris feels great until you get near to the end of the mid-game and then everything starts to feel dead and pointless. To be fair, this isn't that unusual in a Civ game either but CK3/EU4 manages to avoid it entirely. I think this is particularly an issue with Stellaris because after the anomalies and events are all behind you, you start to run into the fact that basically every game system - war, diplomacy, espionage, federations, society, government, leaders, all of it - still needs work. I think it can still be pretty fun to play, but the need for greater depth and differentiation becomes hard to avoid after a few games. To be fair it seems like the devs are aware of that and working on it... but right now playing a bug hivemind and a human monarchy and a democratic alliance of trees all feels pretty samey, and unless you're horribly mistreating slaves or robots your society is going to be pretty much inert.
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Aug 16, 2021 21:33
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In what world do people play EU4 after 1600 when they’re already an unstoppable juggernaut
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Aug 17, 2021 00:01
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I enjoyed the time I spent playing Stellaris obviously but the last time I was thinking of starting a playthrough I couldn't think of a playstyle I hadn't tried. Haven't done much with assimilators but getting to absorb population is so powerful that you win before year 2300 it feels like. If CK3 had the same amount of dlc as Stellaris does I probably wouldn't have played Stellaris yet.
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Aug 17, 2021 00:18
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Lady Radia posted:In what world do people play EU4 after 1600 when they’re already an unstoppable juggernaut The trick is to play it badly.
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Aug 17, 2021 00:37
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True victory in a 4X isn't becoming powerful enough to destroy the other players. It's becoming powerful enough to carve the other players up into perfect modestly sized shapes with pretty borders and enforce artificial peace on the rest of the world.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:23
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1606340/Conquest_of_Elysium_5/ Conquest of Elysium 5 releases today. If anyone plays it, please post impressions.
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Aug 17, 2021 16:17
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Mayveena posted:https://store.steampowered.com/app/1606340/Conquest_of_Elysium_5/ Seems extremely overwhelming.
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Aug 17, 2021 16:23
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:Seems extremely overwhelming. It is a streamlined (believe it or not) version of Dominions 5 https://store.steampowered.com/app/722060/Dominions_5__Warriors_of_the_Faith/ which is really a multi player turn based game that has a pretty decent following. Mayveena fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 16:34
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Nothing overwhelming about it. At first you'll have very few units and they can only move like 2-3 squares. You go around capturing points of interest, train new units, then work your faction mechanic to get more powerful unit. There's no scripting like in Dominion. It's more like an adventure game played in a TBS format.
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Aug 17, 2021 17:05
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pedro0930 posted:Nothing overwhelming about it. At first you'll have very few units and they can only move like 2-3 squares. You go around capturing points of interest, train new units, then work your faction mechanic to get more powerful unit. There's no scripting like in Dominion. It's more like an adventure game played in a TBS format. That sounds pretty fun actually
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Aug 17, 2021 17:11
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Thoughts on Humankind? Getting ready to do a long play through. I'll post with impressions later today.
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Aug 17, 2021 20:44
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Mayveena posted:Thoughts on Humankind? Getting ready to do a long play through. I'll post with impressions later today. I'm eager to see some goon feedback on it
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Aug 17, 2021 21:03
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Turns out there's a Humankind thread here https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3896939
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Aug 17, 2021 21:06
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i was a little leery of checking out humankind but it turns out to be on gamepass which i still have for some reason. so here we go.
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Aug 17, 2021 21:08
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Mayveena posted:Thoughts on Humankind? Getting ready to do a long play through. I'll post with impressions later today. I just didn't like the beta as much as Civ 6 in any way
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Aug 18, 2021 00:15
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mfcrocker posted:I just didn't like the beta as much as Civ 6 in any way The UI is certainly better but it'll be a bit before I get a real feel for the differences.
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Aug 18, 2021 00:23
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So I don't know how popular a janky somewhat visually dry looking indie (Literally made by one person.) hex based game is going to be for folks, but I wanted to mention a fairly insane game I stumbled across. It's called Wizards and Warlords and it's basically Master of Magic on steroids, with full customization of your rulers, and a detailed world sim with procedurally generated empires that have unique cultures. https://store.steampowered.com/app/567080/Wizards_and_Warlords/ quote:Wizards and Warlords is an indie turn-based strategy game, where you play in a randomly generated fantasy world, filled with rival wizards and warlords. Create a customized sovereign or choose from one of many predefined templates. It's honestly kind of absurd how much detail the game has. To put it in perspective, every character in the game is simulated. As is ancient history. As is the religions. As is the empires and their cultures themselves. To give some examples of how in depth the game is: Any given NPC empire might not be an empire but instead a tribal group focused around agrarian existence. Or it might be a tribal group that moves around the map, setting up camps and raiding. Or there can be a theocracy dedicated to a god or goddess. And since gods are also generated (With their own spheres, alignments, and even great cosmic conflicts that can show up.) this could mean that theocracy could have a religion based around...say, human sacrifice. Or raising the dead as a necrocracy. Or ascendance to some insane state of cosmic being, etc, etc. This also extends to the buildings and troops it can produce, meaning they'll have unique options depending on their choice of culture. Ditto for the government. So you could have republics, feudal states, etc, etc. Also, every NPC nation is in play as an active thing, obviously. The degree of which seems to be variable as well. Meaning that on the largest map size you can potentially have something like 50-100+ nations, groups, ancient horrors, monsters, and other organizations doing their own thing. Races too are generated. So you'll get all sorts of stuff, with parameters you can choose to determine the outcome. Wizards too are customizable to an absurd degree. You can choose your spheres of magic and then mix and match not just spells but elements of the fantasy themes that magic would logically provide. So, for instance, you could be a bog standard mage that slings spells from atop their tower as your hired guards do the work. Or you could be a necromancer. Or you could actually use the system in a creative way, being a golemancer who is proficient with necromancy to rip out the souls of the living and installing them in metal constructs to conquer and administrate the empire.  Or how about just building an empire? Since you can do that too. There's even a "no magic, only empire building" option, called the Warlord. And of course the composition of it is your choice. There's even secret setups like starting an undead empire made out of ghosts, vampires, etc, etc or eldritch horrors/whatever you can set up really. This is in addition to other generic fantasy races, stuff the generator comes up with, or even some stuff that other games would never let you play due to them being an end game event. Like a race of celestial elementals/angels being your primary race and characters. And then there's characters. They're like agents in other 4x games, but they have their own traits and agendas. Meaning a priest of ____ god will try to convert not just your characters but you and your empire. An adventurer will want to adventure, and druids and other magical classes will expect their own themes to be pursued. You can even just give them the order to do whatever they want and they will pursue it. Hell, there's even an optional romance option in the world creator, where your characters will hook up with each other according to their sexual preferences. The game is honestly mind boggling in that it's gotten nearly no attention despite essentially being the closest thing to a Dwarf Fortress tier attempt to simulate a world from a 4X perspective with customization straight up in excess of the Dominions series of games. And it's a bit roguelike too given how everything is generated, up to and including the ancient histories and threats. Which of course you can study, since that's a thing. One game I just studied the poo poo out of ancient history, discovered a horde of mummies from a fallen civilization were getting ready to gently caress up the world, and devoted my run to stopping them.     
Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Aug 19, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 13:25
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So it’s dwarf fortress’ world gen but a 4x instead, sold edit: finish reading posts before posting
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Aug 19, 2021 15:22
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Kitfox88 posted:So it’s dwarf fortress’ world gen but a 4x instead, sold The world building seems a lot more detailed in some ways. Gods are kind of just there barring one easter egg in DF. Whereas they can have very real effects (If there's a war on between them it might end up spilling over into the game world, for instance.) in Wizards and Warlords. Likewise, societies are just kind of blobs in gameplay in DF last I checked. Sure they get up to some poo poo in the history logs prior to play, but that doesn't necessarily happen in game. Meanwhile, in W&W by my borders of the wizard tower (and the two or three outposts I set up/1 town) I have a raiding oriented group of tribes made up of self described "Wild Elves" currently pillaging and snapping at the borders of a human seaside mercantilist empire with two or three cities. Both are seemingly very eager to be friendly with me. The elves because I could just crush them by flanking them with my horde of eldritch horrors and orcs from the grim northern wastes and the empire to use me as as a buffer since they keep requesting I "help" them defend their cities by attacking incoming raiders so that they can focus on expanding. And these aren't the actual players you select in the game. You can choose to have up to so many wizards or warlords in a game prior to starting it. Those elves and that mercantilist state are just the random native factions that are generated to occupy the game world. But yeah, it doesn't have any fort building gameplay. Instead it's all hex based stuff and fairly dry in terms of the presentation of the UI. But I could definitely liken it to Dwarf Fortress if it was a 4x. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Aug 19, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 15:45
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How much different is it than Conquest of Elysium if you've played that.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:24
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Mayveena posted:How much different is it than Conquest of Elysium if you've played that. A whole lot different. You aren't a physical character in the world. Instead you're represented by the wizard's tower. Also, the focus is more on the world building, research, and empire building, whereas Conquest of Elysium is more about a Heroes of Might and Magic approach to gameplay. Mind you, it's janky as heck, and definitely a grognard sort of game. That's the result of it being a 1 man project. So keep that in mind.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:27
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Archonex posted:The world building seems a lot more detailed in some ways. Gods are kind of just there barring one easter egg in DF. Whereas they can have very real effects (If there's a war on between them it might end up spilling over into the game world, for instance.) in Wizards and Warlords.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:24
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Can someone give me a rundown on what Shadow Empire is? I see it mentioned a lot and it has good reviews which peaks my curiosity but the visuals are so god drat ugly that the gameplay would have to be truly exceptional I feel.
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Aug 19, 2021 19:48
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Shadow empires is grognar Sod 4x, hex based wargame built off the popular (by grog standards) Decisive Campaigns games, and it's loving fantastic if that's at all your thing. It has: Incredible procedural planet generation In-depth and reasonable engaging internal and external politics Large tech tree that plays into unit designer for tanks and even guns Advanced, grog standard logistics system Customisable toes for units requiring different operational concepts to be researched and then implemented by you high command Detailed character system staffing said high command, as well as various research, intelligence/security and economic councils And probably other stuff I'm forgetting. Either you're going to love it or hate it really.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:17
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Shadow Empire is probably the first game I just straight up read the manual for because I wanted to understand better
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Aug 19, 2021 20:21
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Jack Trades posted:Can someone give me a rundown on what Shadow Empire is? It's super cool if you're willing to spend an hour or two learning how logistics works so your army doesn't starve as soon as you get more than a few hexes away from your capital. Assuming the prospect of that doesn't put you off, it's very worthwhile. This is the writeup that sold me on the game, worth a read. Also Wizards and Warlords sounds like extremely my poo poo, will have to check it out pretty soon.
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Aug 19, 2021 21:32
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If anyone wants to peek at how detailed Wizards and Warlords is, the dev has popped a guide up online that he's working on to explain stats, and while it's bewildering, it also shows just how much stuff there is. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2254789382
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Aug 19, 2021 21:42
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Archonex posted:it's basically Master of Magic on steroids That immediately sold me on it. And suddenly it's five hours later, it has some serious "one more turn" energy. It's all a bit indiscernible though. Lots of little things, like I can't figure out how to summon anything. The summoning tooltips leads me to believe I need to create a summoning circle in my tower, but there seems to be no way to do that even having summoning 3 & warding 5 masteries. But I'm sure I'll stumble across it eventually.
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Aug 19, 2021 23:51
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sloppy portmanteau posted:That immediately sold me on it. And suddenly it's five hours later, it has some serious "one more turn" energy. I'll start with the obvious question of if you have masteries that have summonable units. Summoning, warding, and binding are very handy and are a component of a number of unit researches but don't have any creatures of their own. Doing research into the history of the elemental planes and then focusing research on the new mastery is probably the fastest way to break into a new mastery. I unironically enjoy playing a wizard with nothing but traits, letting random chance control what masteries I end up with. Summoning circle just removes the small chance of suboptimal summoning, last time I checked. The next thing to check would be where you are recruiting from. Most units can't be summoned from captured towns and fortresses. Finally check your unit filters. If it is only set up to show recruitable units you won't see anything that you summon or bind. I think this finally got fixed, but if you are wondering why you can't apply unit marks it is because you need enchantment mastery and x amount of a resource.
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Aug 20, 2021 02:48
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Jack Trades posted:Can someone give me a rundown on what Shadow Empire is? If you decide to get it, make sure to read a guide first. When I tried it blind, I managed to waste all my starting resources and lock myself out of any practical way to get my industry running.
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Aug 20, 2021 04:34
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Mayveena posted:https://store.steampowered.com/app/1606340/Conquest_of_Elysium_5/ I got it (no matter how frustrated I get with CoE, I keep coming back). It's CoE 4 with 3 new races (plus some more I haven't seen before, I guess added in patches to CoE 4?) and other new content. I tried playing the new Kobold race. Kobolds work like dwarves, which is great because Dwarves had an innovative and fun mechanic - they can colonize mines which causes the mines to steadily produce low level units for free. Kobolds can also pay resources for more freespawn or slightly better units, and occasionally get offers for monstrous drakes that cost freespawn in addition to their other costs. The difference from dwarves is that while dwarves are training and equipping their workers, kobolds are getting eaten by the drakes and dragons they worship. There's three colors of kobolds, based on the gems the mines produce, and they all have their own advantages (the green ones are poison resistant and their archers get rather nice poison bows, the blue ones can move at full speed on snow and their "drake" units get nifty frost breath, etc). If you liked dwarves and wanted something similar but different, kobolds are really cool. Of course, like dwarves they live and die based on if you can actually find more mines when you start, and the cruel randomness of CoE map gen hasn't changed. I also played a game as enchanters, my favorite CoE 4 nation, and they had some new stuff or else stuff I had forgotten the old stuff. I ended up with an apprentice that could create animated tools in gold producing squares that both helped defend and provided a resource bonus, a valuable addition to the war against the deer menace (fake edit: On looking it up this was apparently added to CoE 4 in a patch). There are apparently other things added to freshen up the experience for the old nations like new monsters and of course the new plains, but I honestly didn't play enough to recognize what was new and what was old. tl;dr: If you enjoyed CoE4 and are willing to spend $25 for what amounts to an expansion pack, you'll probably enjoy CoE 5. If you weren't a fan, nothing here will really change anything. If you've never played a CoE game, then whether you will enjoy it probably comes down to how much you like the idea of a janky, fast paced fantasy 4x with a bad and suicidal AI but it often doesn't matter because you're sometimes swarmed and brought down by wild deer - but somehow it can still be fun because the game is different and unique.
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Aug 20, 2021 05:25
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habituallyred posted:I'll start with the obvious question of if you have masteries that have summonable units. Summoning, warding, and binding are very handy and are a component of a number of unit researches but don't have any creatures of their own. Doing research into the history of the elemental planes and then focusing research on the new mastery is probably the fastest way to break into a new mastery. I unironically enjoy playing a wizard with nothing but traits, letting random chance control what masteries I end up with. Yeah, unless summoning alone has units in it you've just researched the ability to...summon things that are harder, bigger, and faster. You still need to actually research a mastery that has something that can be summoned.  Take for instance the Darkness mastery (Don't recommend this one if you aren't a vampire. As every level in it also blankets your lands in more and more darkness. Yes, the game is that detailed. Eat your heart out Dominions.  ). It has a level 1 or 2 unit. Ditto for the blood specialization.There's an absolute gently caress ton of units hidden in the tree that can be summoned at your wizard tower (Or a field laboratory or ritual site of some sort if you can manage to get one in a town.). There's an option in the UI to show them, and clicking on them will show you what you need to research to unlock them. Also, if you have spare research keep in mind that researching history has a chance to give you some extremely powerful units. Researching dragon lore for instance might just end up with you getting a pack of dragons for _____ turns instead of learning something about dragons. Ditto for having a priest use all that built up favor with a god. You could get a blessing, or just get a pack of their divine units coming down to stomp some rear end for a bit. Or you could get cursed. Or the blessing could be a curse, if the god is of a purview of a particularly dickish thing like plague or something. I presume those are the ones you want your priests to convert your enemies to the faith of, since then the god will happily share it's blessings with them. I'm kind of tempted to make a thread for it. But I don't know what the interest levels for this game are. Archonex fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Aug 20, 2021 |
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Aug 20, 2021 08:32
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Jack Trades posted:Can someone give me a rundown on what Shadow Empire is? There is a (no longer that active) forums thread. If you do get it immediately install this Art pack.
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Aug 20, 2021 09:14
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I think that's a bit too grognardy for my tastes but thanks a bunch anyways.
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Aug 20, 2021 09:31
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Archonex posted:Yeah, unless summoning alone has units in it you've just researched the ability to...summon things that are harder, bigger, and faster. You still need to actually research a mastery that has something that can be summoned. This game sounds really interest but also very difficult to get started with, I'd love a thread especially with some intro posts.
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Aug 20, 2021 16:37
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Bought Wizards and Warlocks this weekend and have been trying it out. There's a core of a great game here, it's just hiding behind mediocre UI and unexplained game mechanics. It's not that I mind if there's twelve hundred different things going on that largely don't matter, but it would be nice if there was some proper explanation so that I could know what actually doesn't matter.
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Aug 22, 2021 01:05
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I bought Wizards and Warlocks and Shadow Empires the same weekend. Poured like 400 hours into SE and couldn't get into WW. I'll have to try again!!!
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Aug 22, 2021 01:44
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Bought CoE5, attacked some bandits with my leader and army, somehow left them all on the bandit hideout and sent my lone baron up against a bear. game over in three turns
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Aug 22, 2021 03:05
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Mans posted:Bought CoE5, attacked some bandits with my leader and army, somehow left them all on the bandit hideout and sent my lone baron up against a bear. That's usually how your first few games will go. A big part of the game is learning how dangerous the 1500+ units are and how map features can gently caress you. e. it sounds like your army was attached a different leader who died in the last fight and then you moved your baron without re-attaching the army to him. Never have all your commanders in the same stack as having no commanders left is a loss condition. NoNotTheMindProbe fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Aug 22, 2021 |
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Aug 22, 2021 03:23
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:That's usually how your first few games will go. A big part of the game is learning how dangerous the 1500+ units are and how map features can gently caress you. Yeah and in the Baron's case he starts up with a High Lord who insists on leading from the front. So despite their decent stats they are highly vulnerable to getting picked off. Especially if they lead infantry, as their high hp and fast movement will make them target no.1 of the enemy ranged attacks (looking at you javelins).
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Aug 22, 2021 05:30
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