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Reject Modernity Embrace Tradition 
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Jan 29, 2023 21:30
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they should make a pc empire of the sun
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Jan 29, 2023 21:41
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Stairmaster posted:they should make a pc empire of the sun  also pacific war is really good for an 80s design, loving hell
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Jan 29, 2023 21:44
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It's been a hot minute since I posted a Bukrin Bridgehead scenario update, so here's a gif of progress from turn 21 to turn 24 we crossed the Major Victory threshold on turn 23 with 2,930 points this is the victory calculation as of the end of turn 24:  I think I'm going to call this done - I still have over 10 turns to go, and there's nothing left but to rack up the score even higher. Despite the tactical mistakes on the left wing, the main effort in the center was so strong that once concentrated artillery fire started wiping out entire infantry formations, there was very little standing in our way. this is a good scenario, I think: it's long enough that you can feel the operational tempo change from an assault to a breakthrough, where a lot of small/short scenarios stop short of the breakthrough phase, forcing you to play a big boy campaign. Not so here.
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Jan 30, 2023 12:21
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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2033267650 oh wow there's a campaign for north africa mod for tabletop simulator
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Feb 1, 2023 08:02
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Does it have extensive automations?
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Feb 1, 2023 10:03
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I've tried a couple of wargames mods in TTS and the only ones that played better than vassal were block games, anything else was too fiddly in tems of stacking chits, although i heard some updates to tts made that issue better
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Feb 1, 2023 10:10
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I've seen enough: Second Front is strategy game of the year and everyone who posts in this thread should get it.
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Feb 1, 2023 18:35
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It is cute, aesthetically, like Before We Leave. Has a lil Gmod jank to the unit models. 10/10 perfect evolution for the grognard hex game tech.
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Feb 1, 2023 18:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've seen enough: Second Front is strategy game of the year and everyone who posts in this thread should get it.  Lol that it's just the Squad Leader guy
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Feb 1, 2023 18:50
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I thought it just uses ASL, more or less?
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Feb 1, 2023 19:25
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16/f/Danzig
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Feb 2, 2023 06:38
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first Soviet scenario in Second Front is easy-peasy: advance under cover, fire to suppress, assault once enemy is pinned/broken. You'll hardly break a sweat the second scenario ups the ante significantly - running defense and having to hold a prepared position. It's 13-turn brawl with mortars and MGs and snipers and a late-arriving T-26 on your side against two Pz 38(t) from the fascists. The mortars in particular can be very deadly because of how often they'll re-roll a reload and can shoot again.  this is a shot from the very end of the second scenario. I have four squads and two squad leaders on the far-right edge of the map from having been routed out of the objective area, and there's just one squad of green troops holding the objective house, along with a mortar team right outside (that just fought off a German hero unit in melee combat) the game came down to the wire - my position was so weak that the German AI just drove an armored car right up against the house because I had no anti-tank weapons remaining, and there's three full squads inside the trenches just waiting to blitz the objective, had they not run out of time on the lower left you'll see the absolute champ of a T-26: not only did this guy destroy one of the two Pz 38(t) with an AP shot from across the map while immobilized, it also killed off an entire German squad in melee combat game owns incredibly and the emergent narratives are the stuff of legends gradenko_2000 has issued a correction as of 09:43 on Feb 2, 2023 |
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Feb 2, 2023 08:49
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Feb 3, 2023 21:39
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Nuclear War Simulator is out now
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Feb 4, 2023 00:26
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I'm finding Second Front kinda tricky. Every time I move a squad around they surely get hit and break and that's already more or less game over. Hardly any cover and no smoke grenade mechanic (so far).
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Feb 4, 2023 00:36
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that doesnt look like its enough of a thing to be worth 30 dollars how does it stack up to bravo romeo delta
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Feb 4, 2023 00:43
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skooma512 posted:I'm finding Second Front kinda tricky. Every time I move a squad around they surely get hit and break and that's already more or less game over. Hardly any cover and no smoke grenade mechanic (so far). Can I do something about mines or are my boys just going to get randomly blown up?
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Feb 5, 2023 18:47
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City of Gangsters is free on Epic Game Store right now until Feb-10-2023. I played through the tutorial and a bit of a full game to learn the ropes, and it's pretty interesting. At its heart, it's a supply-chain-and-production simulator: * you buy stoneware crocks from hardware stores * you buy malt syrup from bakeries * you combine the two into homemade beer * you sell the beer at a profit * you use the profits to replenish the raw materials, plus the excess goes into expanding the business except in this case, "the business" is all completely illegal, so there is an underlying "favors" economy at work - selling beer to the corner laundromat earns you a favor with the proprietor, and you call it in so you can get introduced to someone new, whether that someone one is another buyer for your beer, another supplier of malt syrup, or even someone willing to sell their building to you so you can set-up a moonshine distillery in the back (with a totally legitimate retail establishment in the front, of course) and all of these businesses and people that you're going to have to talk to, have to be part of your gang's territory, which you expand by being a good patron to the community - a stack of cash here for new uniforms for the little league team, a stack of cash there for a new park, and hey, people will start trusting you and won't rat you out to the cops and if some of those people are a little recalcitrant? well, then you get to extort them once you've expanded your business enough, you then get to expand your crew to other people, at which point you can use the game's interface to automate the circuit of "buy raw materials, drop off at production facility, pick up finished goods, sell to willing buyers, stash the cash" the UI can get quite busy, but the turn-based nature of the game means that there's a lot of time to carefully consider your moves, even if it's plowing through dialog trees or picking out icons from the map. I think it's an effective distillation of the fundamental concept that the Mafia was both running a business, and had managed to ensconce itself into American society because they were providing social services that the government was not. To apply a bit of CSPAM analysis to it, even after Prohibition, the end of organized crime didn't quite arrive until well after the government itself became involved with drug distribution.
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Feb 6, 2023 12:29
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Having spent a little more time with City of Gangsters, I'm already seeing some issues. The game always starts off with you, as the player-character, a car that you own to get around town, about 250 dollars, and an aunt or uncle that owns a building. The building always has a legitimate business in the front, space of an illicit business in the back, and a store-room that has some cash and booze (presumably created and held-over prior to Prohibition). The immediate goal is to take that starting booze and sell it to whoever will buy, and rack up the 600 to 800 dollars it costs to set-up a illegal brewery in your aunt/uncle's building. If you dick around and spend that money on something else, like trying to expand gang territory or doing favors for others, then you'll be in a situation where you have nothing else to sell, but no capacity to create more booze, and the game effectively enters a soft-locked game over. And even if you realize this, the random nature of the very start of the game can still put you in a position where you only have one person willing to buy your booze, and not enough contacts/favors to reach more, and you have to skip a bunch of turns waiting for this one guy to slowly buy all your booze from you until you get to the 600 bucks. The tutorial papers over this by giving you a bunch of money to speed you through the process, but in a "real" game the tightrope you have to walk to get to that first goal of "I have a functioning moonshine operation" is so narrow that it can produce a number of false starts and it seems like it'd be better if they'd either start you off with more cash or even started the game with a brewery already built and in-place. There's a narrative reason for the framing, but it's a little awkward in practice.
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Feb 7, 2023 18:13
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When City Of Gangsters released I read through the Game City builder thread and they followed the same journey as you. Initially impressed, the busy work and lack of scaling makes the game a slog. They used to complain that the cops basically take everything at multiple points and you gotta start from scratch a few times.
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Feb 7, 2023 18:21
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Quite a bit or drama with Second Front banning people from their Discord, steam forum etc over minor concerns about bugs and gameplay issues.
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Feb 7, 2023 18:25
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KirbyKhan posted:When City Of Gangsters released I read through the Game City builder thread and they followed the same journey as you. Initially impressed, the busy work and lack of scaling makes the game a slog. They used to complain that the cops basically take everything at multiple points and you gotta start from scratch a few times. It's actually kind of bad in the other direction, since I felt like cops were kind of a perfect example of the problems with the game. There are neat systems that just kind of don't matter or don't work well in actual practice. Going to be way more of nerd  post than I wanted, but I've been playing it lately. I just wish we could get a good gangster game again. It shouldn't be that hard.Cop stuff works by a heat system. Buying and selling booze or booze making materials generates heat, with selling doing a lot more obviously. Although other general crimes can also spike heat. A murder always spikes it and pulls a cop over in the next few turns for example. But if you have a few favorite stores you sell to regularly then they're going to start getting shakedowns every few weeks. Although some gangsters can have personality traits like Short or Nervous that make them generate less heat. You can also give your delivery drivers skills through experience that make them generate less heat. If the cops shakedown a corner they hang out there for a week or two. This blocks you from doing most business with anyone on that corner until they leave, which can potentially really screw things up. And if you're unlucky enough to have someone hanging out on that corner during the shakedown they get picked up and have all their stuff, legal and illegal, taken by dirty cops. Later in the game I guess they actually get arrested but I haven't messed around much in the true late game. So there's this whole police system that helps define the early game as this cat and mouse thing. You're supposed to be careful and use tools to track the heat you're generating and try to spread it around. You can hire people and use skills to make it easier. You have to pay attention to where your guys end their turns and stick to cooler areas to keep booze shipments from getting seized because losing a whole shipment or even just your cash and your weapons can effectively be a game over. And then...you pay the cops about $300 (about half of a booze production run) and they just completely ignore you from that point on  . You have to repay them every 250 days. Also you can get free weapons from them after bribing them and can use them to send the FBI on your rivals. The whole heat system is basically irrelevant as far as I can tell unless it changes up a lot in the late game. But I had no problem just murdering like 6 or 8 people openly with no consequences. Typically it's what you take care of after you get your first production system going. You usually have to spend a few turns buttering them up with compliments or burn a favor to make them trust you unless you get lucky with them having a matching personality and ethnicity...but yeah. That's the end of that. There's a little "emergent" gameplay where the law system can give you a Police Ethics board that makes the bribe about $500 which is a tougher ask at the start of the game. Bribing later cops also costs a little more and you have to bribe each precinct. Sometimes you start out on the border of two precincts which makes things harder because bribing 2 cops is expensive early game. One time I had my guys beat up a hooligan who was giving us trouble and it turned out they were the local patrol captain's niece and that meant he loving hated me and wouldn't take a bribe. Except there was no other way to handle it other than wait it out. So yeah...It's just a little weird. There are a lot of system like that where systems just don't end up mattering much or don't work. Other criminal outfits are just kind of vague speedbumps. I guess they can suck in the early game, but you basically just out muscle them and beat them back. Protection rackets basically don't matter as an actual money maker. They're just a convenience thing to keep you from having to give money to fronts that aren't raising your reputation. The trade route system is neat in how granular it gets but it's a gigantic pain in the rear end to use once you have a larger empire or just know a lot of people. And like Gradenko said, the early spawn is somewhat random. Cities have a rough layout of residential, commercial and industrial with some constants. Your spawn is picked by what ethnicity you pick for the seed. It's supposed to push you to adapt a little, but in practice it just means that you sometimes have to save scum. I had a hell of a time getting a workable Atlantic City start. I had one decent one but it put me in an industrial district and it sucked for casinos, which is the whole gimmick of the map. Then I got about 4 or 5 starts where it just literally gave me nowhere to buy materials or sell booze. There's a mission that pops in the early game if you get a bad spawn that lets you switch out your starting booze for a different starter, but that didn't help because I somehow had multiple starts without any market for any of the starter boozes. I still kind of like the game and it's definitely worth getting the free version. I also think that the DLC "content" is usually integrated freely. Paying just adds a map that uses the content well (Atlantic City lets you start casinos sooner, Philadelphia gives you an experienced captain so you actually get to see the schemes without playing for hours). It's neat if you're on its vibe and can stop your brain from trying to min max it. That's one of the biggest tips I think I'd offer. A lot of complaints from the forum boiled down to "I broke this game over my knee and now I'm not having fun pushing the pieces around." It's not that hard unless you just get hosed by cop seizures early game or an AI just bullying you early game. Once you have a starter booze production chain going you're never really going to lose. The reason that getting a 25th building costs $1 million is that you're not supposed to be buying that many. At that point you're supposed to be extorting them from gamblers or the city council, since you're basically just running up the score at that point. One guy mentioned how miserable it was just chasing down dozens of gamblers who owed him money each week and it turned out that he had 9 full size casinos. I think the game gives you an achievement for managing to get 3. There's also a guy on the Steam forums doing mod work to add in other goods (called After Prohibition because he's adding in weed grow ops, opium, gun trading, etc.). Haven't tried them yet so no idea how he's doing but people in the forum seem happy. He's also trying to fix up the AI, reduce the ridiculous inflation of building costs and fronts as the game goes on and I think he added something that actually made protection rackets viable as a business option. It's a shame since the special DLC for different country DLCs should have done something similar. The Italian mob DLC gives a start and winning goals that push for way more aggressive early play that focuses on killing and robbing hooligans. A neat change. And then the rest are just flavor. Sometimes dumb flavor. The English DLC gives them the ability to make gray market cigarettes which is really cool. Cigarettes are a cheap product that's great for befriending shop owners who don't trust you enough to buy booze and it sounds like a great way to mix up the early game...which is why they locked the cigarette facility to the mid to late game long after you'd probably care  .
Parakeet vs. Phone has issued a correction as of 19:22 on Feb 7, 2023 |
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Feb 7, 2023 19:12
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Parakeet vs. Phone posted:A lot of complaints from the forum boiled down to "I broke this game over my knee and now I'm not having fun pushing the pieces around." Yes, ok now I remember. Yes sure. I liked the old timey version of this game from 1000 years ago, I'll actually load this one up. Against The Storm understood me perfectly when it just told me I won after I made a citybuilder machine. Perfect pace 4 me
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Feb 7, 2023 19:59
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KirbyKhan posted:Yes, ok now I remember. Yes sure. I liked the old timey version of this game from 1000 years ago, I'll actually load this one up. against the storm is extremely good maybe not deeprock galactic levels of 'this is the best game in its genre and will be for the foreseeable future' but its real goddamn good
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Feb 7, 2023 20:49
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finally lucked into attila total war working on my computer, dicked around a bit as the vandals and got owned. trying to decide if I should restart as them or try the lombards or alans
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Feb 7, 2023 23:42
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I thought this was interesting, wasn't sure the best thread to post it in I studied Late Antiquity and so ATW is really something special to me, I must have more hours in it than all other Total Wars combined. There are some great mods that flesh out this historical details and really bring the period to life. It's a shame it never got the support other titles have, though that's true for TOB too, which I think was also fantastic.
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Feb 8, 2023 14:41
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How would you say City of Gangsters compares to Empire of Sin?
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Feb 8, 2023 15:18
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Feb 8, 2023 15:23
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Frosted Flake posted:
Yeah the time period is really cool and the migration stuff makes it feel a lot strategically different from other TW games. It does really double down on one of my basic problems with Total War which is that there's so many units with such minor differences in so many stats that it's often hard to predict strengths and weaknesses without knowing ahead of time- Shogun 2 was pretty good about this but at the cost of variety, and they just went the complete other way afterwards. But on the other hand you still get to watch Alan horsemen running rings around the enemy so that's fun
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Feb 8, 2023 17:27
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Frosted Flake posted:I thought this was interesting, wasn't sure the best thread to post it in Attila being the best description of what the christian idea of apocalypse entails is incredibly interesting. Oh, the world literally transforms into something new after the trials and tribulations of god.
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Feb 8, 2023 17:30
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Victoria 3 open beta with a bunch of changes is up.
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Feb 8, 2023 17:31
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Oh theyre prepping for v1.2.... oooooh it might be time for me to hop on the Vicky3 train. I watched a 2 hour tutorial on it. Also watched someone play Uganda and some dude setting up an isolationist supply chain for Qing. I think I am ready for mapgame, I just know that mapgames are not ready on launch.
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Feb 8, 2023 17:55
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The world has unbalanced arable land and migration though, isn't the point that Victoria is supposed to simulate how that shaped history?
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Feb 8, 2023 17:57
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Frosted Flake posted:The world has unbalanced arable land and migration though, isn't the point that Victoria is supposed to simulate how that shaped history? no, it's to break little microstates out of their material starting conditions with bullshittery and paint the world. i think back in some iteration of hoi2(?) the systerms were realistically constrained enough so that history proceeded along plausibly but that seems like it gets more de-emphasized with every additional game. which is fine i think? paradox games are really terrible simulators but pretty good funky narrative engines. also it's always hard to tell just how much things going off the rails is by design or because they let that one guy design stuff again. i forget his name but you know who i'm talking about
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Feb 8, 2023 18:02
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Frosted Flake posted:The world has unbalanced arable land and migration though, isn't the point that Victoria is supposed to simulate how that shaped history? yeah but the current numbers are really silly. japan having more arable land in one state than entire european countries, stuff like that. and the current migration balance favors the player heavily if they're any good at the game, high standard of living and outlawing government discrimination against minorities basically causes the entire world to start migrating into your nation. i'm not sure these systems would have been my #1 priority for the second big patch, but they were definitely weirdly balanced
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Feb 8, 2023 18:06
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I don't know about the arable land but the migration definitely needed fixing. It's a big cause of the lategame slowdowns and also exacerbates a bunch of the flaws in the game's economic system while basically removing one of the constraints a player might otherwise run into (number of available workers).
Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 18:48 on Feb 8, 2023 |
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Feb 8, 2023 18:09
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Lmfao I know exactly who you're talking about. Hooboy they let that dingus back in the planning room.
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Feb 8, 2023 18:25
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vicky2 stays winning
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Feb 8, 2023 18:49
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| # ? May 20, 2024 14:54 |
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Russia got some I guess correct changes. Alexander is no longer intelligentsia interest group, but a has a "market liberal" trait. So you can probably do economic reforms but not suddenly also all the social liberal reforms and just skip straight to multiculturalism or something. Also central asia is now a protectorate and Russia doesn't have colonialism enabled by default, so you won't be settling sakhalin, but also gives you way more bureaucracy to work with at the start.
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Feb 8, 2023 19:20
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