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every time I try to get back into CMO I am again blown away by how incredibly loving anemic the supposedly-expansive scenario list is if you do not want to play as the United States, narrowing down further to 'borderline nonexistent' if you also exclude the rest of NATO or NATO-aligned countries it's not just that I do not want to play as the country that genocided my people and beat my grandmother's language out of her - although it is also that! - it's that they're so loving boring. time and time again I read a scenario description and it sounds like an interesting situation that would make a fun tactical challenge for the red side, and then I get to the end, 'playable by US/NATO only', every time. it's like a punchline at this point. in particular a big chunk of the available scenario library can be grouped into one category, which I'll call 'punching down', in which the player has overwhelming numerical or technological superiority and has to bully a weaker nation. there's multiple variations on the theme of getting revenge on Cuba, for example, all of them only playable from the American side. from my repeated experience of scrolling the scenario list looking for anything at all that I feel like playing, 'punching down' covers a solid third of all the scenarios ever made for the drat game. I get that the 'game' is also a training simulator, and it is specifically a training simulator used by NATO and will thus primarily try to simulate the kinds of wars NATO fights from the perspective of the people it is trying to train, but a big selling point of the product was its ability to supposedly simulate any conflict within the timeframe it covers, and it's genuinely kind of frustrating how limited in scope it really is in practice. especially because it was, you know, eighty bucks this has been a problem with grog wargames for as long as I can remember, really, and it's one of the reasons I try (mostly in vain) to seek out games with dynamic campaigns - if you don't have that, and are reliant entirely on handmade scenarios, I really hope you like being the Americans beating on some Designated Bad Guy Countries, because that's going to be basically every post-WW2 scenario ever made for any given game Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 05:56 on Sep 1, 2023 |
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Sep 1, 2023 05:51
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man unity of command 2 Moscow 41 is, appropriately, a massive loving slog
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Sep 1, 2023 14:02
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starfield is garbage that is all
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Sep 1, 2023 14:49
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Quelle surprise.
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Sep 1, 2023 14:54
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quote:The Nation is in disarray and a war is waging between the classes. The working class faces a dismantled welfare system, the capitalists are losing their hard-earned profits, the middle class is gradually fading and the state is sinking into a deep deficit. Amidst all this chaos, the only person who can provide guidance is... you. Will you take the side of the working class and fight for social reforms? Or will you stand with the corporations and the free market? Will you help the government try to keep it all together, or will you try to enforce your agenda no matter the cost to the country? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/321608/hegemony-lead-your-class-victory
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Sep 1, 2023 16:33
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Middle class isnt a class alongside working class and capitalist class and the state isnt its own thing, its a tool wielded by one of the classes. Just such a fundamental misunderstanding of its own concept.
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Sep 1, 2023 16:48
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I got offered chance to play it declined (cuz I had other commitments) and seeing how highly rated it is I really wish I get another chance to try it out
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Sep 1, 2023 16:51
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Typo posted:starfield is garbage that is all Its a Bethesda game, of course it is
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Sep 1, 2023 16:56
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If the working class can't win by withholidng their labor its bullshit
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Sep 1, 2023 17:00
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I'm gonna recommend High Strategy: Oradros as a great strategy game pick-up for the sale. It's a distillation of the Grand Strategy game into a basic set of actions, of which you only get one a turn. You lose out on the historical familiarity of an EU4, but it's a lot more playable because there's always something discrete to do.
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Sep 1, 2023 17:01
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Mister Bates posted:every time I try to get back into CMO I am again blown away by how incredibly loving anemic the supposedly-expansive scenario list is if you do not want to play as the United States, narrowing down further to 'borderline nonexistent' if you also exclude the rest of NATO or NATO-aligned countries I'm sorry about what has been done to your people  If you go into the editor you can switch sides even if the scenario wasn't intended for playing as that side. Though you'll still have to rig it up so the now AI blue side can initiate their attack. And yeah the grog space has a lot of that. Lots of players who like to play as the Nazis, Confederates, and the United States.
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Sep 1, 2023 19:18
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also a lot of Rhodesia fetishism and apartheid-era South Africa fetishism, and a lot of variations on the theme of 'former colonizing power coming back into Africa to shoot up its former subjects'. which in the specific case of CMANO and CMO I get because, again, the game is also marketed as a training simulator to the militaries of those colonizing powers, but that doesn't mean I want to play those scenarios. It almost makes me want to put a bit of effort into getting good at the scenario editor so I can make scenarios I want to play, but down that path lies madness. There's also some games I already enjoy I could spend that time playing instead, I suppose. Graviteam Tactics has been a go-to lately for a number of reasons. The games are mostly about WW2 but also cover some obscure conflicts that rarely get attention in wargaming, in particular a total of 4-5 scenarios (spread between two games) covering the Angolan war for independence. While that isn't a completely unique topic for wargames to cover, Graviteam is unique for both their excellent dynamic campaign system and, more importantly, letting you not play as the fascists if you don't want to, with fully-functional campaigns for both sides. They're janky as gently caress but once you embrace the jank there's something uniquely compelling about them. Graviteam's engine definitely handles WW2 combat better than the more modern stuff, but, like, come on, where else are you going to find an Iran-Iraq War campaign, or a campaign covering an obscure Sino-Soviet border incident from the 1960s (with multiple variations covering both the Soviet and the Chinese version of events, since no one agrees on what actually happened)? Good ol' venerable Operational Art of War also continues to grace my hard drive - it has the same 'a lot of wargamers are fascists and the scenarios are designed with the assumption that you want to play as fascists' problem as every other grog game (there's multiple scenarios floating around in which you fight the Indian Wars as the whites), but TOAW has been around for so goddamn long and had so many scenarios made for it over the decades that there is still plenty of playable content no matter what you want to do. I kind of wish we'd gotten an updated rerelease of Age of Rifles from 1996 sometime, there used to be a huge scenario library for that and it was covering an era that you don't see a lot of in wargaming except for American Civil War games (post-Napoleon, pre-WW1). After having been successfully sold on it by several people, I am about to also give Falcon BMS a try - not even to fly the planes (I am a flight sim nerd but I do not feel like learning a new study-sim airplane right now), but just to play its dynamic campaigns as a strategy game. There's just not a lot of strategy games or wargames focusing on post-WW2 air combat, with CMO holding nearly-uncontested dominance, and I would rather like there to be. Microprose's inexplicable Carrier Command sequel from 2021 almost scratches the itch I'm going for, but not quite. Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 23:18 on Sep 1, 2023 |
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Sep 1, 2023 23:01
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Orange Devil posted:Middle class isnt a class alongside working class and capitalist class and the state isnt its own thing, its a tool wielded by one of the classes. If you play two player it's just working class vs capitalist. You can strike but I assume it isn't just an auto victory.
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Sep 2, 2023 03:13
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The CMO devs had to put out a blog post where they won't nerf the Moskva performance because idiots keep insisting on reenacting its sinking but without adjusting stuff like crew skill or module availability.
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Sep 2, 2023 05:00
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I have terrible news. Starfield is pretty good.
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Sep 2, 2023 08:18
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Typo posted:starfield is garbage that is all Tankbuster posted:I have terrible news. Starfield is pretty good. 
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Sep 2, 2023 11:07
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Ash Crimson posted:*Guile voice* CHRONIC GOON
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Sep 2, 2023 15:15
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I played through the first mission of the first campaign of Songs of Conquest, having picked it up during this strategy game sale. It's extremely Heroes of Might & Magic, but there's one thing that irks me that I really need to get out there: every podcast, preview, early-access review on this game, when it first came out, made that remark that it was so innovative of the game to do-away with "miss chance", and praised Songs of Conquest for its system where ranged units have a "Range", and then they have a shorter "Deadly Range" where they do additional damage. That kind of commentary belies the lack of familiarity, forgotten or otherwise, with HOMM, because that was already how HOMM [3 and later] worked! If a ranged unit in HOMM was firing all the way across the map, or was shooting through an obstacle, the attack icon would be a broken-in-half arrow and the attack would only deal half damage. It was a special ability for certain units, like the Sharpshooter from Armageddon's Blade, to be able to shoot at full damage regardless of distance. Songs of Conquest does the same thing, and that's not at all a point against it, but a commentary on how the people comparing it to HOMM all made the wrong comparison. With that out of the way: - the tutorials are very well done, and convey game concepts quite well - I like that they designed the engine so that you don't need a town to be able to "survive" as a faction, which lets the game do these plot-heavy missions where you're just taking a single Hero (ahem, Wielder) through a map - I like that the transitions from the overworld to the tactical battles are practically seamless - the "Command" mechanic is a huge step forward in design: by capping the number of troops that a hero can lead, you can't just throw novice heroes into the fray as long as you load them down with a lot of troops. I haven't had a mission yet with more than one hero, but I can immediately recognize how this opens up the design space - I like that the heroes already had a number of spells that they could cast right off the bat - the "Essence" system takes out the book-keeping involved in having to track maximum Mana, and it does prevent situations where you're dropping high-level spells on round one (unless you manage to create a skill/troop combo that allows it). I'm not going to say it's necessarily better, but it does flow quite well and is easy to grasp - the one thing I struggled with was when I picked up the Minstrel unit at the tail end of the first mission, and this seems to be a unit that you spend its turn for it to cast a buff, but it wasn't clear to me who the buff affected, how long it lasted, and where I needed to (or could) cast it again.
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Sep 2, 2023 15:25
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Mister Bates posted:every time I try to get back into CMO I am again blown away by how incredibly loving anemic the supposedly-expansive scenario list is if you do not want to play as the United States, narrowing down further to 'borderline nonexistent' if you also exclude the rest of NATO or NATO-aligned countries I had begun painstakingly converting scenarios to use a carefully researched French or Soviet equivalent but I got burnt out. Maybe if there was a way to automate it or something. The scenarios were great, I learned a lot about the French and Soviet militaries of whatever date the scenarios were set, particularly as they had to be equivalent for the mission per their own doctrine, not 1:1 ship for ship, aircraft for aircraft, so I learned a lot about their tactics, equipment and theories of war, but it was lol so much loving work. Maybe I’ll try again at some point. The idea came from TOAW, where someone had made Gulf War scenarios where the Chinese, USSR, etc. took the place of the Coalition. I think it’s a great way to teach doctrine I just don’t like being the one to do it.
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Sep 2, 2023 15:29
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Mission 2 of Songs of Conquest done: this continues the gentle tutorial path, introducing the town management mechanics, and giving you a taste of managing a second hero - I'm not sure I like how the towns are split into various individual buildings on the overworld which you have to visit and click on one at a time. It spares the UI of having a separate town screen, but then I can't help but feel like there's movement points being waster. - the "Rally Point" building does let you hire from a centralized location, and even does the Warlords III/HOMM 4 feature of letting you hire creatures from any town you have regardless of distance, but then the Rally Point itself is a separate building you have to construct, and it's fairly expensive to boot. - the town icons turn into an animated hammer if you've already consumed the build queue for that town, but it doesn't say if you still have upgrades available (because upgrades don't cost turns to construct). It could be better. ___ I'm 25 turns into Mission 3, and I cranked up the difficulty from Easy to Normal, and this one is just pure HOMM: you start with one town and two heroes and you're let loose on the entire map. Optimization brain immediately kicks in where as soon as I find a map feature that grants a permanent buff to a hero, I have to make sure the second hero also gets it. And eventually you start getting enough troops that the second hero can start taking out wandering monsters on their own instead of just being a troop transport and unguarded-resource-picker-upper. Maximum stack sizes are also a great design decision because it lets you know when a hero is "done" amassing an army. It's so good.
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Sep 3, 2023 12:22
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Double post because I finished Mission 3: - I take back what I said about needing to visit individual sites within the town; just visiting the main town building with a Wielder allows you to recruit from all of the unit production facilities within the town - unless I'm missing something there doesn't seem to be a "Wait" command. It's not the end of the world, but it does take some getting used to. - the cap on stack sizes has another fascinating effect on army composition: it lets the game get away with fewer creature types, because then the game shifts into having your armies full of stacks of higher-level creatures. Once you have a lot of creature production going, your main hero can completely forego having a stack of the basic Militia unit, in favor of two full stacks of Rangers, two full stacks of Footmen, and a stack of Troubadors. You'd never get that in HOMM because the Archers would always stack infinitely. - normal difficulty is just about perfect, at least so far; the fights are difficult enough to require finesse, and it does feel good when you actually do pull off some slick tactics that let you inflict disproportionate losses, without it feeling overwhelming. - the basic set-up of the first campaigns plot feels very similar to HOMM 3's Castle arc with Catherine Gryphonheart, but the protagonist here is so unabashedly aristocratic and autocratic, without a hint of empathy, that it's a little grating. She's as hard-headed as Arthas was pre-conversion to Death Knight, but seemingly without the consequences.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:17
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Sounds like an interesting game I'd like to try out at some point. I finished my playthrough of Pathfinder:Wrath of the Righteous (extremely slow burn, the game is extremely long and it can't run full FPS on my computer), and the crusade portion of it took the worst elements of HoMM style battles which made every battle past early chapter 3 kind of a bore. "Through a series of RPG quests and battles, major political decisions involving multiple factions, and battle victories, you have attained the services of several powerful dragons" - yeah, yeah, whatever, my archer stacks are significantly more impactful.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:28
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Is the new GalCiv still full of Stardock's libertarian CEO's dumb ideas? I remember liking the first and second one somewhat, but always lol'd that if you increased your tax rate your population would go galt.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:40
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everyone getting literally horny for tax cuts was also very funny, especially if you were playing as a civ with the Super Breeders trait so low taxes made your population gently caress like rabbits
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Sep 3, 2023 16:43
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BadOptics posted:Is the new GalCiv still full of Stardock's libertarian CEO's dumb ideas? I remember liking the first and second one somewhat, but always lol'd that if you increased your tax rate your population would go galt. I tried playing GalCiv 3 and 4 last year when I was on a 4x kick, and it just wasn't interesting. I could see the parts where industrial production is the most important thing in the game, as it usually is with all 4x's, but the game makes you move square-by-square like it was Civilization, but the maps are mostly wide open spaces because it's loving space, and then your fleets don't really exert zone-of-control, so making contact with enemy fleets and securing "your" territory is painful and tedious. GalCiv 4 actually made things worse because the way they reconfigured planet management means you no longer have governor-automation for planets, so that's a part of micromanagement you can never get rid of.
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Sep 4, 2023 03:03
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StashAugustine posted:been playing unity of command 2 and man i am not good at keeping my units alive, got up past dday in the base campaign but my army is so beat up im not sure i can make it. then i tried the moscow '41 campaign and did you know the soviets were not really in good shape around that time?
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Sep 4, 2023 03:30
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Unity of Command II's Stalingrad campaign is also great, really drives home how loving huge the distances involved were and the difficulty of coordinating your movements across them
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Sep 4, 2023 03:36
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Heroes of Might & Magic 1 and 2 had a problem with the Knight faction, in that everything was terrestrial. You had Peasants, and then you had Archers, and then everything else after that was "hit thing with stick": Pikemen, Swordsmen, Cavaliers, and Paladin. No one could fly, no one had magic, and no one had any special abilities. The Paladin could attack twice, but it was very reminiscent of the Dungeons & Dragons Fighter class where the only abilities they ever gained was "hit things harder." Its only saving grace was that the faction (along with Barbarians) was cheap-and-fast, and could win small maps with rushing and aggressive play, but anything larger than a Medium size map meant that Knights would lose in the long run against Warlocks and Wizards. HOMM 3 addressed this by taking the correct approach of adding more fantastical elements: the Monk/Zealot were ranged attackers which had no melee penalty, the Gryphons were best-in-tier creatures that flew and had unlimited retaliations, and the Angels were so powerful for their cost that they were one of the first things nerfed in official post-launch patches. HOMM 4 kept the Monks, kept the Angels, added Ballista as a "regular" unit, but most importantly added a number of buffs via the "Life" school of magic, specifically easy access to Resurrection. with Song of Conquest, your units for the "Arleon" faction are: Militia/Sappers, which are basically peasants, but they have crossbows to give them a ranged attack. Since it's a crossbow, they have to reload and can only shoot every other turn, but even just getting that one shot off is usually enough to either decide the fight or that the enemy gets close enough that they can attack in melee. Rangers/Archers, which are your bog-standard ranged attacker unit. Poor showing in melee, but they get to shoot every turn (unlike the Militia) and their range is greater. Footmen/Men-at-Arms, which are your bog-standard melee unit. These guys will take the lion's share of losses, since they're going to be protecting your Archers (and sometimes the Militia), or taking the offensive directly, and their mid-tier initiative means they're going to have to soak up lots of attacks. Troubadors/Minstrels - these units can spend their turn casting a buff (a bard song that grants increased defense), but otherwise are a fairly strong melee unit. Their one drawback is that their high initiative combined with the lack of a Wait makes them a little awkward to use: they'll often go first in any combat, which means you'll instinctively spend that turn casting their buff, but then the rest of the armies, yours and the enemy, make their move, where the Minstrels might have made more of an impact coming in late and reacting to the enemy as they close-in. This first-to-go behavior is also why the Footmen keep taking it on the chin: the Minstrels are johnny-come-latelies that are out of position during the first wave of incoming attacks. there are also supposed to be Knights, but I haven't gotten far enough to use them yet. anyway, by giving Militia a ranged attack, and by inventing the Minstrel concept of a unit, the faction manages to avoid some of the Knight problem, but the other thing that really elevates this is the Essence system of magic letting you afford dropping spells on each and every battle (since casting spells in one battle has no impact on the availability of spells in the next battle). It's nice to be able to drop a Quicken to let Footmen walk up to make an attack that they'd otherwise be just barely short for, or an Insect Swarm to drop a unit's initiative so your Rangers get to move first and shoot it dead before its new turn-order comes up.
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Sep 4, 2023 04:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:I tried playing GalCiv 3 and 4 last year when I was on a 4x kick, and it just wasn't interesting. I could see the parts where industrial production is the most important thing in the game, as it usually is with all 4x's, but the game makes you move square-by-square like it was Civilization, but the maps are mostly wide open spaces because it's loving space, and then your fleets don't really exert zone-of-control, so making contact with enemy fleets and securing "your" territory is painful and tedious. That's a shame. I can handle Gladius as a Civ-like for the opposite reasons (actual land features, ZoC, etc.). I guess maybe for my space strategy game I'll finally get around to learning Distant Worlds 2. Already have 200-300 some hours in Stellaris and want to try something a bit different.
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Sep 4, 2023 14:28
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I just want Aurora but with good UI and maybe visual gameplay.
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Sep 5, 2023 01:18
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been trying out Chain of Command solo on tts to see if I'm dumb enough to buy into another miniatures period. It's got some really neat mechanics- there's a elegant if somewhat random system of unpredictable activations, but the big thing is deployment is done with a pregame patrol phase where you move markers around the map representing where your scouts make contact with the enemy, then set up spawn points a bit back from them in cover; but units don't start off on the table at all so you have your first section or scout team carefully creeping forward while you get your mortars set up until they get too close to the enemy and suddenly the MG42 appears out of nowhere. It also manages to represent Soviet infantry tactical doctrine in a way that doesn't just make them entirely worse- their units are less flexible since theyre not divided into smaller rifle/MG teams but that also makes them easier to command and more resilient. But also the rules are a huge loving mess (I'm still not really sure how cover works) since apparently a huge chunk of wargamers are ideologically opposed to copy editing, there's some weird balance choices, and it does seem a little down to the dice. Also the cover has a big Wehrmacht officer on it because of course
StashAugustine has issued a correction as of 01:40 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 01:36
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I have, rather unexpectedly, become a Dominions 6 playtester. Illwinter have politely asked us not to gossip too much, so I won't, but it's pretty interesting to see the actual changes play out.
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Sep 5, 2023 07:02
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New LKMT for Kaiserreich is something else. You spend a maybe three months at war and when you win you spend the next three years trying to figure out who's a counter revolutionary and who isn't.
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Sep 6, 2023 15:33
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLSZSS9tEE8
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Sep 6, 2023 16:06
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I'm watching this youtuber play through a new city builder called High Rise City, which just recently got released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n1mP4OmMlw there's a lot of jank and rough edges to it, but what caught my attention is that it looks like it has a rationalized materials and industrial economy. Building basic housing requires wood and insulation (made from hemp). Later more dense housing requires bricks, which is processed from clay. Even later buildings require "tools", which is made from iron ingots, which is made from charcoal + iron, and charcoal is produced from wood, while iron ore has to be mined and then processed into iron before being formed into ingots. and so on and so forth. The visuals are very reminiscent of Cities Skylines if it was made by a small Eastern European dev, but the mechanics seem interesting because you're not [as blatantly] just summoning buildings from thin air.
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Sep 6, 2023 16:36
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The one thing that W&R does better than all other city builders is toad construction - proper roads are both labor and cost intensive and that games handles it perfectly. It’s disheartening to see a resource-based city builder start off with the player just plopping a road network.
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Sep 6, 2023 19:20
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I would play a resource based toad construction simulator ngl
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Sep 6, 2023 19:33
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Frosted Flake posted:I just want Aurora but with good UI and maybe visual gameplay. not allowed i've been wanting Battlefront.com to have some kind of epiphany and licence an actual engine for the combat mission games. But it can't happen. Can't have grog elements that really add something to the feel of the game AND have good graphics and UI
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Sep 6, 2023 19:39
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City building games are actually kinda bad.
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Sep 6, 2023 20:57
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| # ? May 24, 2024 13:19 |
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Minenfeld! posted:City building games are actually kinda bad. Against the Storm owns.
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Sep 6, 2023 22:00
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