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Check out bballjo on YouTube he has some very nice workers and resources videos that can help how you think about and approach things
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Nov 25, 2023 22:48
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just search his channel for [topic you're wondering about] because he has a billion videos, some in-depth deep dives and some 'here's what you need to know' short focused videos, in addition to a bunch of LPs
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Nov 25, 2023 22:57
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It's the only game in the genre I can think of that actually explains to the player why cities and towns form, why they grow, and why they form where they do.
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Nov 26, 2023 00:38
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Benagain posted:Check out bballjo on YouTube he has some very nice workers and resources videos that can help how you think about and approach things double nine posted:just search his channel for [topic you're wondering about] because he has a billion videos, some in-depth deep dives and some 'here's what you need to know' short focused videos, Thanks 
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Nov 26, 2023 19:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:I picked up Victoria 3 during the sale, and started a game with Brazil, hoping to be able to focus on the economy without needing to dabble on foreign policy at all it's very remincent of oblivion where the entire town will agro on you if you accidentally steal a single cup from a table
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Nov 26, 2023 21:06
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I've finally played more Alpha Centauri. Only about 40 more turns, but what turns they have been. But first, an informal poll. How often do you use the "Power" social engineering choice without getting the Cloning Vats first? That +2 Morale/+2 Support doesn't seem worth it to me for the -2 Industry penalty. Maybe it's worth it if you're in such a desperate war that you're building units with almost all your cities? You only get a little more morale and the extra support is nice but I find the mineral upkeep of units doesn't really matter during a desperate war. Anyway, when we last left Deidre we were fighting Zakharov. It was going rather well, I was able to steal a large number of technologies from him and was beating him with a small number of troops. However, events continued to develop diplomatically.  Miriam made this very unimpressive threat towards me. We're over a 100 turns into the game at this point, she should have gotten 1-2-1 units a long time ago. She then proceeded to declare war on me. Miriam is one of the serious players of this game. She's devoured most of the Peacekeepers, leaving them with only a single city on the ocean. Morgan and Yang are the other serious players. Miriam can be pretty tough. She's got very poor research but comes with a lot of advantages to make up for it. One of her biggest advantages is a 25% bonus when attacking. This makes her a dangerous opponent to face. She also gets a bonus to probe teams which lets her steal technology from people the same way I did from Zakharov. Luckily I have a way to counter that. I put a probe team or two in every city bordering Miriam. Probe teams are relatively cheap and they don't cost upkeep. If you put a probe team in one of your cities then any enemy probe teams has to defeat your probe team first before they can do anything to your city.  Zakharov is defeated after being reduced to four cities. Unfortunately I can't move the armies I was using there to my Miriam front because I'm too worried about being attacked by Yang. Around this time I've researched both Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests. This is usually a huge turning point in the game. Building both these Facilities turns Forests into one of the best terraforming choices in the game. I've modded Deidre to get free Tree Farms once you've researched them, this is quite convenient and really helps propel you forward. I'm taking full advantage of this momentum and plowing it right back into my economy. However, this has had an odd effect. Normally, building Tree Farms increases the amount of minerals you can get per base without causing eco-damage. I think getting Tree Farms for free doesn't give you this effect. This is pretty funny but not a desired effect, I'm going to need to take a look at that. You get Hybrid Forests so quickly after you get Tree Farms. I think you can unlock Hybrid Forests before you unlock Tree Farms. You probably don't want to though as Tree Farms are cheaper to build so you probably want them first. I've been spending Energy hand over fist to rush the production both of these Facilities everywhere I can.  Back to Miriam. I've been attempting to use Infantry as offensive troops. They're both cheaper and better at urban combat. I've now decided that this a bad idea. In Alpha Centauri, offense is better than defense. For some reason, the numbers for weapons (offense) are just bigger than the numbers for armor (defense). Don't forgot that you only use your weapons when attack and only use your armor when defending, you won't ever have a battle where you use both your offense and defense values. Additionally, if you stack units outside of cities then they can take collateral damage. Collateral damage is when you lose a defensive battle on a (non-city, non-bunker) square, all of the remaining units on that square take damage. Let's take a look at how this played out when I fought Miriam. I want to take a city with infantry. Infantry only have one movement. I have to move my infantry next to the city, then end the turn. During the enemy's turn all my infantry that are in place to assault the enemy city can be counterattacked by the enemy units inside the city. This can be mitigated by moving my infantry in assault/defense pairs and spreading them out to avoid collateral damage but that requires me to both build more troops and spend more turns moving my troops into position. Let's compare this with rovers. I move my rover next to the enemy city and then attack that city in the same turn. I can do this as many times as have rovers, all in a single turn. I'm only vulnerable to counterattacks if I failed to defeat the enemy in one turn, so I just need to make sure I do that (and build a few defense rovers to cover my troops just in case I can't). Overall, I think offensive infantry are a sucker's bet, even if they are cheaper. Spartans might be able to make use of them if you can build Elite Infantry. Infantry get a second move when they reach elite discipline. More details tomorrow. Upcoming events, Morgan declared war on me.
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Nov 27, 2023 08:36
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i find that rover assaults work against the ai, but if you're playing against a human opponent and they're even halfway competent they'll generally find and attack your rovers before they get into attack position using roads and sensors
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Nov 27, 2023 10:31
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Grey Hunter is going an LP of the 1946 DLC for Panzer Corps 2 and while his videos have gotten me to pick up a bunch of games I might have missed otherwise, this is the first time that I've seen one that actively turned me off from the product because the first "scenario" is hardly even a playable mission and is just a very long introduction to this fan fiction - I'm not even going to call it "alternate history", because there's poo poo like Manstein having been given the title "Marshal Admiral" and getting into arguments with Kurita and Rommel. The actual first mission is an invasion of Vancouver Island, but there's so much dramatic exposition and preamble that could have otherwise been done as just a paragraph of a mission briefing the way it's always been done except instead we get this talking heads poo poo where everyone speaks like they're anime villains.  EDIT: to be absolutely clear this is not a dig on Grey Hunter at all - he's still rendering a great public service by informing me of how cringe and fail the Panzer Corps 2 1946 DLC is gradenko_2000 has issued a correction as of 16:19 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 16:03
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door slides open and a geisha is pouring tea for a tiger tank wearing a giant kimono
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Nov 27, 2023 16:07
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lmao Panzer Corps' devs definitely gave me the vibe of being unreconstructed Clean Wehrmacht guys who think the Nazis were primarily just badass
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Nov 27, 2023 16:13
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John Charity Spring posted:lmao Yeah Panzer Corps has had bad vibes since they started doing infinite alternate history scenario's for the Germans, which started about 2 seconds after the release of the base game.
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Nov 27, 2023 16:18
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only the finest handcrafted tiger tanks forged from pure hanzo steel
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Nov 27, 2023 17:41
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BearsBearsBears posted:But first, an informal poll. How often do you use the "Power" social engineering choice without getting the Cloning Vats first? That +2 Morale/+2 Support doesn't seem worth it to me for the -2 Industry penalty. Maybe it's worth it if you're in such a desperate war that you're building units with almost all your cities? You only get a little more morale and the extra support is nice but I find the mineral upkeep of units doesn't really matter during a desperate war. I haven't done it since I started playing again, but I used to use the +2 morale specifically to get my infantry to elite status quickly so they could act like rovers. I can't remember if you need a +morale faction or can do it with a monolith and early social engineering, IIRC it's a neat trick though. Without bumping them to elite, infantry work for defense. I usually upgrade any independent scouts to X-Y-1 infantry to help defend a border city, and I'll make X-1-1 artillery at appropriate border cities to help with AI attackers. Even then, you want rovers in the city so that when you counterattack enemy rovers they die instead of retreating. Rovers are just much better at offense, in addition to being able to attack a city without sitting next to it they get from area to area much faster, which lets you keep going once you go on the attack. I like to add some defensive 1-X-2 rovers (with pulse if I've got it, and trance since it's free) to an attack stack, they're cheap and block counterattacks. X-Y-2 rovers are painfully expensive and they're often damaged from attacking so the defense doesn't help. Also your changes to Miriam plus the thinker mod make her a major player. I remember in old games she would basically always get stuck. She might rip up another faction early, but couldn't keep up with everyone teching around her, so she'd be dangerous if you started right on top of her, then an annoyance for everyone as the game goes on. Now she's usually conquering whole empires, and with the free buildings her pop goes through the roof. My latest game is playing Yang and I'm #1 on the charts, but Miriam went from not much to a solid (and gaining) second by absorbing the Morganites (away from me) and is working on the Spartans (who border me). I should be able to counter her since my huge cities have finished building their infrastructure and can turn to making a giant army to sweep back through her lands.
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Nov 27, 2023 17:45
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Orange Devil posted:Yeah Panzer Corps has had bad vibes since they started doing infinite alternate history scenario's for the Germans, which started about 2 seconds after the release of the base game. im gonna create a wargame that poses the question "what if the germans were even worse and dumber"
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Nov 27, 2023 18:58
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has anyone done a alt-history campaign where germanys attack through the ardennes goes worse the fall of france doesnt happen?
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Nov 27, 2023 19:26
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Megamissen posted:has anyone done a alt-history campaign where germanys attack through the ardennes goes worse the fall of france doesnt happen? no, because that takes work you have to actually come up with an entirely different course of the war all the 'what if the nazis did even better?!' horseshit do so by simply assuming no one in the entire world except the nazis has any agency or decisionmaking and just sit there while the nazis do what they want, but in this counterfactual you need to figure out what every single power actually gets up to atelier morgan has issued a correction as of 19:35 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 19:33
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I like to think of the actual historical events as wrong war 2 because Hitler was a crazy idiot and the correct story as being France, Germany and Britain fighting the USSR aka red alert
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Nov 27, 2023 20:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:Grey Hunter is going an LP of the 1946 DLC for Panzer Corps 2 and while his videos have gotten me to pick up a bunch of games I might have missed otherwise, this is the first time that I've seen one that actively turned me off from the product because the first "scenario" is hardly even a playable mission and is just a very long introduction to this fan fiction - I'm not even going to call it "alternate history", because there's poo poo like Manstein having been given the title "Marshal Admiral" and getting into arguments with Kurita and Rommel. lmao poor grey. I am still reading his work on War in the Pacific.
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Nov 27, 2023 22:41
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Buck Wildman posted:door slides open and a geisha is pouring tea for a tiger tank wearing a giant kimono lol UoC II remains the superior pretzelish strategy game
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Nov 27, 2023 23:54
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Slavvy posted:I like to think of the actual historical events as wrong war 2 because Hitler was a crazy idiot and the correct story as being France, Germany and Britain fighting the USSR aka red alert its so fuckd they didnt do a RA II/Tiberian Sun remaster after that first CnC re-release was so good
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Nov 27, 2023 23:56
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Buck Wildman posted:door slides open and a geisha is pouring tea for a tiger tank wearing a giant kimono Rommel: Hey just got word of an Allied armada. It’s headed towards Normandy. I'm not personally antisemitic btw. Manstein: I'll come up with a plan to stop it. Guderian: It worked. Let's celebrate. [Sliding doors open] Yamamoto: Sake's on me, boys
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Nov 28, 2023 00:29
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Previously on "Next Time on Alpha Centauri" I alluded to Morgan attacking me. He did and I played a few rounds to set up something exciting to happened and boy did it.Cerebral Bore posted:i find that rover assaults work against the ai, but if you're playing against a human opponent and they're even halfway competent they'll generally find and attack your rovers before they get into attack position using roads and sensors You basically called it, although it turned out the threat was actually needlejets! The turn after Morgan declared war on me he attacked me with two needlejets, which wiped out my single rover probing attack and took out one of my colony's defenses and dropped off a rover somehow (or maybe it drove in from the fog of war)? This is not an auspicious start.  I'm going to lose that city next turn. It's also at this point that I realize that I don't actually know much about air combat, especially from the receiving end. I guess it's time to learn by doing. Do you guys remember earlier, when I was complaining how lopsided the attack vs defense values in SMAC are? Here's a good example. Morgan has missile launchers (6 attack) while my best armor is plasma steel (3 defense). This 2 to 1 ratio of attack values to defense values is pretty common within the game and is one of the reasons that this game favors attack so heavily. You don't need a 3 to 1 advantage in order to defeat a defender here, 1 to 1 is often good enough. So I can't get needlejets yet and will need to steal that technology from Morgan. I don't have many forces up north because I wasn't expecting an attack by Morgan (I was expecting an attack from Yang). So I need to build up a defensive force and fast ( and then eventually an offensive force). I was also talking earlier about the advantages of mobility and having extra moves over the enemy, well now I'm on the receiving end of that. They can attack my units with needlejets before I can move them into position. I've got to probe Morgan at least twice before I can build needlejets myself so I can't counter with air superiority. I do have AAA (Anti-Air Artillery) which gives a +100% bonus against air attacks (and possibly is needed to attack air units?). The problem is, with my defense of 3 and the enemy attack of 6, this only makes brings me to even with the enemy when they attack me. I would also need a good deal of defensive AAA units to cover my attacking forces and all my vulnerable cities. The cities should be more or less fine since I also have perimeter defense on them. So 1-2 Defensive AAA units per stack plus maybe an Offensive AAA rover to clean up any needlejets that win an AAA fight but can't retreat yet plus my actual offensive rovers plus the units I need to leave behind to defend my cities. It's doable but I've got https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EghMCc6ftoA Spartan Battle Manual posted:Against such abominations, we organize our defenses on the principle that one strong and able mind can shield the many. Abominations? Mind Worms are one of the most noble and beautiful of the native life forms and we should learn to respect them and those who don't should be taught by force. I'm going to be heavily using Mind Worms to attack Morgan.  For those who aren't familiar those are (wild) Mind Worms in the bottom left. Yes, they do just look like a bunch of white squiggles. My naval war against Miriam is going very well by the way, far better than the land war. Anyway, Mind Worms use Psi Combat instead of normal combat. Psi Combat ignores both weapon strength and armor strength, its hugely reliant on Morale (Lifecycle for the Mind Worms). Psi Combat favors the attacker with a +50% bonus however I just got a +50% defensive bonus from my Neural Amplifier that I just completed. This means that my defensive Psi combat is even odds while I have the advantage on offense. Playing as the Gaians, my bonus Planet rating also gives me a bonus with Psi Combat (possibly only on offense) and I plan to stack as many Lifecycle bonuses as I can to turn the odds in my favor even more. Mind Worms do have an obvious disadvantage. They can destroy units much more expensive than themselves but can also be destroyed by much cheaper units. Morgan can beat my mass Mind Worm strategy by building a ton of cheap 1-1-x units with maybe Hypnotic Trance and/or Empath Song on them. That's where the second part of my doctrine will come in. I'm going be adding a few of my Assault Rovers (8-1-2). Ideally, my Mind Worms will fight Morgan's expensive units while my Assault Rovers will shred through his cheap units. This obviously won't work out perfectly but it should work out well enough overall. I may also need an AAA rover or two to take out enemy needlejets that aren't psychically crashed by the Mind Worms. This could all turn out to be a terrible mistake if it turns that there are things about Air vs Psi combat that I'm not aware of. We'll find out together. As an aside, what is a needlejet? It's never described why it's called that in the game. I think it may possibly be because it uses an aerospike-style rocket engines.  Here's a picture of an aerospike straight from Nasa. An aerospike is an alternative to the traditional rocket nozzle we're all familiar with. Traditional rocket nozzles need to be optimized for either sea level operation (small nozzle) or for being operated in space (big nozzle relative to rocket engine), this means that a rocket nozzle can't work well at all altitudes (because of the changing air pressure as you go up). An aerospike can work well at all altitudes because it uses the rocket exhaust itself as a sort of virtual nozzle. You wouldn't use an aerospike on a non-spaceship on earth because a normal air-breathing jet engine is much more efficient (since it can suck in oxygen from the environment) but perhaps on other planets it might make sense if you can't get oxygen from the air. The aerospike looks like a needle hence the needlejet moniker. The only problem with my little theory is that I checked the manual for Alpha Centauri and it turns out there's plenty of oxygen on planet (70% of earth). According to the manual, the reason humans can't breathe the air on planet is because of nitrogen narcosis caused by the high partial pressure of nitrogen. This is something that SCUBA divers suffer from at high pressures. Except looking at the manual's atmospheric composition for Planet the actual symptoms should be somewhere between "No Symptoms" and "Mild Impairment" if the chart on wikipedia can be trusted. Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder. I'm just going to believe my aerospike theory and that Planet has negligible oxygen in the atmosphere. It'll be easier for everybody that way.
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Nov 29, 2023 03:33
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combat in Civ is rather fascinating because there's this tendency, especially among reviewers, to regard it as an afterthought or as simplistic, when there's actually a lot of depth to it when you're fighting in situations where you don't have overwhelming technological superiority, or you don't have overwhelming industrial superiority, or you don't have the luxury of time, or some combination of the three "doom stacks" is a common refrain in this sort of discourse, but when I was playing Civ 4 heavily earlier in the year, I actually moved away from doom stacks and adopted a "broad front" strategy where I placed at least one unit on every tile along the entire border of the enemy I was fighting: - it prevents the enemy from dealing damage to multiple units at once via siege units - it prevents the enemy from doing deep raids with cavalry and other mobile units that simply ride around your stacks - it encourages you to have lots of forces before beginning a war - it gives you "reserves" that you can tap in case the doom stack comes up just barely short and this sort of strategy works even better in Civ 3, because if you have a line of units all across a continent, and then leave one tile open as a hole, the AI will always push their offensive units towards and through that hole. If you then put big stacks of units on the tiles adjacent to the hole, you can easily lure the AI into a defeat-in-detail and then you go even further back into Civ 1 and 2 and doom stacks are even more discouraged, because combat there would completely wipe out the entire stack if the defender lost (unless it was in a city or a fortress) so when you get right down to it, there exists this unexplored space, this "what could have been" alternate universe where Civ did not shift to one-unit-per-tile (even if it may still have shifted to hexes), because people realized that stacking units was not a problem, and there was vibrant tactical-operational combat even then BearsBearsBears posted:I was also talking earlier about the advantages of mobility and having extra moves over the enemy, well now I'm on the receiving end of that. They can attack my units with needlejets before I can move them into position. there's something very Ukraine thread about this statement
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Nov 29, 2023 04:03
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Last Train Home is out to good reviews and looks like a fun game but it sounds like a brain boiling experience historically. Not from the developer, but from a linked review on their steam page: quote:Last Train Home drops you, a lone squad of from the Czech Legion at the end of World War I as the Russian Civil War began - an underused setting and an even rarer perspective on it. The prologue unfolds right when the situation with the new Bolshevik government reaches a critical point. With its allies alienated and the country’s economy in shambles after the war, the party abandoned its original ideals in favor of authoritarian control. The government ransacked the countryside in a desperate attempt to feed the starving cities and set in motion disastrous events that eventually led to Josef Stalin’s brutal plans for progress. There are a whole bunch of reviews like this too. quote:You can shoot orcs quote:You can do humanity a favor and kill commies 
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Nov 29, 2023 04:59
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BearsBearsBears posted:Do you guys remember earlier, when I was complaining how lopsided the attack vs defense values in SMAC are? Here's a good example. Morgan has missile launchers (6 attack) while my best armor is plasma steel (3 defense). This 2 to 1 ratio of attack values to defense values is pretty common within the game and is one of the reasons that this game favors attack so heavily. You don't need a 3 to 1 advantage in order to defeat a defender here, 1 to 1 is often good enough. So I can't get needlejets yet and will need to steal that technology from Morgan. I don't have many forces up north because I wasn't expecting an attack by Morgan (I was expecting an attack from Yang). So I need to build up a defensive force and fast ( and then eventually an offensive force). Defenders have several advantages. They are much cheaper than attackers - a your 1-3-1 AAA unit costs 24 minerals, while Morgans 6-1-10 needlejets cost 40. Upgrade costs from older units using credits are also similarly skewed upgrading from a 1-1-1 scout patrol to the AAA unit costs 50 while upgrading from a 1-1-2 scout rover to a or 1-1-10 needlejet to a missile version costs 100. Defenders get bonuses much easier than attackers - you get 25% from being in a base, 100% if it has perimeter defense and 25% from having a sensor within range plus terrain bonuses in rough terrain, and have things like the +100% air defense upgrade. The costs get even more skewed if you want to put armor on your attacking units (a 6-3-10 needlejet would be 56 minerals, almost double the cost of the AAA garrison). Winning a single fight isn't a clean win. An attacker hitting similar tech defender (like 6 missiles vs 3 plasma) in the open probably walks away with 80-90% health, but an attacker hitting the same defender in a city or in a forest with a sensor probably drops below 50% health. This sticks speeders in position, and planes always get stuck in position after attacking - which leaves them easy prey for counterattack. Since most attackers will be built without armor, counter attacks are even stronger. If the defender has needlejets, they can keep them in a city further back from the front so they can't fall to an alpha strike and can always be ready to counter attackers. So overall an attacker needs to bring enough offensive units to wipe out defensive units and counterattackers, which will cost significantly more than the defender, with counterattacks in play will have significant losses, and even if a counterattack doesn't work will have to spend some time healing after each fight. A tech advantage can really swing a fight in the attacker's favor, and I had forgotten how big of an advantage air units are until Miriam gave me a similar surprise to yours in my game. If you don't have AAA units in a city, it can pretty easily get cleared out by needlejets and one ground unit, that 100% air defense matters a lot. I think the balance of offense and defense is pretty good, as long as you consider counterattacks part of 'defense'. quote:I was also talking earlier about the advantages of mobility and having extra moves over the enemy, well now I'm on the receiving end of that. They can attack my units with needlejets before I can move them into position. I've got to probe Morgan at least twice before I can build needlejets myself so I can't counter with air superiority. I do have AAA (Anti-Air Artillery) which gives a +100% bonus against air attacks (and possibly is needed to attack air units?). You need the SAM upgrade to attack air units in the air (anyone can attack them in a base), which comes with the same tech that gives needlejets. IIRC mindworms can't attack air units in the air, so you're going to want SAM units or needlejets as part of your strategy. Also SAM units (including air units) have a 50% penalty when attacking non-air units, so don't expect them to do heavy lifting in non-air attacks.
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Nov 29, 2023 06:00
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:I haven't done it since I started playing again, but I used to use the +2 morale specifically to get my infantry to elite status quickly so they could act like rovers. I can't remember if you need a +morale faction or can do it with a monolith and early social engineering, IIRC it's a neat trick though. I'm glad to hear you're enjoying my mod. The funny thing is in my game I forgot to transfer over Miriam's changes before starting my game so she's 100% vanilla and she's still doing great. I think the Thinker mod really helps her out. She was already pretty drat strong in the players hands. Keep reporting back your experiences with my mod, it's barely playtested so I did my balancing with a combination of math and vibes. I've also used defensive rovers to stop my rovers from being wiped out in counterattacks. That's essentially how I won my last game as Morgan. They can keep up with the offense and tank an attack or two, which is enough to be the difference between victory and failure. I'm trying out a new hybrid Mind Worm and Assault Rover strategy, we'll see how it works. For the Power value, I think I'm going to reduce the penalty to -1 Industry. That should be enough to move it from "highly situational" to just "situational". Power should be a very reasonable value to choose during a war. gradenko_2000 posted:combat in Civ is rather fascinating because there's this tendency, especially among reviewers, to regard it as an afterthought or as simplistic, when there's actually a lot of depth to it when you're fighting in situations where you don't have overwhelming technological superiority, or you don't have overwhelming industrial superiority, or you don't have the luxury of time, or some combination of the three It would have been simple enough to make doom-stacking non-optimal (if it wasn't already) but breaking the players of the habit would have been harder. I never played the Civs after Civ 4 (except 5 during a free weekend). They've made massive changes to the basic formula in both 5 and 6. Are they innovating or floundering? gradenko_2000 posted:there's something very Ukraine thread about this statement I think of the Ukraine war a surprising amount when playing. I was thinking of The Ghost of Kyiv when I was reading about Recon Rover Rick, "Mythology for Profit" indeed. Pantaloon Pontiff posted:Defenders have several advantages. They are much cheaper than attackers - a your 1-3-1 AAA unit costs 24 minerals, while Morgans 6-1-10 needlejets cost 40. Upgrade costs from older units using credits are also similarly skewed upgrading from a 1-1-1 scout patrol to the AAA unit costs 50 while upgrading from a 1-1-2 scout rover to a or 1-1-10 needlejet to a missile version costs 100. Defenders get bonuses much easier than attackers - you get 25% from being in a base, 100% if it has perimeter defense and 25% from having a sensor within range plus terrain bonuses in rough terrain, and have things like the +100% air defense upgrade. The costs get even more skewed if you want to put armor on your attacking units (a 6-3-10 needlejet would be 56 minerals, almost double the cost of the AAA garrison). I do consider counterattacks part of attacking being better since it's part of the attack value. Defenders are significantly cheaper and do get better bonuses (although the best bonuses are only when defending a city). I stand by my 1-1 ratio for winning, you have to count the counterattackers for the defending side. The huge mobility of air units does change things significantly since so many counter-attackers can get in range. If you consider the cost, then the ratio would be different though you would also have to count the mineral cost of perimeter defenses and such. Of course, if the defender stacks excessively in a city you can always use artillery bombardment (or a probe team to destroy the perimeter defense or just straight mind control the city). SMAC has a lot of play and counterplay at this level. I'm hoping it does so for the air unit phase as well. Pantaloon Pontiff posted:You need the SAM upgrade to attack air units in the air (anyone can attack them in a base), which comes with the same tech that gives needlejets. IIRC mindworms can't attack air units in the air, so you're going to want SAM units or needlejets as part of your strategy. Also SAM units (including air units) have a 50% penalty when attacking non-air units, so don't expect them to do heavy lifting in non-air attacks. drat, so air units are very difficult to counter without the tech that unlocks them. They can pick whatever fights they want and can't be counterattacked. I could be in a real touchy position for a few turns. I feel confident 1-2 Mind Worms (+Neural Amplifier +Lifecycle bonuses) per city should be able to easily handle it though. Hell, just 1-2 AAA units in city should do fine with the AAA bonus and the Perimeter Defense bonus. I like the flexibility of the Mind Worms though.
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Nov 29, 2023 07:57
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BearsBearsBears posted:I was thinking of The Ghost of Kyiv when I was reading about Recon Rover Rick, "Mythology for Profit" indeed.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it before but that's completely bang-on.BearsBearsBears posted:I never played the Civs after Civ 4 (except 5 during a free weekend). They've made massive changes to the basic formula in both 5 and 6. Are they innovating or floundering? the big innovation of Civ 6 was districts: they're city improvements that you can place on the map, which act as both a tile improvement, as in it increases yields, while also acting as its own specific improvement-grade bonus. An Encampment district adds one production to the tile it's placed on, while also producing Great General points, while also granting additional experience for any military units built in the city. Later, you can upgrade the Encampment into a Barracks, which further increases the XP effect for infantry and ranged units, or you can upgrade it into a Stable, which increases the XP for cavalry units. The Barracks and the Stable can be further upgraded into an Armory in the Medieval era, and then a Military Academy in the Industrial era. Similarly, you can place an Industrial Zone district, and then upgrade it into a Workshop, and then upgrade it into a Factory, and then from the Factory into a Coal/Oil/Nuclear Power Plant. Now, if you remember your Civ 4, a city can build the Barracks improvement, and then it can later build the Stable improvement. Or a city can build the Forge improvement, and then the Factory improvement, and then later one of the Power Plant improvements. In general, the only thing standing in the way of a Civ 4 city from building all the improvements is time, all other things being equal. With Civ 6, by transferring these improvements into Districts, that have to be placed on the map, you cannot build every District in a city. There's a cap on how many Districts a city can have, as determined by the city's population, and then even if you set that aside, a city might not have enough tiles to place all the Districts it wants. This is one of the ways that Civ 6 imposes limits on the geometric growth of an empire: where Civ 1/2/3 had Corruption, and Civ 4 had empire-wide city maintenance, and Civ 5 had empire-wide happiness limits, Civ 6 implements a sort of soft-cap to how productive any given city can ever be, because tiles are a limited and restrictive resource. It's an interesting way to design the game, and I wouldn't say it's bad per se, but once I realized what was happening, the mystique kind of fell away for me, you know?
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Nov 29, 2023 08:24
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ModernMajorGeneral posted:Last Train Home is out to good reviews and looks like a fun game but it sounds like a brain boiling experience historically. I'm trying to decide if the game play makes up for thr brain worms
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Nov 29, 2023 08:30
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ModernMajorGeneral posted:Last Train Home is out to good reviews and looks like a fun game but it sounds like a brain boiling experience historically. Yeah I played the demo of this during the last Steam Next Fest and even there the bonkers politics stood out. It really lays it on thick how the Bolsheviks are evil - they're all peasants acting as bandits and murdering people for no reason, and you meet a general who is the only one who's intelligent and is a moustache twirling manipulative kind. One instance that sticks in the mind is you find a farmhouse where the family has been killed because the Reds came to requisition grain and the farmer refused to give the amount they asked for, but then they left behind the grain afterwards because the murder was their real goal lol. It's also just very badly written, overly verbose and full of puns or pop culture references in the objective names which clashes a lot with the serious story it wants to tell. It gives you separate objectives for each step of that farmhouse vignette for instance, from approaching the farm to opening the gate. I think the gate opening objective was titled Gate Of Fate or Door Of Doom, something like that. You just get barraged with this inane text all the time. Also, while it wants to be historically informative (from its perspective), there was clearly a developer decision to be Gender Blind and so your Czech Legion has a 50/50 split of men and women. A liberal DEI fantasy version of history that's also got an educational mission, it's very odd. Gameplay-wise I found it frustrating and annoying to control, particularly in comparison to recent squad-control games like Aliens Dark Descent which are so much nicer to play. Something that stood out is that you had to individually order your soldiers to open crates of supplies where the Aliens game smartly just selects the closest soldier and sends them to the indicated supplies even if you queue up a bunch at once. In Last Train Home doing this interrupts your existing search orders so instead you sit for a minute shift-queuing these slow-rear end search orders then watching them play out while nothing else happens. Combat seemed inferior to something like Partisans 1941 (another game it has genre commonalities with) and the metagame of directing the train through Russia... well, I can't really judge it as it was still in heavy tutorial railroading (sic) in the demo. Oh and it also ran like poo poo although that might have been improved since the demo build. Not Good is the official JCS opinion
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Nov 29, 2023 08:58
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I for one am shocked that a game about people who fought on the side of the White army in the Russian civil war would have bad opinions about Reds It is a shame because trains are cool
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Nov 29, 2023 10:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:With Civ 6, by transferring these improvements into Districts, that have to be placed on the map, you cannot build every District in a city. There's a cap on how many Districts a city can have, as determined by the city's population, and then even if you set that aside, a city might not have enough tiles to place all the Districts it wants. Back when Humankind was in open beta, there was a scenario where the human player got surprised by an AI alliance wardec which forces them to suddenly militarize to fight off objectively superior forces. The interesting part of this is that districts connected to cities have walls so from a military standpoint you want as much districts on good ground as possible. Districts not connected to the city center are urban terrain but they don't have the protection that walls and fort districts offer. Building for military scenarios however also means economic productivity is worse because there aren't synergies being utilized and back then city districts were based off of a hard cap of settlement population. The tradeoffs were an interesting scenario not present in the live build because I guess a lot of people failed that scenario.
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Nov 29, 2023 17:06
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BearsBearsBears posted:I do consider counterattacks part of attacking being better since it's part of the attack value. Defenders are significantly cheaper and do get better bonuses (although the best bonuses are only when defending a city). I stand by my 1-1 ratio for winning, you have to count the counterattackers for the defending side. The huge mobility of air units does change things significantly since so many counter-attackers can get in range. If you consider the cost, then the ratio would be different though you would also have to count the mineral cost of perimeter defenses and such. Of course, if the defender stacks excessively in a city you can always use artillery bombardment (or a probe team to destroy the perimeter defense or just straight mind control the city). SMAC has a lot of play and counterplay at this level. I'm hoping it does so for the air unit phase as well. Yeah, there's a lot of back and forth that I didn't t really remember from back in the day that I've rediscovered in this game. If the attacker tries to use artillery, you can build your own artillery who then change it from 'no-risk bombardment' to 'duel it out using attack values'. Even if the attacker wins, since it's an even fight they're likely to be at 10-20% health and so can't really do anything for several turns. Probe teams can be countered by defense probe teams, social engineering, and the Hunter Seeker wonder. That's one of the nasty things about Miriam - bribing units or cities can really mess with a tough enemy and the AI isn't great about probe defense, but it's not an option against her once she gets her preferred social choices. I also like that you can build and especially upgrade quickly enough to counter things as they happen, one thing I see in some games is that production or upgrades take so long that if you don't have the counters at the start, you're just stuck. I'm not sure how much more I'm going to play out my current game. I think I've definitely won it since I'm bigger (pop, tech, and economy wise, soon to be territory) than Miriam even after she ate Deirdre, Santiago, and Morgan1 (he respawned and Lal took Morgan2's cities) and have her feeding units into my defense on one front while I'm taking her territory on the other, but she's so big it's going to be a grind to get her down (and to last long enough for one of the other victories) and I'm ready to try a fresh start. It will probably help to put most of my formers on automated improvement, and I'm really only foresting at this point so the AI can handle it. Miriam got one fairly forward city of mine when she demonstrated how aircraft work to my non-air-having empire, but I've been maintaining air superiority from a few turns after that.
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Nov 30, 2023 01:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:Grey Hunter is going an LP of the 1946 DLC for Panzer Corps 2 and while his videos have gotten me to pick up a bunch of games I might have missed otherwise, this is the first time that I've seen one that actively turned me off from the product because the first "scenario" is hardly even a playable mission and is just a very long introduction to this fan fiction - I'm not even going to call it "alternate history", because there's poo poo like Manstein having been given the title "Marshal Admiral" and getting into arguments with Kurita and Rommel. Yeah, there's a reason why I only bought the base PC2 game and quickly dropped it. You don't have to hurt yourself like that Grey Hunter!!! Fuligin posted:lol Hell yeah. Edit: lol https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/arts/last-train-home-ashborne.html Gonna make a game that has an all-woman squad called the Valkyries and ignores all that messy Bolshevik propaganda about massacres. BadOptics has issued a correction as of 02:56 on Nov 30, 2023 |
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Nov 30, 2023 02:07
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https://www.timeextension.com/news/2023/11/phantasie-star-command-and-more-ssi-mindscape-games-coming-to-steam-and-gog On December 19, a number of SSI games are going to get Steam and GOG releases Most of these are RPGs, but buried among the list is Great Naval Battles Collection (Great Naval Battles: North Atlantic 1939-1943, Vol. II: Guadalcanal 1942-43, Vol. III: Fury in the Pacific 1941-44, Vol. IV: Burning Steel 1939-1942) (1992-1996) Wargame Construction Set Collection (Set I, Set II: Tanks!, Set III: Age of Rifles 1846-1905) The latter is an especially big win, as Age of Rifles was not only one of the more complete treatments of the ACW at the time, including battles as obscure as Hood's campaign in Tennessee, but also covered battles like Isandlwana and Sedan 1870.
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Nov 30, 2023 04:20
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Armored Brigade is getting a sequel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sym9KXe_wfA and it seems that the devs have put a lot of work into further eliminating the "hive mind" problem of spotting in RTS games by simulating contact reports moving up and down the chain of command: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1089840/view/3798284112485742645?snr=1_5_9_
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Nov 30, 2023 04:49
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://www.timeextension.com/news/2023/11/phantasie-star-command-and-more-ssi-mindscape-games-coming-to-steam-and-gog I saw that the people who took over John Tiller's studio are getting serious about moving to Steam. I'm so glad we're coming to the end of an era. I get it, I do. Wargame designers have always charged as much for computer war-games as the cardboard ones, and it's not exactly a volume business. That's on top of Steam apparently taking a pretty large cut and dictating the discount when titles go on sale. Still, I can at least walk over to the grognard store to buy a hex and counter game. Half of these studios had borderline unusable websites, limited activation keys, Jutland Pro has a weird Epic Games style proprietary launcher.
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Nov 30, 2023 05:24
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OctaMurk posted:Armored Brigade is getting a sequel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sym9KXe_wfA Still won't have any infantry
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Nov 30, 2023 05:32
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Frosted Flake posted:I saw that the people who took over John Tiller's studio are getting serious about moving to Steam. I'm so glad we're coming to the end of an era. I bought Tiller's North German Plain '85 for mobile a few years ago and they removed it from the Google Play store after getting bought out. Still salty as hell about that.
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Nov 30, 2023 06:10
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BadOptics posted:Yeah, there's a reason why I only bought the base PC2 game and quickly dropped it. You don't have to hurt yourself like that Grey Hunter!!! Lmao quote:When the video game producer Petr Kolar and his future colleagues made a research trip to the Legiovlak, a replica World War I-era train that chugs around the Czech Republic, he noted the pristine Czechoslovak Legion uniforms worn by the museum guides. quote:A researcher from the Association of Czechoslovak Legionnaires, a veterans’ group, taught the studio about equipment and weapons. quote:It was an event Ashborne omitted, according to Kolar, because it did not fit the flow of the story. Most intellectually honest anticommunist
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Nov 30, 2023 09:09
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Frosted Flake posted:I saw that the people who took over John Tiller's studio are getting serious about moving to Steam. I'm so glad we're coming to the end of an era. Wait did your probe run out right as Kissinger died?
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Nov 30, 2023 09:21
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