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Veryslightlymad posted:Would you settle for 3 out of 4 Xs? This was vaguely on my radar (I wishlisted it at some point). I'll give it a look before long, thanks!
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Mar 16, 2024 11:16
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Megazver posted:This was vaguely on my radar (I wishlisted it at some point). I'll give it a look before long, thanks! Just for the sake of clarity, when you said "What Against the Storm did for townbuilders" I assume what you meant was "You do all the fun 'early game' challenging stuff and then leave the map before it gets monotonous and start a new run with different objectives." Because that's what I took it to mean when I posted. I adore Terraformers, but I wanna make sure I'm describing what it actually is. It deserves a space to be talked about in detail, but I'm not sure it's big enough to have its own thread and it doesn't really fit another genre neatly.
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Mar 16, 2024 11:43
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Oh sure, I got ya.
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Mar 16, 2024 11:50
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Looking at Endless Space 2 to supplement my Master of Orion habit. Can you set up your own, stable Private Idaho using different strategic styles? Each session I try to stay focused on a pre-identified approach to see how far it can take me. If I can only succeed within the game using one The One True Path then the urge to replay goes away fast. I'm happier with a BIG sandbox so I can play in different moods. Can you mostly auto-run game mechanics until if/when I decide to try my hand at optimization? Is the narrative content quickly stale or have enough variety that replays aren't ho-hum here we go again? How much DLC do I have to buy up front to have stability and variety and minimized avoidable frustrations?
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Mar 16, 2024 19:54
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Megazver posted:someone is probably already working on a game that does to 4X what Against the Storm did to town builders If someone makes this it'll be the best 4X in the genre. Loddfafnir posted:Old World has a good AI Old World isn't afraid to give the AI insane bonuses and a massive headstart and pretty sure they also let it just ignore a bunch of mechanics that are too complicated for it. That's not good AI. It does result in a fun challenge and is thus good game design though. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Mar 16, 2024 |
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Mar 16, 2024 20:32
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Veryslightlymad posted:Just for the sake of clarity, when you said "What Against the Storm did for townbuilders" I assume what you meant was "You do all the fun 'early game' challenging stuff and then leave the map before it gets monotonous and start a new run with different objectives." I was going to say, Worshipers. But then I remembered that it is also a card collecting game where the real focus is on battles. And by battles I mean figuring out a crazy unit/army synergy. Like Against the Storm for Age of Wonders. Which isn't quite what you are looking for.
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Mar 16, 2024 21:21
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I saw Mandalore Gaming's Sins of Solar Empire: Rebellion video and I'm intrigued. Worth the 20bux for a 10 year old game?
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Mar 16, 2024 23:29
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algebra testes posted:I saw Mandalore Gaming's Sins of Solar Empire: Rebellion video and I'm intrigued. Worth the 20bux for a 10 year old game? I enjoyed it in multiplayer ages ago, but I didn't find it very engaging for single player kinda felt like space Kohan in MP edit: does that make Dune spice Kohan? 
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Mar 16, 2024 23:30
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algebra testes posted:I saw Mandalore Gaming's Sins of Solar Empire: Rebellion video and I'm intrigued. Worth the 20bux for a 10 year old game? I personally find that it is but also I'm the weirdo who has six installs with different mod sets and reverse engineered part of the game to make a publicly accessible modding tool I was missing while I was without internet for a week so maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt.
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Mar 16, 2024 23:57
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Veryslightlymad posted:Would you settle for 3 out of 4 Xs? Terraformers is currently 45% off, so I bought it and played a few games. I like it! It does feel like a 3X game without combat. You're placing cities, placing building in them, exploiting resources and all that jazz. The one more turn factor is definitely present for me. It's a bit boardgame-y, but so is AtS, and it's not a bad thing. I've been wanting to play something like this ever since I tried out the 2008 Sid Meier's Colonization and thought "this would be so much more satisfying without the other nations". (Come to think of it, the King in Colonization is the Queen's Impatience in AtS, right? There is potential for a AtS's Colonization.) I got to the 15/Insane difficulty before the discontent ramp-up finally overwhelmed me and I lost for the first time. Just based on what I've seen so far, there does seem to be enough depth here to play for at least a few more days, which is good enough for me. I haven't really touched the terraforming mechanic yet and I haven't put a single animal or plant on the surface, so I've got that to figure out. Downsides: I wish the planet wasn't round. Yeah, yeah, it's 'realistic' but having to spin the planet around is actually giving me a bit of vertigo, and since there's not a whole lot of landmarks to speak of, it starts to get confusing once your empire grows more than you can put on one screen. But this is a minor issue. Overall, if any goons here still haven't tried it, I second the recommendation.   
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Mar 17, 2024 01:11
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This is a good thread on the fan who gave the AI in Pandora an update to make what is said to be one of the best AIs in a game. I've never played it myself though. But it's a good read. https://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=55252&sid=1e983705b9e7a98bf493d48209cb56d2
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Mar 18, 2024 03:21
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The original Imperium Galactica (in dos box) is on sale for < $2. The sequel is on sale too (I haven't played this one). I just finished the first rank/stage of the game. The graphics are challenging and dated, but still fun (make sure to set dos box to a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of the default). I played so much of this as a kid and never beat it, so maybe this is mostly nostalgia talking, but the game has a lot of style. The first several hours have a narrative story built in as you learn the ropes and face increasingly serious challenges. It's a lot of fun. The tiny little videos attached to most events add a surprising amount of charm. Some of the events will almost certainly kick your teeth in the first time. The event right after your first promotion is completely unfair, but that just makes it more fun to load up an early save (or restart) and figure out how to prepare properly. I enjoy the mix of city builder and 4x elements a lot. But the mix of narrative and 4x elements in a way that works well is really rare.
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Mar 18, 2024 03:50
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LLSix posted:The original Imperium Galactica (in dos box) is on sale for < $2. The sequel is on sale too (I haven't played this one). just snagged this, looks like a ton of fun ty!!
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Mar 18, 2024 05:56
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I played an unwise amount of hours on Endless Space 2 this weekend, since it was one sale, and for the most part I have no complaints aside from the fact that genocide is too complicated, there's no real straightforward way of removing Craver pops which is annoying because they damage planets over time.
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Mar 18, 2024 20:12
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Mods new thread title please
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Mar 18, 2024 20:17
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Telsa Cola posted:Mods new thread title please
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Mar 18, 2024 20:25
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Telsa Cola posted:Mods new thread title please Video Games › 4X strategy games - genocide is too complicated
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Mar 18, 2024 21:32
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Telsa Cola posted:Mods new thread title please
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Mar 18, 2024 21:39
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Telsa Cola posted:Mods new thread title please
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Mar 18, 2024 21:49
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SIGSEGV posted:I played an unwise amount of hours on Endless Space 2 this weekend, since it was one sale, and for the most part I have no complaints aside from the fact that genocide is too complicated, there's no real straightforward way of removing Craver pops which is annoying because they damage planets over time. Send them over (through the spaceport) to their own planet. Use Chain Gang to convert them to manpower. You're welcome, mein fuhrer.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:05
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That does sound useful, it'll teach them not to damage the environment while I'm using it.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:44
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toasterwarrior posted:Near three decades of playing 4Xes have taught me that Good 4X AI not only isn't achievable, it's probably not worth it at all. I have sour grapes'd Good 4X AI, and I will not be convinced otherwise because if thirty years of 4X games haven't made this mythical Good 4X AI then it probably cannot be done. I have won the war against myself...I love Big Brother I remember all the old articles about the various Galactic Civilizations’ AI… I’ve long since ceased giving it any thought, in favor of playing stupidly without going back to old saves when I gently caress up.
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Mar 19, 2024 01:23
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Once you shove all your undesirables onto ships to a full system you can set some ships as privateers and have then hang out there as well, the privateers, so long as they are size small or medium, will hide their nationality and will shoot civilian ships including the refugee boats. This is very helpful.
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Mar 19, 2024 01:49
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How is AoW: Planetfall if I liked 4? I enjoyed 4's asymmetry and the highly variable builds and strategies that are possible, but I find the endgame a bit tiring since the optimal strategy often involves snowballing doomstacks mopping up one-sided fights for experience.
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Mar 19, 2024 01:58
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Omi no Kami posted:How is AoW: Planetfall if I liked 4? I enjoyed 4's asymmetry and the highly variable builds and strategies that are possible, but I find the endgame a bit tiring since the optimal strategy often involves snowballing doomstacks mopping up one-sided fights for experience. I, personally, found Planetfall to be the superior game... but I also avoided playing single-player in both of them for that exact reason. Planetfall has IMO superior battles because of the unit mod system, which is where AOW shines best in the first place.
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Mar 19, 2024 02:14
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SIGSEGV posted:Once you shove all your undesirables onto ships to a full system you can set some ships as privateers and have then hang out there as well, the privateers, so long as they are size small or medium, will hide their nationality and will shoot civilian ships including the refugee boats. Wait! You can use privateers to blow up your own civilian ships? That would be very helpful for dealing with cravers. So far my other methods have been leaving them forever in the spaceport bound for nowhere, or sending them all to one planet that cranks out infinite chain-gang points (or has that population-to-dust convertor you can get from a lucky anomaly.) All very inefficient though. I love the idea of cravers, but have never played more than a quarter of a game with them because depletion makes the Number Go Up part of my brain sad. I think at one point I made an anti-craver custom civ that was basically Unfallen with the Sower's ability stacked on, and a bunch of other minor bonuses for funsies.
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Mar 19, 2024 03:13
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At least civilian ships with the pops on them are blowing up, might be my opponents blowing them up, I am like 5 hours in and not observing or thinking much, so it might be either. Cravers are great for the same reason the Zuul were great, but also, it sucks when you can't commend that with government forms for example.
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Mar 19, 2024 03:17
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Omi no Kami posted:How is AoW: Planetfall if I liked 4? I enjoyed 4's asymmetry and the highly variable builds and strategies that are possible, but I find the endgame a bit tiring since the optimal strategy often involves snowballing doomstacks mopping up one-sided fights for experience. Really good, it has even more complexity in terms of unit makeup due to the mod and race/secret tech systems Also fun setting with a ton of really unique and cool races, and galactic conquest mode if big sprawling continuous games are your thing As far as boring endgame, highly recommend cranking up difficulty and lowering map size - most of my AoW4 games end just as endgame spells and units come online, which feels just right
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Mar 19, 2024 04:04
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Haven't played 4 since it'd fry my computer, but Planetfall is great.
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Mar 19, 2024 10:30
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Megazver posted:Terraformers is currently 45% off, so I bought it and played a few games. Glad to hear it! This ate an entire month of mine last year, and I am likely to come back to it several times going forward. I never got to insanity difficulty, but I never lost, and I was cycling through the various different objectives. One thing I liked about it was how hard it was for me to predict how a game would go. The run I thought for sure would be my first failure wound up beating my previous best score by about eight turns. Hahaha.
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Mar 19, 2024 14:25
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Omi no Kami posted:How is AoW: Planetfall if I liked 4? I enjoyed 4's asymmetry and the highly variable builds and strategies that are possible, but I find the endgame a bit tiring since the optimal strategy often involves snowballing doomstacks mopping up one-sided fights for experience. I prefer Planetfall for the very particular reason that AoW heroes, magic, and light RPG mechanics break my brain and cause me to hyper focus on my band of heroes instead of the cold calculating doom stacking you need to be doing. The scifi setting just works better for my brain in this way. Same thing with ES vs EL. I can just never win at higher difficulty because I end up wanting to play the games as RPGs instead of 4x.
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Mar 19, 2024 16:13
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AOW 4 is great but yeah I prefer Planetfall too, it’s just more thematically interesting to me and it doesn’t feel aged compared to 4, so I just keep both installed. I wonder how AOW 3 plays these days, might give that a try with the Chivalrous Intentions mod installed. I’d be psyched if they made a Planetfall 2, though if Triumph’s tired of making AOW stuff after a decade of it, then I wouldn’t blame them for doing something different next game.
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Mar 19, 2024 22:21
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I think there are a number of things that Planetfall does better than AoW4, including build diversity, but it's also more obtuse and difficult to learn. Triumph are willing to get weirder with the scifi setting than they are in the fantasy games but that also makes it more difficult to immediately parse the game: you can probably guess how a Feudal Elfkin Archer works and what it does, but what does a Dvar Echo Walker do? Do the sentient plant units combine well with your lovecraftian psi-op equipment? Likewise, the mod system is cool and flexible but it also means the same troop type can have completely different properties depending on how it has been built. Prepare to read a whole lot of tooltips more closely than usual for the genre on your first few maps, basically.
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Mar 20, 2024 02:19
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Honestly one of my biggest gripes with AOW4 is that they went too far on the customization. I can be a fan of Planetfall's Amazons, I can't be a fan of Non-Descript Feudal Culture Nature Tome Nation.
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Mar 20, 2024 02:28
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orangelex44 posted:Honestly one of my biggest gripes with AOW4 is that they went too far on the customization. I can be a fan of Planetfall's Amazons, I can't be a fan of Non-Descript Feudal Culture Nature Tome Nation. yeah, 100%. I'm not surprised lots of people love the nation designer, it's a good implementation of a concept people get really excited about, but I find it way less interesting than factions explicitly designed to have strong mechanical/flavour themes. the cultures feel a bit different but much less so than full factions would (and they matter less and less as the game goes on anyway)
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Mar 20, 2024 04:32
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I never really felt like the customization was weighty or meaningful, which kinda sucked cause that was supposedly a big selling point for the game.
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Mar 20, 2024 14:38
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Telsa Cola posted:I never really felt like the customization was weighty or meaningful, which kinda sucked cause that was supposedly a big selling point for the game. wat....even tier 1 item equipped units outclass units with no equipment with stats bonus and extra capability. Once you get to tier 2 and tier 3 item the gulf is insurmountable for units with no equipment. edit: Actually I misread, I thought we were talking about Planetfall pedro0930 fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 16:22
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The new Spellforce dlc is fun, summoning demons is pretty neato.
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Mar 20, 2024 17:56
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pedro0930 posted:wat....even tier 1 item equipped units outclass units with no equipment with stats bonus and extra capability. Once you get to tier 2 and tier 3 item the gulf is insurmountable for units with no equipment. Oh I'm talking more in regards to the faction customization. I played a couple games and ultimately felt like I had basically done/seen everything which is not great.
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Mar 21, 2024 05:00
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So thanks to EA having a rare moment of clarity, I got back into SMAC (I didn't know they had a share in that game's IP), or rather SMAX. I'd like some advice regarding terraforming improvements, because it's been so long and I've forgotten the conventional wisdom. 1) This is Civ 2/3-era rules, so bases can't grow past 6 until a early-midgame tech and building. This puts food in a weird spot where you do want as much as you can to grow quickly but it'll hit a cap, and you still don't want to neglect minerals and energy. 2) You can't get more than 2 units of a resource per tile until you start unlocking certain early-midgame techs too, except if you have a food/mineral/energy bonus on the tile. These will uncap their resource. 3) SMAX rule: mines will remove 1 food from their tile. 4) Citizens eat 2 food each, so you want to make sure each one can sustain themselves for optimal growth. 5) Forests! Braindead easy but as it turns out not that optimal: 1 food, 2 minerals, and 1 energy is good but it does leave you at a food deficit until you get a mid-game tech and build a city building. Still way better than a shitass arid flat tile with nothing, of course. 6) Farms can be paired with mines and solar collectors as long as the terrain isn't rocky. 7) Rocky terrain should have mines and roads for that big mineral gain eventually, because you're still capped without the corresponding tech. With these in mind, what I've been doing is following these rules: 1) Appropriate improvement to resource bonus tile. They uncap resources, so yes, go for it because otherwise that's just a waste. 2) If a tile has 2 food base, I'm doing a mine + farm combo. Minerals are high priority resources, and getting one mineral while keeping a citizen fed is worth it. 3) If it's a 1 food base, then it's farm + solar collector. 4) No resources at all or just 1 mineral? Forest. That said, I'm a bit conflicted in regards to food bonuses in particular because they uncap food; hypothetically, a forest on a food bonus tile works out to 3 food, 2 minerals, and 1 energy, which is an extremely good spread of resources that most tiles are going to be hard-pressed to beat. Should I be doing that instead? Also feel free to talk poo poo about my conclusions, I wanna learn the good stuff, though I probably won't be doing crazy intensive micro stuff like supply crawler borehole spam or whatever.
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Mar 21, 2024 11:36
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