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Mar 11, 2024 01:55
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"How many CB strikes have you undergone?" "40....simulated"
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Mar 11, 2024 02:32
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The Chad Jihad posted:One of my bros was talking about this during a match and thats what prompted the uzi example/anecdote lol lol hell yeah I love when a discussion comes full circle
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Mar 11, 2024 02:44
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Aliens is a Vietnam war parody with the dumb officer who has no experience leading a platoon of ten marines. The most fictional thing about the movie is that he didn't get fragged by his own subordinates.
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Mar 11, 2024 03:32
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Lostconfused posted:Aliens is a Vietnam war parody with the dumb officer who has no experience leading a platoon of ten marines. Well he kinda was
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Mar 11, 2024 03:42
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:The Free League Aliens RPG, like all of their licensed stuff, is amazing, though it just makes me wonder how the Union of Progressive Peoples hasn’t decisively won since the Three World Empire and United Americas are dysfunctional in the extreme. In the William Gibson Alien 3 script this all comes from the UPP messing around with Xenos is presented just like many other weapons ideas of the Cold War, the Capitalists are looking at this thing to destroy us, might as well see whats it about. I'd have to re-read the Colonial Marines handbook but part of their doctiine is for a platoon to hold dozens of kilomters of a front on their own.
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Mar 11, 2024 04:01
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Lostconfused posted:Aliens is a Vietnam war parody with the dumb officer who has no experience leading a platoon of ten marines. I mean strictly technically he did
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Mar 11, 2024 04:05
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While on the subject of Aliens, the latest Aliens video game, Dark Descent, was...surprisingly good? There's not an original bone in the game's body but it takes a bunch of elements from existing tactics games and meshes them together in a fairly interesting way. It's mostly X-COM, there's a lot of obvious X-COM influence in there, but it also draws a lot of inspiration from Darkest Dungeon, of all things, with your squad gradually building up more and more stress the longer they're in scary situations, and potentially ending up with long-lasting debilities if their stress is too high for too long, but if you managed to lock down a secure room you can reduce stress mid-mission by having the squad take a breather. There's also some elements of Commandos or other stealth-based tactics games, with managing how alert the xenos are to your presence being a major part of the game. It is gleefully sadistic at times, and is quite happy to occasionally ambush you with more facehuggers than there are people in your squad, which is an instant squad wipe if you don't react quickly. The game became a lot easier once I realized that enemies killed by sentry guns or proximity mines don't alert the hive if they didn't see any living humans before dying.
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Mar 11, 2024 04:24
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The absolute key to that game is getting suppressed snipers asap so you can stealth your way through as much as possible Also the endgame was garbage Also I loving love that game and I desperately just want more missions or a dlc or something, I found the overall structure and gameplay loop and the way it all reinforced the absolutely perfect aliens vibe incredibly compelling
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Mar 11, 2024 05:19
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Maybe it’s just me, but all Alien media since the first one seems to go too hard on too many aliens. There’s a tendency to have the danger come from a massive infestation right out of the gate, rather than one or two, which were obviously dangerous enough to the crew of the Nostromo. I’d add that Alien media since Prometheus can’t resist having Engineer poo poo everywhere. You can’t throw a stone without hitting engineer ruins, apparently. These are both problems Star Wars now has with lighsabers and Trek with cloaking.
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Mar 11, 2024 05:26
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Alien is about pregnancy.
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Mar 11, 2024 11:56
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Orange Devil posted:Alien is about pregnancy. Gonna take this opportunity to pitch Octavia Butler's short story Bloodchild which is basically this taken to its conclusion
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Mar 11, 2024 13:25
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Aliens Dark Descent is like 90% really good and does some genuinely interesting things with squad control rather than just being XCOM. Tindalos' previous game was Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 and that also ruled
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Mar 11, 2024 14:00
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Dark Descent just nailed the atmosphere more than anything. I do think the first mission catches the cat-and-mouse type of gameplay better than anything that comes after though. As you level up that gripping tension of the start goes away as you get more and more tools to deal with poo poo going sideways.
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Mar 11, 2024 14:06
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Orange Devil posted:Dark Descent just nailed the atmosphere more than anything. I do think the first mission catches the cat-and-mouse type of gameplay better than anything that comes after though. As you level up that gripping tension of the start goes away as you get more and more tools to deal with poo poo going sideways. Different genre, but Aliens: Fireteam Elite has the same problem.
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Mar 11, 2024 14:08
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Getting increasing amounts of control over the situation is part of the genre though, and it builds up further on horror's property that an understood horror is no longer a horror, just a threat.
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Mar 11, 2024 14:47
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Yeah true, but at least for me the result was the first mission was the most fun and fun then steadily decreased and eventually things became more tedious.
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Mar 11, 2024 15:44
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Maybe I'm just poo poo at games but for me that didn't feel like the case, I found the game got overwhelmingly tense as it went on because the swarms got bigger and the hero Aliens turned up more, the really cramped mission where you have to board the spaceship was excruciating
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Mar 11, 2024 18:26
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Well, that comes back to Alien media unable to decide if it's Alien, Aliens or Prometheus, all of which are incredibly different. Alien Isolation is very clearly informed by the former, but most of the games seem to draw from Aliens, which obviously changed how dangerous each individual alien is.
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Mar 11, 2024 18:38
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Could be worse. Could be Rambo.
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Mar 11, 2024 19:19
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:Well, that comes back to Alien media unable to decide if it's Alien, Aliens or Prometheus, all of which are incredibly different. Alien Isolation is very clearly informed by the former, but most of the games seem to draw from Aliens, which obviously changed how dangerous each individual alien is. also avp
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Mar 11, 2024 19:21
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one of my favorite parts of Dark Descent was actually right at the beginning, where you're alone on the space station and there's aliens and sinister androids and it is very clearly paying homage to Alien: Isolation, but then a bunch of Marines show up and effortlessly gun the android down almost instantly and control switches to the people you'll actually be playing as it was a very efficient shorthand way of establishing that this was specifically an Aliens game and not an Alien game
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Mar 11, 2024 20:03
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Mister Bates posted:one of my favorite parts of Dark Descent was actually right at the beginning, where you're alone on the space station and there's aliens and sinister androids and it is very clearly paying homage to Alien: Isolation, but then a bunch of Marines show up and effortlessly gun the android down almost instantly and control switches to the people you'll actually be playing as That's a very good point, actually.
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Mar 11, 2024 20:05
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Steel Division is really cool but I wish it didn't take so much effort to play. Sometimes you just wanna sit back and chill while slaughtering nazis instead of managing a battalion down to individual squads in real time
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Mar 15, 2024 02:41
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StashAugustine posted:Steel Division is really cool but I wish it didn't take so much effort to play. Sometimes you just wanna sit back and chill while slaughtering nazis instead of managing a battalion down to individual squads in real time yeah Steel Division 1 was awesome (never got a chance to play 2) but every multiplayer game if the other team were decent was just my brain running full tilt to keep all the plates spinning
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Mar 15, 2024 03:13
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn_7xA8GAJA Slitherine dropped a preview of one of its in-development projects - "Scramble: Battle of Britain". The actual gameplay starts at 0:38 This has the potential to be a really good game: Achtung Spitfire! from the 90s was always held back by its 2D roots, where you needed full-3D modeling to really capture the full vibrance of aerial combat, but height differences could only be represented as +1/-1 markers on the aircraft, and the sprites were also unchanging so you couldn't "see" at a glance if any given fighting was banking or pulling up, and so on but this, this is something else. I think it was Bruce Geryk that said that flight simulators are inherently flawed representations of aerial combat because you can no more do real air-to-air tactics while controlling a single plane than you could do squad tactics from an FPS, and this could take us closer how things should be.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:50
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it took most of yesterday and today, and a few mods, but I finally grasped enough of Victoria 3 to make it click and hooo boy that feeling when you successfully industrialize a nation is such a rush. I'm about 35 years into a Brazil campaign and I'm already a top 8 power. it's such a powerful condemnation of Laissez Faire because you'd never be able to do it if you can't direct the state to take the first few steps out of raw resource extraction. Someone's going to have to bite the bullet and build a steel mill and the capitalists are never going to do it themselves.
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Mar 18, 2024 15:17
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That's the thing about Victoria 3, as a player you don't have any incentives to do things other than industrial development. So there is no internal conflict or tension between developing productive forces and hoarding capital for personal vanity and enrichment.
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Mar 18, 2024 15:21
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the very first thing I did in Victoria 3 was a Haiti game in which I turned it into a Great Power and it wasn't even particularly difficult, just slow by the 1900s Haitian standards of living were the highest in the world by a giant margin and I was drawing in so many immigrants that I was deliberately deactivating labor-saving technologies purely to give people something to do the trick was, counter-intuitively, sucking up to the French enough that I was able to ally with them, then unilaterally stopping the debt payments, which wasn't enough of a relations hit to get them to go to war with me because our relations were otherwise good. equally counter-intuitively, the thing that really supercharged my economy was getting into a customs union with France, because being part of the French market allowed me easy access to both all the raw materials and all the demand of the French metropole. I could then throw all of my state wealth into building factories to supply the French market with manufactured goods it was short on, effectively running the colonial money hose in reverse, building up the productive forces of the periphery using the wealth of the metropole. by the end of the game Haiti was a global manufacturing powerhouse rivaling any of the old European great powers. now in real life at the time France would have of course just invaded anyway, especially once they realized what was happening, but in-game they happily just let me pull a China and outsourced all of their industry to me until they were hopelessly dependent on Haitian goods for the survival of their economy immigration got very very funny in that game - not only did I siphon off so many immigrants from Europe that they were a significant portion of the entire country's population by 1936, but, more notably, the entire Afro-American population, literally every single black person in the US, emigrated, with the overwhelming majority of them going to Haiti. I eventually started expanding my territory because I was pulling so many immigrants that I was running out of room in which to put them, and unemployment was becoming an issue. I built up a disproportionately large military to dump said immigrants into, stole Cuba from Spain and integrated it, conquered the Boer republics in South Africa and integrated those, and industrialized all of that along with Hispaniola itself, and still had substantial unemployment by the end of the game because there were just so many people clamoring to get into the Haitian utopia Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 16:01 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 15:54
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Yeah I'm interested in whether the new mechanic for foreign investment will make it more dangerous to be a small power in a customs union if the metropole can just buy up your factories. It should at least make actual colonization make more sense, no longer do rubber plantations in the Congo have to be owned by people living in the Congo
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Mar 18, 2024 15:57
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It's counter intuitive because the computer sucks so hard at the game that none of the countries behave close to reality. A colonial master would be able to industrialize at a rate fast enough that the relationship would never naturally reverse on its own. There's also not enough cost associated with the distance the goods produced need to travel, I thought they tried to fix that, but it wasn't enough I guess.
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Mar 18, 2024 15:59
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Lostconfused posted:It's counter intuitive because the computer sucks so hard at the game that none of the countries behave close to reality. A colonial master would be able to industrialize at a rate fast enough that the relationship would never naturally reverse on its own. Yeah I think the biggest issue with the game is just that the AI is so incompetent that you can out compete it by just not being braindead. It also encourages autarky just because you can't actually rely on other people to produce the resources you need. Its also something that you can't put on a features list for an expansion, so idk if it'll ever really get working. They did kinda fix land trade being bizarrely better than sea trade, but I think travel costs are just something that has to be abstracted pretty hard
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Mar 18, 2024 16:03
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Mister Bates posted:equally counter-intuitively, the thing that really supercharged my economy was getting into a customs union with France, because being part of the French market allowed me easy access to both all the raw materials and all the demand of the French metropole. I could then throw all of my state wealth into building factories to supply the French market with manufactured goods it was short on, effectively running the colonial money hose in reverse, building up the productive forces of the periphery using the wealth of the metropole. by the end of the game Haiti was a global manufacturing powerhouse rivaling any of the old European great powers. Haitian Deng ftw
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Mar 18, 2024 16:07
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it was very funny that I was able to successfully do Dengism in the 1880s, but the fact that it works and was so easy is not exactly a point in the game's favor, lol, it's so poor at simulating the logic of imperialism that subordinating myself to a European power as a subject was actually a net benefit to me and a cost to them it's like it treats the 'benevolent civilizing mission' rhetoric of the 19th century as literally true, with wealth flowing outwards from the metropole to enrich the colonies and the colonies giving back little in return even the United States, who should have viewed me as a natural competitor, gave me very little trouble, and indeed actually indirectly benefited me by acting as a source of immigrants - again, literally the entire black population of the United States had migrated by the end of the game, and I also had small but definitely-present populations of Dixie immigrants
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Mar 18, 2024 16:39
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That's why you fail the reconstruction after the civil war.
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Mar 18, 2024 17:21
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Mister Bates posted:it was very funny that I was able to successfully do Dengism in the 1880s, but the fact that it works and was so easy is not exactly a point in the game's favor, lol, it's so poor at simulating the logic of imperialism that subordinating myself to a European power as a subject was actually a net benefit to me and a cost to them Lincoln's original plan was to deport all the black people (they were not citizens lmao) to Corn Island and Liberia
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Mar 18, 2024 17:24
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It's also kind of funny that that run is still possible because I think that used to be a fun gimmick run I heard about in Victoria 2. Be independent Hawaii and benefit from their relatively high literacy rate and then start colonization on a bunch of Asian territories, with the goal being not to actually colonize them but to let all the random pops immigrate into utopian Hawaii, giving you a massive population that you could use to industrialize.
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Mar 18, 2024 23:15
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Play India and watch the bog island people living large on the back of your hard work. Until everyone gets mad enough to start a revolution.
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Mar 18, 2024 23:26
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I actually tried the Haitian Utopia run a couple of times, and the second time I tried it, the US never abolished slavery and I ended up backing, and then fighting alongside, an abolitionist New Africa revolt in the early 1900s, which won unfortunately the revolt inherited all US policies, including slavery, so all the slaves were still slaves, and all the free black people in the US had once again immigrated to Haiti. in addition it inherited the USA's racial supremacist policies, but had a different primary culture, so none of the white people in the new country could vote, and there were no free black people, so even though it was technically a democracy there wasn't anyone in the new country who actually had the legal right to vote, and it collapsed into a reactionary uprising almost immediately it's been quite a while since I've played it and maybe it's better now, but in general it seemed hilariously easy to completely drain a country of any oppressed minority group by providing them a slightly better place to immigrate to
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Mar 19, 2024 00:05
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Oh so Liberia?
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Mar 19, 2024 02:37
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