Grognard Games Megathread - stop making me want this I do not have $95 bux

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Grognard Games Megathread - stop making me want this I do not have $95 bux

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

I've been waiting for Flashpoint Campaigns to go on mega-sale on Steam, and it's $10 right now, so snap it up if you've been waiting (unless you think it'll be even further discounted during the Steam Winter Sale).

Interestingly, I started reading the manual, and was surprised to see this snippet:

FC:RS Manual posted:

"2.8 GENDER PRONOUNS
We are happy that our game enjoys both male and female fans and players. We try to keep language in the game and manual gender neutral when possible, but sometimes use the pronoun �he� to refer to the player. This is merely to streamline the writing, and is not meant to exclude anyone."

Kind of refreshingly surprising for this to even be addressed by such a grognard game.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2014 19:44

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 04:45

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Drone posted:

So yeah, my shortcut still should work fine. It just isn't.

Drone posted:

-
"D:\Games\War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition\War in the Pacific Admiral Edition.exe" -w -f -px1440 -py1080

Your shortcut has both -f (fullscreen) and -w (windowed). Try choosing one or the other.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2014 20:37

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Drone posted:

So can we talk about Aurora here? I feel like it's more than groggy enough.

I never understood how to build a space station. So in my current game, Uranus has a fuckton of sorium that I want to exploit. I'd like to build a space station at Earth outfitted with an orbital habitat (for the 50,000 workers), massive cargo bays, and a fuckton of sorium harvesters. Then I want to tug it out to Uranus orbit and have it start hoovering up all that sorium into its cargo bays, which my cargo ships could then pick up and transfer to Earth. Or I could use it as a forward naval base for refueling.

Question is: how the gently caress do I go about doing it? I'm in the ship design menu and I select PDC instead of ship, but there are basically no useful components listed besides like.. crew quarters and maintenance bays.

PDCs are not stations. They are "Planetary Defense Centers," which are basically "engine-less ships buried in the ground."

You just want to make a ship without engines. Also, you need fuel tanks, not cargo bays, since sorium harvesters convert sorium directly into fuel. Then you'll need other ships to come collect the refined fuel. (Aurora Wiki.) Sorium harvesters do not require population to run. Orbital habitats are basically for if a body is not colonizable but you still want to have facilities on the ground. Orbital habs can hold population to operate colony-based installations. You can feel free to ask these questions in my LP as well, since I'd imagine a decent amount of Aurora players frequent it.

# ¿ May 29, 2015 17:54

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Drone posted:

I would, but I'm a couple thousand posts behind in the LP (which is fantastic btw) and I want to preserve my lastread as I work my way through it

So what if I wanted to do like a "terraforming station" in orbit of Venus? First move a shitton of terraformers there on the ground, then build and tow a spacestation with workers over to Venus and it'll get chugging?

Yes I know this is a poo poo way to terraform a planet, especially one so difficult to terraform as Venus, but in my mind it's kindof a set-it-and-forget-it option.

You'd be better off researching terraforming modules and building ships incorporating them. Each module acts like a single terraforming installation and requires no pop to run.

That said, yes, what you said will work, though remember that each terraforming installation requires 250,000 workers (5 habs worth).

# ¿ May 29, 2015 18:16

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

jBrereton posted:

Emperor of the Fading Suns is/was sort of this, back in the nineties.

EOFS is what actually prompted the space/ground discussion in the first place.

I love EOFS and would love a modernized remake or spiritual successor. It's one of the projects I'm mooting for after I finish my Aurora LP. (The other project is turning all the tools I wrote to facilitate my Aurora LP into an Aurora-like).

# ¿ Jun 1, 2015 17:33

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

When I first started the LP, I was taking screenshots of all the important screens and presenting those to the thread so they could keep tabs on the UN's status. Taking those screenshots got to be most of the time I'd spend writing, so I decided to work on something to extract the data directly from the database.

I have a .NET application that reads from the Aurora "savefile" (really just a password-protected MS Access database) and spits out the relevant information to JSON.

I had a friend write up some quick php pages to display the JSON, which means I've essentially replicated (albeit in read-only format) many portions of the Aurora UI (you can see it here). The .NET application also contains the beginnings of an object model for the important Aurora data entities.

Other than Steve and some of the oldest of the old pentarch forumites, I'm probably the foremost expert on the Aurora 5.62 database schema, and have enough code in place that I could probably bang out a direct C# port of the game within a few months if I worked on it regularly.

There's some other stuff in the solution as well: a utilities assembly containing a bunch of classes for handling things like Aurora Time and database enums, an aborted armor penetration simulator, a ground combat simulator, an intercept calculator, and about ten minutes worth of work on a WinForms UI for the game.

bgreman fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 1, 2015

# ¿ Jun 1, 2015 19:06

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Mokotow posted:

What would the best/any way be of creating a target practice barge in Aurora? I need to try out my rocket designs without waiting for another race to come and curbstomp my survey ships.

Design the ship, create another faction, SM the ship into existence, and then transfer it to the new race.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 17:57

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Lockmart Lawndart posted:

Anyone know what designer mode does in Aurora? And why Steve is so against giving out the password? He should just tell people that break their own free game with designer to piss off.

Makes civilians show up in player race dialogs (Task Groups and Individual Unit Details) and makes the NPRs show up in all the dialogs. Once you start fiddling with them, your game can go to hell very quickly.

Steve is against it because what if someone jacks up their game using it, then doesn't say they were using it when they file the bug report? How is he supposed to know that they broke it through careless meddling and not just regular gameplay if they don't self-report it?

# ¿ Jul 31, 2015 17:25

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Drone posted:

Aurora question:

I kinda want to start a new game similar to bgreman's LP where there are multiple civilizations on the same homeworld (1 human player and a couple AI), probably with 3-4 civs sharing Earth total. Something like North America, Europe, China, and Nonaligned. I would want to start them all as peaceful to each other and then see how the diplomatic situation develops. Is this feasible? How would I do it? Is it a really dumb idea? Will it make the game run like poo poo?

Newer versions of the game contain an option to prevent factions sharing a body from deteriorating relations for a set amount of time from game start. It's called the "truce timer."

Don't get your hopes up about diplomacy in the game, as there basically little you can directly do to change your relation score with other factions. I wind up having to SM things a lot to fit the narrative.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2015 18:32

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

CMANO is 50% off on Steam right now ($39.99), and CMANO + Northern Inferno is 45% off ($49.49).

# ¿ Nov 25, 2015 23:27

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Decrepus posted:

Your game isnt complex enough if time is passing faster in the game than it is in real life.

The Coldest War is now running significantly slower than real-time.

That Children of a Dead Earth game is fun as hell, though it currently plays more like a puzzle game than an operational sim. Maybe I haven't gotten far enough in. Is there ever anything like a solar system-wide sandbox campaign?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2016 07:49

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Hi, my name is bgreman and I have an addiction. I am now addicted to CMANO.

Not so much playing it as watching videos of it, which is strange, as I have never really been able to get into watching videos of others playing games.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2017 22:57

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

I'm having an issue in CMANO where the UI in the right panel behaves weird. Elements disappear or lose their text/styling when I mouse over them, especially buttons. Here's an example where I moused-over a whole bunch of stuff.

Googling suggested disabling the Steam Overlay, but I tried that and it's still happening. Any other suggestions?

# ¿ Apr 2, 2017 07:29

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

bgreman posted:

I'm having an issue in CMANO where the UI in the right panel behaves weird. Elements disappear or lose their text/styling when I mouse over them, especially buttons. Here's an example where I moused-over a whole bunch of stuff.

Googling suggested disabling the Steam Overlay, but I tried that and it's still happening. Any other suggestions?

With a little help from Baloogan (Game dev of the century), I sorted this out.

I found, through trial and error, A program installed with my ASUS Motherboard, Sonic Suite 2, was causing the issue. Like Nahimic (a similar product for MSI mobos that someone posted about causing this issue on the Matrix forums), it claims to improve sound, but I find no use for it. I found that launching it launched two other executables: SS2Svc64 and SS2Svc32 when I checked Task Manager. Killing SS2Svc32 and restarting CMANO fixed the issue for me. To avoid having to do this every time, I went to the Startup tab of Task Manager (in Win 10; in prior versions of Windows I believe this would need to be done in msconfig) and disabled SS2UILauncher.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 23:46

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Baloogan posted:

read bgregmans (sp?) aurora LP
its actually p good science fiction even without the aurora factor

Just a reminder that my LP (currently on hiatus due to life) is from two major versions before the current version, so there's a lot of things I don't cover, and one area (engines) that's changed majorly and another (crew endurance) that's entirely new.

Those automatons are still awaiting rescue ;_;

# ¿ Sep 16, 2017 07:14

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

My sole experience with Close Combat was a demo disc that came with my original Windows 95 computer back in like 1996. I played the CC1 demo mission (and all the other games that came on that disc) probably at least one thousand times. I've never gone back to try to play again, sounds like I missed out.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 17:23

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

dublish posted:

I miss that LP. Anyone know why it got dropped?

I got back into RTW recently and was reading that LP to get some tips on how to make better botes, and am now only 3 pages from the end. Sad to know it'll kind of fade away but who am I to talk about mysteriously dropped LPs?

# ¿ Jun 20, 2018 23:45

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Jimmy4400nav posted:

REMEMBER MARS

Ah just joshing you, it was fun to be able to experience that glorious monument to Goon administrative incompetence and strategic planning so over complicated the Japanese Naval Command of WW2 said "whoa, slow your roll guys". I'm happy to have been apart of it!

I consider it on hiatus. It sits there. Taunting me.

"Come, bgreman. Update! What's the Mind up to? Just run one day. What can it hurt?"

*Some time later*

"Fourteen hours pass and I've only done six hours of in-game time?!"

# ¿ Jun 21, 2018 06:51

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Popete posted:

Way to link to it you nerds.

Here you go, but requires archives.

Also, I think all the image links might be broken because SA now only allows image embeds from SSL-enabled sources and my website is anything but.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2018 23:17

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

I'm having a blast with Objects In Space, despite it crashing on me all the time. It pushes all my low-fi space trucker buttons. I do hope they add more content (more ships, more meaningful customization options, more weapon systems, etc), but I binged it for four hours last night and had a blast.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2018 01:29

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Pirate Radar posted:

Them and the Independence-class ships were sort of what I settled on.

I wonder if one tech category will simply be �aircraft complement� as people struggle to fit more planes into their hulls.

This could abstract things like folding wings and improvements in aircraft handling on the deck, etc. I like it.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2018 19:48

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Got my 8 year anniversary coupon from MatSlith and used it to finally snag WITP:AE, which was already on super-sale. Now to never play it!

# ¿ Nov 27, 2018 05:14

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Was about to post the link to the CW raw viewer (for irrelevant Aurora Classic ship designs) but it's apparently broken by the https changes in browsers over the last two years.

I did spend some time recently pulling all my LP materials together and working on getting Aurora Classic installed on my new PC...

bgreman fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jan 19, 2019

# ¿ Jan 19, 2019 00:07

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Stairmaster posted:

the extra 10m is if they enemy has ECM so I don't lose performance on the fire control....

Just put the weight into engines or cut it entirely and get closer

# ¿ Jan 19, 2019 05:11

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

# ¿ Feb 8, 2019 17:43

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 04:45

bgreman: Oct 8, 2005; ASK ME ABOUT STICKING WITH A YEARS-LONG LETS PLAY OF THE MOST COMPLICATED SPACE SIMULATION GAME INVENTED, PLAYING BOTH SIDES, AND SPENDING HOURS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND TO ENSURE INTERNET STRANGERS ENJOY THEMSELVES

Finally delved into a non-tutorial CMANO scenario last night when I tried the opening scenario of the Northern Inferno campaign.

I managed to sink all ten Soviet subs for the loss of a single Dutch ... destroyer? I let one of the subs get too close and was feeling cocky about avoiding three or four of its torpedoes, so I felt it wasn't a big threat in close. Certainly not as big a threat as the non-localized ones that were slinging ASMs from the darkness. I went to go follow another group sinking a sub and then got the pop-up notice that the Van Ness had been sunk.

70s tech is an interesting limitation to work around.

It was a fun scenario but ASW isn't really my favorite. I hope there's more surface and air stuff going forward.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2019 18:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Grognard Games Megathread - stop making me want this I do not have $95 bux