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Libluini posted:SEV came periliously close to this. You could: Vodyani in ES2 but I never played it as I dumped the game after 5 hours 
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Mar 29, 2024 18:37
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Microplastics posted:Gimme a homeworld 4x this was the idea behind the haegemonia games: homeworld-style combat but you controlled planets and so on. no idea if any of them were actually good though
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Mar 29, 2024 19:36
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Wouldn't really describe it as homeworld style combat, but it was a fun hybrid 4x. Had its issue, but I liked how your performance in previous campaign missions actually mattered. Had a fun campaign where I accumulated research points and only researched an absolute minimum of techs until I got spies, and then got half the tech tree at a huge discount.  e: Also I was sluggish as hell when it came to conquering planets because I felt bad about nuking billions of people from orbit until the last few hundred million give up, so I used spies to try to reduce their morale in advance as much as possible. my dad fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Mar 29, 2024 |
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Mar 29, 2024 19:44
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my dad posted:Wouldn't really describe it as homeworld style combat, but it was a fun hybrid 4x. oh I just meant in the sense that it's a 3d space combat rts, I only ever played a little of it
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Mar 29, 2024 19:49
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haegemonia had an alright soundtrack that changed depending on peace/action, and had 3-5 "stages" of each track so you could feel the tension building up way better as alien bullshit escalated, which i thought was cute for a game, i don't think any other RTS/4x ever did that and it's a huge missed opportunity imo the spaceship shield effects were also super good. also, explosions were really well done, but every ship hull had exactly 1 death animation so if you overwhelmed the enemy you could watch 10 ships blowing up beautifully in the exact same way lmao in multiplayer it was kinda broken tho, the balance was completely one-sided so it quickly devolved into "who can research quantum battleship quickest"
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Mar 29, 2024 20:00
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Truga posted:haegemonia had an alright soundtrack that changed depending on peace/action, and had 3-5 "stages" of each track so you could feel the tension building up way better as alien bullshit escalated, which i thought was cute for a game, i don't think any other RTS/4x ever did that and it's a huge missed opportunity imo Some ships had two death animations!
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Mar 29, 2024 20:06
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I loved how the planetary defenses worked. Admittedly, it's fairly similar to how MoO2 planetary defenses worked, but it was really cool watching big fuckoff orbital guns moved into position to blast some dipshit into another dimension. Also, I preferred ion weaponry despite it being kinda meh, just because of how cool it looked in a fight.
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Mar 29, 2024 20:09
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my dad posted:I loved how the planetary defenses worked. Admittedly, it's fairly similar to how MoO2 planetary defenses worked, but it was really cool watching big fuckoff orbital guns moved into position to blast some dipshit into another dimension. Oh, Haegemonia. I always used a mix of everything, until that became to cumbersome, and switched to a more sane mix of ion and proton weaponry. Also yeah, that planetary conquest by genocide system was pretty stupid. I always tried to get it over with fast, and dumped marines to speed things up.
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Mar 29, 2024 21:01
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Goddammit, someone brought up SEV. Now I have to reinstall it and play it for awhile. If you get it on steam (it's like $3USD now) there's something janky with the install where you have to manually add in some of the game folders so that it will actually run, but the folders are empty so you're not like losing anything by adding empty folders. I thought the story was the dev got bought out by a competitor who then shuttered the studio.
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Mar 30, 2024 20:13
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chainchompz posted:Goddammit, someone brought up SEV. Now I have to reinstall it and play it for awhile. Is this something new, or did I just get lucky? I never had this problem with my Steam-install. Instead the game just randomly started throwing errors and refusing to start, once in a blue moon. The repair option or sometimes just restarting Steam fixed that, though. Eventually I got the SEI-V collection on GOG and so far, the problem hasn't shown up playing on GOG. So that may be an alternative if Steam's version makes too much trouble.
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Mar 30, 2024 21:49
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Probably got lucky. Check out discussions, a bunch of folks have run into that bug.
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Mar 30, 2024 22:26
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So, regarding the 4X game Millenia: It has been brought to my attention that spice merchants national spirit is completely and utterly busted if you have enough diplo income, or enough engineering/improvement making income to get some outpost with caravansarais, you can break the game over your knee. The cost of buying merchants quickly caps out at a level where you can build 1 per turn with enough caravansarais, does not increase further. The cost of converting a merchant to a settler is fixed, and very low. The wide governments were not intended to scale with the utterly insane number of colonies you can make with this, and you'll soon get exponential growth due to spice merchants allowing diplo income to scale with the number of vassals you have.
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Apr 2, 2024 23:45
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That game really needed some time in the oven, a different recipe and more seasoned chefs.
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Apr 3, 2024 02:38
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Gaius Marius posted:That game really needed some time in the oven, a different recipe and more seasoned chefs. Seems to be par for the course for them
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Apr 3, 2024 02:43
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my dad posted:So, regarding the 4X game Millenia: It has been brought to my attention that spice merchants national spirit is completely and utterly busted if you have enough diplo income, or enough engineering/improvement making income to get some outpost with caravansarais, you can break the game over your knee. That's not actually a thing. Caravanserais are an outpost-only improvement that can only be built on deserts. They're limited to 3 per outpost (a kind of proto-city that exists to harvest resources without requiring a full city), which since they provide 2 XP each is a total of 6 diplo XP. I don't know where merchant costs cap out, but it's at least 124 XP and probably more, which would put it at 7 outposts with 3 desert tiles each to generate that much. For one thing, I don't think I've ever seen that much desert on a map, even in my current Huge Pangaea game. For another, each of those outposts costs you a bunch of engineering XP to build, so you're also cratering your engi income for absolute ages. For a third, caravanserais are actually very expensive to build on their own; 21 caravanserais costs 1050 improvement points which could otherwise be spent improving your actual cities. For a fourth, Feudal Monarchy already generates shittons of government and diplo XP, that's one of its entire points. You don't need to do something this moronic to get oceans of diplo XP income. For a fifth... having a billion diplo XP per turn doesn't actually do that much for you. The only things you can do with diplo XP by default are spawn envoys or merchants (which you do not need that many of), increasing vassal integration (which only matters if you intend to actually integrate them, and you probably don't), and gaining a point of Tolerance, which is the worst social fabric and has a 6 turn cooldown anyway. This is a total nothingburger. It's beyond that, it's actively detrimental to winning the game. Zurai fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Apr 3, 2024 |
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Apr 3, 2024 02:52
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Spice merchants do keep catching me out with their outpost garrisons. I always forget
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Apr 3, 2024 02:55
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Isn't Bribe Diplomacy? I hadn't specced into it, but managed to Bribe a few alien ships into crashing. Probably could've dealt with a whole continent-spanning invasion that way if I had.
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Apr 3, 2024 03:40
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Arcanuse posted:Isn't Bribe Diplomacy? I hadn't specced into it, but managed to Bribe a few alien ships into crashing. Probably could've dealt with a whole continent-spanning invasion that way if I had. It is, but you have to take the tech for it (admittedly a low bar since it's a Bronze Age tech) and by the time you get to Spice Merchants, its only actual use is the one you're talking about. Also I think Bribe has a 3-turn cooldown.
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Apr 3, 2024 03:51
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Gaius Marius posted:That game really needed some time in the oven, a different recipe and more seasoned chefs. For what it's worth I think it's pretty good, and it's got a fairly active thread here.
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Apr 3, 2024 04:54
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OperaMouse posted:Distant Worlds. Ask Grey Hunter. Look, I ended that war with the minimal loss of Securan Life. They really should not have gone up against a empire with two planet killers.... (Also, the game needed a pop up and pause when a planet killer comes online.)
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Apr 3, 2024 08:49
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Bremen posted:For what it's worth I think it's pretty good, and it's got a fairly active thread here. Yeah it's fun. Lots of little knobs and levers to pull, even during peacetime. And without quite as much fiddling around with tile synergies like Civ6; you have a couple of towns for each region, that can specialise to boost one type of adjacent tile, that's it. The fun is how they took EU4's mana system and ran with it. There are many types, and they all do several useful things.
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Apr 3, 2024 10:08
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Zurai posted:This is a total nothingburger. It's beyond that, it's actively detrimental to winning the game. The cost of merchants capped out at 42 for him.
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Apr 3, 2024 10:18
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Shadow Empire and the expansion are at a historical low on steam at $26.98 which is kind of tempting. Know we've got a thread for it but was curious if anyone had any thoughts on it, it seems kind of intimidating. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/31532/Shadow_Empire_Complete/
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Apr 3, 2024 10:37
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Here's the screenshots from the game he discovered this exploit on, don't have any from his ongoing breaking the game as much as possible experiment: This is without actually rushing the strat.  The map is huge continents.  Here's an example of envoying an indie city and then just chaining off of it. Incomes:      And the capping out of prices (merchants were apparently also influenced by the engineering social fabric, there's some weird poo poo going on with their scaling cap)   e: forgot to add this: 
my dad fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Apr 3, 2024 |
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Apr 3, 2024 10:46
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Theotus posted:Shadow Empire and the expansion are at a historical low on steam at $26.98 which is kind of tempting. Know we've got a thread for it but was curious if anyone had any thoughts on it, it seems kind of intimidating. Even if you don't get in the groove, know that the planet generation is something amazing to look at, if it doesn't pan out, the conditions are so varied you get an automated RPG setting generator.
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Apr 3, 2024 14:01
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my dad posted:The cost of merchants capped out at 42 for him. Then something is definitely interacting weirdly because I took that 124 from my own game. EDIT: As for the "proof" screenshots.... here's my own game with half as many vassals:       So your friend spent all that effort to get 19 vassals over me for ... 2 government XP, 2 Diplomacy XP, less than 2 Culture per turn, and more than a hundred less improvement points per turn. The only significant gain was in wealth per turn, and I'm absolutely swimming in gold in that game anyway (as I have been in every game that gets this far). Zurai fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Apr 3, 2024 |
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Apr 3, 2024 14:40
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Shadow Empire is 4 years old and has zero mods, always a bad sign
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Apr 3, 2024 14:50
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I built my first army in Shadow Empire, kept it near my capital, and then just watched it attrit to nothing over the course of a few turns for no reason that was surfaced to me in the UI. I'm fine with my games being arcane, but if I can't tell the difference between a hidden mechanic and a bug, I'm gonna have to assume the latter...
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Apr 3, 2024 15:40
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Theotus posted:Shadow Empire and the expansion are at a historical low on steam at $26.98 which is kind of tempting. Know we've got a thread for it but was curious if anyone had any thoughts on it, it seems kind of intimidating. Shadow Empire is very cool and worth getting, but it's complicated as hell and scores very high on the Grognard scale. It's a simulationist hex wargame with NATO counters as well as a Mad Max 4X on an alien planet. If that sounds interesting, go for it. The game hits the very specific target it is aiming for pretty much dead on. Just be prepared to spend a number of hours losing as you accidentally start on an ultra murderous hellworld, fail to figure out the political mechanics, get eaten by alien megafauna, accidentally starve your entire army while trying to make a logistics system that doesn't cause total economic collapse, etc. SE does have a great manual that does go through everything you need to know to succeed. There's just a lot of that, so the manual is very thick. I printed out the entire thing, which ran my printer dry.
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Apr 3, 2024 15:51
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Cugel the Clever posted:I built my first army in Shadow Empire, kept it near my capital, and then just watched it attrit to nothing over the course of a few turns for no reason that was surfaced to me in the UI. I'm fine with my games being arcane, but if I can't tell the difference between a hidden mechanic and a bug, I'm gonna have to assume the latter... There's an overlay that shows you supply range by tinting the tiles clear/green/yellow/red as supply penalties increase. It's been a while since I played SE, but I could've sworn it was the default one. It's definitely a complicated, obtuse game, but supply is very much not hidden. The game is about logistics as much as it is anything else and there are several UI modes to show various aspects of supply.
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Apr 3, 2024 16:28
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Zurai posted:There's an overlay that shows you supply range by tinting the tiles clear/green/yellow/red as supply penalties increase. It's been a while since I played SE, but I could've sworn it was the default one. It's definitely a complicated, obtuse game, but supply is very much not hidden. The game is about logistics as much as it is anything else and there are several UI modes to show various aspects of supply. 
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Apr 3, 2024 16:33
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Cugel the Clever posted:Yep—overlay indicated that they should have been in full supply. No indicator on the unit itself, either That's odd, then. I can't recall ever having units take attrition while in clear supply range or significant attrition in green range. Unfortunately, can't say more without more information, and it doesn't sound like you have any screenshots or willingness to test it further. Which I'm by no means blaming you for. Shadow Empires is definitely not easy to get into.
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Apr 3, 2024 16:41
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Maybe you had an extremely hostile environment where standard enviro suit is insufficient. Honestly I remember units in Shadow Empire being quite stable as long as supplied, unlike say...Decisive Campaign where there is wears and tears from just moving.
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Apr 3, 2024 16:51
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My play with Shadow Empires so far has been to generate cool planets and kinda think about what gameplay might evolve on them, then panic-quit on turn one. Most fun I've had with a 4x in years.
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Apr 3, 2024 16:52
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doctorfrog posted:My play with Shadow Empires so far has been to generate cool planets and kinda think about what gameplay might evolve on them, then panic-quit on turn one. Most fun I've had with a 4x in years. This maintains the truism that fun in strategy games decreases as you spend time in each playthrough. Of course quitting on turn 1 maximizes fun! It's brilliant.
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Apr 3, 2024 16:54
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doctorfrog posted:My play with Shadow Empires so far has been to generate cool planets and kinda think about what gameplay might evolve on them, then panic-quit on turn one. Most fun I've had with a 4x in years. My go to strategy for most 4x games.
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Apr 3, 2024 17:28
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Shadow Empires is the best game to fire up a new world and then play for an hour before dropping it; coming back to it weeks later not remembering what the hell I was doing and how I got there; and then starting the cycle anew.
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Apr 3, 2024 17:32
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I remember getting a dilemma in Shadow Empire where one of my leaders had angered the nation by a summary execution. One of my options was to "reverse the decision of the leader". Seemed a bit ambitious... I do kind of adore the game though. I like that there's lots of detail which still remains manageable with the political points abstraction, characters and the card system. Let's say I want a tank regiment. In a different 4X I'd pick a city, tell them to build tanks for X minerals and send it off. In Shadow Empire I still need the raw materials. Depending on the planet, maybe I'll build roads through a monster-infested jungle and dig a mine, or maybe I'll have my people salvage metal from the ruins of a huge megacity. Then I'll need a viable design for the thing. I don't have to do it myself, I just need to lay out design goals and have someone present a prototype. Maybe I'll need to wait to find a competent designer and frustrate the militarist political party by refusing their failchild candidates, souring relations with my chief of staff. After getting a workable design I'll need to field it, recruiting enough people away from the workforce to man the unit. I will also need a commander: maybe my best option is a skilled but hideously corrupt general. Maybe I'll try to get some of the funds back, or decide it's too risky and live with the extra cost. Finally I'll need to stockpile the regiment with fuel, food and ammo by ensuring my logistics network functions. Especially on poor planets finally fielding a major force feels like an achievement to me, like I've really mobilized all of my pretend nation's resources. Then a guy gets upset about being denied a cushy department head job, rebels and cuts off my shiny tanks' supply route, forcing me to scramble. I get this won't appeal to everyone, especially since all you build in the game is a war machine, but to me navigating all these complications is fun even in single player.
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Apr 3, 2024 18:39
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Cugel the Clever posted:I built my first army in Shadow Empire, kept it near my capital, and then just watched it attrit to nothing over the course of a few turns for no reason that was surfaced to me in the UI. I'm fine with my games being arcane, but if I can't tell the difference between a hidden mechanic and a bug, I'm gonna have to assume the latter... So what were they needing exactly?
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Apr 3, 2024 18:54
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Joe Chill posted:So what were they needing exactly? Hugs from the Commissar
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