|
orangelex44 posted:To anyone who's interested, Age of Wonders Planetfall just released it's final DLC along with a big patch with a new free game mode. The game is 66% off on Steam until Friday. I was considering just that. What are overall opinions on the game?
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2020 17:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:14 |
|
|
Ardryn posted:Reach For The Stars had such a cool campaign, but the final mission in it was incredibly unstable for me and kept crashing repeatedly until I was forced to shelve it. Still, a game, nevermind 4X, that had such unique races as one that was so tiny it lived on asteroids and never got anything bigger than destroyers. Another that was the devouring swarms from Stellaris but had to go All In on rushing because its tech tree was less than half the size of the rest of the races, and all of them interacted with the very simple combat system in different enough ways even though it boiled down to whether you wanted to stay at short, medium, or long range. I was pretty disappointed when I found out I couldn't buy a copy that worked on modern systems anywhere (and my own copy has long since been lost in moves over the years). The difficulty of that campaign drove me crazy. Maybe I just sucked at the poorly explained ship designer, though.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2021 20:06
|
|
|
JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I like this. I'm imagining how this might work in Civ - something like 'the player can directly control X cities and must rely on governors in the others'? Doesn't stellaris kinda do this with sectors? I recall there a limit to how many systems you can have in your core, directly controlled sector. Been a while since I've played it though. There used to be. They changed this because, surprise, it was extremely unpopular. For that matter I also recall it being a design goal of MOO3.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2021 17:19
|
|
|
Yeah, Star Ruler 2 was a great game and I always felt bad it never got any publicity.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2021 18:53
|
|
|
A Wizard of Goatse posted:the problem is AI governors always suck tremendous rear end and build queues can only slightly alleviate the tedium of micromanaging 400 mostly lovely production centers There's always how Warlock 2 did it - you could have up to x major cities, and the cap slowly increased with tech, and then the rest of your cities would be minor cities (I may be getting the names wrong, it's been awhile). Minor cities had no buildings or upkeep, it was simply based on their population. So a Farming minor city might produce 2 food per population, a Temple minor city might produce 2 mana per population, etc. If you wanted to do a 4x game in a similar style you could start with an empire having the cap for one major world where you pick buildings and stuff, while going around colonizing planets to create minor colonies, which would slowly build their population up while producing a trickle of resources, then eventually they'd unlock the ability to transform one or more minor colonies into more major ones and want to pick the best worlds they had found. After transforming they'd use the population of the world for buildings or whatever the game uses. It makes the minor worlds/planets over your cap straight up worse than full colonies, but as long as that's true for everyone equally it's not really a balance issue and even a balance factor for wide vs tall. Bremen fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Jul 5, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2021 18:56
|
|
|
Truga posted:i liked the one in star ruler 2 That one was cool, but I was really bad at it. I did a quick google for anyone who hasn't played.  (It wasn't "fill in the preset grid" either, you literally painted the shape of the ship)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2021 19:16
|
|
|
NoNotTheMindProbe posted:Conquest of Elysium 5 is coming out in a few days. They're adding 4 new planes of reality (cloud/sky realm, Atzlan, Primal, Celestial) boats and boat battles and a bunch of new battle maps including towns, forests etc and destructible fortifications. Also three new factions. I don't think I've ever seen any of the other planes on Conquest of Elysium, despite playing it quite a bit. Usually I'm slowly expanding, spending most of my time retaking the few towns and mines I find when they get conquered by wild deer, and then either the AIs get themselves killed doing who knows what or show up on my doorstep on turn 20 with an army of like two hundred units. And the few times I try to fight anything stronger than a few bandits or some wolves my entire army gets destroyed in seconds. Maybe I'm playing it wrong. Mans posted:What's the difference between Elysium and dominions? It's kind of sorta the same game with a completely different engine and gameplay loop I guess? They obviously started from the same place and went in completely different directions. Conquest of Elysium is kind of a roguelike 4x. I find them both fun, just in different ways. Bremen fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Aug 14, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2021 18:04
|
|
|
Mayveena posted:https://store.steampowered.com/app/1606340/Conquest_of_Elysium_5/ I got it (no matter how frustrated I get with CoE, I keep coming back). It's CoE 4 with 3 new races (plus some more I haven't seen before, I guess added in patches to CoE 4?) and other new content. I tried playing the new Kobold race. Kobolds work like dwarves, which is great because Dwarves had an innovative and fun mechanic - they can colonize mines which causes the mines to steadily produce low level units for free. Kobolds can also pay resources for more freespawn or slightly better units, and occasionally get offers for monstrous drakes that cost freespawn in addition to their other costs. The difference from dwarves is that while dwarves are training and equipping their workers, kobolds are getting eaten by the drakes and dragons they worship. There's three colors of kobolds, based on the gems the mines produce, and they all have their own advantages (the green ones are poison resistant and their archers get rather nice poison bows, the blue ones can move at full speed on snow and their "drake" units get nifty frost breath, etc). If you liked dwarves and wanted something similar but different, kobolds are really cool. Of course, like dwarves they live and die based on if you can actually find more mines when you start, and the cruel randomness of CoE map gen hasn't changed. I also played a game as enchanters, my favorite CoE 4 nation, and they had some new stuff or else stuff I had forgotten the old stuff. I ended up with an apprentice that could create animated tools in gold producing squares that both helped defend and provided a resource bonus, a valuable addition to the war against the deer menace (fake edit: On looking it up this was apparently added to CoE 4 in a patch). There are apparently other things added to freshen up the experience for the old nations like new monsters and of course the new plains, but I honestly didn't play enough to recognize what was new and what was old. tl;dr: If you enjoyed CoE4 and are willing to spend $25 for what amounts to an expansion pack, you'll probably enjoy CoE 5. If you weren't a fan, nothing here will really change anything. If you've never played a CoE game, then whether you will enjoy it probably comes down to how much you like the idea of a janky, fast paced fantasy 4x with a bad and suicidal AI but it often doesn't matter because you're sometimes swarmed and brought down by wild deer - but somehow it can still be fun because the game is different and unique.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2021 05:25
|
|
|
Omi no Kami posted:Star Ruler 1/2: I've heard this described as "Slipways with a lovely ship editor"- is it worth a look if I'm planning on minimizing combat/design as much as possible to focus on crunchy trading/resource networks, or should I stick to Distant Worlds 2 to satisfy that itch? Since no one else has mentioned it I'll note Star Ruler 1 and 2 are vastly different games. Star Ruler 1 is a 4x with a lot of unique mechanics, very different from anything else but with its own issues. It's kind of fun to play with the scale, since the fact that size is just a number you put into the ship designer means you can have ships the size of solar systems and eventually blow up entire suns (it's a game where everything, up to the galactic core black hole, has hitpoint values). Star Ruler 2 is more of an RTS where you're colonizing systems in order to set up resource chains, like Slipways as I understand it, and I honestly did find it a ton of fun. Including a ship designer in an RTS (though it can be paused) is honestly one of it's odder decisions, but you can save and load designs or even download from a player submitted library to avoid dealing with it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2022 15:56
|
|
|
Phigs posted:Slipways is so close to the kind of space 4X I want. Make it real time with pause like a paradox game or proper turn-based. Make it so you can redo connections. Then add battleships and soldiers as resources. Gimme some super streamlined war system where you basically just compare battleships with your opponent and then spend soldiers taking some of their planets if you win. Throw in some events and some solid diplomacy and you have yourself a game I think I'd throw way too much time into. Apologies if I'm being presumptuous, but have you played Star Ruler 2? It's not exactly what you're talking about but there's a reason it gets compared to Slipways. Descar posted:This was me until civ4, every sequel from 1 was an amazing improvement. I don't mind 1upt in theory but I do object they never got the AI to be remotely competent with it. I realize this is basically whining about the entire 4x genre but I really hate games where the AI is easy to clown on so the developers just make up for it by giving it enormous resource multipliers. Especially in a game like Civ 5-6 where the AI is particularly horrible at combat so basically the only way to win on higher difficulties is to be a warmonger. Sometimes I like to play Strategic Spreadsheet Organizer and not mess up my pretty spreadsheets by taking the AI's unoptimized stuff. Bremen fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Jul 8, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2022 17:07
|
|
|
Moonshine Rhyme posted:For Star ruler 2, is there a thread or page somewhere dedicated to it? Beyond just the GitHub, because it sounds like there was some form of forward development/modding community. We had an SA thread on Star Ruler 2 (actually we had two), though of course it's long dead. You can find it here.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2022 05:50
|
|
|
Travic posted:I don't know if this will help anyone, but I bought the 2 expansion packs for AI War 2. They made the Fallen Spire campaign waaaaay easier. I think they buffed the Spire ships too. Stuff just evaporates near my fleet like it did in AI War Classic. I'll have to scrub through patch notes tomorrow and try and find out what they did. I was just trying it a few days ago and I found the Fallen Spire campaign to be extremely difficult, for what it's worth. Not unfun, but much harder than a conventional victory.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2022 16:38
|
|
|
Autsj posted:Not sure of any guides, back in the day AoW was mostly a niche forum talk type of game. I do recall the best way to brute force it was via your heroes. Aow still had unlimited retaliations per unit (iirc) so as long as you could stack a hero with the max (was it 10?) defense they could pretty much just tank and grind out any force that wasn't fully dedicated to magic attacks. Add in some abilities like life drain, first strike, or stun attack (shock attack?) and your hero can carry you through most maps. Abilities like dominate or charm also had very few limitations, allowing you to creep together a whole map worth of troops. Some of those abilities might need to be taken at character creation though. Spells that boost melee defense were very handy especially early on when you are still building out your hero, and later on investing the mana into more melee attack. This is true, but likely not going to help much in the first 10 turns of the first map. Honestly I don't remember AoW being that hard, but IIRC on the first map the easiest way to build up is by diplomacy rather than traditional recruiting. Which is to say when you find a neutral city/group of units, you just have to move one of your units into them and they'll usually be like "this unit will join you for x gold" which is often a lot cheaper than building those units yourself would be. Also walls. Walls and an archer or two won't make a city invincible, but it'll hold off a lot of small raiding parties and let you concentrate your units in a reactive force that moves around dealing with threats.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2022 16:39
|
|
|
my dad posted:e: Also, enchantments you place on your units are permanent (though they require upkeep). While research is cool and good, you're better off spending your mana on keeping a bunch of these up early on - research is easier to do it once you've crushed your enemies, seen them driven before you, and heard the lamentations of their AIs. Oh yeah, this is a good one. With how the AoW 1 combat system works having one good unit is much better than having several average units, so if your choice of magic schools has some decent buff spells try to layer them all on a few good units.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2022 18:42
|
|
|
GreyjoyBastard posted:Sots2 could have been so goddamn good I actually really liked how SotS2 handled task groups and fleet bases, as well as system defenses, it seemed like a really fresh take on 4xs as opposed to just dumping all of your ships into a death blob. It's a pity about, you know, everything else.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2022 23:33
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:I would absolutely love to read about someone playing ffh2, what a great goddam game The Realms Beyond forums often do play by plays of multiplayer games, I recall the first FFH one being quite good. That one's pretty old, and there's a lot of more recent ones as well, but I can't vouch for which are particularly good. They have lots of interesting campaigns of most Civ games and a lot of mods, for that matter; I remember them even having some fun ones of that SMAC mod.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2022 17:36
|
|
|
Jack Trades posted:While we're on the subject on 4X games that do something unique. Sort of the Megacorps/criminal syndicates from Stellaris. They can expand normally, at a penalty compared to other empires, but can also expand into other empire's worlds. Megacorps need permission to do so and are sometimes beneficial, criminal syndicates don't need permission and are straight up parasitic.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2023 00:07
|
|
|
I find the battles in Total War games kind of annoying, to be honest. Too much to keep track of. I don't play them much, but when I do I tend to make heavy use of auto resolve. I think that just means the TW series isn't for me, though.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2023 02:29
|
|
|
Infidelicious posted:I didn't really either until I played it after reading Grey's France LP. Like I said, games move fast enough to where even if you gently caress up your designs your tech base advances and your old bad ship becomes obsolecent anyways. Does RTW cheat in the AI's favor? Because I remember my last game I ended up just ragequitting after the fifth or so time I dropped several torpedoes into an enemy ship and had it sail away with moderate damage, whereas every time my ships got hit by a single one (even plane launched) they sank within minutes. And it's not like I was skimping on the torpedo protection, either.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2023 22:21
|
|
|
HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:It never cheats, I'm pretty sure. Whole bunch of factors go into the efficacy of a torpedo, including the torp itself. Nothing short of a proper battleship tends to survive one, and that tends to come down to tonnage and damage control whether you actually do end up surviving. It's been a while since I've played RTW and I don't quite recall how the randomised tech tree works, but if you were fighting Japan then I'm 90% sure they get a natural bias towards torpedo tech and can get some pretty nasty stuff going there. I was Japan, and I was regularly hitting battleships and battlecruisers with 3-5 torpedoes and having them survive the battle, while mine would go down after one. Like, I'm normally one to scoff at unfounded "the AI cheats" allegations, but it was ridiculous levels of the enemy shrugging them off.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2023 22:37
|
|
|
Tuna-Fish posted:Were you skimping on researching torpedo techs? There are really major step changes in the destructiveness of torpedoes. IIRC each new torpedo protection tech is paired up with a torpedo warhead tech, and any torpedoes earlier than that are basically hard-countered by the new protection tech. No, I had it focused, and my ships were (as far as I was aware) well designed and this happened over several wars over several years. Honestly I walked away from the game with no doubt in my mind the game was designed to give the AI a large advantage in battle (to make up for the AI itself not being great, mind you) and now I'm not sure how to take everyone insisting that it's not.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2023 13:12
|
|
|
orangelex44 posted:4X_AI.txt I mean, in theory it's possible to have an AI curve similarly to a player, through a combination of good programming and intelligently distributed bonuses (as opposed to just letting them start with more or get other flat bonuses). Some day I hope to see it, too.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2023 02:44
|
|
|
Super Jay Mann posted:If you want to see how machine learning algorithms perform when tasked with playing a complex single-player game with consistent mechanics and movement rules but random maps and asymmetric and highly chaotic entity interactions, you should read up what happened when competing teams were tasked with writing an AI to play Nethack. To be fair, I think experienced Nethack players forget how hard a task it is to train a human being to play Nethack. It's mechanics are a pile of spaghetti with thousands of unpredictable bits added over a long dev history. I do think machine learning has potential large impacts in gaming - here's a video where someone combined voice synthesis and chatGPT to get the NPCs in skyrim to conduct a conversation in (not exactly) real time. But 4x AI is not going to be magically solved so easily. Bremen fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Apr 9, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2023 15:39
|
|
|
Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Can you expand a bit more on this? AoW has always seemed like more of a wargame with an empire attached, and I like things the other way round typically - does the new one have enough on the strategic empire/economic side for that, or should I just keep waiting for Victoria 3 to get a sale instead? This was pretty much my impression, yeah, and AoW4 feels like a definite shift in AoW's model to a more civ like experience. Well, it still has a more in depth tactical combat system, but the strategic mode is more in depth as well now. So I guess I'd say now it's closer to an even mix while previous titles were more tactical focused? As far as the empire creation itself, I'd say it seems to take definite inspiration from Stellaris, and benefits from being built from the ground up with the knowledge of what worked and what didn't. Lots of similar stuff is there; design the race, then the nation, with two civics picks to add flavor and make each empire play a bit different. But compared to Stellaris they feel a big more impactful. And then the tome system makes your empire change as it develops but not always in the same way, which is cool. Bremen fucked around with this message at 14:02 on May 3, 2023 |
|
#
¿
May 3, 2023 13:57
|
|
|
LLSix posted:Were you playing toads? Are you thinking mission 1? Because I'm playing Elves on mission 2 and also have mopey toad people neighbors.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2023 03:41
|
|
|
LLSix posted:I’m thinking of the one with Yaka as the bad guy. I agree it was pretty lame. No, I wasn't counting the tutorial, it's the one marked as Story Mission 2 where you're on the island map.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2023 03:56
|
|
|
Mayveena posted:How is the Dragon Dawn content for AoW 4? Someone just asked in the AoW4 thread, you can check out the response here. But the short of it is it adds some new variety to the game, and if you enjoyed it but put it down when it started feeling same-y you'll get a few more games out of it, but if the game didn't hook you in the first place the DLC probably won't change that.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 28, 2023 04:11
|
|
|
Ardryn posted:Yeah that was Star Ruler 2, I forget if 1 allowed that too, and you didn't need to stop at planets, stars, and if the map had one, the supermassive black hole at the center could all be destroyed with increasingly devastating results. That was more Star Ruler 1 than 2, actually, especially the planets using the same rules as ships.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2023 15:56
|
|
|
TheDeadlyShoe posted:There's a TI-specific thread, but it's kind of an issue that the game is still patching heavily through early access. While general principles mostly haven't changed, most of the information and guides available refer to the state of the game as it was on EA launch. So the specifics are kind of off or even just wrong. I'd suggest at least checking out the last few pages of the TI thread, as some other goons have picked it up recently and have been asking good questions and getting good answers. And if there's something that hasn't come up, feel free to ask; those who love Terra Invicta tend to really love Terra Invicta, so there's lots of helpful Goons in the thread (like me) happy to write up lengthy posts about their favorite strategies.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2024 18:21
|
|
|
Mayveena posted:Anyone in for Dominions 6? Love to hear some thoughts before the sale ends on Jan 24. It's got a thread here.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2024 16:26
|
|
|
I've been playing the Millennia demo and there's a lot I like; the production chains for cities make for interesting decisions, the alternate ages look cool (I haven't gotten any yet), and the slotting units together to form on the fly armies is a good solution to the problems of one unit per tile. But right now it seems like a game with great ideas but in need of better implementation; the whole game feels unpolished in various ways; the popup sticking mechanic means they're constantly getting in the way, documentation is lacking (some tile improvement popups seem to show yield but some don't), and it just feels generally janky. I'm hoping they're able to improve the interface in which case it could be a real gem of a 4x game, but it isn't there yet. Bremen fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Feb 8, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2024 07:21
|
|
|
Millennia got a release date, March 26. The more I played the demo the more I loved it, but I also admit it had issues. Hopefully they use the two months between the demo and release to fix any rough edges. It'll be a day one purchase for me either way, but it feels practically like a game designed for me.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2024 18:22
|
|
|
Comstar posted:Do the ages just punish you for being bad and make you feel bad for being a bad player? The last Civ game I played with them seemed to do that all the time. On paper, the ages are balanced because they're the same for everyone, but doing the things to trigger them seems to set you up well for the variant age, so if you can steer the world into one it will usually go well. To give an example, the variant age in the demo was the age of heroes, which was triggered by exploring three landmarks with scouts. When it started, it spawned quests over the map - in effect, it spawned a new round of goodie huts like the tribal villages everyone already cleared out, but that could only be activated by hero units. And scouts with a certain level of xp (which they got from finding landmarks) could upgrade into heroes (everyone also got a free one). So everyone could participate in the age of heroes the same way, but if you were the one who triggered it, you were probably best situated to take advantage. The other alternate age in the demo was the age of blood, which was triggered by killing at least six units from other civilizations. During the age of blood all nations were locked into wars with each other and there was no war weariness, so again, if you're the one that triggers it (by being a warmonger) you're probably going to handle it better than average. It might be strictly speaking harder than the basic age, but since the changes apply equally to everyone it doesn't really matter. They're not like golden ages and dark ages in Civ. Bremen fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Feb 23, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2024 05:00
|
|
|
My overall impression of Millennia was it's a game with a lot of cool ideas, but the demo was maybe somewhat lacking in polish. And the turn limit means we didn't get a close look at things like balance or if the AI was braindead (well, it did attack me a few times in the 60 turn demo, so it's not completely passive, but no idea how well it competes with a player). So I don't want to oversell it or anything. But if it does flop I hope other Civ style games steal some of its ideas, because they're really cool.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2024 15:17
|
|
|
Veryslightlymad posted:Did they do away with the Horse Node, the most brain-dead concept in 4x games? And the animal husbandry tech which does the opposite of what animal Husbandry is? I never found any horses. There are deer, sheep, and cow resources (and elephants if you go down one national idea), but I never saw horses. Working a pasture produces exploration xp which I've heard suggested might be to represent the availability/use of horses in animal husbandry, though. There's no animal husbandry tech, I believe you have pastures from the start, but if you mean can you only put them down on deposits of animals that spawn in the map, then yes, I think so.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2024 15:31
|
|
|
Veryslightlymad posted:Hahaha. Oof. A bit surprised that was somehow my first post in this thread. At the very least, Millennia doesn't require you to have a horse resource in your borders to train cavalry or anything. I'm not sure there are any units with direct resource requirements (maybe nukes). It's simultaneously more abstract and more specific with resources than Civ. For example, you can mine iron deposits for iron, and then process them into ingots. Those ingots can then be used for production, or you can have a forge that converts them into warfare xp, which has a lot of uses including upgrading your units to new tiers or (with enough xp) spawning in units without having to use production to build them. People explaining the game often call the various XP resources "mana pools". But I never saw anything like needing iron to build swordsman, it just gave you more options.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2024 16:26
|
|
|
Antigravitas posted:I watched a few Millennia videos and it seems interesting. I am so starved for a good 4X after the disppointment of Humankind… We've got a thread on it here, though it's mostly based on the demo and a bit of stuff put together from pre-release material and kind of outdated now that the embargo is ended. My impression boils down to the game being heavy on interesting new mechanics (and borrowing some more ideas from Call to Power and Alpha Centauri that modern 4xs seem to have forgotten about), but kind of lacking on polish and graphics.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 19:53
|
|
|
Mayveena posted:Sooo who's ponying up for Millenia? Please post your thoughts when you have a chance I already bought it after loving the demo. I'll report back tonight, but probably in the Millennia thread.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 18:29
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2024 04:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:14 |
|
|
Zurai posted:It absolutely was. In addition to the Paradox complaints, there were also lots of people bitching about there not being any multiplayer. To clarify this, the game did launch with (admittedly poor) internet multiplayer, it was just confusingly worded. It launched with two options under Multiplayer on the startup screen, one saying "Hotseat" and the other "Simultaneous Multiplayer (Coming Soon)", which convinced some people that at launch you could only do multiplayer taking turns on the same computer, even though hotseat was still internet based, it just meant you had to wait for your opponent to take their turn before you did. So some people (incorrectly) review bombed it incorrectly for not having multiplayer at all, and others negatively reviewed it (not unfairly) for having the multiplayer implementation of a late 90s game. Also, yeah, there's a lot of anger at Paradox right now and that spilled over onto Millenia for being a Paradox published (but not developed) game. Millennia isn't perfect, but I think it deserves better reviews than it got.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2024 21:18
|
|