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HOI4 is kind of busted in the vanilla game if things go too ahistorical because you get poo poo like fascist India joining the Comintern or whatever. It's a cool game though and I like the focus on production and equipment, plus it's got a decent implementation of logistics since they added railways and supply hubs to the core mechanics. The Kaiserreich mod is good too and is even starting to get rid of the horseshoe theory bullshit that was built into it from day 1 now, they're slowly changing things so that communists and fascists aren't just lumped together as 'totalists' half the time. I'm currently doing a Kaiserreich game as Serbia and it's fun to go socialist and have to military conspiracies and prepare for war against Austria-Hungary in order to form Yugoslavia and get Tito inDanann posted:i picked up that rebel inc game and the main takeaways i got from it (pretty certain it was unintentionally too) was that the economist sucked rear end and that NGOs are the devil's tools and should never be trusted lol that's the one with a glowing quote on the steam page from the (now former) Afghan ambassador to the UK
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Jul 13, 2022 23:41
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Remains the best designed of the series. Humankind sucks and is boring and weirdly racist, but I hear good things about Old World even from people who have otherwise gone off Civ games
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Jul 14, 2022 00:00
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Ha, what did they do to outdo the inherent racial phrenology of the Civ genre? it's got basically the same thing with inherent racial traits and bonuses but it's even more deterministic about it because of how it limits cultures to particular eras. like you can be the Mayans but when you advance to the next era you have to stop being them and instead choose to be some Europeans or whatever (or you can stay as the Mayans and be at a disadvantage because you don't get any new units or bonuses). The selection of civs is very funny too, like the contemporary ones are stuff like 'Australians'. This approach avoids Civilization's pitfall of having Americans be an eternal civilisation who existed since the stone age (reminiscent of Boer propaganda about them being the real natives in South Africa) but instead it treats cultures completely disposably and also has this thing about them being 'obsolete' once technology moves on which is just as racist in its own way. All of the marketing for Humankind was about how it was going to be a Civ beater which fixes and modernises all these archaic mechanics and what they did was basically do Endless Legend with a historical veneer and its own racist poo poo involved too. Rubbish
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Jul 14, 2022 09:50
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Tankbuster posted:Wait how is that racist? Its a build a bear civ game and the improved endless legend combat is better than anything in Civ. it'd be fine if it was more genericised stuff like "steppe nomad culture" rather than literally "the Mongols" but once you bring actual cultures into your build-a-bear and you start thinking about what these things imply then you get into the weeds of it being weird and gross sometimes. something like Crusader Kings 3 deals with cultures a lot better but then has its own pitfalls around the eugenics poo poo where you can breed Perfect Royals and even get bonuses to inheriting good congenital traits, etc. I think in Humankind's case the racism is just unthinking rather than malicious but it's still there. having a great time being the Zulu, oh no we've become too technologically advanced, time to become the Dutch instead! maybe that's the sort of thing that deserves some examination when you're designing your game they actually realised this with the religion, as Humankind treats religion as a set of archetypes with the serial numbers filed off rather than saying 'this is literally Buddhism and Christianity', but hey
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Jul 14, 2022 13:34
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Cerebral Bore posted:yea, most every paradox game suffers from the same lifecycle problem. first they start out as a buggy mess, then they eventually become playable and fun a few patches (and dlcs) in and in the end they've tacked on so many goddamn bells and whistles that it's just a chore to play this is definitely what happened to EU4, a game I really enjoyed at one point but is terrible for it now. I think both HOI4 and CK2 (and now 3) are better for it, though. HOI4 has added a lot of systems but they mostly feel good and apt to the rest of the game, with the possible exception of espionage. EU4 started to get seriously bloated when they added Estates and they've never recovered, only got worse
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Aug 9, 2022 09:20
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Civ 4 was the last time I enjoyed Civ. you know what game absolutely sucked? Civilization IV: Colonization. not only disgustingly racist but it loving sucked to play too
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Aug 9, 2022 10:59
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:our finance minister in the 90s would spend hours a day playing Heroes of Might and Magic III on his work PC I bet this was better for the populace of the Netherlands than anything that would have happened if he'd been doing his actual job
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Aug 9, 2022 15:11
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both Pharaoh and Stronghold were amazing. I think Pharaoh probably stands up today as the best of those kinds of resource-chain citybuilders
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Aug 26, 2022 11:24
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I agree, Workers & Resources is fantastic. I think it's the best modern citybuilder (both in setting and the recency of the game itself) and it surprised me with how flexible it was for turning off the complex systems until you get your head around some of the other ones first. When you're dealing with everything it's a really complex tangle of logistics and infrastructure but if you find it hard to get your head around the heating system you can just turn it off, for instance. The scale of it makes it extremely satisfying to see your towns and industrial complexes and railways and farming villages and tourist resorts spread out across the landscape. That whole transformation of nature thing.
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Aug 26, 2022 16:42
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Orange Devil posted:Wanna see a W&R big box store with parking. the biggest individual car parks you can place in W&R have like 24 spaces or something lol. I guess you could put a shitload of them all together
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Aug 29, 2022 23:36
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Cities Skylines started out as a pretty good Sim City clone (after 2013 shat it completely) with weirdly deep car traffic simulation and then every update to it has just made it a worse game by adding a bunch of systems that don't gel together. I think that's part of what impresses me so much about W&R - not only is it using a better model to simulate an economy and society, but every system works in concert in a really satisfying way because it's all based around resources and supply.
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Aug 30, 2022 08:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:That anecdote about how your game is going to turn to poo poo once you start cranking out cars because the game models each and every car and you'll need to start putting parking spaces everywhere is fascinating to me, because we now have the kind of computational power to render these sorts of simulations at a 1-to-1 level (with enough effort), and when you do that, suddenly all of the "assume a perfect sphere in a frictionless room" bullshit of neoclassical economics goes away and all you're left with is the immortal science. yeah there's a huge impact with even a comparatively small number of cars because they need parking spaces everywhere to be of any use. In my most recent game I tried building with an eye to limited car ownership from the beginning and found that even 100 personal cars (a statistic the game tracks and surfaces pretty prominently) in a population of 15,000 made for a traffic nightmare at previously sufficient junctions. I started having to make multi-laned roads with clearly delineated areas for buses and freight transport and lots of bypasses of particularly clogged areas, it was a mess. Public transport and pedestrian walkways work so much better and with less headache lol
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Aug 30, 2022 08:45
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I remember it was helpful also to have jets with air to ground missiles on call to help blunt any such pushes too. the jets would be pretty safe since they'd fire and then evac before they got over your own lines
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Sep 1, 2022 00:02
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Danann posted:It'll probably end up anti-communist as gently caress though unless there are more secret tankie modders than it seems in the paradox community. the largest demographic of TNO mod developers was 15-20 year old anarchists so, yeah, that seems likely
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Sep 16, 2022 20:05
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Paradoxish posted:On that topic, the actual Battlefleet Gothic games are way the gently caress better than I ever expected them to be. poo poo in competitive multiplayer, but fun as hell to fly around gigantic ships and watch them pound the poo poo out of each other. Okay but shallow campaigns, too. Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 is a great time. maximalist space battle tactical game. amazing sound design too, love hearing the groaning creaks as you ram a cathedral ship into a giant space bug
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Sep 17, 2022 07:31
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Frosted Flake posted:The XCOM Long War team’s upcoming game is getting great press XCOM's best modders have made a mind-boggling grand strategy game Leana Hafer tends to have at least some idea of what she's talking about so this is promising. I gave the demo a try a few months ago and it was impressive and intriguing although extremely lib-brained in its geopolitics (I've posted about it before, possibly even in this thread, I can't be bothered to check). I'm looking forward to giving it a shot.
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Sep 23, 2022 13:41
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StashAugustine posted:This is getting a bit off topic but Hitman had shockingly good writing for what it was the overall plot was rubbish but the in-mission writing was often great. the Ark Society level with the eyes wide shut billionaire party especially
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Sep 25, 2022 01:09
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Ignorant Hick posted:Been chugging along as Mexico trying to build up my market, US went to war with the UK very early over something to do with Argentina so they've left me alone all game so far. If I'm wanting to flip communist should I keep things as lovely as I can or is the game going to let me pass a bunch of reforms and hit the communism button? as long as you get communist-leaning interest groups in government you can reform into it although you might face violent reactionary backlash if the other interest groups aren't appeased or marginalised. In my case as Sweden into Scandinavia I didn't have much trouble switching from monarchy to a council republic, but becoming a command economy angered the industrialists so much that I only narrowly avoided a revolt.
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Oct 26, 2022 23:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:the way I'm reading the discussion over the last page or so is that the way you proactively take command of the economy is that you look at what your people [want to] consume, and then you start building those up, even if you have to start from something as basic as grain farms to replace subsistence farming Sort of but you can also import things and that's often a straightforward profit too, from tariffs and just from making goods more available to fuel your industry or whatever.
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Oct 28, 2022 15:55
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I actually think the abstracted war is a good idea and while not implemented perfectly, it suits the game a lot more than micromanagement of troops. you're still organising how they're outfitted and equipped and where to send them and so on, there's enough control to be engaging, but not so much that it becomes impossible to keep track of the rest of the game
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Oct 28, 2022 18:33
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Maximo Roboto posted:What feels more like a complete game at this point, Vicky 3 or Terra Invicta? victoria 3 by far, there's no contest
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Oct 29, 2022 00:19
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I think the game seriously overmodels the number of convoys needed for functional trade. As Scandinavia I had some 60,000 convoys in operation by 1900 and I hadn't even come close to maxing out my ports. Even assuming every one of those convoys is a single merchant ship, I think that's more merchant ships than existed in the world at that time, just for one country. It's hard to get a bearing on this exactly but for reference I believe the British merchant navy in the 1930s was around 4500 ships and that was the largest in the world
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Oct 29, 2022 00:36
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:It's just an abstract number. It has to theoretically compensate for the difference between 200 tonnage clippers and 10,000 tonnage steamers, as well as facility throughput Yeah I guess that's fair. Needing to account for varying tonnages etc hadn't actually crossed my mind, and now I feel stupid lol
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Oct 29, 2022 01:06
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I stand by it, Terra Invicta has a lot of separate systems that don't really cohere very well and it's terribly paced even though it's got great ideas and ambition and compelling mechanics. I think a lot of it is going to change significantly over the course of early access, while Victoria 3 already largely does what you want it to as a game even though it has issues like the AI not handling the lategame economy well at all also Terra Invicta's UI is much worse about hiding key information from the player John Charity Spring has issued a correction as of 10:23 on Oct 30, 2022 |
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Oct 30, 2022 10:20
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Mans posted:Do you need pharmaceuticals to reach anarchism or am I seeing it wrong? It's not a prerequisite, the line goes from Egalitarianism to Anarchism behind Quinine not via it.
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Oct 30, 2022 12:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:so I started playing Galactic Civilizations 4 tonight, and one of the early techs you can research is a Space Elevator, but the very first one you build as the humans is special, so it's named, and it's named "Elon's Lift" lol makes sense, GalCiv was always trash by libertarian idiots reminds me of how the Surviving Mars game had lots of Musk references in it too
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Nov 13, 2022 14:38
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Maximo Roboto posted:Stellaris isn't turn-based though? it is, the turns just auto-advance unless you pause
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Nov 17, 2022 17:56
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Jazerus posted:it is eternally funny that a ron paul guy produced the core economic system of a game that makes capitalism look like dumb poo poo for assholes He gave a game dev conference talk years later about how he designed the economic system around marxist economics because it made the most sense for a game even though he personally didn't believe in it It's not a good simulation of marxist economics either but you can kind of see what they were going for lol
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Nov 22, 2022 06:57
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lobster shirt posted:there is a peninsular campaign dlc for napoleon total war the sea combat in those games is simultaneously janky and the best real-time portrayal I've seen in a game lol. it becomes uncontrollable once you have more than like 4 ships to babysit though
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Jan 10, 2023 21:06
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Steam is having a big slate of demos again so I tried that Great War: Western Front game and my impressions from the tutorial were... mixed. I like a lot of what it's doing mechanically in the battles although the campaign layer does seem fiddly. Some of that is how restrictive it is in the tutorial where it lets you do one action at a time but some of it is just UI design. for instance: when you examine an enemy army before a battle it shows you the unit cards if you have intel in the province, but doesn't let you hover over to see what the name of the unit is. but they have distinct art on the cards so you could identify them once you're more familiar with the game, so it's not a deliberate 'fog of war' thing, just an oversight on the tooltip. It's also very easy to misclick and send units on moves that you didn't want. it's got an admirable commitment to representing different aspects of WW1 combat like... MGs, mortars, different uses for aircraft, the observation balloons, light and heavy artillery, siege artillery, undermining before battle. And I like the way each subsequent battle in an area has an increasingly more hosed-up landscape and more extensive trench network going on. It's quite good at some aspects of the battles, visually, but it's kind of strange for it to be so bloodless, honestly. I don't want gore fountains or Realistic Dismemberment but you do just see the little figures flop over and then their corpses disappear after some time, and when it's trench fighting you can't make out anything basically. You just watch a number go down on the unit strength bar, and it comes across kind of euphemistic. I do appreciate that they include Belgian, Indian, ANZAC, and Canadian troops as well as the French, British and Americans, but it's kind of goofy that they went with a 'national bonus' for each. French infantry is cheaper to deploy to represent home field advantage. fair enough. Brits... I think they fire faster or something, mad minute myth poo poo. Americans have an 'affinity for tanks' so they get a morale bonus if tanks are nearby lol. My impression is that these bonuses probably don't mean much at the scale you're fighting at but maybe I'm wrong. Anyway. The tutorial campaign lets you keep playing after you complete the actual tutorial so I was going to do that, but then the game got stuck in an infinite loading loop on the very next battle and I had to end the task. So that was the end of that. It does seem like they've put a lot of thought into the mechanics of how to make a WW1 RTS but... I'm not sure what they've ended up with is actually good.
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Feb 8, 2023 19:38
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Slavvy posted:Thanks for this post, been interested in this game. yeah one of the main mechanical decisions they've made is incentivising attacking the same area over and over even if some of those attacks are likely stalemates or losses because you still want to keep the pressure up. which is a clever way to get the player to make 'bad choices' in attacks like a WW1 general might. but also it sounds really repetitive and boring and miserable to actually play, even if you're autoresolving a lot of them
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Feb 8, 2023 20:18
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:What do the Belgians get I didn't get a chance to see if they get a specific bonus but it did say that Belgian troops can fight alongside both French and British troops without getting a 'disunity' morale penalty which otherwise represents how the allies are a bunch of different armies (even though you play as some supreme allied commander controlling all involved nations)
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Feb 8, 2023 20:21
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I was using 'bad choices' as a paraphrase for the idea because I know all that already lol the game is also not really able to represent constant low-level activity at the front and instead makes it into a bunch of offensives every month, to give an idea of what the devs are aiming for. The game also doesn't do the manouevre warfare at the beginning of 1914 and there's not even a possibility of breaking the line and exploiting with the cavalry as both sides wanted to do the entire war. it's not an accurate representation but it might be the closest you can get with an RTS, it's just that maybe an RTS can't actually represent this properly
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Feb 8, 2023 20:41
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Tekopo posted:should have included circular runs for added spiciness I think I remember this actually being possible in SH4 but I might be just making it up with years of distance.
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Feb 9, 2023 15:22
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my dad posted:Since I'm already posting about this - remember the guy who was accused of cheating, but it remained kind of ambiguous since he backed out of the game afterwards? He was absolutely, 100% cheating. To people not in the know - the guy was reading not only the other thread but also the offsite 'hq' we used to work with the map and discuss things in a more chat-like manner than the more official and rigid "Here's your orders, follow them" kept in the thread for ease of coordinating. The German commander noticed that one of his guys was acting really suspicious with sudden 'flashes of insight' that he confirmed (after the game when he was allowed to read the other side's stuff) were conveniently timed with our own conversations, brought his worries up with Trin, Tin talked to me, and I set up a trap to get the guy to tell on himself during round 2 (the vote for the new commander, with a few little tricks included) - he bought it hook, line, and sinker, and I will remain smug about catching him in the act like that for the rest of my days.
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Feb 9, 2023 23:05
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my dad posted:Trivia: Serbia ended up with a lot of Prussian influence on its military. The way this happened was unusual. Prussia (and Germany) was incredibly lovely to its minorities, and Sorbs in particular suffered pretty bad, and were often told to gently caress off to Serbia. (despite the similarity of names, we were about as distant as Slavic languages and cultures can possibly get, but this didn't end up mattering at all) Catch: Sorbs had a very high degree of participation in the Prussian military, and over time Germany effectively donated a shitload of Franko-Prussian war veterans, professionals with ties to European arms industries, and officiers trained in the Prussian way of war to Serbia. When Sorbs started arriving to Serbia, and the Serbian government stopped pinching itself to check if this is real, Serbia rolled out the red carpet and went full 'Welcome Slavic brothers! Our homes are your homes, our lands our your lands!' - One of the commanders of the Serbian military in WW1 was general Paulus Sturm (Pavle Jurišić), who was a Sorbian dude who was an old war buddy of German general Mackensen. that's pretty fascinating and also 'Paulus Sturm' is in the same category as 'Stalin' in terms of being like a teenager's forum username a century ahead of time
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Feb 10, 2023 12:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:Nekhen done. On to Men-Nefer!
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Feb 17, 2023 13:21
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I'm not comparing them directly because I haven't played the original since... probably 2002 or something. But the remake is really good overall, it's got some good UI decisions and others that are less successful and the changes to military are mixed at best but I'm having a blast with it. It's still the same game at base, with some better updates and some bits that were misguided and other bits that they should have changed and didn't. But on the whole? Still one of the best classic citybuilders.
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Feb 22, 2023 17:04
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The military changes, to be clear, are that battles now resolve in a special screen using your trained troops/built ships against the invaders, rather than actually taking place on map. You can no longer order your military around on the map, which was always a pretty lovely part of the game so whatever, but this does mean you can't deal with predators with the military anymore - your best option is constables - and also it makes walls and towers pretty useless. You can still build them and they might affect troop strength in battles somehow but it's very unclear, and there's no point in walling your cities to defend buildings because enemy troops never enter the map, if you lose then stuff is wrecked at random. Actually maybe defensive structures are prioritised for being destroyed but that's just supposition. Anyway it's not great but no-one played Pharaoh for the military stuff anyway so it is a minor complaint.
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Feb 22, 2023 22:08
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CoH2 really was inexcusable nazi apologia and I'm still not over that, but also I thought it was pretty lacking in terms of gameplay too. I was expecting to hate 3 but I gave the multiplayer tech test a go and actually enjoyed it a lot because it felt far more like CoH1 again, so I picked it up on release. I've only played the Italy campaign a little so far and it's made me realise how good Creative Assembly is at these turn-based campaign layers because it is pretty loving clunky here by comparison (and not helped by some intense and limiting tutorialisation). However I do like the look of some of the mechanics there and the first proper scripted mission, the invasion of Salerno, was a lot of fun. The 'story' is very mediocre at best but at least it's not nazi apologia here (and Italian resistance fighters are already playing a decently sized role, though I doubt it'll go into how communist-dominated they were). I'll play more and report back. The African campaign being from the Afrika Korps perspective makes me raise an eyebrow and expect the worst but I read that at least its narrative is more about Libyans dealing with the occupation and stuff like that, which sounds better than the Opposing Fronts thing of totally apolitical SS officer brothers just wanting to do a good job of being soldiers I'm having zero performance issues or bugs so far but one of my friends also bought it and he has a much better PC than me but is having constant freezes in singleplayer, and he got an incredible bug in the first skirmish he tried where his own faction was being AI controlled (training units, issuing orders) and his own clicks were being ignored lol. like he'd found some secret Demo Mode in the game
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Feb 24, 2023 09:11
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