Video Games

[Longes]

@everyone ubisoft is giving away the racing game "the crew" for free on uplay right now.

But... I'd have to install uplay...

[Stahlseele]

yes, that is the problem.

[RelentlessImp]

I definitely see what you mean, I didn't see the point of having me do two sets of five missions that took 12 hours, also research for artifact power and class hall upgrades seem glacially slow to me. I also am somewhat annoyed that my level 110 engineering goggle schematics are locked behind a heroic dungeon that I have to grind for rep (and this faction thus far seems stingy with the rep...) Turns out that the rep grind is fairly quick once you get far enough in the story for the zone, but it's a MYTHIC only dungeon instead of a heroic dungeon. Not to mention that I already have something that's much higher level and easier to upgrade (stupid obliteratum being locked behind 4 items that go on the AH for over 20k from three separate crafting skills, none of which I have access to). Also I want to punch Nomi in the dick for burning so much damn food.

The only good thing about this expansion is I've broken 100k gold without purchasing gold for the very first time. the Starlight Rose market is so easy to control.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'm having less success making money due to me being an engineer, but that's not exactly a new concept. I don't recall that it ever was a decent moneymaker.

[RelentlessImp]

Okay, so I lied, there's a second good thing about Legion: it made me realize how much fun I wasn't having with WoW. So I'm back on the FFXIV wagon, 4 days before the new content patch hits while I scramble to get the item level to finish off the current content.

They recently added the Palace of the Dead, which is a very interesting idea for an MMO. Basically, you start in it at level 1, either with a four-stack or getting a matched party, and level REALLY rapidly - going from 1-60 in about 3 hours. The Palace is a series of 5 sets of 10 floors. Your current gear doesn't matter at all, because you're equipped with a generic "Aetherpool Arm" and "Aetherpool Armor" that you can power up by finding silver coffers.

The ultimate endgame to Palace of the Dead is getting the Aetherpool Arm and Aetherpool Armor both to +30, so that you can get an item level 235 (currently only 10 item levels lower than the best gear) weapon that you can use out in the real game world. And, I mean, it's fun! The floors are randomized every time you hit them, and you have to kill X number of enemies to unlock the next floor, repeat until you hit the boss level every 10 levels.

The system uses save files, which are a really silly thing to be in a modern MMO, and you get two of them. Your + to your Arm and Armor are shared across your save files (even if you delete one to reset it - which you have to do after floor 50 anyways), so really it's RNG protection, running the sets twice each to reach the cap for that level of floors. Or taking one to floor 50 and letting it sit as a complete while you run the others on the other save file trying to hit +30/+30. It's a little monotonous after a while, sure, but it certainly breaks up the dungeon grinds.

And the best part is you can do this from level 17, and you get a significant chunk of actual experience every time you finish 10 floors, so it's good for leveling classes - shockingly good, if you get a four-stack and spam 1-10 over and over and over, takes about 5-10 minutes depending on the group for each set.

It also doesn't follow the four-person light party structure (tank, heal, 2 dps). I just got dumped in a group with three tanks - all Dark Knights. My healy butt is happy to have so much HP to heal. Mind you, the later floors (31-40 and 41-50) are a bit troublesome with, say, no healer. It's a little annoying, actually.

The new Primals are fun, too. Sephirot was a lot of fun, and he has a great theme here - stay for part 2, because it turns into a NIN/Tool-like song.

The new wing of Alexander that I missed out on has a good song too. Though I have to question the appropriateness. It's a combination of the two songs from the previous wings: Floors 1-3 and Floor 4. According to Square-Enix, metal+EDM = upbeat jazzy magic.

All in all, I have a lot more fun in FFXIV. I'm just missing my friends on WoW, but the game instills too much hate for me to keep playing at the moment.

[OgreBattle]

In tactics ogre I am one dragon horde fight away from unlocked my the palace of the dead but those goddamn dragons have really good defenses

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Did wing 1 of the Emerald Dream raid in Raid finder. Missed out on the first boss but I'm not going to complain too much. I managed to not die, which is cool. And I got yelled at because I didn't immediately give up a cloak that dropped from the boss (Explanation: The default loot for Legion dungeons and raids is Personal, which means each boss drops x pieces of loot, and the game assigns those to random people in the raid who could use it). It wasn't an ilvl upgrade but the cloak I had boosted shitty stats so I put the cloak on. It seems I was supposed to give that to someone it could benefit. Yeah, no. This isn't my guild and I don't know these assclowns, and half of them died on highly telegraphed attacks that were easy to dodge. If they want an upgrade they can wait a week like everyone else.

[Omegonthesane]

So I got Offworld Trading Company on offer, after nigh on 20 hours I still feel like I don't exactly know how to actually win like ever. I mean, better than evens win rate if I get to HQ tier 4, but ridiculously higher rate of deciding the game's gone south and rage quitting. You'd think the volatility of the market resulting in the lack of a need to memorise build orders and shit would make it more accessible.

Fuck, it's not even like I have a preferred faction yet.

[CapnTthePirateG]

So I've been playing Pillars of Eternity.

Fuck ghosts. Fuck ghosts forever. These fucking things paralyze my entire goddamn party so I never get a turn.

Fuck ghosts.

[RelentlessImp]

Fuck Pillars of Eternity

[Stahlseele]

So, after having watched, by now, about 60 hours of Civ6 pre release game footage by several youtubers and twitch streamers . . i find myself kinda meh about the game . . anybody else wanna talk some civ?

[nockermensch]

So, after having watched, by now, about 60 hours of Civ6 pre release game footage by several youtubers and twitch streamers . . i find myself kinda meh about the game . . anybody else wanna talk some civ?

I have 500+ hours sunk in Civ5, every single one of them in Single player mode, in heavily modded games.

[Stahlseele]

*nods* yeah, me too ^^
both no quitters and community balance patch and gigantic earth maps with TSL have been played. Choppers do not embark when entering water tiles, because that is stupid. But they do crash if they do not end their turn over land.
I have won on each map type and size and on every last difficulty setting.
I am still working on getting the won with all civs once achievement on steam.
I am not going to do the multiplayer stuff, ever <.<

So, what are your preliminary thoughts on the civ6 pre release version so far?

[nockermensch]

*nods* yeah, me too ^^
both no quitters and community balance patch and gigantic earth maps with TSL have been played. Choppers do not embark when entering water tiles, because that is stupid. But they do crash if they do not end their turn over land.
I have won on each map type and size and on every last difficulty setting.
I am still working on getting the won with all civs once achievement on steam.
I am not going to do the multiplayer stuff, ever <.<

So, what are your preliminary thoughts on the civ6 pre release version so far?

I'm severely underwhelmed by wonders requiring a tile now. If I can't have my capital city with 15+ wonders, it'll be sad. Starting the capital on a tile with marble and then getting the Monuments of the Gods pantheon belief is fun. I'm neutral towards Civics, they seem to be interesting.

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, no more wonder-spam ._.
My best game was with egyps. Marble starting location.
Went for Desert Folklore instead of Monuments of the Gods though, because with that start you are already at 40% speed boost for wonder building and getting more faith is more important.

In Civ6, i can see several wonders never being built, because they need not just any old tile, but a very specific setup to be built. Big Ben for example needs to be built on a tile. Next to a commercial district. Which has a bank in it. And the tile Big Ben is actually being built on needs to be on a river.

In general, they seem to have drastically lessened the ressources you get.
Less Gold, Less Culture, Less Faith . . Happiness now seems to be more complicated. Luxury Ressources give you amenities, which get split evenly between your cities. So you actually do need several copies of stuff and not ust a wide variety of them . .

The Eureka stuff for me does make it pretty clear what path you are supposed to follow with getting techs due to synergy effects.

[Voss]

Fuck Pillars of Eternity

Honestly, you were far too kind. The story was shit, and incoherent freshman philosophy 101 bullshit, most of the NPCs are shit, you set out to murder some guy for reasons that aren't even explained until the very end, your Special Bullshit Chosen One status is shit, and the game ends in a 'Which ending do you choose?' button press, so nothing you did along the very restricted railroad passing for the game matters in anyway at all.

Then there are the mechanics, which are actively worse than the infinity engine port of the 2nd edition rules. Which is just sad. Partly because the fucker designer insisted that abilities could only be used in combat time as if it were fucking 4e, and no pre battle buffs or summoning. The cipher class is overpowered because it's designed for the game (nova bursting shit down as fast as possible, then building the power pool back up during clean up, or post combat), and the chanter is rather shit for not being designed for this combat system (gradually building up over time to use powers when fights are pretty much decided in 30 seconds or you're doing it wrong). That they're in the same game is fucking baffling.

So, after having watched, by now, about 60 hours of Civ6 pre release game footage by several youtubers and twitch streamers . . i find myself kinda meh about the game . . anybody else wanna talk some civ?

I'm largely into it. I like the districts, and the split tech trees, and most of it feels like an improvement.

A couple things are irksome: no 'wait' hotkey, the stupid unit auto-cycle (and no way to turn it off currently), the diplomacy screen doubling: sit and watch a speech, get the text bubble for the speech, then click off and get the text again on other screen with the response options. This should not be two screens.

However the big bugbear is the AI is absolute dogshit, again. They put up an hour long video, actually on Emperor difficulty (showing off Greece with Gorgo as leader). First off, it was shit because they spent 50 minutes of a goddamn 60 minute stream setting up, instead of preparing a save at turn 25 slightly before they launched the war. This is not how you present shit in a stream format.

Mostly it was terrible because the AI the chieftain difficulty AI (which is literally the only AI priority list), but with bonus resources and starting units (like every other civ game), and a trivial attack bonus. Tactically, it is actually better than the civ 5 Ai, as at least ranged units can move and shoot in the same time (seriously, 5 couldn't do this, at least in vanilla)

But they did everything wrong. They sent the greek unique spearmen against warriors (which have a +10 bonus against anti-cav units), kept them apart (phalanxes get +10 bonus when adjacent to each other), and sat in missile and bombardment range of the city while attacking into difficult terrain across rivers, rather than wiping out the enemy in the open. Oh, and sent in troops in dribs and drabs rather than a solid block.

They literally did everything wrong they possibly could have, then stopped because their 'time was up.' And that was supposed to highlight how much better the Emperor AI is. Except... it was just a big warrior swarm from having bonus resources, and it didn't do anything beyond batter a couple of their units.

The various youtube videos and streams do a much better job of showing the game off (though the press build is limited to prince). The Firaxis spokes-team came off as pair of idiotic chucklefucks who have no clue what they're doing (and were too busy recounting ancedotes to each other to focus on the damn game).

They even outright stated that the only thing they felt they needed to do with the difficulty levels was give bonus resources (and not work on priority task lists, customize different civs or even make certain that AI upgrades units)

But yeah, AI missionary spam is still a thing (like 5), it's really easy to run past the AI in research (the eurekas and inspirations make shit too easy, honestly), and the AI still struggles hard with strategic decisions (partly because the designers can't prioritize stuff properly, because they've got that magic 'everything is equal, there are no better/worse civs or better/worse strategies' bullshit ideology stuck in their heads.


So if you want a multiplayer, you might be OK (unless the netcode is shit again), and if you want to screw around and watch the exploration and the city design layout unfold like a flower, it looks enjoyable. If you want a strategic challenge out of the game, go fuck yourself, because Firaxis.

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, Sad innit? ._.

[Judging__Eagle]

The really sad thing about the designers of Civ6 not being able to determine a build priority, is that they're probably not very good Civ players if they think that way.

It wouldn't be hard to set up build orders for some of the general strategies that have been around since well 4X games came about:

Exploration
-Unit & unit spam focus; building settlers to spin off production of units into more cities; prioritizing pop growth improvements

Exploitation
-Research focus: build research & research related improvements

Expansion
-Trade points focus; building trade & trade related improvements; including roads/rails

Extermination
-Almost purely unit, military defense, production &/or capitalization; i.e. "total war" footing

With each of the these having a list of buildings they'd want produced; and the AI running through the list of what it can make. With options for the other strategies if higher tier options aren't available, or a city has reached a supply limit for produced units.

There could be a higher level of detail whereby cities are flagged for Exploration, Exploitation, Expansion & Extermination based on pre-arranged thresholds for local terrain (high food prod. cities are worthless for anything save Exploration; while peninsular coastal cities are wasteful if not used for Exploitation; and hilly regions are ideal for Extermination build orders).

Really, there are ideal build orders. Anyone whose got 50+ cities in a single game doesn't do "lolrandumb" every time they plan out a new cities production goals.

[Voss]

The really sad thing about the designers of Civ6 not being able to determine a build priority, is that they're probably not very good Civ players if they think that way.

Watching the lead designer (Ed Beach, who used to do board games) and one of the designers/programmers stream for an hour is terribly painful. Just his mannerisms are weird, as he _never_ touches the keyboard (so doesn't use hotkeys at all), and has to move back to take the mouse in hand every time he does something. Then slowly drifts the mouse across the screen to click something, then sits back, lets go of the mouse and blathers about something irrelevant to his sidekick. It is painfully apparent that computers are not his thing. But neither is blather, as he is really boring to listen to.

But, worse, just watching the early game videos from a few youtubers has given me tips and tricks for the early game that he seems blithely unaware of.

Or even really obvious stuff: Yes, apparently siege block cities (putting every tile around a city in a unit's zone of control) is a good thing, but he's obsessed with it that he tries to do it before, say, crushing the enemy army. So he fights at a disadvantage for no reason, which no competent player would do.

Various youtubers are selling this game really well. But the developers are really absolute shit at selling the game.

[Stahlseele]

People like Quill18 for example . . and still i am not in a rush to buy it as i was after watching the yogscast flounder around in Civ5 <.<

[Judging__Eagle]

-sighs-

Yeah, watching people fail at the abstract concepts of Civilization are fairly frustrating.

For me, the game's harder difficulties resulted in higher scores than on easier difficulties. Balancing between the 4 strategies of a 4X game is actually easier than one imagines. While optimizing special resources first is always the first thing to do (doubling a high production space makes bleeding off a settler for a new city or infrastructure project more bearable in smaller cities), I found that ultimately research into advancing my civilzations technology beyond my enemies made the real difference in the long run. Unrelenting research could give you a seemingly small advantage that could easily snowball use of careful strategies & loss-limiting tactics; into grinding up seemingly overwhelming odds.

I can really only recall one campaign where I was behind the curve for some reason; however my scale of production was so high that I was able to field something like... 10 knights per enemy unit of musketeers; the attrition ratio meant I 'just' had enough troops to win, but it would wipe out my army to win this war. Pretty much emphasizing the need for maintaining tech levels higher than your enemies.

[Voss]

Well, the 'AI Battle Royal' for Civ 6 was a thing that happened. Special build with an observer mode and 8 AI empires going head to head with no human presence.

And it was bad. Worse, a lot of the bad stuff was shit the developers knew about and could predict.

There were two continents- on the narrow western one, from north to south were the Aztecs, Brazil and Russia.

On the second there was Spain up top, England, Rome and Greece smeared in arc across the middle, then Japan.

So the first problem developed immediately. Russia sends a settler out. Travels past the natural wonder and river in their natural expansion area and takes 20 odd turns to settles north of the Aztecs, vaguely near their natural wonder... essentially at the opposite tip of the continent.

Second problem was (unsurprisingly as this had come up before), the lack of unit upgrades. So warriors and archers and catapults stayed that way for a _long_ time. This is apparently mostly due to a lack of access to strategic resources. And nothing in the AI apparently tells them to try to obtain them in some fashion.

Third problem was the AI was bad at war. Bad at actually declaring, and bad at doing anything on the rare occasion that they did.

Russia (with its helpless northern cities) declared on the aztecs early on. This went poorly, and smolensk (their second city founded long before) got captured... and handed back in the peace deal. After that, no cities changed hands at all until about turn 400. (Though I believe the Aztecs had taken a city state before that) At turn 400, the Aztecs finally said fuck it and took the northern Russian cities.

But meanwhile, Rome declared on Japan with about 10 legions and a couple catapults sitting across the border. Then unaccountably didn't advance on the japanese city with no units and declared peace 10 turns later.

A couple joint wars happened, but at this point the (head?) AI developer was in the room... and accurately predicted that nothing would happen. Apparently both AIs in a joint war want the other to attack first, so neither will actually attack. He referenced game theory. And apparently... this happening is fine. None of the devs/programmers/whomevers in the room were ever surprised (except once) by anything that happened, nor did they seem particularly concerned about it.

The one surprise was Brazil founding a late game city. In the snow (not tundra, snow): the stuff that gives no resources at all. They laughed.

But mid to late game, the game essentially stopped. According to the AI guy, the escalation of warmonger penalty by era essentially means the AI won't do anything. And that they run these AI battles during the day, and he sets one to run every night when he leaves, and he's never seen a Domination Victory. Ever. Not even a fluke snowballing event that should happen with a couple thousand iterations. Domination is essentially impossible (and more or less statistically impossible) for the AI.

I don't know where this guy's professional pride was, but his acceptance and indifference to obvious problems was exceptionally galling.

Basically, the game was over by turn 250. But it went on to turn 450, waiting for tourists to accrue for an Aztec cultural victory. There were several opportunities for a science victory (Aztecs, England and Russia) but they lost interest and didn't finish all 5 projects (Aztecs came the closest with 3). Russia just... didn't do it, and England lost interest and spammed mech infantry for all the wars they weren't fighting instead.

Two other things- the AI guy claimed the AI wouldn't produce settlers unless they had found a spot for them.... yet didn't seem particularly concerned by the 5-6 settlers sitting in capitals for 200 odd turns.

Spain didn't really badly, being constantly overrun by barbarians for about 50 turns early on. Two things resulted from this- Spains immediate neighbors, the aggressive Rome and aggressive Gorgo of Sparta... didn't attack them. The second and even more concerning thing, 200 turns later, the half-dozen tiles the barbarians had pillaged weren't repaired. Apparently (according to the AI guy), it had other things to produce that it valued more. (Including a settler it never used, amongst other unspecificed and unclear things).

The whole thing was really pathetic, and highlighted by the Firaxis team's indifference to a host of glaring problems... the day before release.

[Judging__Eagle]

Honestly... as bad as it sounds; the AI in Civ 2 sounds smarter when I fought it than anything here.

At the very least, Civ 2 AIs would declare war; and then actually attack me when they did even imagine a war would be a smart move against me.

[Stahlseele]

And in Civ5, the AI was in some cases ridiculously agressive . .
But yeah, they again went with a bad AI that simply gets to cheat on higher difficulty <.<

[Stahlseele]

Fallout 4 is 50% off on steam
So is Doom right now.
Also, Stellaris got a new DLC that actually seems interesting enough to me.