Waiting for Dwarf Fortress adventure mode for Steam on Wednesday (beta version), plus Galactic Civilization 4 getting an expansion on Thursday that I will check out.
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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Riven. I'm finally tackling this one, after trying it as a kid and not understanding any of the puzzles or what the backstory was supposed to be.
I'm just finishing Tax Paperwork Hell, U.S. Edition. Whoever made this game and obfuscated the equations for stat progression is a real fucker, TBH. Do not recommend.
Doing different playthroughs of Total Warhammer 2. So far I've done:
- Repanse de Lyonnesse: I still hate Bretonnia, cavalry is bad
- Heinrich Kemmler: A tricky start due to everyone nearby hating him, but he gets unstoppable once you get some more ghost units with the buffs he gives them. Also there's just nothing like lining up a Winds of Death to get 200+ kills in one cast.
- Thorek Ironbrow: EZ auto-resolve to victory. Got lucky with some settlements meaning I didn't ever have to go to war with the Lizardmen and avoided the worst parts of Thunderdome. Honestly really liked his campaign of getting the artifacts.
- Grom The Paunch: Fun campaign mechanic with the cooking pot but the DLC units (pump wagons) seemed to just... suck? Ended up cheesing the late game with an "oops all Arachnoroks" doomstack. The campaign's final battle being to take Tor Yvresse (I think?) fell a little flat because I'd already taken it in the game world like 5 turns earlier lol.
- Wulfrik the Wanderer: Had to drop this one after every elf in the world declared war on me. Don't really know how to play Norsca, their units are pretty good but the economy sucks shit and I'm constantly rushing to put out fires which means I can't afford to send a stack to just raid Couronne or Marienberg or whatever.
- Count Noctilus: The special achievement for growing the Galleon's Graveyard takes way too long, but otherwise this campaign has been pretty neat. You're pushed to go straight into the High Elves and I did so, eventually getting the Sword of Khaine on the Count himself leading to some real shenanigans. Lustria seems weirdly stable, with no major players knocked out by turn 100, which is surprising.
I'm playing with some mods that generally make the game easier:
- Remove penalties to Public Order etc from difficulty (I want to play on Very Hard so there are more enemy armies but the modifiers to the player are tedious)
- Build minor settlements to T4 (just makes it easier to consolidate everything in one province so I don't have to shuffle things around as much)
- When a subfaction of your faction is eliminated you can recruit their lords, including LLs (just nice to be able to get more LLs because they're fun!)
- Double skill points (kind of makes the game herohammer but the AI gets it to so w/e)
Project Wingman. It's a spiritual successor to Ace Combat and I have no idea what's going on because I play it music blaring (the politics are probably incoherent) but it plays extremely well.
Dragon's Dogma 2. I'm annoyed that they've made it arbitrarily difficult to make back up saves (probably for pawn economy reasons, I guess) because there are many things I need to experiment with, and experimentation is difficult when I can only do some things once, and other things require waiting for monsters to respawn or what have you.
I could just look up the answers, but that doesn't sound like fun.
Guilty grease strive. Aba mad annoying. Cant make celestial (skill issue i know). Milia got a new move and the combos are kinda neat.
Visual novels on itch.io. Lookouts is the best gay cowboy story I've read, highly recommend! It's free and you can play it in your browser right now (took me about 5 hours)
Just played a run of Suzerain's new expansion, Kingdom of Rizia. Was fun, did a reformer run successfully.
I just finished Ys VIII and Katana Zero.
Ys was very good, even if they upped the anime cringe compared to 2003-2007 Falcom games, it still had the best gameplay loop in the series. Searching for castaways and seeing your village grow in a deserted island while spamming your flashy animu skills and swapping between characters is just so fun.
The bosses are easy and the game allows you to pause and heal similarly to BOTW but I needed to relax this week so it was fitting. The music is also great as well.
Katana Zero is the most cinematic game I have ever played thanks to the great mechanics and level design, with a ton of action movie-like setpieces the one after the other. Too bad it's unfinished because I was hooked by the story but it's still worth it.
I finished Romancing SaGa 2 a bit ago. I was nervous to fight the last boss as I had read about how it was supposed to be one of the most difficult last bosses in the series and then I did it one attempt without any major problems. Maybe I just got lucky with attacks because mechanically I can see how it's supposed to be a hard boss. Overall I enjoyed the game but it's a hard one to recommend to people due to how unconventional it is.
I skipped RS3 for now and moved on to the SaGa Frontier remaster. It's fun but also a step back in complexity from the RS games and so it feels a little too easy sometimes. Also the limited rehashed quests gets old fast (ugh runes). Anyway I'm hoping to be done with this one before Emerald Beyond comes out. I'm abusing NG+ so I don't have to grind out every single scenario so I don't think it'll take too long.
Stardew Valley, my wife turned me onto it when 1.6 dropped and I haven’t played anything else.
Dragons Dogma 2, I'm just slowing exploring places and occasionally doing a side quest. Have refused to start the main quest at all. Found the Sphinx and that was cool.
Stardew Valley, the new update is very impressive and I only really did a farm once way back in 1.0 so getting all the changes is very fun. My girlfriend also plays it so we can chat about our farms.
Helldivers 2. It's fun to do a mission or two a day, I wish it was not locking all the new stuff behind battle passes or releasing them slower. Because keeping up seems like they expect 5 hours of gameplay a day rather than the 40 minutes I put in.
Balatro, just do a run or two a day, I'm up to gold stake on yellow deck and it's very hard so I'm switching to some of the fun decks I unlocked to see what they are like.
Playing Syrian Warfare https://store.steampowered.com/app/485980/Syrian_Warfare/ I love RTS games and this is one is right up my alley brutally difficult I am playing on realistic and I got through the first 2 missions without reloading much but mission 03 is kicking my ass.
Space station 14 pretty much exclusively. By far my favorite game. Other than that I've been studying for finals. It's terrible. lol
Sekiro is one of my favorite games of all time. Only game i ever bothered to platinum and ended up going all the way to NG+7 charmless
The combat is truly sublime when it clicks
Last week I played the single player campaign in Warcraft III Reforged. It's still a great game. I played it a long time ago and have nostalgia for it. Feels good to revisit something that you played as a kid
Dune: spice wars. Pirated. It's neat, does stuff with a stale genre.
Stormworks I want to get back into but I've been too busy.
I just got a 3d printer too
Can you elaborate on Dune Spice Wars a bit? Curious about that game but haven't quite committed the bandwidth to it yet
What is the same if I've played C&C Generals or Dawn of War: So, there is some base building and real time unit command with health, armour, ranged units/buffs etc. This part is not super deep on its own. After that, it deviates from the standard RTS fare. Timeframe is roughly Supreme Commander medium maps (slower than starcraft or C&C, faster than HoI or Stellaris). Rushing is almost impossible (if units are just moving somewhere, they run out of supply if they're not close to a friendly village). I'm slowly doing one mission per night while my meds kick in. Just setting expectations.
Multiple paths to victory!
- You can get "Hegemony", which is basically map control to win. It's quite a lot and is the "default" way of winning.
- Last man standing, which can be done through conquering the heavily armoured main base or using spies to "assassinate" the enemy general. As the tech faction, I use assassinate a bunch.
- CHOAM shares victory. Very hard to do at the best of times, but if you have half of all available CHOAM shares you win. There are some bonuses and stuff that work of CHOAM shares, but they're just a way of storing money that grows over the course of a match if you can't think of anything else to do. CHOAM doesn't pay dividends.
- Landsraad Victory. There's a particular chair on the council that if you hold for 30 days, you win. Haven't done this one, but there's a bunch of things you can also do with the Landsraad.
Each path to victory comes with a bunch of shenanigans with its associated mechanic. With CHOAM shares you can do a pump and dump, with Landsraad you can get subsidies or hand out penalties etc.
You kinda have to spec into one or two depending on your comfort levels and sometimes the mission will bar you from some or give you a different one.
Multiple factions!
- So, each faction has roughly similar buildings, roughly similar techs, and different military units. Each faction plays pretty differently. Haven't explored too much, and I chose the weird DLC faction first (Ixians, the ones rejecting the butlerian jihad, but in secret)
Diplomacy is every match! You want to win, so allying long term usually means your one AI ally will become your major rival. So pretty much every game involves some diplomancy. There's some treaties and stuff. Not as fleshed out.
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade style campaign. Each full map game comes with different little bonuses that you can invest in. Also, losing one game doesn't knock you out of the campaign. (I lost 3 games in my current campaign and am looking at victory). There's a bit of positive feedback here, but I think the AI faction does too.
You have to capture towns, which will usually have a couple of units defending. This has a 4X-but-real-time feel. To get to another faction militarily, you generally have to have friendly villages all the way up to their territory. You need to generate "Authority" resource
Definitely sounds interesting enough for me to check out. Thanks for taking the time to write this up. I'll probably give the game a shot over the weekend as it seems like something that will probably be up my alley.
Still playing Dragon's Dogma 2, absolutely loving it.
Also picked up El Paso, Elsewhere which has been pretty fun, it somehow manages to have the cringiest soundtrack that is actually also sick as fuck.
Slay the Spire. It's been an on-and-off game for me, and I'm currently in my yearly hooked-up phase with the game. Beyond amazing game and community.
I've played THE FINALS (lol) so much. Basically all weekend
I have been playing quake and dusk. Dusk rocks.