neonrev

Yeah, getting all 'Hooray for YOOOOOUU, BIG BAD TOUGH MAN!' for Viking raids destroying entire provinces for loot seems suspect. It's really just tone, it's not like things are any better for the Catholic or Muslim lords, but there the horrible (and historical) things you do are presented in a more self aware way, a little more obfuscated under 'The Rights of Lords' or 'The Will of the LORD', and the terrible things you do are presented in a less openly violent way. I guess maybe I'm just more put off by descriptions of violence than I am by engaging in it in a game, and maybe they're just not for me, I dunno. Oh, and I'm not trying to accuse anyone of anything with that, I just live in northern MN, where there are a lot of guys who are very very into their Norwegian Viking ancestors, and the heritage they latch onto the hardest is a really idealist 'Noble Viking Warrior' idea of what that time was, and its just sad to see their other accomplishments in trade or settlement get buried under all the petty infighting that didn't really define their practical legacy, even in a game. Oh, and my problems with the Civ 5 workshop are less to do with the content (although it is mostly new civs and maps, it is A LOT of new civs and maps, if you're willing to dig through the crap.) and more with the syncing between subscribed mods and what the in game mod browser detects/shows. It's super early obviously, but I'm having the same problems with CK2. Were there any games made with workshop support in mind from the start? It feels like it's not really workable to have a super general mod organizer for a bunch of different games all kludged together after the fact.

Ah, well I still feel like I have a good couple dozen games with all the DLC now before I start feeling the TC itch, so that's fine with me. I was just worried it would end up like Civ 5, which I still can only get to notice about 2/3's of the stuff I have subscribed, and not even a consistent 2/3's either. I just want some of the more obvious UI options and maybe more attention paid to fleshing out the non-catholic (or god-damned Nordic, which I find the presentation of astonishingly... don't have an adjective. Masturbatory?) parts of the world, and if paradox isn't interested, hopefully other history nerds are.

Anyone see anything interesting in the steam workshop? That was honestly the most exciting part to me, centralizing what felt like a really fragmented and insular modding community, at least to me. Glancing through it, nothing really earth shattering is there yet, but I'm seeing a couple of little tweaks already, and hopefully that can help Paradox satisfy hardcore powerplayer folks and newer or less intense players. I'm hoping to have a much easier time swapping in and out little adjustments, and a tiny bit of customization goes a long way for me getting into a thing. Was EU4's steam workshop integration good? I don't own it, but it seems like it'd be a pretty similar situation.

Yeah, I'm not really convinced that having a slightly cheaper OR set owned by facebook coming out earlier is better than a more expensive, potentially less optimized (for the initial release of a fairly new tech, so still, whatever) OR set without that outside influence coming out much later. I think OR is going to set a lot of the tone for VR as a commercial future, I think even the least influence Facebook can have on it (and they do intend to recoup the money they provide to improve the hardware, of course.) is going to drive the entire market in a direction I loathe, and a direction that is going to treat an entirely new experience as a fucking commoditizable market place, instead of whatever else it could have been. Every word I read that frames this as positive seems so focused on treating VR (what I would rather see as a new medium for expression) as a product that must be made profitable and as cheap and common as possible, and I just don't see why that's good. This deal made me more likely to be able to afford one, but also eliminated any interest I may have had in it, and moreso, any trust I had in the individual developers as people who cared more about a future medium than getting the damn thing to market. Fuck I hate capitalism.

Oddly, Far Cry 2 has always been my 'too frustrated with STALKER to breathe anymore' break game. It provides a lot of the atmosphere of disempowerment and decay of STALKER, but with slightly less disempowerment mechanically, and the endlessly respawning trivial enemies and long distance driving suddenly feels incredibly freeing in comparison.

Yeah, for it to even have that sort of power and for me to only know about it vaguely is a pretty good sign it's doing it's job well. And that failure is interesting, since the CS:GO team would be more in touch with whoever administrates VAC than any other random developer and it looks like that was a server-side problem instead of something a user did, and... yeah. I'm super interested in this all of a sudden, but I don't think I have anything new to say. I just really want a retrospective from whoever manages it telling me how they differentiate between legit and non-legit edits, how monitoring for 'cheating devices' works and also what those even are, and just anecdotes I guess. But yeah, it'd suck if 200+ games on steam just went away because I went too far messing with The Guild 2 or whatever, and there was no appeal. There must be a similar system on consoles, but I've never owned one, so I wouldn't really know.

What in god's name is going on with those slides? Is this some Macintosh sorcery standing between me and this presentation? Even the images in the data folder seem to be too small for me to properly practice frottage wi appreciate.

I assume VAC started as an in-house anti-cheat thing for multiplayer modes of early valve stuff, and has since just picked up more and more stuff to do as Valve had more games and started selling other companies games, then became a major retailer for PC game downloads... I really want to see a history of it now, cause balancing trust in the platform as a means for multiplayer stuff and such and trust in the community that VAC isn't going to get a false positive and take down all your games without appeal (which I'd never heard of happening before, is that rare or do I just not hear about it?) for something innocuous sounds fascinating.

Just out of curiosity, what sort of actions are likely to draw the notice of VAC? I've never tried to actually cheat (or really compete, even) in competitive games, but I certainly enjoy fussing about in game files and such, and never even considered VAC at all. Not worried, just wondering.

I think PK's are supposed to eat into your late game surpluses through repair and weapon upgrades, or at least create a choice between the regular squad and them, but I only ever really used one, really situationally, to draw the attention of other PK's so I could flank them and shoot their hapless pilot from behind. I had the same surplus (basically after base defense you're set, I found) in my playthroughs, put it into grenades and mines when I could (There is nothing in this world as satisfying as having a scout and engineer rig all the doors and windows of an occupied building and leveling it without the enemies inside discovering you. Or really just mining all doors and then turkey shooting them through the windows as the AI just experiences the weirdest Sophie's Choice ever. Neither of these seemed so sadistic until I typed them out.)

I'm pretty sure I know what mission you're referring to, and if I recall that mission got bugged in one of the patches and is currently impossible to beat without cheating at least a little. But yeah, besides that weird mission, the game is really pretty great. How'd you feel about the collecting enemy equipment and stuff to sell back to your employer so you can buy other guns from him? (Still seems weird to me.) I remember the end of mission search of every room and the inventory tetris being oddly hypnotic for me, but I can see that being really annoying to others.

It also lets you feel the letter on each key, if you have sensitive enough finger tips. (I assume its still done the same way, with the symbol being marginally indented.)

Since this popped up the day after I was inspired to go looking for my old Corsair keyboard by another thread (relevant to this), I'll share my recently discovered disgusting story/drunken mistake. In college, I had my desk setup under the lofted bed in a little alcove, imagine a short hallway wide enough for a twin bed and just enough room to have a chair. I'd been an extremely bored DD for the night, ferrying drunk people from apartment to apartment, and at some point we had to drop someone off at a dorm and decided to stay there. I was overeager to catch up, and wasn't familiar with the idea of a double shot glass. Long story short, what I thought was a fairly reasonable 10 shots (Kraken, to improve matters) over the course of rest of the night was in fact 20, and the rest of the night turned out to have been about an hour and a half before everyone else passed out. I was fine to walk back to my dorm, and thought I was fine puking once in the bathroom before headed to bed. I left a garbage can on my chair next to my bed, so it was about 2-3 feet below me, in case I needed it. I woke up still quite drunk, and discovered that in the night I had continued to vomit in my sleep, but not primarily in the garbage. There was a fine spray covering the walls, floor, chair, computer and desk, and everything else I had near my bed. My keyboard took a direct hit, and I just remembered that's why I put it in storage (I could never get it truly 'clean' after). I also discovered that my roommate had come back from his parents early that weekend, and had been there and was terrified by the magnitude of the vomit. I hangover/drunk cleaned my little alcove, staggered to food service, ate cucumbers and a salad, staggered back and vomited cold cucumber and salad (it was actually sort of soothing, no joke.), and passed out for the rest of the day. And that's why I have a shitty keyboard now, and also why I don't drink liquor anymore. Not as gross as an EMT's job, but at least you're (probably) sober for that.

I had one of the cheaper (Raptor something, I think) Corsair keyboards a while back, and I liked it fine. I mostly just wanted a backlit keyboard, but I remember liking the surface on the keys, some sort of grippy rubber. The tips of my fingers hurt sometimes with my new (boring logitec) one, and those might be related or not.

Its not exactly endgame, but the Silent Storm games (turn-based, squad management in a WWII setting) introduce mech-type things about midway through, about once you've perfected your small arms tactics and gotten people spec'd out. It's a dramatic ( but non-nonsensical, mind you) turn in the story and gameplay, and I found having to completely switch up my approach and deal with a new way of engaging enemies (it encourages more aggressive advances and heavy weaponry, instead of the stealth and long range engagements that are more useful until then.) with my old squad and recovered equipment pretty interesting. It feels artificial and out of no where, but it made the endgame a new sort of war instead of a dull conclusion to the old one.

Wow, I hadn't looked at the achievements, these are nuts. The production numbers ones don't look out of the world to me , but 900 citizens? I have no idea what the hell that is all about, I always saw the game presented as a small village builder. I'm curious how he decided on those numbers, cause those don't match up with the game's strengths at all, and I see why people keep trying to expand beyond the point of stability and fun. I'mma look back through the dev blog sometime and see if I can find a post about achievements, maybe he's got some logic behind all that. Edit: Here is a post on the tutorials (another weak point for me) and the achievements. It's more code than design thoughts, but I guess he thinks they're reasonable? This might shed some light on the problem:

Mmmmm, the lack of information, the tension of not being sure what the best choice to make, and the slow and tedious pace of advancement are sorta what I like about this game. It turns city builders from a exercise in steadily adding more people, more jobs, more roads into a exercise in desperately trying to protect and shelter people who have very little skill at what they are doing long enough that they can carve out a little place to live in, and the stories of the towns that fail are usually pretty interesting. I'm really not having the problems other people are having re: housing inefficiency and unrecoverable disasters, and maybe that's just and RNG thing, or maybe I'm doing something differently. I notice in a lot of pictures that you guys seem to have dense housing sections, whereas I place housing only at jobsites, and really compartmentalize my production centers, and I never see anyone walking more than maybe the length of a field or two to get to work, (and starvation NEVER happens with food in the bank, I don't even know how that can be happening to anyone.). I guess I don't have much experience at towns of more than 100ish people, but I also don't really think its a game about making a large city, and I don't feel bad about starting over once I get a solid town running without issue for about 5 years without any more growth. I sorta think its a game about chiseling away someplace for these people to call 'home' in a really inhospitable environment, without proper tools or experience, rather than a game about making the biggest city you can, and that is a game I have wanted for years, so I'm happy with it. I hope further patches and content can make the game more palatable to people, and I can't wait to see what the modding community will do with this, because it seems like a fantastic base for either a more traditional city building game or a more Dwarf Fortressy/resource management game.

Yes, and I have to say, the Idlethumbs/asymetric crossovers recently? Messing with my head. Been a fan of both for a while, and its weird to hear them suddenly have an office together(?) and stuff. Makes a lot of sense to me though.

Diseases still completely elude me. I've had illness wipe an entire 70+ person town (with an herbalist and hospital running, no less) in a single year, and yet my 30 naked dudes eating nothing but pumpkins and fish just managed to survive about 70% of them catching measles in the winter, with only a couple of old people and kids dying. What the hell?

I like how that in the middle of a disaster, with deaths happening so fast that you can't read them, the event box chooses to remind you that you're low on firewood.

The number of nomads doesn't only include working adults, it can be and is sometimes mostly kids or student aged kids, who will just eat and not work. It's both an infusion of free labor and a huge hit to resources, I try to only take them after the first significant wave of old age deaths, when my population is down, and turn off the school if you're worried about food. If you end up with a bunch of kids or students and no adults, having no teacher puts them straight to work the field, where they BELONG. They are a gamble in a lot of ways, I'm told but have not seen that they can carry diseases from distant lands to infect your population. For people having problems early on with firewood and food being spread too thin, try building a boarding house, and then only build enough houses at the jobsites for the people working. Its way easier to heat the boarding house, food storage is centralized and it keeps people from getting homeless to quick. Building the houses at jobsites gradually seems to help ensure that people end up in places that make sense for their job, and you can control early population growth easier that way. You also have a buffer for nomads, and it helps if a couple houses get destroyed by fire or tornado or whatever.

Oh, and laborers place priority on gathering jobs on a first in, first done basis. They'll only stop doing a thing if you remove the gathering selection, and juggling gathering tasks that is unfortunately necessary and painful part of efficient laborer management. It might pay to wait a little bit if you're getting burned out on it being obtuse, I feel like he's going to patch some of the more obvious UI and behavior problems (No idle workers count, no breakdown of why health/happiness are what they are, etc) pretty soon, and that'll help a lot with some of its problems I think. That and modding hopefully being in the near future almost makes me want to set it aside until its more feature rich. Also, holy crap, IGN gives it a solid review and RPS pretty much pans it? This is very strange. One thing I've noticed is a weird difference in the way people respond to it depending on whether they think of it as a city-building game or a Medieval settlement simulator. Its a pretty excellent survival simulation game, but it really is an absolute crap time if you're looking to approach it like a Simcity or Anno.

Man, I dunno, not having any of those issues. Maybe try watching some lets plays? I guess I had been watching lp of it before it was released, and watching him figure stuff out was immensely helpful. The way productivity matters so much on house placement and food storage locale, it helps to see someone figure it out on an individual situation more than general tips, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I find mines and quarries to be less efficient than plain clearcutting until I have excess labor enough to run them at 60-80% full. I once found more success pouring excess labor into surplus log and firewood cutting, and trading that for iron or stone as often as I could, than the same 4 or 5 guys working my quarry could typically get me in the same interval, but its definitely a crapshoot early on figuring out where the labor is best spent with so few dudes. I'm looking forward to spreadsheet set clearing some of these ambiguities up, there was so much mentioned in development I'm unable to figure out what is mechanics and what is superstition. For instance, I still am not sure if old growth forest is better for gathering and hunting than forests planted by foresters, as that was a discussed feature, but its not explicitly stated anywhere at release. I'll just keep the old grove near the edge of town, with whatever magic bonuses may lay inside.

For the love of god, if you just found out about Silent Storm from this and you have any interest in squad-based tactics, get it. It and it's sequel, which adds a financial element to hiring/firing guys and buying/selling equipment, and makes the random missions more interesting and useful, and makes an enemy with a powerful weapon more exciting to run across, especially if you can recover and use it in mission. It also has a ballistics system that makes angles and cover actually tactically important, and the camera is pretty good at letting you judge lines of sight and fire, which is actually what I like most about it. The story is ridiculous and the voice acting is pretty dull, but man, its pretty unique in terms of feel. I don't even know how much I'd compare it to JA, just because it doesn't have any of the strategy layer, and the graphics feel so much better suited to the actual gameplay in combat that I honestly can't stand how simplistic and unrepresentative JA is. It's always had a really special place for me, and I've never seen anything that feels like it, particularly before the mechs show up (human on human fights are more interesting, if only because the firepower is lower, and injury is more common and injurious.). Its a really gripping WWII era squad based tactics game, its terrible to see it languish in the 'Eastern European game' ghetto for so long. I guess this was my first post as well, so hello! I was just very excited to hear it mentioned, its the game I've played the most without ever having heard it referenced by anyone else.