Sno

Compared to other 2002 games, Morrowind's character models were noticeably behind the curve, but it made up ground by having such vibrant and detailed environments. Also, at the time, that pixel shader water just floored me. Heh.

http://www.dota2.com/springcleaning/ These two scare me.

I'm assuming this is pretty late in a run, probably right before the flagship? Given that you can only mount three of these weapons with your current weapons system, which is totally fine alongside that upgraded laser artillery you also have, I would take the burst mk2, the dual lasers, and the chain laser. Normally the chain laser kind of sucks since it doesn't really combo very well to start and has low damage, but the burst mk1's are actually much worse, having the same energy drain as the mk2 with only the effective power of the dual laser. The point here being that if you manage to get the flagship's shields solidly down, you will benefit greatly from the fast recharge of the chain laser. Consider putting the chain laser in slot one so its chain doesn't get reset by a system outage. (If you can damage the flagship's engines or its bridge after taking down its shields, it will be taking so much guaranteed fire from your weapons that there's no way the fight will swing back in its favor. As always though, be especially wary of the flagship's missile launcher.) Use the anti-drone for phase 2, but the advanced combat drone for phase 1 and 3. I'm not sure how much power you can still get out of your reactor, but if there's room there, use that left over scrap to upgrade your engines. (Only 35% evasion is quite scary when going up against the flagship.) Maybe also throw some unpowered levels into oxygen and some extra levels into your piloting system, both for durability. (In fact, sell anything you don't need to get the scrap for those upgrades, the engine especially.) That's how i'd do it, i can't see how you'd lose.

From a purely technical standpoint, i have no complaints with the PC version of Dark Souls 2. Loads fast, runs smooth, looks great. (Crashed once when i first loaded it up, but not since then.) I'm playing with a mouse and keyboard right now, however. That's not how i want to do it, my intention is to play with a gamepad, but i don't have a wired 360 gamepad available presently. So mouse and keyboard it is, and those mouse and keyboard controls are pretty terrible. At its core, i don't think Dark Souls is the kind of game that benefits from a keyboard and mouse, and i didn't expect that it would play particularly well with them, but there are some things there that just seem bizarre. For one thing, you can't do guard break/jump attacks when mixing mouse and keyboard commands, but if both commands in the combo are mapped to the keyboard, they work fine. (Whaaaa?) The UI is the real problem though, the lack of any keyboard/mouse tooltips for the menus and the weird implementation of right click commands. When initially setting up the game, i kept hitting esc and wondering why my settings weren't saving, having not yet realized that the game wanted me to right click and hit "back" in the right click menu. I don't think these things should necessarily be held against this game since i don't think this is a game that should be played with a keyboard and mouse in the first place, but... You know... Nitpicknitpicknitpick. They are things that are there and are dumb. Anyways, Dark Souls 2 is pretty rad, you guys.

To be clear, Machine Games specifically includes Starbreeze's founders and many of the key people involved with The Darkness and the two Riddick games. Syndicate nearly destroyed Starbreeze, a lot of people left the company during its development, and while it's cool that Starbreeze has managed to find new footing after all that trouble, it seems like Machine Games is where the people who defined what you associate with Starbreeze ended up. Also, Wolfenstein has already been through a ton of weird reimaginings, i don't see any problem with one more. Consistency was never a strength of Id's franchises. That's kind of how i felt about it, Wolfenstein 09 was a very good "B" game. It's really very competent all around, but maybe doesn't manage to leave a lasting impression. I really enjoyed playing it, but the way it was positioned as a product in the top end of the console-focused retail FPS market, it didn't really stand a chance. Singularity is in a very similar space, but it stands out as more memorable to me because it's both a little more focused and goes a little crazier with the things it tries to do.

The second you repaired that door system, if you had sealed the exterior doors and opened all the interior doors to equalize the air pressure, you might have been able to pull that off.

So it is VAC secured though? It's also completely through steamworks? No additional logins or anything?

Some kind of EVA component would be really interesting if handled well, or even just being able to suit up crew so they can safely conduct operations in low-oxygen environments both on your own ship and on an enemy's. (Perhaps once they take any damage, their suit is "ripped" and they start taking damage from the lack of oxygen.) I think bolting too many systems onto FTL would really run the risk of ruining it though, the game strikes me as very precariously straddling a line between complexity and elegance in its design.

I think i would like to see hacking at least have a cooldown if a drone is destroyed before it lands, like how all the other drones have cooldowns when destroyed. The way the AI spams it at you is probably the most bullshit part of it. Maybe there could be a way to have a crew member in a hacked room try to counter the hack, just another thing to repair. That would work well with the drone sealing the doors to that room, and that would add the dynamic of needing to coordinate hacking with other kinds of attacks like mind control/boarding parties/stun weapons/etc to secure your control.

I can probably understand why they ended up being in there, i think i can imagine the circumstances in which combat drones would be even more powerful in AE than they were in vanilla, they probably thought they had a good reason for trying to present more of a counterpoint to it. The thing just is, even in vanilla, so many pieces have to fall into the right place to end up with an effective drone build. Even with drone recovery, there's a massive strain on resources when you start trying to launch multiple drones in a single fight. With all the the powerfully effective new gear for the core weapons system, and the old weapons being more useful by association, it doesn't really make sense that the already difficult-to-utilize combat drones would need to be nerfed alongside that under the premise that, in certain rare circumstances, they might be overpowered. On top of that, from the standpoint of being the player, i don't understand why i would want to use anti-combat drones. Combat drones are dangerous in the first couple sectors, but once my shields and engines are upgraded a bit, i basically stop ever worrying about them. (I guess anti-combat drones would probably be useful for the stealth curisers, which are extremely vulnerable to the various combat drones early on.) I'm also going to say that hacking probably needs a small nerf. The issue i have with it is just... Weapons, engines, shields, and drones are systems serving incredibly critical functions, but it normally takes a good deal of effort to pummel them to a breaking point either through physical damage or emp damage. Hacking kind of circumvents that latter element of balance. It, in regular intervals, can completely cripple those systems, and it feels like an unduly significant dice roll when its coming from the AI ships. (Which will spam hacking drones at you until they either land one or exhaust their stock.) Hacking just feels like a very blunt and clumsy mechanic to me. Basically the only two issues i have with AE, presently. Also, I just had the thought that an upgraded cloak and supershield drones would probably be awesome together, the 15 seconds of cloak perhaps giving the drone time to set up a stronger supershield. I'll have to try that out.

Flak is a super interesting addition to the game. It's easy to look at it and assume it's just another weapon thrown into the mix, but it has a lot of strange little traits that really mess around with the established rules of the game in weird ways. Namely, it's really actually now the best weapon in the game for breaking shields. (Amazing when combined with beam weapons.) It would then be easy to look at that and assume that maybe emp no longer has a purpose, but flak actually allows it to fulfill a different and arguably more valuable role. (You know, disabling systems other than shields.) At the other end of things, flak cannons are actually really poor damage dealing weapons against systems and hulls since they're not only subject to evasion rolls, but once they break through shields, their randomly determined scatter can end up not actually overlapping with a room on the ship. There are new hostile ship layouts in AE - i'm pretty sure they're new - that seem specifically geared towards messing with these new scattering weapons. I've said already that i think hacking is a little wonky balance-wise, yeah. There's a huge, huge disparity between the severity of different systems being hacked. (Oh ho! They hacked my sensors, i'm in real trouble now!) Mind control feels like a system that has a lot of nuanced and elegant interactions with other mechanics in the game, it's really powerful when properly coordinated. Hacking though... It's basically just a huge dice roll when you're fighting against a ship that has that system, and when on offense with it, it feels like you're just bludgeoning your way through the game systems to make up for deficiencies in your build. Also, has anybody really tried to do a drone-focused ship in AE? It used to be quite viable in the base game, but with the new ways to defend against drones, i'm not so sure anymore.

That would seem to make flak a way to distract defense drones long enough to allow missiles and boarding/hacking drones to slip through.

You basically have four ways to defend yourself against missiles. (Not counting explicitly offensive actions, like hacking or emp.) 1 - That evasion stat, and since engines are easy to level up a few times early in the game, that is usually enough by itself to minimize the amount of damage you'll take early on from weaker missile launchers. Try to have at least 35-40% evasion by the time you get to the late sectors though. (Your crew's piloting and engineering experience will be a big part of that.) That said, once you start running into ships that have multiple missile launchers or more powerful missile launchers, you'll need some extra help... 2 - Defense drones are the most effective counter, and it's not a huge cost if you specifically wait to buy a drone system that comes with a basic defense drone. (It'll be 85 scrap.) The basic drones target only physical objects: Asteroids, missiles, and actually also those rare shield-piercing crystal weapons. (They may or may not also attack flak projectiles, i'm not completely clear on that as of yet. They certainly can't destroy them, and there might be some other conditions to whether or not they fire on them, variables between the different types of flak weapons or something.) Advanced defense drones target energy projectiles too, and also recharge faster, but can in some cases actually be less effective than the basic drone, since they'll tend to miss shooting down missiles if faced with a lot of projectiles to track. 3 - Cloaking is the other very good counter for missiles. Wait for an enemy to dump his missiles and then immediately cloak. Those missiles will almost certainly miss you, since cloak works as a massive evasion adjustment. Then for the remaining duration of the cloak, they also won't be able to lock-on for their next shots. Your clever use of the cloaking system has just bought yourself plenty of time in the fight. 4 - Super shields block missiles and mostly everything else, but late-sector weapons tend to just melt through them in seconds. Super shields come in two flavors though: The Zoltan super shields that charge only during a jump, and the super shield drone that intermittently charges up one bar of super shield during battle. In my time playing, the super shield drone has actually proven to be a fairly viable alternative to the advanced defense drone, but suffers from similar failings against large volumes of weapons fire. Cloaking is the only one that will really help you against the flagship's burst-fire missile launcher, but in phase 2 and 3 of that fight, you need to use your cloak to avoid its special attacks instead. Always destroy the flagship's missile launcher first. Again though: Don't ignore your engines! I always put more into my engines than into my shields. You basically never need more than three shield layers, especially if your evasion is good.

According to Steam, i've probably added around a hundred hours to my playtime with the game since the AE stuff came out, way more time than i had spent with the game originally. Like you though, a lot of that is probably the game idling. AE is phenomenal though, the changes make it feel so much more intricate and thought-out. I also have all the ships unlocked, so i'll continue to tease everybody about how awesome the crystal ships are. (Hey, hey, i just won a normal playthrough with Crystal B, despite getting completely hosed by shops never selling weapons until the very end. All i ended up with was two emps and a heavy laser. I also swapped out my medbay with a cloning bay and turned my crystal guys into a suicide squad. So i defended myself with an advanced defense drone and my cloak, crippled enemy ships with emp and powerful boarding crews, and then slowly whittled them down with my double heavy laser. Beat the flagship with a single hull point remaining, yikes.)

The Tektite is a ridiculously good start, probably one of the best ships in the game. It has huge advantages, namely that Rock Cruiser augmentation, but where the other two Rock Cruisers each have fairly significant failings, this one has basically none. The heavy crystal cannon can be blocked by defense drones, but the swarm missiles easily overwelm them. If you upgrade it with a teleporter, it's only a two man teleporter, but a crystal being and a rockman make for an awesome boarding party. The crystal racial ability lets you easily divide and conquer on an enemy ship, you can lock their crew out of their medbay while you tear it up and then just pick apart the crew after they finally break in. (Speaking of boarding teams with crystal beings, Crystal Cruiser B starts with three crystal beings in its crew, a four man teleporter, and gets cloaking and shields out of the gate. Both of the crystal ships are among the best in the game, but Crystal B can completely spiral out of control. However, like some of the Mantis ships, it lacks ways to deal with supershields and drone ships early on.) About cloning bays, they tend to end up costing me more in scrap, given that you really do need to upgrade them for the passive healing, while a medbay will easily do its job even if it just stays at one point. Reconstructive teleport also really helps on boarding-focused cloning ships. I also think medbays tend to be more useful defensively, especially if your crew is squishy. Like that story i shared a few posts above, about being swarmed by a boarding team of mantises, they just fed through my clones and i ended up losing a whole bunch of crew experience. Being able to take more risks with dice roll events is very appealing though, just make sure you didn't power down the clone bay in a nebula storm during the prior jump, heh. There is one thing to keep in mind about the cloning bay on the Tektite though, since a two-block cloning bay only has room one for one crew member, if it's destroyed in combat, you will lose anybody in the queue. You can swarm a four square bay with three engis and fix it fast enough to save somebody, but that will not happen if you can only have one person doing repairs. Definitely upgrade that bay for durability.

I just won a normal playthrough with the Fregatidae using the flak artillery's ability to reliably break shields to capitalize on a glaive, which was the sole weapon i had equipped. I fully upgraded a cloak to try and give myself a buffer for the long charge times on both. I also had further upgraded my teleporter and my cloning bay to cycle four of my crew into an attacking ship as a persistent harassing force. New favorite ship, definitely. I don't think i lost more than five points of hull against the flagship. Mind control by itself doesn't generally end up being very useful, but it's valuable force multiplication for a boarding party, or you can coordinate the mind control attack with a hacking drone to give the manipulated enemy room to safely do its malicious work. (Or, in absence of those two, just use it to interrupt repairs on a system you want to stay broken.) As for Slug B, it seems like people cite it as one of the more difficult starts, but starting with a ton of missile parts and a healing bomb pretty much lets your crew live on the enemy ship. It's an underrated boarding ship, i've had a couple good runs with it. (Starting with a decent missile launcher also helps it skirt the issue some of the other boarding-focused starts have, which is helplessness against drone ships.) Engi B is really brutal start, it just takes one hit to your drone room in the middle of a fight to completely hose a playthrough, unless you were lucky enough to pick up some extra crew early on. Engi A is probably going to be harder in AE too, with anti-combat drones. (Zoltan C is applicable here too, combined with other more severe failings.) Also, as rough as the other Stealth starts are, Stealth C has some especially peculiar shortcomings. Beam weapons are bad for the other two, but they're worse for C. Beam weapons just melt through super shields, and Stealth C can't even fall back on using the cloak to halt their lock-on. I'm also having a lot of trouble with Lanius B, but that might just be me, because that ship seems like it should be awesome. I want to use some of my Federation C tricks with it, but you can't vent the Lanius to space to claim fresh full-health clones. Heh. On the other hand, you have mind control to help out your Lanius in early boarding actions. Upgrading the cloning bay to help the passive healing would probably be the first thing to do with that ship.

I always loved the opposed mythologies and the contradictory and unreliable historical accounts, it's something a lot of fantasy universes don't really do. Usually they tend to subvert their own mysteries by just dumping out a very clear and unambiguous narrative for you. Skyrim and Oblivion struggle with this, i think. Oblivion, especially, but Skyrim also fails to capitalize on some fun ambiguities that were previously laid out in the fiction for the series. A lot of the world building in Morrowind just felt very real, it seemed appropriate that parts of its main quest had you sifting through libraries to try and put together a picture of what your role in the unfolding events should even be.

I had another game with federation cruiser c on normal difficulty and made it to sector 7 before getting wiped out. (Went way too long time without seeing any shops, struggled along with less than five hull points for probably five jumps or more, and finally got wiped by a ship that had multiple missile launchers that my defense drone couldn't deal with. Had well over a hundred scrap for repairs, and my ship was set up quite well to take on the flagship. Playthroughs end that way all too often.) I had two mantises that were both never quite benefitting from maxed out skills, their intermittent deaths were robbing them of that maximum rating, but a reconstructive teleporter was keeping them alive for much longer stretches than earlier in the playthrough. Something to keep in mind - There are effectively only three levels to progress through on each stat for your crew since bonuses only come when you fill up one of the bars. With nowhere to go after filling up the second bar, cloning a crew with a maxed stat can only knock them down to the second level. That highly suicidal playstyle is awesome fun though, the Fregatidae might be one of the most entertaining ships in the game. Often, you're just using your boarding parties to keep enemies distracted so they're not repairing system damage you've caused with your flak artillery cannon. (Which will consistently cause damage to your own boarding party.) My other crew was mostly engis and zoltan, very squishy. At one point, an event dumped like five mantises into my cruiser while i was also taking fire from an enemy ship. For a long stretch of the fight, i consistently had maybe five crew in the cloning queue while my engines and shields were crippled, something that could have gone horribly wrong if i hadn't already managed to significantly damage the other ship's systems. My squishy crew though, i was just sending out the poor engis and zoltan to go whittle down the mantises and surely die, while my own mantises were on the other other ship messing things up over there. (Venting wasn't really an option to clear out the hostile mantises, not by itself at least, i needed to keep the mantises engaged in battle so they wouldn't cause further damage to my engines and my shields.) Earlier in the game, i did actually lose a rockman when a stray laser bolt hit my cloning bay. I immediately sent all my engis in there to try and repair it before my mantis was lost too, just narrowly saving his life. It all made for an exciting, entertaining playthrough. Edit: Also, i had a flak cannon and a halbred beam, which seemed like a pretty effective pair even in the end-game. (Since the halbred has a longer charge, put it in slot one so it won't be disabled by system damage.)

I was having trouble getting anywhere with Federation Cruiser C, but it just now kind of clicked. Cloning bays, in general, have just clicked. Federation Cruiser C though. No weapons, a two man teleporter, and a crew that is decidedly slanted away from effective boarding strategies. (Two zoltan, a human, and a mantis.) You have an upgraded cloning bay though, and you do have a Mantis. If you use your guys like suicide troops, it works out. The ship's unique flak artillery lands and destroys the enemy ship while your mantis/human are aboard it? Doesn't matter, fresh replacements are on the way! Your mantis is wounded - but alive - after a fight? Can't have that, you need him at his best, vent him to space and spawn a fresh clone. The ship even starts with emergency respirators, so don't think twice about throwing your mantis into a drone ship to deal some damage, he'll live long enough to destroy something. In fact, despite the skill loss on cloning, this reckless style of play is allowing my boarding party to cause enough damage to still level up their combat skills.

I really admired the first game and felt AC2 built on it tremendously. I love that series, but that is an example of one that is just being bled out, i can't keep up with them. ODST is worth looking at if you want to play a Halo game that just completely stands alone narratively and does a great job showcasing the dynamic combat the series is known for. (It takes those mechanics and transplants them to a large and open-ended environment.) It's also something of a Firefly mini-reunion, with Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Adam Baldwin all voicing main characters. Also, just to add some perspective here, Halo's been around for 13 years now and there's six of those. (Not counting the RTS.) Admittedly, still a lot, but Call of Duty has seen in the vicinity of two games a year for around eleven years. I find it strange that you would feel that LTTP was a chore, especially if you like Super Metroid. There's so much overlap between those two series. It's certainly a mistake to assume that people are really into those "worlds" for their stories. For the vast majority of players, i would confidently say that Metroid is just a series of cool visuals providing the loosest context for an exploration-based game system. (The Metroid games where Nintendo decided that they really needed to tell a story? Those are widely regarded as the worst ones.) Zelda is the same, i feel. It's all tonal context for the player's adventure, it's not really about whatever the game's actual narrative is.

I have to imagine it's something they'll eventually get around to doing, there's been plausible and consistent rumors around a Halo 3 port for years, but Microsoft has plenty of reasons to continue holding off on it for now, and will probably use it as a way to coerce people into adopting something dumb when they finally do it.

I kinda like Blighttown.

I think the power drain hacking causes on weapons is just too damn harsh.

The score for ODST is almost definitely my favorite work of Marty's: I also love from Reach, which plays during... You know, and for good measure, how about of the series' main theme.

I had a beautiful run going on normal, just about flawless. Then the flagship hits my weapons room with a hacking drone, and the timing works out that it manages to cleanly alternate between cloaking and hacking my weapons. Okay, okay... It takes 3 jumps for it destroy home base, so i jump away and jump back, whereupon it immediately hacks my weapons room again. I think hacking might be over-powered.