Gormongous

Consciously or not, I think it's part of the age-old "geek hierarchy" wherein people are drawn to using "lesser" mediums to conceptualize the less desirable aspects of their own preferred mediums. Art-film enthusiasts complain when an art film is too Hollywood, blockbuster enthusiasts complain when a movie is too video gamey, gaming enthusiasts complain when a video game is too anime, anime enthusiasts complain when an anime is too cartoony, and so on. It's a natural consequence of geek-adjacent communities defining themselves by how their favorite works are different from the rest, but it does lead to instances of accidental elitism all the time, which is too bad.

Nah, anime's all cartoonish bullshit with no sense of grounding or tone. Anime, as a genre and a medium, is suitable for describing works from other genres and mediums that are shallow, overwrought, or otherwise immature in their execution. I kid because I love (anime).

Actually, it's the first Progresscast when the "And I'm Nick Breckon" meme really got cemented, at least as far as I can tell. At the beginning of that cast, Sean says "And I'm Nick Breckon," and then at the end, Sean, Jake, and Chris all say it at least twenty times, over and over. If anything, Nick was responding to that with his own F. Nick Breckon Transmission 87. Also, I'm sure this gets asked a lot, but is there a possibility that the Progresscasts could be released and hosted somewhere that's not the Kickstarter page? I don't think anyone cares about keeping them exclusive, four years out.

The moment where it really clicked was last night, when I got to Shambhala and was faced with a boss battle for which I was completely overmatched... until I realized that I could make the boss scared and then most of his attacks would miss. There's a really great progression of "use whatever attack fits the mood" > "change the mood to fit your party's strongest attacks" > "use the mood change itself to debuff the enemy and buff your party" as you learn the game. Opening up Friendly, waiting for the enemy to go Friendly as well, and then turning Aggressive to take advantage of the boost to attack is always satisfying. Ten hours in, I'm still finding wrinkles, which makes me feel optimistic that the one weakness in the design (physical attacks are much weaker than speech attacks unless used to counter an overly Friendly enemy) is probably just a sign of my inexperience.

Renowned Explorers is really good, guys. It's got all the charm and tightness of Reus, but without the required twenty- or thirty-hour grind to reach the meat of the game. Every morning since the DLC came out, I've woken up with a quick hour-long campaign, and it's basically been the high point of those days.

Hah! The best emotional arc.

With pride or frustration...?

Yeah, the "sow dissent" action has basically never been viable. It gives a tiny opinion malus by default, with a chance to get a larger malus by event but an equal chance of the vassal's overlord finding out. It's also difficult to target and often chooses barons or mayors over counts and dukes.

I reread Hitchhiker's Guide and Dune yearly from sixth grade to the tenth. They were definitely seminal. I also dressed up for the Return of the King release and got thrown out of the theater lobby for staging a mock swordfight with a friend. Harry Potter I read because my mother was an elementary school librarian at the time and wanted a hot take about whether the books were good (and not satanic). I enjoyed them, but they weren't foundational for me in any way. That said, I enjoy retrospective rereads and rewatches, so I'm on board here, especially if there are sections that look forward to later books and movie adaptations.

Turrican, please don't give people shit for having negative opinions of stuff in this thread, too. Panzeh is clearly familiar with Creative Assembly's games and implicitly compliments Shogun 2, which is the last Total War game that landed for me as well. He's not some troll doing a drive-by.

Pulaski was ostensibly an interesting character, but the writers made the mistake of giving her an aggressive one-sided rivalry with Data, a well-established and well-liked character who had no control over the reasons why Pulaski disliked and mistrusted him. Having a new character berate another, who responds in turn with the guilelessness of a child, is a great formula to make the former hateable. I like Lwaxana, too, but I think that's because I was more familiar with her from DS9 first, where she is a kind and sympathetic character as well as being an over-the-top extrovert.

Yeah, Michelle Forbes was also offered more recurring roles on TNG (and Voyager, apparently) but turned those down, too. She was really afraid of torpedoing her career by being associated too strongly with a long-running "niche" TV series and I think she's said in interviews that that fear was a mistake to act upon, in hindsight.

It doesn't count vassals, allies, or federation members, no.

Armies with agent functionalities! Oh man, that'd be a great reason to have a general lying around whom you can't afford to back with an army yet.

I look forward to a day when Creative Assembly finally removes agent avatars from the campaign map and moves their gameplay functions to a all-in-one UI element. It'll have the dual boon of cleaning up the map visually and encouraging the designers to stop using agents as crutches for wonky settlement and army controls...

I love that it slams anime while being a spiritual sequel to Megaman.

I have a desire to make something for Spector's Oil, but I'm waiting to see if my first one is actually drinkable. EDIT: Okay, I can't resist some guesswork here, either. Tested and drinkable, although I had to substitute a sweet red for creme de cassis. The cinnamon works especially well.

This cocktail is subject to change as I actually make it, rather than modify preexisting recipes on the back of an envelope while at work. EDIT: Tested and drinkable, although I have no idea why I made a cocktail with absinthe when absinthe makes me gag.

One influence a month is somewhat low, but it's not irrevocable at all. The ceiling for bankable income is so low (1000) and there are so many things that are hungry for it in the early game (outposts, capitals, special buildings) that it's pretty easy come and easy go. Once you start putting some of those outposts into sectors, which don't play influence costs (currently thought to be partially a bug and partially a design oversight), the pressure will be off of you and, even if it's not, you can just disband the offending outposts. Once you reach the midgame, most planets will be fully developed and outposts will only be used occasionally to tweak borders with other empires. Ninety percent of my influence, at the endgame, is just paid out to suppressing rebels, which is... eh. One thing I will say about Stellaris, the early game does a great job of making you feel like every little mineral and influence point is dear, even though most economic contests in the game are rarely close-fought things.

Actually, most of those permutations amount to distinction without difference. There are only sixteen AI personalities in the game, twenty if you count those exclusive to Fallen Empires, and everything else is just bonuses and maluses to diplomacy and economy: http://www.stellariswiki.com/Artificial_intelligence You're still getting the inflexible hive mind every game, it's even on that too-short list! It's just that sometimes, that hive mind is made up of pandas now, and that makes it different but also more generic, because there's less impact when anything can be a hive mind. I don't know, I only played one Ironman game to thirty hours and stopped after the Zerg endgame event bugged out, but I was already seeing repeats: meet the new Hegemonic Imperialists, same as the old Hegemonic Imperialists, except these ones are lizards instead of bugs. It's underwhelming, the Brownian motion of design-through-randomization.

Jacobin has been publishing some good stuff lately: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/hillary-clinton-dnc-bernie-sanders-lenin-democracy/

Turrican, it feels like you're caught up in a fantasy that numerical scores appeal to an objective (or at least shared) reality that descriptive scores do not (and maybe cannot?). The argument that Tom should not be allowed to grade his reaction on a scale from one to five, unless he alloys it with some arbitrary tilt to account for the public's tastes at large, because, despite an easily accessible ratings guide, it might still be conflated with a (nonexistent) numerical metric that is consistent within and between publications is patently ridiculous, most especially because you cop to having no problem with the exact same five-step scale if it used descriptive gradations from "I hated it" to "I loved it." It's really just the fact that it's a number, isn't it, and therefore that it elides some explicit meaning? People who fail to read the text of the review and just look at the number could possibly, in the worst of all worlds, mistake the 1/5 for "bad game" and not "game I didn't like" and...? I don't really see the danger here. If you're trying to protect strategy gamers from poor reading comprehension, attacking the time-honored (albeit often unnecessary) use of numerical scores to sum up personal opinions is a strange place to begin. Isn't it just as likely that, if descriptive scores become broadly accepted in games journalism, the same over-hasty person will just read "game I didn't like" as "game I didn't like (because it's a bad game)" and get the same "wrong impression" as a 1/5 supposedly gives? EDIT: I also read the eXplorminate review that you keep referencing and I honestly found it a very weak review, even given the broad range of possibilities in the professional space. It's overwhelmingly a feature list, with occasional interjections about how breadth of options means depth of gameplay. It doesn't even appear that the reviewer reached the endgame, something I did in twenty-odd hours, because he discusses the concept of endgame crises in the purely hypothetical register of "this could be interesting." If this is your gold standard for a good review, Turrican, then I don't think it's possible for us to see eye-to-eye.

That's honestly a little bit disappointing to me. Every Star Trek series that I have loved has come from close familiarity with the individual members of a given crew and their relationships with each other. If it just becomes a sci-fi anthology show set in a shared universe, it caters to the parts of Star Trek that are historically the weakest and have aged the worst.

No one agreed to make one star out of five a nuclear option reserved for broken games. That's all you, man. If one star out of five is reserved only for games that are poorly made or not "quality" in some elusive sense, it is a meaningless score that does not belong on the rating scale. Games that are not enjoyable for the reviewer to play, are seen by them to be needlessly obscure, or fail their explicit or implicit potential in some way are just as deserving of one star as a game that is technically deficient. Really, if it's some kind of slander to give one star to a game that you hated as a gamer and a critic, then I have no hope for the profession of games journalism whatsoever. Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder if anyone should even be engaging you. A negative review of a game that is kinda empty and half-baked and that launched with mid-scale bugs in every gameplay system is a "smear" now? What's wrong with you, why are you taking this so personally? Would you be having the same issue if Tom's review was two stars, or does the score have to be in the positive end of the spectrum at three or better (you know, the score he gave to CK2 that got him blackballed by Paradox for being too negative) for the text of his mostly negative review not to be a "smear"?

Tom is very transparent about his scoring system. One star is "I hated it" and he doesn't pretend that it's anything else. His review completely supports that score. However, when someone on that very review said that Stellaris doesn't feel like a 1/5 to him, Tom said: The problem we have here is that you have, independently, decided that numbers like 1/5 and 6.3/10 have a meaning beyond "I hated it" and "Okay," through an impressionistic digestion of years of strategy game reviews, and your concern appears to be that people will interpret those numbers as you have chosen to interpret them, rather than how they are explicitly interpreted in the site's documentation. The solution, apparently, is for Tom and Rowan to misrepresent their own opinions in such a way as to avoid any ambiguity between how they feel about it and how other people might feel about it. As paradi6m says, this is insane. Disliking a game, any game, is not a "nonsensical position" unless you think it's impossible for one person to dislike what someone else likes. I feel a little bit like I'm reading Orwellian Newspeak here. Tom complains that the system of randomization for creating alien races produces arbitrary and interchangeable outcomes. Instead, he references the alien races of previous space 4X games for having set traits, many of them asymmetrical in gameplay, that make them distinctive. Your argument is that having those set traits ultimately makes them familiar, rather than strange, which I concede, but Stellaris hasn't exactly solved that problem either. I don't know how many games of the latter you've played, but let me tell you: I would rather have the pre-baked "weirdness" of the Klackons than have the militant spiritualists be parrots in one game and sloths in the next. Because there are a limited number of combinations that produce an even more limited number of personalities, all of which are shared with the player, it still becomes familiar over multiple playthroughs and you still cease to see the races themselves in place of their specific combination of ethics. For me, it has the additional downside of weakening first contact when I encounter an empire of fungi who love me because we believe exactly the same things. As for your other question, I'd recommend the scramblers from Peter Watts' Blindsight, the T'ca and Knnn from C.J. Cherryh's Chanur novels, the Presger from Ann Leckie's Ancillary novels, the titular character from John Carpenter's The Thing, and the Weavers from China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. That's off the top of my head, if I were to hit up TV Tropes' "Starfish Aliens" page, I could probably do even better. Even if some of these depictions have small traces of human thought processes, courtesy of being written by human beings, all of them share a fundamental and (ah) inalienable strangeness that makes Stellaris' "rubber forehead" aliens, after Star Trek, something of a letdown.