Gormongous

It must be nice to be sure that someone's opinion isn't worth considering, no matter how articulate or reasonable they are, because they don't like what you like. Saves you a lot of thought, I bet. Me, personally, I like a reviewer who isn't afraid to err on the side of scoring "too low," whatever that really means. So many reviewers seem as though they're afraid to be the music exec who told the Beatles to get a haircut, especially after many of them failed to get in on the ground floor of CK2's popularity, so we're seeing grade inflation that puts Harvard to shame. I am not interested in reading a review that attempts to attach a number to Stellaris' ambition and potential, substantial though they both are. I am interested in reading a review that asks why a game about exploration and discovery builds "alien" races out of precisely the same ideological building blocks as humanity. Good on Tom Chick for doing the latter. I don't dislike the game like he does (although that's subject to change the more I have to use sectors) but I cannot dispute his reasons, well documented, for feeling the way he does. Of course, Paradox is happy to dispute his reasons. Tom was blackballed on Paradox titles after giving CK2 three stars out of five and he has been informed that he only received review code for Stellaris in error. So much for Paradox's magnanimity with Rowan, eh?

AnimeNewsNetwork published a short interview with Sadamoto Yoshiyuki, a character designer who's been with GAINAX since the beginning. He talks about Evangelion, FLCL, and the sequel to Royal Space Force: Honneamise that he's doing with Yamaga. A lot of the comments are saddened by how tired and uninterested Sadamoto sounds (burnt out on Eva, dismissive of the new FLCL, etc) but I love the apparent honesty of someone who's not beholden by a corporation or an audience to be unfailingly positive about the industry. I am reasonably sure that this is what Sadamoto is actually thinking and that's cool to me.

Thankfully, a few patches ago, they changed it so that assigning a church or town holding to a character didn't automatically transform them into a priest or mayor, so there's even a little leeway there, although you'd never want to do it on purpose.

Well, Rowan's review is not the lowest Metacritic-listed review anymore! Tom Chick gave it one star out of five.

Yeah, I got to that point later. I'm still somewhat skeptical, but this is the best that I can find: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkSouls2/comments/23x6je/stuck_blocking_w_360_controller_on_pc/ Apparently, Dark Souls on the PC has a key that toggles block? Eesh.

Highlights from the @GamesMemes twitter account: https://twitter.com/GamesMemes/status/732441269809614848 https://twitter.com/GamesMemes/status/732442074524594177 https://twitter.com/GamesMemes/status/732443119602503680 https://twitter.com/GamesMemes/status/732453674484674560 The JoJo music clinches it.

I am seven minutes into the latest stream and Nick is killing me (and himself) with how much he keeps his shield up. While running!

Yeah, wasted Estus is really a drain in the close-fought fights. I'm not sure I could have beat the Dancer if I didn't have my Estus ring and the greater headroom offered by being embered.

Well, yes, but you certainly don't need to ask the pope's permission. Generally, titles that you give to vassals will stay with those vassals for the foreseeable future, unless you're willing to flirt with civil war to get them back. If you want to place some lands in someone's hands temporarily, you put it in the hand of a son who's set to inherit from you or (barring that) an old man with no children or other family. It is also generally easier to expand your demesne through conquest than through reclaiming vassal titles, at least until you're surrounded by large, consolidated powers on all sides.

You were using the wrong button to revoke vassal titles. Using the "claim" button under the title screen asks the pope for an automatic strong claim to the title in question, which he virtually never gives unless you personally put him on the Seat of St. Peter. What you want is to revoke those titles under the diplo screen for the vassal in question, which incurs an influence hit but certainly doesn't involve anyone beyond you and the vassal.

Honestly, reading through the old Developer Diaries now that I've played the game, it seems like Stellaris team suffered from a lot of "not invented here" syndrome. They tore out a lot of the automation and information in the Clausewitz engine from EU4 and CK2 because they had ambitions of designing a Paradox game that didn't need map modes or a ledger, so they removed those functions entirely (and many other basic ones that came from years of player feedback with other games) to keep them from being crutches to design. Unfortunately, that kind of aspirational design typically has big gaping blindspots, which Stellaris is definitely full of. Also, the Clausewitz engine can't handle seamless zoom, which I understand, but what I don't understand is why zooming out past the maximum in system view doesn't take you to galaxy view and vice versa. That's really basic usability that Paradox needs to get better at catching without the help of prominent streamers and fans pointing out.

At least with Crusader Kings 2, Paradox preserves popular old patches as beta forks on Steam (1.111, 2.0.4, 2.1.6, 2.2.1, 2.3.6, and 2.4.5)... Checking now, it appears that they do the same with EU4! The final patch prior to every major piece of DLC is available as a beta fork.

Well, observation posts being included in sector management is confirmed to be a bug. Sector AI not following the "preserve tile" and "respect tile bonus" options has not been confirmed as a bug. Civilian ships built by a sector spaceport not being listed in the outliner and automatically returning to the sector has also not been confirmed as a bug. Not a bug but, as far as I can tell, the only advantage of a forming a federation, besides the achievement, is if you're behind in tech and manpower and want access to the federation shared-tech fleet; otherwise, it's identical to an alliance except only the current three-year president can declare war—even bonuses and penalties for joining and leaving alliances and federations are the same! I've begun to feel that this game needed another month of testing, at the very least, and that Stellaris is currently the most paint-the-map style of game that Paradox has ever made. On the plus side, someone mapped the tech tree! It's a lot flatter than I imagined, with less interdependencies between related techs, but lots of neat ethics prerequisites and more than a few techs that have scientist-focus prerequisites, too. Yes. By agreeing to a war that one of your allies is declaring, you are basically saying in advance that you are fine with whatever they decide, even if it involves giving away all of your lands if the other side wishes, should your alliance lose. There's no way to preview what war goals an empire might choose in a given conflict, no way to alter war goals once the conflict is underway, and no way to choose any peace options when ending a war besides all, some, or none of one or the other side's predetermined war goals. There's not even a system in place for exiting an alliance mid-war or making a separate peace! It's a very stiff and fragile system, especially since the only war goals that currently exist are cede world, liberate world, and make vassal. I understand that Paradox will probably build out the options (like they did at certain points in Crusader Kings 2's post-release development) but it's a very spare list for a game that's supposedly been a fixture of office multiplayer sessions for months. Where are the war goals to dismantle stations, to force ethoi, to change governments, to deport alien pops? I guess we've learned that Paradox employees like to fight and conquer each other and don't pay much attention at all to internal empire management? Maybe they should get other people to test their games, in that case...

I feel like at least every major content DLC has a feature or two not included in the patched version of the base game that'll really gall a player who's learning. Trade leagues, protectorates, religious leagues, and cardinal automation are all DLC-only features that are desperately needed to play the base game. In general, EU4 is worse than CK2 at sectioning off optional features, maybe because the base game lets you play as all cultures and governments, so there's not as much of a drive to section off culture- and government-specific features into DLC.

War goals are set after the vote, you can check them by clicking on the war's button at the bottom right.

When you go to war as an alliance, the two initiating parties (attacker and defender) set the wargoals for the entire alliance that cannot be changed, only fulfilled in part. It can lead to some very peculiar situations and I definitely wasn't thrilled when the Telcor went to war against a smaller neighbor, lost handily before my fleets could get there, and released a bunch of my systems to form a new empire as a condition of their surrender, with their holdings completely intact. I know that Paradox has been looking for ways to force members of an alliance to fight together, but letting the myopic and often inept AI give away the player's stuff doesn't feel like the answer. Speaking of odd decisions, I'm currently fighting a war as one hyperdrive-using federation against another. I have conquered the entire empire adjoining my own, but all the lanes to the rest of the federation are blocked by a nonaligned member that hates both sides and won't grant military access to either of us. I've been sitting here, stuck at 19% warscore, for almost an hour now even though I've won every battle and held all my wargoals, because apparently Paradox did away with ticking warscore. The only way I see through this fix is to attack the third party, simply to gain access, and white-peace out before it gets too bad. It's not great. Also, one more odd thing: you can't genetically modify alien citizens of your empire who originate from other empires unless you have a path of civilian access to their homeworld, a limitation that is not exposed to the player until they reach the last stage of that process. I have seven pops from a neighboring empire, quite hostile to me, and I can't modify them because I'll never get access to their place of origin. It seems like a very odd limitation, possibly even a bug...

I had the exact same issue and the exact same thought, although it was my war with the Fallen Empire that forced me to dig around in the interface and find the option. That's the downside of the tech system, it's hard to know if you're missing something in the interface or if you just haven't gotten the tech yet.

I'm entering the late game right now (it's the year 2360) and I have two big reactions to this game as an overall experience. All of my best in-game stories have come from the uplifting, observation, and genetic modification systems, to the point that I wish the game i) presented these systems more prominently in the interface and ii) had more gameplay systems that were reactive to them. Uplifting a race of beetle-people and discovering that they're ugly, solitary, and slow is one thing, having them slowly migrate throughout your empire and make people miserable on previous prosperous planets is great, genetically engineering them to be less unhappy by removing "undesirable" traits is awesome, but then it stops there. As far as I can tell, there are no penalties for engineering a custom-built population for every planet, except the research cost and the risk of them migrating to sub-optimal planets. More events, is what I'm saying, and more chances for the uplift process to go wrong, beyond just the uplifted species having undesirable traits. Also, would it kill them to leave you access to observation stations in your sectors, like they leave you access to spaceports? The sector AI doesn't do anything with the observation stations on its own, so you have to leave the system unincorporated if you want to infiltrate or uplift them. It feels like an ugly kludge and it basically opts me out of interesting content. Fallen Empires are a great idea in theory, if only because they give the galaxy a distinct political geography that's usually missing from space 4X games, but in practice they fall apart rather pathetically as the player nears the end of the mid-game. I fought the Gwelicor Ascendancy, who were militant isolationists, and won not because I had better weapons (I had the missiles IV tech and shields III, mostly on battleships and cruisers) or because I had more ships, but because I could keep producing ships and transports while the Gwelicor, being a Fallen Empire, couldn't. Every ship that I lost I rebuilt, but every ship that they lost was gone forever, which meant that I won a sixty-year war against them by shooting down all their defenseless transports (which they couldn't replace) and then losing roughly 60,000 attack power's worth of ships in a war of attrition. They could destroy my stations but not occupy any planets, so they couldn't actually enforce any of the wargoals necessary to end the conflict that they were "winning." Eventually, I destroyed every ship that they had, landed troops on one of their ringworlds, and they instantly surrendered. I'd put maybe 100,000 minerals of destroyed ships into this conflict, but I'd gotten nearly all of the endgame tech from their debris, maybe fifty years early, and the Gwelicor are just sitting there defenseless, waiting for the truce to end and for me to annex them. It feels really gamey and I don't think that Paradox has thought the feature through. Probably, in the multiplayer games that constitute most of their testing, no one ever decides to fight a sixty-year war of attrition against a Fallen Empire, but it was definitely a natural path that my singleplayer game took.

Yeah, I dumped Daft Souls from my feed a couple of months ago because Twig and N1njaSquirrel pointed out that I was always complaining about Matt Lees, and I realized that I didn't really miss it once I'd skipped a couple of episodes. I don't know that Matt's an asshole, but he is a very annoying and unthoughtful person sometimes. That means he's just not very good as a podcast host for me, even though he's great in pre-scripted reviews on Shut Up & Sit Down and Cool Ghosts. Shit that he does all the time includes: He complains regularly (maybe every third show) that gamers don't appreciate how much work goes into games and how it's really a miracle that games get made at all, then he'll turn around and dismiss a game (or even shut down another co-host who's talking about it) for something incredibly shallow and childish, like its marketing or the kind of people that he imagines play and enjoy it. Street Fighter V was a recent example, bad enough that Matt apologized (and then Quinns told him he shouldn't have apologized, for some reason). He gives absolutely rapturous pre-release evaluations of certain games, which sound great but are mostly conjecture and usually turn out to be partially or entirely wrong. The XCOM 2 preview episode is full of Lees imagining what the best possible version of that game was going to be and, in hindsight, it was an absolutely meaningless exercise born out of hype and woo. A lot of times, even for games of which he's a big fan, he seems to come to the table with no idea why he likes what he likes and he'll stall the conversation for ten or fifteen minutes disagreeing with someone but being unable to explain or back up his own feelings with anything substantive. Often, Quinns or another co-host will have to walk Matt back into an argument that justifies his feelings, even though they personally don't agree with him, just to move the conversation past Matt insisting that a game's "nice" or how people who don't like it "aren't playing it right." The Stardew Valley discussion was a recent example of this, where Matt spent fifteen to twenty minutes absolutely struggling to articulate the difference in feel between Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. He has a tendency to trump himself as a tastemaker and it's tedious to have that recur in the host of an hour-long podcast. Whether or not it's true, I need to hear Matt's story about singlehandedly ensuring the success of Dragon's Dogma in Western markets exactly once, not four times, and I need to hear about how he was one of the earliest proponents of Bloodbourne not at all, especially during a podcast that's supposed to be about Dark Souls 3 and Keza MacDonald's new book. In general, I've also been pruning back the gaming podcasts that I follow. The rule's been pretty clear-cut for me: I don't care to listen to a bunch of journalists or industry figures i) psychoanalyze gamer culture, through discussion of the latest crisis or fad, from their armchairs; or ii) proscribe feelings or behavior in gamer culture, again through discussion of the latest crisis or fad. I'm interested in people talking about how they feel about stuff, not how they feel about how other people (who aren't there and can't explain themselves) feel about stuff, and that's put Isometric, Idle Weekend, and now Daft Souls on the chopping block for me.

By "salted earth" with CK2, I mean that, shortly after the first cycle of DLC for the game was complete, all the parts of the game that were obviously and easily extensible had been extended, so Paradox made the choice to continue releasing DLC by i) broadening the scope of the game and ii) simulating previously abstract systems. I have less to say about the former, except that CK2 just doesn't work at the 769 AD start and it's a shame that people think of it as the "default" start now, but the latter is almost certainly a blind alley up which Paradox chased fun and got lost. In the game's current state, the number of gameplay systems (almost always the pretext for their respective DLCs, rather than the result) that are accessible to large amounts of player agency (insofar as players have agency in CK2) but are i) hidden three or more mouse-clicks away from the main and ii) are largely irrelevant to the normal experience of gameplay are honestly immense. Just off the top of my head, with it being almost a year since I played CK2 with any intensity, there's the trading post/fort system, the new education mechanic, the life-focus system, the College of Cardinals, the tributaries mechanic, the viceroy system... At a certain point, you're just not gaining anything by adding complexity to an existing design. I think, if Paradox had stopped expanding and adding systems after The Old Gods and just released event packs, the state of the game would be virtually the same for the vast majority of players. I have yet to meet anyone, on the internet or in real life, who's played a nomadic or subcontinental lord except that one time after they bought the relevant DLC. That doesn't fill me with confidence that Paradox knows the different between a fully-fleshed game and unconscious aspirations to be a crappy version of Dwarf Fortress in space. We'll have to see, I guess. I also remember the state of EU4 at release and the fan reactions, that's why I brought it up! I'm not surprised that Paradox chose discretion over valor, but I do think that the problem in both cases is that there's just not that much to do to prevent (or to spark) rebellions. With Stellaris, especially, unhappy pops in a sector naturally join factions, but the only factions are separatist factions and, barring an extremely heterodox population, there will never be enough unhappy pops at one time to cause a faction to revolt out of nowhere. If there were options beyond "bribe them to stay quiet," or if certain governors had an amplifying effect to happiness or unhappiness, there'd be a reason for revolts to be more regular (if Paradox ever concedes that some people want to play games with internal politics, multiplayer or not), but I can't really fault them for quashing it as it is. The system's just not where it should be.

Yeah, it was a very odd episode to listen to, although overall enjoyable to hear a lot of diverse opinions about the game. It sometimes seemed like Stellaris was losing at both ends: where it fell short of CK2, it was criticized (even in contexts where EU4 also falls short of CK2) and where it fell short of EU4, it was criticized (even in contexts where CK2 also falls short of EU4). Unrest and rebellion have always been underwhelming in EU4 ("press a button before a number gets too high" eventually became "press a button to lower a number that lets you press a button before a number gets too high," to Paradox's credit) but Stellaris is faulted for not being more like CK2 in that regard, for example. Occasionally, Stellaris was even criticized for falling short of the general expectations of science fiction as a genre of artistic endeavor, like when Rowan gripes that Stellaris doesn't make him care about the technology of his ground troops even though both EU4 and CK2 have always had abysmal "army management" systems (Do you want whitecoats, redcoats, or bluecoats in EU4? That one-pip difference could matter a lot! Do you build barracks or militia training grounds first in your holdings in CK2? Light infantry provides a better cost-to-power ratio but only past a certain threshold!). Without history to act as a glue and a filler, a lot of Paradox's foundational design decisions in their games do feel weaker, but they're still the exact same decisions! I think a lot of criticism, justifiably, is focusing on the fact that Stellaris is a shallow grand-strategy game but a dense space-4X game. Turns out, in a lot of cases, the blending of the two genres is less a chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation and more of a broccoli-and-cottage-cheese situation: tasty, but not instant magic. I think that Paradox's way forward is clearly threefold: add a more robust interface that doesn't hide basic information three screens down out of embarrassment of being a high-complexity game; build out and complicate systems, especially peacetime ones, if war is going to be mostly a late-game concern; and keep adding events and event chains to the game. Knowing Paradox, we'll see a lot of the second, some of the third, and none whatsoever of the first. Hopefully that'll be enough in this case: it was for CK2 until the run of DLC between Rajas and Conclave totally salted the earth there. Oh! Also, Rowan, it's clear from Paradox's Blorg stream that factions used to be much more prone to revolting, but once late-stage multiplayer testing had ramped up, the design team apparently decided that sector revolts were too much of a distraction from wartime maneuvering, as well as too much of a drain on influence and energy, and flattened the chance into the dirt. If I recall, EU4 was the same way, immediately pre- and post-launch. With luck, they'll build something out there, too.

My impressions are good, with some qualifications. I was feeling very sour in the beginning because I failed the first five anomaly encounters, even though all were individually below a 35% change of failure. I know that it's statistically possible, but it felt stiflingly unfair and it was keeping me from encountering the writing like I wanted. Not actually a criticism, just a passing annoyance! I love the feel of progression, the "card game" that is technology captures the feeling of blind research from Alpha Centauri without the ability to lead yourself up dead ends. Very few techs and buildings are just adding percentages to percentages: in the early game, at least, one more production point a month makes all the difference. The ship designer is crap, the "core" system is clumsy, and the meaningless granularity of small/medium/large modules is an utter waste of time. If they wanted to impose that distinction, they should have tied it to the different classes of ships, because right now I take different boxes and put stuff in those boxes but sometimes the stuff changes size when I put it in a box so I have to take it out and put it in a different part of that box. It's fucked and it makes me dread upgrading my ships, which is tragic because the UI workflow for upgrading ships is as good as it gets! The randomly generated alien races are cool, especially how the ethoi combine to create AI personalities, but I made the mistake of choosing a large galaxy (600 stars) with a lot of AI races (17, I think, not including Fallen Empires), so they've all begun to blur together anyway. I'm also at the odd point where I want to build a coalition, maybe even a federation, so my diplomats are going across the galaxy trying to find the enemy of my enemy of my friend of my enemy of my friend and then rivaling them. Next game, maybe eight races and a smaller galaxy, so that I have to deal with the neighbors I have rather than looking for new ones... At certain points, the Clausewitz engine is straining badly trying to adapt its cities and provinces to planets and solar systems. I still haven't gotten past the fact that there are separate screens for galaxy view and solar system view, presented as if they're the same screen with a jump imposed between them. It leads to a lot of UI workflow breaks, like trying to zoom out with the mousewheel and going nowhere or double-clicking on a ship's shortcut in galaxy view and getting dragged into solar system view by it. I understand that you make a game with the engine you have, not the engine you want, but there's a lot of wrestling here that wasn't happening in Crusader Kings 2, maybe even just because galaxy view is treated as a window that you close to go back to the default presentation, solar system view, as opposed to province view being a window on the overmap. Anyway, I played it for nearly twelve hours straight today, so that's the real judgment of quality. I'm going to need to pace myself on this one... I also did a really science-heavy play and was also blocked from early expansion by Crystalline Entities, but I found that once I'd gotten maybe fifteen corvettes with missiles, that was enough to drive off all the space monsters around me so that I could get down to researching the galaxy. An especially important fact is that Crystalline Entities don't heal (although I think that Space Amoebas and Void Clouds do) so you can go a couple rounds of combat, retreat and repair, and then come back with full strength to finish them off.

The first Dark Souls is different. Dark Souls 3 doesn't really have any passivity traps like that. The stream just told Nick to kill Patches because some of them really hate Patches, even though that breaks more than one quest and basically denies Nick a chance to experience a lot of really funny and pleasant moments.

Yeah, and not only plot progress. Nick's instincts have clearly gone a long way towards being trained: rolling forwards, fishing for backstabs, getting a sense of space before running forward... That's been really satisfying, although Nick needs to stop listening to chat when they tell him to kill NPCs. If it talks, don't attack!