Pepyri

So, I know we all get kinda tense in the final bits of a game- aka, once the Offworld Trading really begins. What's funny though, is that while those give an initial edge, it dies out quickly because it only gets you really halfway through someone's stock pool. In general, other players have a good 2-5 minutes to 'catch up' before the game is pretty-well sealed. The biggest trick is to get involved in trading stocks earlier and earlier. I still don't have a solution to debt. I let it skyrocket, and eventually my worth is so huge my debt can't touch me. But this is only on Employee difficulty. I'd like to make it all the way to CEO and see what the 'real' game is. Gah I love this thing too much. I'd say the one thing I really want, is a way to operate outside the "claims" structure- claims quickly become the standard de-jour, and as a result whatever your expansion is effectively determines how you must play, since if you can't expand you can't do jack. The only alternative to this, is going food/fuel/oxygen route, with glass as a 'backup' resource(hoping for low silicon prices). If it was possible to invest heavily(say, 2x the base resource costs) to upgrade a node to 2x efficiency, it could provide ways to operate outside the claim economy. Unless there's some sort of game design reason for keeping everything to claims. Also: BE CAREFUL OF WHAT PATENTS YOU BUY. I got Cold Fusion, and it nearly wrecked my game because I had to use it, and can't turn it off once you get it(makes it so water is your power source instead of Electricity).

This game's tutorials are ridiculously hard near the end. Scientific is harder than some multiplayer games.

Picked this up tonight from watching Day9 play. I'm still awful but hot damn is this an impressively fun game. Even the tutorials are nerve-wracking.

From the start I've been spending the majority of my time with the Insect Glaive, but I can't quite tell if I enjoy it or not. I genuinely dislike the setup phase. It feels haphazard, how my bug rarely actually goes to the color I want. And in a game as exact as this, that feels crappy. I've been contemplating switching to Longsword, as I got a Rusted one cleaned up and it has even higher damage than my Glaive I upgraded. Thoughts?

Is moving out of the question? I just ask because that's what I had to do when I was in a super similar situation. Ended up working out really well, though I certainly had a manual labor job afterward, but I think there were others too. It doesn't have to be forever, after all, just until you can find something better. But I totally understand if it's not possible/too difficult.

total shitpost incoming, I am so sorry So, I think at this point it's hard to not acknowledge that I have overall-health related depression. IE, because I can't get myself healthy it makes my mood for everything in my life fucking awful. I managed to lose 20 pounds, then gained it back in a week because of a mixture of forgetfulness and bad planning. While my overall confidence in myself is high, my mood and ability to convey my emotions seems to be getting worse- to the point that I effectively have whittled down my friends. All of this a few months after a shitty workplace gets rid of me because of an anxiety disorder that for some reason just shows up suddenly at 26. Yes, I've never, ever, had anxiety issues before. It just appeared, after years of not having it. Then you've got Valentine's ruining my mood further, literally everyone I know hooking up with each other, a close friend going way too far and abusing me sexually/emotionally for her power trip, and basically I'm falling apart. The one thing on my side, is that I'm not suicidal. I suppose that once I figured out how to get out of my 14 year hole of wanting to off myself and trying way too many times, that I must've done it for good. So that's something. Sorry. Back to your thread, I just wanted to say this where people might read it.

I've used the Insect Glaive exclusively so far, so I figure I can post a simple writeup about it: The Insect Glaive effectively introduces the idea of two phases to any fight: A ranged, buff-up phase, and a melee murder-everything-you-can phase. In the ranged phase, you can use the R button to aim where you want to shoot a little pod at a monster to tell your Kinsect where to go when you deploy it(with R+X). The color of the cloud that comes off of the spot where you shoot it, changes what 'essence' the Kinsect will find when it gets there- Red for Damage, Orange for Defense, and White for Movement/Stamina. On small monsters, you only have access to one of these colors per monster, but on big ones, different parts of their body grant each color- Red comes from the head, white from the legs, and orange from the body. Once your Kinsect has collected one, you can recall it with R+A. Thing is, you can even deploy your Kinsect multiple times. This lets you get the effects of multiple essences- but also, it lets you extend the duration and double the power of Red/Orange essences when you combine them with a White Essence. If you manage to get all 3, it'll even grant 50% more on top of each effect, and this can completely change how you stack up against a monster. I highly recommend always having at least a Red+White combo going. If it falls off, bring it back. The damage difference is huge- 20%(Red+White)-25%(Red+White+Orange), and upgrades your strikes, to make them hit more times per swing- so much more, that you effectively are doubling your damage output with Red+White alone. In melee phase, you hit the damn thing. Without Red+White, it's got speed and power comparable to a Longsword at level 1(ie, pretty okay). With it, it has the power of a Longsword at Level 3, with speed just below that of double daggers. It's brutal. Your unsheath-attack is effectively your moving A attack, or your moving 'heavy' attack. This can effectively be doubled up by simply hitting it again(this works for all versions of moving A attack). Your X attack combo starts with a forward thrust, but after that is basically a hit-everything-around-you combo. The ultra-special feature of the Insect Glaive, is the vault- by holding R and hitting B with the weapon unsheathed, you'll vault yourself up into the air, so you can mount, air-strike(X), or shoot the top of your foe(A). It's pretty wicked. Overall, I love the weapon. Apparently it's pretty OP- I wouldn't know, I haven't tried anything else and it's been over a year since I played Monster Hunter 3. But it feels good, varied, and like you can be pretty powerful with it in the right hands.

Penalty for failing to complete: Mostly reputation. If there's something else I haven't noticed. Bounty Hunting scanner: Significantly increases how much money you'll make from bounties. By 10-50% or more. Flying without assist: Once you feel like you're very, VERY good at killing people, start practicing. Not before then. It's only useful insofar as hitting the pinnacle of flying skill.

I think they're primarily marketing this to hardcore indie types, as to be honest I'm not entirely sure very many would be eager about this sight unseen(even though they should!). They know what it is and that the idea of controlling a robot with it probably implies a very different game from what they're used to.

I super recommend it. If this had come out in 2014 it would've definitely been a top 10 of the year for me, it's special, has more charm than everything but Necrodancer from 2014 put together, and is the most innocent thing I've ever played. It nearly makes Mario feel violent in opposition.

I'm just really disappointed in the support for this game right now. There's an absolutely huge, full-hard-lock-computer-crashing bug that affects a lot of people, and Frontier's complete lack of communication is just aggrivating. It's bad enough that I'm seriously considering asking for a refund, because I'm just not getting any support whatsoever and I've done everything under the sun to fix a problem that is only in their game.

I use Overcast and even pay for it, but honestly after doing so I still think you get a better experience from Downcast for free. The UI isn't as slick, but it's got all the features you could want(with the most important being streaming) and feels 90% as good as Overcast. I kept thinking there had to be something about Overcast I was missing, but at this point I'm pretty well convinced most of those who advocate for it so strongly just haven't given Downcast a try.

What do you guys enjoy about Kill Screen? Generally when I've read it in the past, I've felt like I came away worse informed than I went in, confused, and annoyed by writing that seems to define pretentiousness. I tried really hard, because I'd heard such good things, but it felt like someone reaching for quality while being mangled in a mulcher. Edit: I apologize, it's fairly off topic to the actual core of the thread.

Yeah. But I wasn't meaning to derail, just explaining a bit further into the police militarization.

For what it's worth, most military surplus items local police departments are getting are free from the DLA Disposition Services department, under the 1033 Program. Frankly, most police departments nationwide are not doing so well financially. And as much as cybercrime and harassment is an issue, when you have a nationwide issue(and especially in cities) of not even being able to keep the guys you catch doing serious crimes(since drug crimes take priority over anything short of murder, if your prison is full you release car thiefs/etc), it's not hard to understand why most don't put it high up enough on their radar to deal with the problem in a worthwhile way. Edit: This isn't me saying harassment and threats aren't serious crimes, but the amount of resources you need to pour into figuring out who actually owns an anonymous twitter account is huge, and that's if the person running it is a complete idiot and doesn't know how to hide their tracks. Even with some more basic means of obfuscation, you'd have effectively no hope of catching the person. While on the other hand, you have the guy who was sitting in a car that has been hotwired, who has been convicted of car theft in the past and the vehicle is not registered to, literally in your jail but you release him anyway.

I'm pretty dang capitalist but I always find it funny how people take personal offense to the idea that capitalism has some negative aspects. I mean criminy of course it does, they all do, it's a question of if they're acceptable and how to curb those aspects as much as possible. The amount of philosophical enshrining that happens with these people really sends me for a loop.

I just find TB to be hilariously hypocritical. He was fairly well known back when DotA 2 was in beta for calling the entire community horrible trashy individuals and in general taking the piss out of them for how hostile some were ingame. Now he crusades for gamers because "only some of us are harassing women". Then you combine that with how he tries to act like one of the "upper tier of intelligence" folks in the industry, while embracing every anti-intellectual stance he possibly can in regards to characterization and storytelling. The guy is a joke, a stain upon an industry covered in ketchup. The one credit I can give the man is his WTF videos aren't awful, and tend to cover exactly what I'm looking for when it comes from gameplay videos and explanations. He's also one of the few journalists who understand the future of the critical industry is personality, which is a sad thing to say(that he's one of the few, that is).

I really feel this is going too far. Even as I find their user experience to be terrible, and the overall design to be not only nonsensical but in conflict with their values as a site, I still have to recognize that there is quite a lot they've done in the past year or two that are easily worth a damn. Not to mention, they were practically the only site to recognize just how amazing the last Fire Emblem game was. Everyone else seemed to say "Oh yeah it's good" and just pass it off, when honestly it's one of the best games of the last 5 years or better. They understand how to provide scope through multiple articles than most sites do.

Polygon definitely has a design that isn't great for checking news quickly, but I enjoy reading their articles more than really anywhere else on the web. Even Vox, a site that uses a very similar structure, doesn't feel quite as 'right' for the natural reading experience. But it's also pretty terrible for headlines, or following certain games.

I guess my problem is, I feel like the site has very little personality. I don't know who works there, other than Stephen, Patricia, and Klepek(Checking now, I see Kirk is still there. neat!). The layout and style of the content makes it difficult to tell instantly who is writing something, and as to that thing of having writers stay with certain games, they don't exactly make it easy to filter down to the games/personalities I want most. And, frankly, trying to put personality out there via any means that doesn't include someone's voice immediately diminishes it by large factors. Edit: Frankly, the entire design of Kotaku should probably be taken out back and shot: Yeah, I sure need those ads for sites-I'm-not-on, and your "Discover More" hamburger menu should definitely have a big Powered by Kinja at the top, and then a bunch of links to blogs with literally no information about them at all. Polygon's been around for what, 2 years now? The design on Kotaku is the kind of stuff a developer makes out of bootstrap in half a morning in the first week of development.

Yeah, I've gotta admit, I'm a bit disappointed by it too. Kotaku in 2013 and before was fairly consistently releasing things where I really boggled at the range in quality, and up until their Fire Emblem: Awakening review, I felt like their reviews always left me puzzled- sure, they told you what to do in the review itself, but the actual text of the review did an awful job of saying why, which if you're gonna get rid of scores(as one should), you really need to get the text right. Furthermore, it removes his personality in a way I'm not a fan of. I understand not wanting to do the everyday podcast thing, but I suppose as a fan of him personally it's disappointing. Then again, there's a few people at Kotaku I'd love to hear on a podcast, but they're also too spread out for it to be a good time, to me. I guess I've gotten used to the Idle Thumbs/GB style of needing to be in the same room. I dunno, it feels really puzzling in a lot of ways. Kotaku is great but I honestly have trouble with this purely on the merit that even for as much as I horrifically disagree with nearly every remaining member of GB, they're one of the few outlets where I feel like they really get the new way of media- that personality wins above all else, because it's what lets you write what you want.

see I can't tell if you guys like my post or not and I'm not gonna make a joke about Steve

Isn't that what Bjorn just said

If we keep it up at this rate 2016 will both be the year and number of official Thumbs

Multiplayer changes some things, but mostly it just makes space feel less lonely because you see other CMDRs running around. Sometimes you can shoot them, but it isn't common. So, I decided to get involved in the big civil war. There's more ships there than even that radar implies. Those bright lines out there? Laser and tracer fire. It's a bloody, ugly war, started by players. To get a civil war started, you take a region that is close to equal in terms of influence, then you sell as many weapons as you can to them, and add in killing people for whatever side you believe in. Pretty soon, you've got 2-6 conflict zones happening all over the system, and real value in focusing your efforts in a local area. I also got to find out how hard it is to fly without your cockpit's front glass- ie, without the front core of your HUD: Stopping is hard enough when you can see what you're aiming for. Trusting nothing but your compass, relative speed and distance meters and praying you nail the timing on hopping out of your jump is even harder.