Dewar

I tried Reinhardt once, but it's probably worth another shot. I'll definitely take a look at that list tonight and see if I do any better with them. The heroes that I've put a reasonable amount of time into are: Mercy: By far the one I'm the best at, and I actually really enjoy playing as her, but it would be nice to not have to play it every time Tracer: Surprisingly, maybe the one I'm best at besides mercy. Spread shot with the SMGs means that accuracy isn't as important as some other characters, and I'm pretty good at flitting around and staying alive. Not really that effective at killing though Pharah: Another one I enjoy, rockets are a bit easier to hit with and it's easy to jump away and stay alive, but I don't really do a ton of damage. Even in one miracle match where I had 32/38 direct hits, I had 5 kills Roadhog: I'm pretty decent with the hook, but I die so incredibly fast before I get more than a couple of shotgun shots off. I feel like everyone else lives forever as Roadhog, but I feel so fragile. Winston: I really like the gun since it doesn't require much aim, but I can't ever land the jump right and once again I die so fast Hanzo: I can't hit much with the bow besides by accident, and despite seeing multiple team kills with the dragon in one match, I can't seem to do much useful with that either.

My experience so far has been that it's fun to play with friends, but playing with randoms I've been running into a wall of people that are a ton more skilled than I. Not sure if matchmaking will begin to even out and make more fair matches, or if Blizzard are even implementing an MMR type system at all.

I found out that I indeed cannot aim in this game, nor can I get good positioning for any of the close range heroes to be effective with them, but healing with Mercy and the ability to switch between healing and damage boost makes the old TF2 Medic formula much better. Edit: I don't understand how anyone hits anything in this game. I see replays and people are hitting like 75 percent of their shots and I'm lucky if I get to 20%

Leftover chicken sandwich from Dairy Queen

The last stalwarts in my usual group of friends crumbled and bought it, so I decided to purchase and download it overnight. I figure $40 for the PC version isn't bad, and I've spent far more on things that I've gotten next-to-no use of in the past. We'll see how it goes tonight.

interesting, I guess I took another path for that event, because.. I got that same bit of text when I attacked one of the federations. It was much less entertaining to me since they had attacked me three times prior. You know why...

As much as I love being an early adopter, I'm beginning to think that I'm lucky that that the Oculus price was too high for me.

That's not an endgame event. it's just a random event chain. You will continue to get messages about it as time goes on.

A completed colony will have a longer border range than a frontier outpost, so it's generally a good strategy to build frontier outposts, then colonize, then remove the outposts. Unfortunately, there's no way to preview that I know of. There are technologies that give you monthly influence (and also border expansion,) the top level capital gives you an influence, having rivals gives you more, and allies less.

I have a 1:10 commute each way, I've taken to listening for about 15 minutes before bed and in the morning, and I also get some time to listen to podcasts at work. All told, i manage to eat through about 20 hours of podcast a week.

Even though I know that most of my friends group is going to be playing nothing but this for the next couple of weeks, I've managed to hold firm and not purchase it. At this point, having played none of the beta, I'd be way behind already, I never liked TF2, and my skill at shooters has really decreased in the last couple of years. Sure does look pretty though.

Fallen Empires should only attack you if you do something specific to anger them. You can see the specific triggers at http://www.stellariswiki.com/Fallen_empire This weekend I beat the end-game disaster I mentioned in an earlier spoiler, and it just winked out with a whimper. I expected at least a page of flavor text and a cheer or something? Not only that but the rest of the galaxy didn't seem to give a crap that a galaxy ending disaster was going on, I got attacked twice during the event. At this point, I think I'm done. I saw and beat an end-game event, and taking over 40% of the habitable planets in the galaxy seems like a huge grind-fest.

The Starbreeze VR thing was announced last year with very little details. This is the first I've heard of it since, so it's likely that you know as much as anyone from the press release you've seen.

After playing though Dark Souls with a shield on one arm and a catalyst/rapier on the other the entire time, I decided to play through Dark Souls 2 shieldless. I settled on a miracle/dual wield build and had a blast. Playing through a second time with the remastered version, I've been going shield and lance, which was serving me well right up until the bosses of the DLC areas. Dark Souls 3 I've just been running catalyst in one hand and rapier in the other the entire time, with three different rapiers depending on enemy weakness. Boy that's tough, especially for when you run into folks with heavy armor.

I definitely wouldn't say they first season ends disappointingly, but it does end depressingly. That's not really a bad thing, a lot of the best movies end on a down note as well. It impacted me more than I thought it would, which I'd say is a testament to how good it really is.

I found DS3 to be the hardest souls game I have played (I don't have a PS4 to play Bloodborne.) I played them in the order of Dark Souls, Demon Souls, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, and I've used multiple different builds at different times. I found the bosses in DS3 to be a lot more mobile, and in a lot smaller spaces, making it pretty hard to play a primarily magic character. Also, that very first boss is a beast if you pick deprived. Edit: I should mention that I'm still only about 1/2 way through the DS2 DLC, and those areas have been pretty hard as well. I'm using a pretty unconventional build though.

So I loaded back into the game where I had just beaten that federation, and they were immediately able to declare war on me again. I'm not sure if it's because the leadership had changed hands, if truce timers don't count if the looser wants to go another round, or just a weird save/load glitch. This time, I was a bit more prepared, so it didn't take hours to smack them down. Then, my best (and only at this point) friends suddenly went -100 for threat and started a war against me yelling about my aggression. Keep in mind I've only ever started one war, all the rest of these have been defensive. Anyway, they were much smaller than the other federation and it was a bit silly that they even tried to attack. End game spoilers

Wow, just finished Season 1 of Friends at the Table

Thanks for that link, it's the first review I've seen that actually goes somewhat in depth on the map mechanics. I really enjoyed the strategic layer for Empires: Total War, at least until I found out that the CPU was unable to disembark soldiers from fleets which made me completely unbeatable due to the fact that I'd started as an island country. And then it took them like three months to fix it. It sounds like rather than work harder at that bit, they're just pivoting away from it

Oh, that's nice. I think the last one I played was Black so maybe they've fixed a lot in the interim I guess. The experience I had when moving through my history with pokemon (Blue, FireRed, Pearl, Black) was a lot of additional systems bolted on such as the dress-up game and more story with rivals and friends, rather than any really new mechanics. A lot has probably happened since then.

I mean the reviews, YouTube videos, Twitch streamers, and such are showing the tactical combats with army lines and cannons and goblins who fly through the air. I really want to know how the greater map strategy works. The stuff that sets up the combat has always been more interesting that the combats themselves to me.

I played through the Hitman DLC last night so I can watch those videos.

Right, but all of that doesn't get you much unless you breed a level 1 Pokemon, and then fight level 1 enemies with the right EVs until you max out the ones you want.

Hmm, it's clear from the previews and reviews that the things that I like about Total War (the strategy bits) are not a priority for most folks.

I was talking to my wife and what I said to her is that it feels like the game is missing a middle level of complexity. If you want to just kinda understand types and grab the pokemon that look the coolest and level them up, the game has that in spades and is very beatable that way. If you want to really get into the nitty-gritty and breed your own with all the perfect AVs to make them absolute fighting machines (or all shinies) you can do that. But there's no middle ground between them. I don't want to spend the time required to do the EV thing, but I also don't find the surface level tactics all that satisfying either. I want a deeper level of mechanics I can intuit without a 300 page guide.