Golden Calf

Ya, I got up to about ~375 pop and my desire to keep playing utterly evaporated. Once I had more or less figured out the systems, it didn't really feel like there was anything left. But I'm pretty OK with that - I put in 25 hours for $20, and had a lot of fun watching over my frantic little colony, loving each season change along the way. And I guarantee that, updates or not, I'll end up coming back to play again for a while in a month or two. I'm overall pretty satisfied with the game and, with the exception of the fires, I feel like any wonky behavior on the part of the AI is within reasonable bounds for a group of independent, mostly unmanaged medieval peasants. That quote is gold though lol.

It's narratively-driven, beautifully illustrated anti-virus software.

Designing an airplane is incredibly complicated, and you can be very intelligent and still do a catastrophically bad job. You don't get a pass simply because the task is difficult. Ken Levine was in charge of ~200 people, and his decisions affected their lives in serious ways. Given that he ran a studio with exceptionally high turnover, that there are hints that he was at least partially responsible for a particularly bad working environment, and that he seems to have run the very popular studio into the ground, I think it's entirely fair that he's the target of criticism, even if it is partially speculative. I obviously don't know him, so I have no idea how smart or good a guy he is, but I think there's something particularly gross, given the above info, that he gets to sail out at the end with the same 'visionary creative' status that he may well have earned after the first Bioshock (and before), ESPECIALLY given how the vision and story of Infinite was (for me and many others) such a garbled mess. In his letter about the shutdown, he wrote "To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy" as if he's some font of invaluable insight and should just naturally be keeping his position, giant studio or not. It seems weird that after the failure of the studio, he's the one who is assumed to have value and get to keep his job, rather than being let go and having to find a new job like the rest of the people who poured themselves into the project.

Man fires are horrible.... Do the wells do fucking anything? I put a bunch of them down and a fire still manage to burn down half of my houses.

Einstein's Dreams I think, which is weird because I absolutely hated that book when I read it. Maybe I should give it a second look.

The fact that he, the head of a major developer, was under a lot of stress seems like a pretty poor defense against accusations that he treated employees poorly during development or in the shutdown. I guess I should never criticize any public figure, politician, whatever who happens to have a stressful job? http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

Do you have any builders? They're the only ones that can build buildings. God I laughed so hard at that. Weird, as I was reading your first paragraph, I was going to suggest building a marketplace super early. In my experience, they're super valuable. In the first place, they seem to force equitable distribution or resources to all households within their radius, so I never see people complaining of cold or hunger unless everyone is. It caps out at 12 workers, but I only use 1 or 2 and it works just fine. And second, they end up making trips to get food or tools or clothes more efficient because the people don't have to run to whichever storehouse holds the good they're looking for (which might not be a problem for you if you keep all your storehouses in the center of the homes, but I think that ends up being inefficient for workers dropping of their produce). Anyway, as a general response to several of the last posts, I definitely agree that the game seems to have a pretty steep learning curve at the start before you figure out how to get the basics up and stable. Not sure what to suggest in that department. I think I may have just gotten lucky on my 4th try :\

I was going to add something, but I mostly just wanted to agree along the above lines. As an aside, I find that adding an article and an Italian accent to Danielle's twitter handle (Il Danielleri) makes for a much more sinister member of the Idle Thumbs Cabal. Maybe Jake and Sean glossed over it because they were loath to contradict the ringleader while she was there keeping tabs on their public messaging.

I think you might be trying to set up mines too soon. Their yield seems to be lower than just collecting iron from off the ground, until you've picked up most of it near your starting location. Same with the quarry. I think they're supposed to be mid-late game buildings.... though I could be wrong. I've been clearing all the trees, stone, and iron in a pretty large area around my town until I have ~40 pop at least.

It seems to me that lack of gender parity is even less excusable in fantastical stories because there are no real-world excuses (like no women in combat in WW2) that could even possibly come to bear. Yes, it's a cartoon monkey game, so isn't it that much easier to conjure up some female characters?

that guy took me so fucking long..... he and kalameet took me longer than all of blight town

Ya this happened to me on my third attempt to get a city working. I didn't understand you had to let crop fields lie fallow for a year every couple years to keep them productive, so all of a sudden I was producing almost nothing and most of my ~45 people died. It was winter, and I wasn't going to get crops again for a while, so I set everyone to fish. I guess they weren't that effective because they were starving, and kept interrupting their work to find food or something.... Fishing doesn't seem to produce that much food anyway. In my most recent town, I built 2 docks just for variety, but get most of my food from livestock and agriculture. In all but my most recent city, things seemed to be going well for a while, and then one problem popped up, like a fire, or a food or tool or firewood shortage, and then there was a rapid cascade of failures as I attempted to remedy the first one. It seems that you have to get a REALLY solid footing before trying to grow your population at all, or risk everything going to shit rapidly. I've definitely had to adjust to the game's expectations with this one.

I've been really enjoying the game so far. I find that even on medium, the game is pushing back against me in satisfying ways. I wanted to highlight an interesting comparison between it and SimCity (2013) - I remember Chris talking about permanence on episode 99: I think that by focusing on such small communities, the game is scoped perfectly to deliver that sense of weight and history. Because there are so few actors (you start with five families on Medium difficulty), the game can meaningfully model each person, in a way that SimCity wanted to but never could. In my first city, things were going decently well - I was beginning to trade for livestock and had achieved relative stability - when a fire broke out that I wasn't prepared for. It proceeded to destroy half of my houses in late Autumn. To keep the newly homeless from freezing to death, I frantically set almost all of my people to work on rebuilding, a process which took longer than I anticipated. Meantime, my farms lie fallow and my fishing docks sit unmanned. By the time the townsfolk settled back into their old jobs, eighty percent had starved. I limped along for a little while, but food production had slowed to such a trickle that most of the rest soon followed. In the end, I was left with a 67 year old male fisherman, and a 32 year old male shepherd. Convinced I was unlikely to be rescued by a fleet of Nissan Leaves, I consigned them to their fate and began anew. Anyway, I highly recommend the game so far.

It's too bad that there's no way to import steam friends en masse.

This seems like a really weak argument to me. If bad gender representations are a problem, then they're a problem whether or not the writers cared to subvert them (in the same way that racist characterizations are a problem whether or not a writer makes subverting racism a priority). I think the phrasings 'subvert' and 'trying to be more' reveal an assumption that bad gender representations are just to be expected, that interesting or complicated female characters are a special treat we get every once in a while if we're lucky. I'm just not able to give writers a pass on this any more. I still definitely think Brothers had merits, but this did bother me (and others apparently). edit: woah the discussion moved a lot before I hit post on this

I laughed out loud on the train when he said his first game used every button on the keyboard twice.

Ya I hit the same wall a while back. It was super frustrating. I think it comes down to the fact that there are a number of difficult to quantify skills that are necessary to progress, and only come from practice and experimentation in a bunch of different situations that are going to come along. To that end, I'd recommend not setting Yama as your goal, but just try to do a few runs a day without getting frustrated, and try to narrate to yourself in your head what your thought process is in approaching each situation, and never run blindly into things and get panicked. That really helped me get out of some bad habits and helped me slow down and develop better situation analysis. Also, watch a few Bananasaurus Rex videos on youtube. That guy really opened my eyes to some stupid ideas/habits I had built up. Eventually you just get that combination of a lucky seed and the right mindset and it feels great.

why would you ever do that to yourself... you gotta YoutubeOptions them away

I dunno, "Game for fags" and "Hipster indie bullshit" sound like things I'd be into. Find out what COD bros hate with this one weird trick

I'm hoping the first few seconds of this episode are a preview of the new theme song.

They weren't books, more of projects/theories proposed by architects, but he mentioned: Ron Herron's Walking City (from a 1964 journal article) Arata Isozaki's City in the Sky and Kisho Kurokawa's Helix City

Ghost juking is definitely my biggest weakness though. I panic and start making really stupid decisions. I admire your calm.

I'd argue even that ignorance is more or less irrelevant here. Ignorance can certainly make it easier to exploit people, but is by no means required. People with gambling problems are probably often aware at some level how badly the odds are stacked against them. That's where the exploitation comes in, by using tricks from psychology, cognitive science, or whatever else to goad people into acting against their best interest and providing negligible value in return.

No shame in quitting this one. I also loved clearing out the outposts and generally rambling about the islands. But the story and attendant tone are ass gravy, and the story missions don't in any way capture what (for me) is interesting about the game.

Oh man