Ninety-Three

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Everything posted by Ninety-Three

  1. FTL

    That's absolutely it. The best defense is blowing up their offense, and now that you phrased it like that, I've realized that I can generally describe my strategy as "Sink all my scrap into getting as much offense as I can possibly use ("as I can use" is important, no sense having eight bars of weapons in sector 3), spend leftovers on shield + cloaking". If you're using them defensively, I agree, the defense drone 1 can be absolutely fantastic. It's not uncommon to have enough shields that the enemies cannot breach them, or only breach on some rare alignment of their desynced weapons, but missiles will always damage you, stopping that feels great. For that reason, I actually prefer the DD 1 to DD 2. Even if they costed the exact same amount, I'd take a DD1, because the DD2 will often shoot down an incoming laser that wouldn't have breached shields, and then be recharging when a missile comes in.
  2. FTL

    Regarding kiting, I've found that if you're willing to micromanage and pause a lot, you don't need pheromones to execute near-flawless stalling inside an enemy ship. They're not worthless, they're just infinitely less valuable than a weapon or extra shield bubble. I'm not a big fan of buying a drone system: 85 scrap and 2 power is a lot to pay for something that only gets through 1 layer of shields. Sure drones have higher DPS than weapons once the enemy's shields are down (which does make them amazing on ion loadouts), but getting the enemy's shields down and getting those first two hits on enemy weapons are the hard part of a fight, and not only are drones bad at fighting through shields, they're terrible at damaging relevant systems. Of course, sometimes you find no weapons so drones are the only firepower you can get, but given a choice between drones and a decent gun, I'll never pick drones. The three-slot ships do make it a lategame priority to find a weapon loadout that makes use of all eight bars of power (or a couple combat drones, something to let you invest more than 6 power in offense), whereas that pretty much happens automatically on a four-slot ship. However, I don't think the Rock C gave you bad habits about weapon slots, what it gave you was an astoundingly powerful starting weapon that most ships lack. The Heavy Crystal 1 may be the most powerful gun in the game (its competition being the other crystal weapons, and the Burst Laser 2) Two damage and one piercing for a single bar of power is simply more efficient than any other weapon, so I can imagine being a little thrown by the lack of it.
  3. Recently completed video games

    I'm not sure the Stanley Parable has a message. Much like how the paths don't hang together with each other narratively to paint a cohesive world, I'm not sure they work together to give one message either. You can say that each path has a message, but many of those messages are so divergent or unrelated to each other that the statement "The Stanley Parable has a message" seems misleading at best. Depending on how one defines very broad terms like "message", I can certainly see saying that the Stanley Parable is about the player-developer interaction, that's certainly most of what I took away from the game, but I also got the sense that the game was trying to be entertaining, and bringing up these interesting points about player-developer was just one of the ways it did that. I'm in a weird state of agreeing and disagreeing with this. The game is definitely having fun with itself, and the point is often just to enjoy the experience, but that can be true without it being the message. After all, the point of a lot, if not most entertainment "Just enjoy what's happening in front of you", but most of them don't have that as their message.
  4. The Stanley Parable

    Yes and no. There are several paths which provide an explanation for what's going on, but like how the Joker got his scars, they're contradictory and there's no indication that one takes precedence over the other. That lack of... continuity? Consistency? is the one thing I didn't like about the game. I enjoyed the narration in most of the paths, but I started by heavily exploring the door on the right, and elements from a few of the paths gave me a sense that this was a world that operated on rules. I was far from a complete understanding, but I felt like by seeing the content on a few paths, I was able to start putting together an understanding more advanced than "Anything can happen, unpredictably". But as I kept going, each path provided information that didn't fit together to form a larger picture. Eventually I was forced to accept that there was no grand mystery of the Stanley Parable to be figured out across multiple playthroughs, the story of each path exists in a vacuum. It made the game's end a bit of a letdown. Instead of any grander conclusion, I finished the last path, spent a run or two confirming that I couldn't find any more paths, and then declared to myself "Well, I guess I've seen all there is to see. Done with that now." In the game's defense, I can't imagine how they could make it end any other way, but in my complaint's defense, that doesn't make it less dissatisfying.
  5. I hate Far Cry 2, what am I doing wrong?

    I wouldn't say I'm fighting to enjoy it, I played for long enough to want to put it down, did so, then came here to see if I should pick it back up. To that end, I played a bit more of the game with the promise of getting out of the jungle, and developing a loadout. In the process, I got the bolt-action sniper rifle, which so far has been game-breakingly good, and now I'd like to ask about that. It's not just so good that it turned the game into a cakewalk, it's so good that I can't imagine how the game will ever be hard again. Thirty bullets on a 100% accuracy rifle that kills with torso shots, it's insanity! I can attack enemy camps from so far away that their AI can only run around rather than shoot at me, and then it's trivial to snipe them all. Because it's so ammo-efficient, I can engage medium-range targets with ease, as opposed to the assault rifle where I had to think "Is it worth most of my clip to gun that guy down from here?" I can take a mission, head towards it, kill every enemy I encounter on the way there, mop up the mission with ease, and return to base on one load of ammo, without even touching my secondary or special weapons. Clearing out a camp or a blockade is somewhat satisfying (becoming overpowered always is) but I have to imagine that the lack of challenge will get old soon, and I'm all the more perplexed by it based on the comments in this thread. It seems like everyone else played a game that was difficult, which Far Cry 2 has suddenly stopped being. Do you just choose not to use the sniper rifle, or does the game find a way to challenge sniper players? On a different note, I continue to be irritated by all the driving the game makes me do. I feel like the game is just not respecting my time. Case in point: Why is Mike's Bar not in Pala? Why do I have to drive to Pala, then spend another minute driving down the completely dull, never-contains-an-enemy road from Pala to the bar? What does that add to the experience, other than making me wish for fast travel? The game is full of so many empty roads that do nothing except force the player to spend uneventful time driving to get to where they're going.
  6. Movie/TV recommendations

    A while ago I watched Hustle and Leverage, which were pretty much the same show. Their format was a highly episodic 45 minute heist movie with a strong focus on the conman aspects. Are there any other shows like this (focus on conmen optional)? It seems like its own genre, but it's one that's hard to Google.
  7. I hate Far Cry 2, what am I doing wrong?

    This confuses me. In my experience clearing out checkpoints doesn't matter, because the next time I go there, the baddies will have respawned. Sure I could fight them each time to gain access to the resource, but that seems like a good use of neither time nor resources, given that there are free refills available from other buildings not guarded by enemies. As for being rescued by friends, twice is too many times to sit through a fifty second cutscene in which nothing happens. I quickly started reading that as the game telling me to just reload my save file, because I'd get back into the action a lot sooner. Finally, you said some things about beauty and loadout, and I just haven't seen those yet. So far every place I've been to has been indistinguishable jungle with boring dirt roads, and my loadout choices are currently "Shotgun vs rifle vs other, similar rifle". Do things improve further in to the game? I'm playing it on PC, and the biggest problem I'm having with combat is that it seems the enemies have X-ray vision and magical aggro-locking. If there's a giant leafy fern between me and them, they will light me up, and I can only fight back by spraying the fern with bullets and hoping to hit blind. And because they engage from long-range, there's always a fern in between us. I've also noticed that enemy damage seems to be wildly variable: I've had an enemy hit me from long rang and knock off a tiny fraction of a bar, then hit me again and blow away ten times as much, what's going on there? Another combat question: When I shoot a guy, he staggers, implying to me that like in Just Cause 2, damage can stunlock an enemy. However, I'm pretty sure I've been shot by guys in the throes of a stagger animation. Is it just aesthetic, or does it indicate that they've been briefly stunned?
  8. Quitter's Club: Don't be ashamed to quit the game.

    I'm quitting Bravely Default. I'm twelve hours in, which sounds like a lot, but it's a JRPG so I'm halfway through chapter 2 of 8. What made me quit was that I suddenly realized how bland the combat was. No matter what the enemy was, combat consisted of "White Mage heals whenever the party gets damaged, everyone else DPSs using the same attack every time." I had hoped the Brave system might add a little more depth, but all it did was change the standard JRPG attack chain from "Attack, attack, attack, attack" to "Default, Default, Default, Brave, Attack*4". Once I realized that the enemy could do literally anything short of one-shot a party member without interrupting my rote attack patterns, I completely lost interest. Maybe I've been spoiled by Zeboyd (the people behind Cthulhu Saves the World, and Rainslick Precipice 3 and 4), who figured out how to solve not only the problem of "Repeat the same attack (chain) until someone dies", but also how to avoid the problem where dedicated healers can completely counteract incoming damage, making fights unlosable. The more I think about it, the less I can imagine playing an oldschool "Attack, enemy attacks, heal, repeat" JRPG.
  9. FTL

    Regarding stores: they are completely random, the only way in which they respond to your ship is that they'll stop stocking systems (battery, cloaking, etc) once you have that system installed. As for strategy, do you mean Mantis A or B Wanderer? B has a four person teleporter, which lets you rely almost entirely on teleporting for combat (once you're boarding four at a time, you can clean out a medbay-equipped ship without ever disabling the medbay), whereas A's two-person teleporter means you still have to be able to fight fair a lot of the time. With the Mantis B, I sell off the boarding drone (who needs a fifth border?) and the pheromones as soon as I hit a store, and my first priority is to get a weapon (or combat drone), any weapon, to deal with Zoltan shields. After that I try to get enough firepower to deal with automated ships, while still relying on teleporting for crewed ships. If I can't find enough weapons for automated ships, then either teleporting rockmen, or upgrading the teleporter and teleporting my Mantises will let me damage their subsystems and kill them with whatever wimpy weapons I have. I don't upgrade the shields until I'm positively swimming in scrap: with two bubbles and a defense drone, the Mantis B kills fast enough to not take much damage. Cloaking is even better than it normally is, once I can kill automated drones I start saving up scrap in the hopes of finding cloaking. If random events don't pay out any crew in the first sector or two, you'll need to buy some at stores, priority goes to Rockmen and Mantises for their combat abilities. The Mantis A plays a lot more fair, you have to be able to reliably breach shields, otherwise your two Mantis boarding crew will be stymied by the first medbay-equipped ship they encounter. Since you start with bombs, that's not hard in sector 1, and since you have both boarding and the ability to kill drones from sector 1, you should have plenty of scrap. Sell pheromones as soon as you need to buy something, and try to keep 70-100 scrap open at all times until you've bought another weapon. Your next priority is upgrading shields , and upgrading weapons enough to equip your new weapon. After that it's hard to give advice given how differently things can go, although it's worth mentioning that cloaking is insane on any boarding build, so try to get that. In general in FTL, I almost never have trouble getting enough firepower. A few important points: Always try to have a decent amount of scrap on hand at all times so you can buy a weapon or useful system if you find a store. Yes, this often means delaying shield upgrades. Explore each sector as thoroughly as you can. This means two things: don't leave the sector until the last minute; and when navigating try to see as many new nodes each jump as possible (although distress beacons are higher priority, since a guaranteed encounter is great). Goodness, that post went a lot longer than I was expecting. Hopefully it was helpful, and not too wall-of-texty.
  10. New people: Read this, say hi.

    Hi Idle forums. I'm a long-time PC gamer and I've been a reader for most of the podcast's life, and I'm not usually the "Use forums" type, but I recently picked up Far Cry 2 and, wanting to talk about it, this seemed like the place to go. I also don't have much to put in this introduction, but apparently it's necessary to indicate that I am not a spambot, so I reiterate: Hi!