Gaizokubanou

It's a wargame first with everything else serving at best as minor flavor stuff or at worst, as distraction.

It was like Thanks thanks~ I'm in USA now (immigrated from Korea though (like longggg time ago)) so I think I'm in Region 1.

Macross: Do You Remember Love? has a really cool premise (execution is clearly dated though)... trying to watch Turn A Gundam myself and looking for good affordable and legal source.

Maybe this is too spoilery and not to argue (cause I get why people do this and makes lot of sense) but I'm having hard time personally labeling EVA as mecha genre :x

About half way through (just got to the part where you guys are about to talk about Trigun), going to finish after doing bit more work. Good podcast guys. I hope one day you guys will cover Gundam (or mecha in general) then please please please let me join I wanna talk about 0080, 08th, 0083, Z, ZZ, Char's Counter Attack, F91, Seed, Seed Destiny, 00, Macross Plus, Eureka 7, Gargantia...

This podcast is highly interesting to me cause it tackles lot of issues that are of no concern to me as a player (1000+ hour HoI2/3 vet) but is something that I, as a fan, am highly interested in for sake of success of the franchise. Both 2 and 3 had poor implementation and connection of diplomacy/industry to actual warfighting so no surprise there to hear that it still remains rather obtuse. But to hear that actual warfighting remains obtuse is... ehh I guess not so surprising because it was pretty dense to get into. If I had to explain to newbies what HoI3 was primarily about, it's about fronts composed of two opposing lines of armies... and both trying to break the opposing line to encircle the other. Think of Unity of Command, except scale it up by 10x, add dedicated unit production and run it in Paradox Time (pausable real time micro turns). So I would recommend things like just researching and building 3 things as Germany... infantry, medium tanks and interceptors cause game largely boiled down to lines of infantry with tanks for breakthroughs and interceptors for air superiority so your production and troops remain safe from allied airforce. Once they get hang of this front based warfare of breakthrough and encirclement, then you get into the layers of tweaking these things like adding artillery to infantry, adding CAS/TACs to airforce to build your own attack power, motorized divisions so that your breakthroughs can be better protected. Left the navy out cause naval warfare was always bit of sour point (basically EU4 level of depth, get a bigger stack of carriers than the other guy and smash them). So to hear that most people didn't get to dive into that juicy wargaming of the most organic breakthroughs/encirclements cause the game is still having hard to teaching the players what its about is so frustrating to hear cause it's super fun wargame underneath all that stuff... Damn now I just want to play HoI3 again. Damn now I really want to play HoI4.

Yeah, monarch points have always been a sour point of EU4. It has its goods (good for newbies to grasp the game faster) but overall I think it is a net negative :/

Going to do that right after this 3MA about HoI4~~~ <3

WHAT!?!? Not sure how true it is (as Twig said, he heard similar thing with Cell) but I think Freeza arc wrapping up dragonball makes a whole lot of sense because it comes to a complete circle as to Goku's origin and his pseudo destiny and whatnot. Or maybe he wanted to end with Freeza, then again wanted to end with Cell.

While this is legit point, for some reason the context-less reading of this is still quite hilarious

Standard Civ game can last something between 4 ~ 10 hours on average so one could set up % based on a number in there somewhere? As for bugs, severe ones like save file corruption in a long progression heavy game is always a strong case for complete refund. So I still think this new system over and under protects. Still a hugely positive change (beats the shit out of no refund). Just that implementation feels bit too simple but then again that does have its own benefit (clarity of rules like for refund is critical for consumer trust) so hard to say.

Well original was in pretty bad shape in regards to bugs. It was after the first expansion when I really began to sink some time in so if you bounced off the vanilla version then to be fair to you, it was REALLY hard to get something out of vanilla. Like it either took end of first expansion or early in the second expansion for PI to identify and fix this 'AI super stack bug' where all the allies would hurdle their 200+ divisions on that tiny land-bridged island off north of France, and Germany would in response get their 200+ divisions on the adjacent province, effectively taking out both Germany and Allies out of the game as neither would EVER make progress against each other. Then there was this bug that defensive stats for units did not work at all, and that was only discovered (yep, nobody knew about it) by the third expansion. Granted once you got the meat of the game going, it was delicious. And despite some serious bugs I mentioned, first expansion did a whole lot in making the game very playable, but then again, I did stick around through vanilla HoI3 so obviously my tolerance for the game was pretty good.

OOoooyeahhhh.... oh no I hope none of those issues are stuff that would bother me as returning HoI3 player D:

OOoooo all of them are looking good~ Oh and Common Sense is out I think?

Oh the surrender events were the worst. I hope they make HoI4 more organic, like EU4. I mean obviously WWII scenario demands lot more structure than EU4, but I think there are lot from EU4 that can be applied. The maps are looking sexy as hell though for sure. Eagerly waiting for it and I'll probably plunge into Common Sense til then

Sorry that those assholes gave you trouble for no good reason D:

You responded perfectly, I should have read that context better. My apologies. You are right in that reasons for wanting diverse representation obviously exceeds the boundaries of USA/Western Europe liberals and I didn't realize that was that strongly hinted at (maybe he didn't mean that, who knows I'm sure he can clarify his wordings) by Deadpan. I got way too carried away and for some reason thought you were disputing Vainamonien's post. I should have read better.

Right, the idea that Witcher lore is slavic is not valid and I think pretty much everyone here agrees? But some of us were saying the production is Polish. Edit: My reply to Bjorn is based on my misreading so going to remove that as it serves no purpose to the discussion. Yeah, in single player setting you can do a lot with Civ games and it is a wonderful thing. Just that in competitive multiplayer it kinda and sadly turns into this weird quasi war game. If Witcher 3's whiteness is reflective of some form of racism that's prevalent in Poland then of course, I agree it would no longer be a morally neutral decision. Like Gor's previous post on how turning Witcher's map sideway reveals surprisingly close geography of real life, which I think is indeed a strong evidence that there may be perhaps some form of Polish racism going to ignore southern region as a barren wasteland like that.

Highly interesting question but just want to chime in that I think it would have to depend highly on the game's theme. Take WW2 games for example... the setting/theme is such that use of violence is forgone conclusion. Compare that to say, Civilization games. Designers of those games wondered about how to combat the games devolving into war game at highly competitive level, one of reason being this question. There this question makes a lot more sense cause game's theme should be broader (and it is, it just gets overshadowed when game is pushed to max). But that isn't to say genres previously thought as combat exclusive (like mechanics demand that game be combative) are being challenged so there is that. Like WW2 game that is about defusing the situation? Might need few Cold War games of that sort but could be interesting. This is the reason why I love Spec Ops The Line, such wonderful commentary on how expectation of becoming a hero by shooting everyone (how most FPS games operate) is silly/bad. Splatoon is very cool also in that it took usually highly violent (third person shooter) genre and turned it into more friendly, cheery sports like game. Not sure what my point is...

IGN article on Xcom 2 and modding~ http://m.ign.com/articles/2015/06/08/xcom-2s-exciting-modding-potential-ign-first Normally I would be skeptical of dev/publisher's promise of good modding scene, but given how Jake Solomon often name dropped Long War (instead of the usual "we love mods" as in nameless, ambiguous stuff) and Firaxis' history on mod support (especially recent support, they gave Long War modders lot of direct support), I pretty much buy this promise at face value.

OMG that was in decimals!!! What would less than 1 but greater 0 casualty mean?

Also being limited to 3 aliens per shot! I'm still super impressed what they achieved with just 3 alien suits in Aliens.

If you roleplay, you can get a whole lot of those out of Crusader Kings II as that game gives pretty rich tools about interpersonal relationships for players to use.

It would have as much value as any other social commentary with proper contextual considerations of course. In that sense, a post commentary on Hatred (assuming hypothetical universe, without all the pre release coverage) perhaps wouldn't make much sense at all as a solo coverage but maybe would be part of more comprehensive coverage on multiple games of that type. But overall, my point wasn't that timing alone is everything, just that it's part of lot of stuff (volume, type, etc.) to take consideration of.

The angle is that it would be better (not perfect, just better) if creator of such material got less money out of it. I agree that complete-silence approach is not right but will get to that below. Yes, but that would need education on why hateful things are bad. Most coverage of Hatred IIRC wasn't about that cause it was a fair assumption that their audience would reject hateful contents without much explanation. That's why I still stand by making more practical consideration for coverage of this kind of stuff... not silence, but rather, more intelligent coverage. For example, simple timing and type of coverage matters a lot... post release in-depth writing like the one Walker did does actual good work vs the 7 (+?) articles Polygon released prior to release.