Chris

Almost as important as brushing up on their math is that they're being introduced to mouse-and-keyboard PC gaming at a young age. Excellent.

The movie looks like garbage to me, but the game has some rad pixels in it!

If it sells really well, I don't think it will be because of the name. People have heard of it, but not enough people in the game's target market. At this point it's weird that they're calling it XCOM. I think what must have happened is that Take-Two wanted to use the name for its legacy, and by the time they ended up with the current design and setting, it had changed a great deal, but it retained the name since that's what it was conceived as.

I noticed! I probably noticed everything that everyone did for the last few hours of the game, because I had basically full map visibility and I was glued to my screen, refreshing compulsively, trying to do anything I could to get the game to keep every star I had so the game would end as soon as possible and I could finally relax.

The primary reason for this is that, in my experience, it's almost impossible to genuinely come to someone's rescue in this game, without simply allying up and parking a bunch of ships on their stars. But generally speaking, attempting to draw fire is a very inconsistent and often inconsequential tactic, I've found.

I assumed you were gearing up to attack me, so I had started to prepare for it, but it's certainly true that since you didn't end up doing so, I was in a stronger position in the long term, and in that respect it was probably also a turning point for me. At least from my perspective, that encounter kicked off the bloodbath involving you, Ethos, and Murdoc, and I tried to stay out of it as much as possible.

Which player were you? Also I think the reason people didn't pay me as much attention was because I was actually pretty middle of the road in infrastructure stats for much of the game, and I was as non-combative as possible for as long as possible. I've gotten in really bitter wars and grudges in past Neptune's Pride games, and it really stressed me out, so this game I made a material decision not to do that. As a result my expansion halted for quite a while at a certain point, particularly when the massive factional war got started, so I mainly just built up. I'm sure I slipped up a couple times, but until it was clear the game was basically over, I didn't attack players unless it was in self-defense or they had slipped into AI administration, often because they had been heavily damaged by someone who wasn't me. Also, to be entirely honest, I think I understood the combat system better than most people in the game, which gave me a leg up in a lot of situations. It's possible I was just misreading certain people's actions, but it seemed like some players threw a fair number of ships away at times. Anyway this was definitely the game where I put past Neptune's Pride lessons I'd learned into play.

Sure, I'm down for a mini-postmortem.

I can't figure out how the hell the code-hacking minigame works. I'm playing it on PC, in case it's different. It makes no sense to me at all.

Hell yeah. That's one of my favorite movies ever.

That avatar image is of Dominic West as James McNulty in The Wire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_McNulty

I read that, it was really good! (Also it's Doris, not Francis)

Hooray for chat!

Yeah it was by far the chattiest Neptune's Pride game I've played (not that I've played tons). I've also gotten more direct mail than I've ever gotten in this game. I'm doing a really poor job of replying to it in a timely fashion because I've been checking the game pretty irregularly.

Man the busted chat makes this game even more surreal. It's as though some inexplicable galactic phenomenon has wiped out all open communication channels.

Most of those things are fairly common sense measures I already take, but early in the game I don't worry too much about waiting until the last moment to buy economy; it's pretty obvious based on ship ETAs whether you'll have more stars by the time payday comes, you don't really have to hedge your bets. That matters more later in the game when things are constantly shifting. Also, the payday moment is right when I get out of work, which comes after the busiest part of my day, so it's not usually practical for me to leave time-sensitive stuff until then. Anyway I understand the principles you point out, but that's clearly not all that's happened in this game.

Sup UK Thumbs. I am in your town of London for the next week or so and a few people have asked me if I was planning a UK meet. I am not planning one personally but if somebody who actually lives here and knows what a good situation would be wants to come up with a time, day, and place, I will show up to it, and most likely bring some other UK Thumbs veterans like B.M. Bronstrong and possibly Alex Ashby and Lawrence Bishop. Anyway, if folks are interested, feel free to post in this thread or shoot me an email at chris at idlethumbs dot net. If there is any interest, and a consensus in terms of location and time, I will post about it on the Thumbs front page and Twitter.

I don't know if I'm the one you should be looking at. I'm tied for the most stars, but that's a deceptive metric. Looking through the player list, I'm certainly not the wealthiest nor the one with the largest army, not by a long shot. I'm actually kind of baffled how some people seem to be so much further ahead in terms of infrastructure. There must have already been some significant star captures, whereas I haven't been involved in any real conflict yet. (That doesn't count the brief but insane life of Schmeptune, who apparently joined the game solely so he could mass his entire fleet on one carrier then send it bouncing around my empire doing as much damage as possible.)

Well, it wasn't that subtle, considering I'd already stated my deadline earlier in the thread. I was in the country for more than two weeks total.

Have fun!

I can't tell if he's playing or not. He's definitely moving his ships around and putting them on stars, because I can see him next to me, I just have no idea if they're on waypoints he set a while ago and forgot about, or what. EDIT: Yeah he's definitely doing something.

It looks like this is a bit too indefinite to plan something, particularly if some people would have to go much out of their way to make it work. Perhaps just wait until next time I visit your fair city?

Monday might work for me but that's the last feasible day, as I'm leaving on Tuesday.

That seems like it would cause a really extreme curve towards the end game, which already sort of happens in this game, so my vote would be no on that, but I'm willing to give anything a try really.

I'm in!