n0wak

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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    1739
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About n0wak

  • Rank
    dot com

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  • Website URL
    http://the-inbetween.com

Converted

  • Location
    Not Toronto
  1. iOS Gaming

    Actually, San Juan is a port of Puerto Rico for cards. It's an existing physical game, and a nice one at that as it manages to reduce Puerto Rico's complex decision making into a card based system. It has a lot in common, mechanically, with Race for the Galaxy which is a, honestly, much better game (and a lot of what powers that was basically the same thing: It was originally meant to be a card version of Puerto Rico. Ideas are sort of shared between them). Unfortunately, you can't play RftG digitally yet though it is coming. Albeit, unfortunately, via Goko.com
  2. FTL

    About time since my most successful runs always involve boarding crews. I wish they'd pick some of the priority issues regarding crew and droids though. That one basically fucked me over in a run yesterday.
  3. Puerto Rico is a great game in person. I think it's one of those really finely designed games: low on random (only the tile selection,) with a great balance of player interaction, decision consequence, and you never feel out of the game even if you're losing badly. I just wish the iOS port had much much better interface design.
  4. FTL

    Finally did it (on easy) last night with the Type B Zoltan ship, which I'm now a huge fan of. The biggest hindrance with that ship is early on the shield upgrade costs 100, but after that it works great and the layout is nice. It helped that I got lucky early on and apart from the Pike Beam and Ion Blast that I start with, I managed to get TWO MORE Ion Blasts really early (and an Ion Blast II a little later). I also managed to get a Mantis crew member (and lots and lots of humans, three of which i had to dismiss cause I ran out of room) and teleporter pretty early too. A second Mantis joined me later and we fucked shit up. With constant constant ion blasts enemy ships were effectively immobile and I'd send crew in and kill everyone. I think in total, not counting autodroids, I probably destroyed no more than five ships in the entire game (everyone else was killed by raiding party, or by asphyxiation, or by fire). I had a huge, huge scare one jump away from The Last Stand though as a fire-engulfed Rock ship blew up a little too early... with my Mantis crew still on board. So I thought I was fucked. I still had two humans but those were mostly defensive (one was the engine guy too) but that put me at a disadvantage. A couple fights against some Rebel Fighters also lowered my hull quite a bit before taking on the mothership. Still, with all those ion cannons, a boarding party, and max stealth (and stealth weapons) I was so ready for it and I fucked it up so bad. Barely got scratched. Phase two went well but I had an energy surge happen one time when my stealth was recharging which did a LOT of damage to me. The breaching droid was also problematic as I only had Zoltans and one Engi to deal with it, but the constant ion blasting effectively made it more of a nuisance than a threat. I survived phase two like this Phase three, with this load-out, was a piece of cake. Nice little ship that. Now to do it on normal.
  5. FTL

    It is also really, really fun and/or dickish to have Rocks blasting away at the enemies on the ship and then drop a firebomb into the room. Or their medbay.
  6. FTL

    I've got like 25 plays and still haven't managed to beat the game, even on Easy. Made it to the final boss's stage 2 form in a really souped up Kestrel but ran out missiles and those droids just fucked me up so bad. So far the best games I've had were both Kestrel runs with a focus on boarding and all those times I've not managed to get a single mantis for my crew (nor get that achievement for multiple aliens on the ship.) Every time I start getting a nice, mixed alien crew something really stupid comes along and kills some of them. In one game I managed to hire 9 crew members total and lost them all by the fifth sector So unless I get a blue text option, I'm never ever fucking around with giant spiders again. What this means is that I really need to unlock the Mantis ship to be able to beat the game in my style. I like the Engi ship, but drones drive me crazy because you can't micromanage them and I suffocate because the genius repair droid decides to fix the sensor room before the oxygen. (One thing that I hate in this game which should be a bug is that if you have a deactivated boarding drone on your ship and you send guys into that room to repair the breach/system, they ATTACK the inactive droid while they suffocate or burn to death. Morans.)
  7. Music of the games of video

    FACT: the best fictional-language-in-a-video-game-song remains
  8. I want to start paying for music

    Depends on what kind of music you like, really. If you're into the more electronic side of things I heartily recommend http://boomkat.com (I've bought tons off them.) You can buy as mp3 (320kbps) or lossless FLAC. There's also junodownload and bleep.com (owned by Warp)
  9. Outwitters (iOS)

    Playing it now but it seems... average so far? Basic symmetric teams and standard advance wars-inspired resource management. I guess after playing something a little more complex like Summoner Wars this just seems rather basic to me. Anyway, hit me at n0wak on Game Center.
  10. Been playing a lot of "Summoner Wars", another card based game adapted to iPad by Playdek (Ascension), and it's very interesting game with a decent amount of customization. Unfortunately, it's buggy as fuck. The deck builder crashes the app on me about 99% of the time. Often the game does too. But when it works it's nice and it'd be great on multiplayer. Unfortunately, Playdek hasn't really added anything new to their multiplayer system beyond what's in Ascension and not having rankings or any kind, or even just leaderboards, is somewhat annoying. I haven't tried it online yet because I'm still learning the various decks (and hoping I can build one of my own without it crashing) but this can keep me occupied for a while WHEN (if?) they fix all the stability issues. My only qualm about the game itself -- rather than the app -- is that the end-game of Summoner Wars is rather weak. If you run out of playable cards or magic you have to go through confirming your way through the various turn stages over and over again. It's tedious. And nothing worse than having to continue playing a game, sometimes for a bunch of turns, that you have quite clearly lost but the opponent hasn't delivered the finishing blow yet. Anyway, if you win/lose before you get to the end game it's thoroughly more enjoyable.
  11. The Electronic Three: 2012

    The Last Guardian :(
  12. Post your face!

    SUP?
  13. So I did this last night https://twitter.com/#!/n0wak/status/202813767585775616/photo/1 I think the adjustable honour pool kind of highlights some serious balance issues in the original deck and expansion that weren't too visible with the default (two player) 60 honour pool. The game ended because I basically got bored of being in an infinite turn after turn loop rather than because I ran out of any ability to play. So yeah, "Tablet of Time's Dawn" became a broken card when the expansion was added. They should errata that shit because if this was Magic that kind of play would be banned already.
  14. I love it too. Storm of Souls is interesting to me in its mechanics and balance, but I do tend to notice that you need a lot more heavy militias and the like because of all the trophy monsters. Combine that with a bunch of those destroy/return to hand Mechana constructs and the biggest problem, when you are playing to that strategy, is just managing the little tiny construct holder in the bottom of the corner. I agree that the game can be overly random at times but that just means that a more balanced general strategy is necessary rather than something very focused (if you are focusing on buying mechana constructs and get nothing to battle monsters with then you're kinda fucked if the center deck draws all monsters!) Being able to play with an enlarged honour pool is awesome too in that it lets you experiment more. In one game I basically had all the mechana constructs (this is just the base game) and had banished everything except for a few high mana + draw cards + gain honour cards. I would play the entirety of my deck every turn. That shit's impossible to set up with the default honour pool but it was fun beating the computer like 235 to 80. (Also, that play five turns in a row achievement is insane.) Anyway, who wants a game? I'm n0wak (that's a zero) on game center. I need more human opponents.