What are you playing right now?

[Yora]

I actually got Star Wars: Racer working on Linux with a PS3 controller and it was mostly rather painless.

I like the tracks a lot more than those of Wipeout HD and Redout, but I realize this game is really simple. I think I could speedrun it in under 3 hours, ever after not having played it in over 15 years.

So yeah... 3 hours 15 minutes to get 1st place on all 25 tracks. I think four of them took me two tries because I had to familiarize myself with the track again, but that was it.

Games didn't become easier. We just sucked as kids.

[Triaxx]

Go play that last flipping junkyard track, from the 'special' circuit, and tell me how easy it is. Even the freaking auto-pilot from the cheat menu couldn't fly it.

[Yora]

The one on the asteroid mine? That's perhaps my favorite track.

Or the one in the lava cave that is actually on the jungle planet? That one is indeed pretty insane. I crashed into almost impossible to see obstacles and exploded probably some 20 times. Still made first place on first time without any trouble. Though by that point I had speed and acceleration maxed out so that didn't really matter anymore.

[Triaxx]

No, the one in the atmosphere of a planet with the cage around the track. Roid mine and lava caves were also my favorites.

[Kato]

Nah, Isaac has a normal wiki. Like a website. I assume you mean an in-game encyclopedia of some sorts. Also, not to be totally antagonistic, but "learning by playing" is a common game trope. Found in almost all roguelikes as well as most "high-skill" games like Dark Souls. If you don't want to go that path, internet wikis are always there to help.

Oh, I know it has a website. But that means I need to tab out to know what an item does or memorize the wiki. And as you said, Isaac has quite a variety of items. Of course you could tell me to take it more serious and do the latter if I want to play the game / get good at it. But... Why should I? Why not include an almanac or whatever in the game? I'm not too familiar with the Souls series but I think it does tell you what it's items do (doesn't it?) With some games it's not required, e.g. I don't need a wiki for the five items in Mario or for Final Fantasy to give me the precise damage formula for every spell, but if in the latter every spell had some nonsensical name and I had to memorize what fifty spells do I'd be annoyed as well.
It just seems to me like the kind of arbitrary difficulty that has no reason to exist. It doesn't make things harder, only more complicated.
(none of this is saying I think Isaac is a bad game, I just consider this lack of a feat stupid)

[Yora]

No, the one in the atmosphere of a planet with the cage around the track. Roid mine and lava caves were also my favorites.

Yeah, that one is terrible.

[Zevox]

So, while the BB Tag beta is over, ArcSys took the unusual step of letting players continue to play the offline-only content of it (which is basically just versus mode) even after the online beta wrapped up, so I keep coming back to that. You can sort of simulate a training mode by setting the second player to be a human and having it play Yukiko, since she can heal herself, so I've done some of that, but also just messed around against the AI. Which is, well, one of the easiest AIs I've ever seen in a fighting game - I cranked the difficulty up to the maximum and I can still usually win even with random characters I have no clue how to play effectively. The AI at that level is so aggressive that certain tactics just universally work well against it, including just throwing out random supers.

Still, it's gets me even more excited for the game when I take a couple of characters I've wanted to learn to play but never did in their own game, like Yu and Chie from the Persona side of the roster, and go spank the AI with them. Heck, I even start to figure out a few legit combos here and there, which starts to make me wonder if I should try playing them more seriously.

Though really, picking characters is going to be insanely hard for me once the full game is out. I already liked playing Ruby and Weiss, and based on the previews I've seen of Blake and Yang I'm guessing I might well like the entirety of team RWBY. Plus there will be Labrys and Naoto from Persona (and Mitsuru, assuming she's no longer a charge character, since that's the only reason I didn't play her in P4A), and once all of the DLC is accounted for literally every BlazBlue character I've ever played or wanted to learn to play, which shocked the heck out of me since I was not expecting some of them at all. At this point I'm almost grateful that the fourth franchise in the crossover is one I'm totally unfamiliar with, just so that I'm not tempted to play any of its characters.

[tonberrian]

I'm house-sitting for a bit, so now that I've got my own Switch I'm playing Breath of the Wild again. Not yet back to where I was, but I am making significant progress in it.

[DigoDragon]

My daughter and siblings had another Minecraft LAN party a little while back. We attempted to go as a group into an abandoned mine for resource raiding. This quickly devolved into Starship Troopers against two Cave Spider spawners near each other. I spent so much time poisoned that I thought it was a graphical glitch when my hearts turned red again. XD

GalCiv2. Haven't had much time with it, so I'm still learning, but really enjoying it.

That game is really nice for the AI. Probably the best 4X AI I've had the enjoyment of playing against.

Let me know how you like it when you look up and ten hours have passed.

That's called 'casual gaming' in my book.

[LibraryOgre]

Really enjoying GalCiv II... thanks again to those who suggested it to me as a replacement for Civilization. I don't have a need to madly rush into militarization (I literally traded for Rail Gun tech, upgraded the scouts I'd been pumping out, and transitioned from the worst military to the best), and the turns-as-weeks and lack of game-wide singular monuments eases my stress a lot. I haven't beaten a game yet, but that's a matter of time, not anything else.

[warty goblin]

Really enjoying GalCiv II... thanks again to those who suggested it to me as a replacement for Civilization. I don't have a need to madly rush into militarization (I literally traded for Rail Gun tech, upgraded the scouts I'd been pumping out, and transitioned from the worst military to the best), and the turns-as-weeks and lack of game-wide singular monuments eases my stress a lot. I haven't beaten a game yet, but that's a matter of time, not anything else.

Glad you're enjoying it.

There are a couple galaxy-unique buildings in GalCiv II, but they're more...nice things to have instead of strategic cornerstones. I don't think I generally worried about 'em much.

One thing I liked to do, particularly on larger maps, was build ships I called Sensor Buoys, which was basically just the best sensors I had stuck on a tiny hull, with maybe a bit of life support. They're dirt cheap to build, so you can build a bunch of 'em, then stick 'em out along important borders so some insufferable alien bastard doesn't drive up and spore ship a bunch of your worlds.

In unrelated news, spore ships are awesome. If you haven't considered virus-bombing an entire planet into a blasted hellscape while billions of innocent aliens and their fluffy little alien puppies die horrible plague ridden deaths, it's definitely worth it. Hey, if it saves the life of even one psychopathic omnicidal murder-alien, it's worth it. Blowing up suns is also nice, but it's rather hard on the real estate.


edit: Since the worst of the dissertation is finally in the ground, I've actually had some gaming time again. Been mostly playing:
Far Cry 4: I like this. Sure it's a lot of Ubistuff, but that's fun, and it's a damn fine action game. I suspect the campaign missions would annoy me if I didn't play the whole thing as a straight shooter, since they basically require playing as a straight up shooter. So they serve as a nice change of pace from less directed open world murderfests. Wish it was a bit harder though.

Conan Exiles: For some reason, I actually like this, even though crafting survival games usually fill me with deep displeasure. Some of it is probably the really gorgeous world, some of it is that things are about the right balance of challenging but not stupidly grindy, and some of it is that it the combat is actually pretty alright. Better than Skyrim at any rate, with the added perk of much less time spent listening to stupid people tell me stupid things for stupid quests.

Field of Glory 2: A moderately hardcore turn based wargame focusing on mid/late antiquity. I haven't spent a lot of time with this, but I really like it so far. There's clearly a lot of depth to the systems, but not so much you can't actually pick it up and play it. I particularly like the tutorial system, which is basically 'here's a battle, now have fun'. The presentation isn't going to win any awards, but it looks pretty good for the genre, and has a pleasing amount of chaos once things get going.

[DigoDragon]

There are a couple galaxy-unique buildings in GalCiv II, but they're more...nice things to have instead of strategic cornerstones. I don't think I generally worried about 'em much.

One thing I liked to do, particularly on larger maps, was build ships I called Sensor Buoys, which was basically just the best sensors I had stuck on a tiny hull, with maybe a bit of life support. They're dirt cheap to build, so you can build a bunch of 'em, then stick 'em out along important borders so some insufferable alien bastard doesn't drive up and spore ship a bunch of your worlds.

Related, there is one galaxy-unique building that helps with setting up Sensor Bouys. It's at the end of the Sensor tech tree, called Eyes of the Universe. It's a nice building that grants all your ships automatically the best sensor range possible.

[LibraryOgre]

So, GalCiv2: How do I extend the ranges of my ships? Even on a small map, relatively centrally located and with a power-dive towards making inhabitable worlds habitable, I've got a couple places I simply can't reach with my ships... too far beyond a friendly system or station.

[warty goblin]

So, GalCiv2: How do I extend the ranges of my ships? Even on a small map, relatively centrally located and with a power-dive towards making inhabitable worlds habitable, I've got a couple places I simply can't reach with my ships... too far beyond a friendly system or station.

So the way that GalCiv II does things is that there's a base distance from your nearest planet or starbase that a ship can move. Adding life support modules to a ship (they've got a branch in the tech tree) lets you extend the range for that particular ship; I can't remember exactly how it calculates the range of a fleet though. Note that colony modules have a lot of life support built into them, so colony ships usually have a pretty long range, much longer than early generation warships. Anyway, bottom line, add life support modules to a ship to extend its range, build a starbase at your frontier to extend the range of all your ships into the area around that base. IIRC there's modules you can add to a starbase that increases that range as well.

Generally I found I was better off using starbases and planets to extend my range into areas I was actually interested in, instead of lots of life support. It's just too much of a space hog to build a really good hyper-efficient death machine of a space ship if you need lots of life support on it, though for scouts or trade ships the investment can be worthwhile.

[LibraryOgre]

So the way that GalCiv II does things is that there's a base distance from your nearest planet or starbase that a ship can move. Adding life support modules to a ship (they've got a branch in the tech tree) lets you extend the range for that particular ship; I can't remember exactly how it calculates the range of a fleet though. Note that colony modules have a lot of life support built into them, so colony ships usually have a pretty long range, much longer than early generation warships. Anyway, bottom line, add life support modules to a ship to extend its range, build a starbase at your frontier to extend the range of all your ships into the area around that base. IIRC there's modules you can add to a starbase that increases that range as well.

Generally I found I was better off using starbases and planets to extend my range into areas I was actually interested in, instead of lots of life support. It's just too much of a space hog to build a really good hyper-efficient death machine of a space ship if you need lots of life support on it, though for scouts or trade ships the investment can be worthwhile.

Yeah, I wasn't TOO worried about it... it's just that one clan is ALL the way in the east corner of the map, and so I can't even see their planets.

I am going to have to spend some time on that tech tree. So much more complex than Civ... but to the good, IMO, since it's smaller chunks. "Take a few turns/weeks to figure this out. Ok, now you can figure THESE out." Unless I have a goal, I'm sorting things by time required and just taking the fastest techs, at this point.

[warty goblin]

Yeah, I wasn't TOO worried about it... it's just that one clan is ALL the way in the east corner of the map, and so I can't even see their planets.

I am going to have to spend some time on that tech tree. So much more complex than Civ... but to the good, IMO, since it's smaller chunks. "Take a few turns/weeks to figure this out. Ok, now you can figure THESE out." Unless I have a goal, I'm sorting things by time required and just taking the fastest techs, at this point.

That's actually pretty usual in Gal Civ II, particularly on the larger maps. I once had a game where I started in the corner of the map in a cluster of stars. Between this cluster and the rest of the galaxy was this huge and utterly empty void that was simply uncrossable by a standard ship. I had to build a special, life-support heavy constructor to cross the void and build a starbase.

Tech-wise, I find it handy to get the first wave of improved buildings pretty quick (so marketplace, the basic lab, basic factory), since those give you a lot more power to shape your economy. Military-wise I often do a batch of research before reconfiguring the fleet, particularly if I'm at peace. The enemy can see your ships, so there's no point telling them just how good of giant doom lasers you can build unless you need them in a hurry.

[tonberrian]

I could never quite get the economy of Gal Civ II right. How do you make money, aside from spamming farms and banks on a planet?

[Triaxx]

You can of course also simply chain stations together into a tether, or you could last I played. (Been a bit and only had the base game, no expansions.)

[warty goblin]

I could never quite get the economy of Gal Civ II right. How do you make money, aside from spamming farms and banks on a planet?

Messing with the sliders.

(Note, this is from memory, so details are likely wrong)

There's 5 sliders that matter in GalCiv II:

These are the most important two:
Slider 1: this controls how much of your possible economic power you actually utilize
Slider 2: this controls your tax rate

Sliders 3 through 5 determine the relative proportions of your economic power that goes to industry, science or cold hard space-cash. Tweak as needed for the circumstances; I usually favor science and production over money, but not massively.

Slider 1 is probably the most important, because it's basically a scaling factor for your entire civ. You want this at 100% as much as possible, so everything's running 100%. Otherwise you're losing potential production and research, and paying maintenance on the buildings while you're at it. It's difficult to fund this, particularly early game, because each unit of production/research costs you 1bc; i.e. if you have a factory that puts out 5 production a turn, that production costs you 5bc per turn. IIRC you don't pay for economic production from banks and so forth, but they won't produce money at full capacity if you don't have the slider all the way up either.

The tax rate slider is a tricky one. Higher tax rate means more money to pay for slider 1 (and therefore more death laser research), but it lowers your approval. Lower approval mostly means slower population growth and greater vulnerability to cultural conversion, though if you screw up you can also lose elections. That is easily avoidable by dropping taxes the week before the election so everbody loves you, winning the election, then go right back to taxing their faces off. This works because space people are idiots.

Slower population growth is the bigger problem, particularly early game. You need your people boinking like rabbits on enough Viagra to fuel the porn industry for a year, because babies = taxpayers = money = maxed out slider 1. People only do this when they are happy, so early game when you need to fill up your worlds with new taxpayers ASAP, you generally want a low tax rate. Once the planets are filled up with people, the fact that they're too miserable to hump each other's brains out anymore doesn't really matter, so you can tax 'em hard again. Basically you run your economy with a maxed out slider 1 and a low tax rate - hence massive deficit - for the first year or so, keeping it afloat through finding space junk and occasionally going into the red. Once you have planets filled with people, jack the tax rate back up.

The rate at which approval varies by tax rate is not smooth however; it's got two jumps in it, one at IIRC 30% and one at 69%. That is, people really hate being taxed at 70%, way more than they hate a 69% rate. So usually you want to keep your taxes just under one of those breakpoints, though again, early game, you really want the extra approval for maximum taxpayer generation. Go as low as you can without causing your economy to catch fire and explode.


So you do all that, and you have a solid base of citizens paying taxes. Next step is to turbo-charge this sucker. Trade with other civs is very good. It makes them less likely to try to murder you, since a declaration of war breaks the trade agreements that they benefit from as well, and you can make a bundle of cash off of it. The other key is starbases. Build economic modules on a starbase that covers multiple planets, particularly multiple planets with large populations, and you can make lots of cash. You get more cash from trade routes that pass through starbase zones with trade modules. Finally, world specialization. Having a couple high population worlds can make a lot of money, and by 'high population' I mean 'build one, maybe two, farms.' Apparently your people don't like it when you jam 20 billion people onto a ball of rock and tax them for everything under the sun, which can cause occasional problems. In particular at some point they get so crowded and miserable that they stop squirting out larval taxpayers, and you never actually hit population cap on that world, so any excess food you produce (by which I mean pay for) is wasted. So you're better off having somewhat smaller population, offsetting the approval hit with some entertainment centers, and then building banks. Lots and lots of banks. An economic capital is a good choice for one of these worlds.

[factotum]

The rate at which approval varies by tax rate is not smooth however; it's got two jumps in it, one at IIRC 30% and one at 69%. That is, people really hate being taxed at 70%, way more than they hate a 69% rate.

I'm sure I recall there being a significant difference in happiness between every 9% and the next higher one, e.g. there's a big dip between 49% and 50%? Could be wrong, it's a long time since I played 2.

[LibraryOgre]

...I have to go looking. I have no idea where these sliders are.

[Triaxx]

Planet management screen, economy tab.

[Jama7301]

Legend of Zelda - Link Between Worlds (3DS)
Pinball FX3 (Switch)
Lost of team customizing in Super Mega Baseball 2 for a dumb custom league thing.
Dusted off Mario Maker again because there are some great levels out there.

[warty goblin]

At this literal minute? Waiting for Battlefield 1 to load. I like the game, but dear me does it take forever to load.

[Friv]

Finished Nier, and am on to Disgaea 5.

This appears to be the Disgaea game set in an area of the Netherworlds in which shirts were outlawed centuries ago.

[warty goblin]

Played some more Field of Glory II this morning. It's ability to randomly generate a super-compelling random battle is crazy, and extremely enjoyable. A clash between Gauls and Hannibal's Carthaginians (who are substantially Gauls)? Yes please. Also rather funny, because Gauls aren't so good at that whole 'discipline' thing, so there's heavy infantry charging off at random and cavalry charging them and the whole thing was a glorious mess.

My best battle so far though was Carthaginians vs. Romans, where I started rather outmatched, and had to hold out for reinforcements - again, just randomly generated. This was really intense, because Roman legionaries in this game are just flat-out terrifying; like they will disorder and force back a perfectly intact infantry unit in one charge. Fortunately I had superior cavalry, which did mean things to assorted Roman light elements and their absolutely dreadful horse-boys and kept the heavy infantry from concentrating on my much inferior line of battle. Even then it was a close run thing, with my first line basically disintegrating about the time the reinforcements arrived. It's quite likely they were only saved by one of my original infantry companies rallying, and charging right up a Hastatii company's right flank.

If you're interested in some historically accurate turn based stabbing, I can't recommend this highly enough.

[GloatingSwine]

Finished Nier, and am on to Disgaea 5.

This appears to be the Disgaea game set in an area of the Netherworlds in which shirts were outlawed centuries ago.

It's warm down in the Netherworld. Shirts are simply unnecessary.

Been that way since the first game.

[tonberrian]

Breaking News: Breath of the Wild is god**** ENORMOUS. It's also really fun paragliding.

I'm at 105/120 of the regular shrines, 1 Divine Beast down. Haven't really done any of the DLC content or picked up the items aside from certain ones that were in my way - Majora's Mask and the Switch shirt were just randomly found, and I only picked up the portagate because it was in the basement of the labyrinth I just beat and there were other things down there to get.

[Cespenar]

Played some more Field of Glory II this morning. It's ability to randomly generate a super-compelling random battle is crazy, and extremely enjoyable. A clash between Gauls and Hannibal's Carthaginians (who are substantially Gauls)? Yes please. Also rather funny, because Gauls aren't so good at that whole 'discipline' thing, so there's heavy infantry charging off at random and cavalry charging them and the whole thing was a glorious mess.

My best battle so far though was Carthaginians vs. Romans, where I started rather outmatched, and had to hold out for reinforcements - again, just randomly generated. This was really intense, because Roman legionaries in this game are just flat-out terrifying; like they will disorder and force back a perfectly intact infantry unit in one charge. Fortunately I had superior cavalry, which did mean things to assorted Roman light elements and their absolutely dreadful horse-boys and kept the heavy infantry from concentrating on my much inferior line of battle. Even then it was a close run thing, with my first line basically disintegrating about the time the reinforcements arrived. It's quite likely they were only saved by one of my original infantry companies rallying, and charging right up a Hastatii company's right flank.

If you're interested in some historically accurate turn based stabbing, I can't recommend this highly enough.

It's pretty tactically deep and fun, but a lack of game modes tires me out very quickly. In something like Rome: Total War, you had these high-intensity tactical battles, and then you rested during the strategic gameplay, building your armies and whatnot. It's just good pacing.

Here, I found the tactics to be too intense, if that's possible. If they could have coupled this with a good strategic gameplay, it could easily be the indie turn based game of the year.

[warty goblin]

It's pretty tactically deep and fun, but a lack of game modes tires me out very quickly. In something like Rome: Total War, you had these high-intensity tactical battles, and then you rested during the strategic gameplay, building your armies and whatnot. It's just good pacing.

Here, I found the tactics to be too intense, if that's possible. If they could have coupled this with a good strategic gameplay, it could easily be the indie turn based game of the year.

I can see that; it's certainly not something I play five battles in back to back.

On the flipside though, I've never gotten on well with the Total War games. If I'm in the mood for largescale strategy, Total War makes me fight all these tactical battles, which just break up the flow of my strategizing. If I'm in the mood for tactical battles, I have to shuffle dudes around the map and build crap, which isn't what I'm there for.

I have this problem with a lot of duel layer strategic/tactical games like that. Off the top of my head, the only ones that I think really pull off the design smoothly are the Age of Wonders games, mostly by keeping both layers quite breezy. XCOM/XCOM 2 do ok at it, but the strategy layers in those games are mostly just strategic waiting screens.