Syt Plays

[Syt]

Yes, I notice that. I checked out some guides, but I also feel I may have hit the "the game becomes serious" thresholod for me, where I may have to pay too much attention ... which sucks when listening to podcasts.

[frunk]

Yes, I notice that. I checked out some guides, but I also feel I may have hit the "the game becomes serious" thresholod for me, where I may have to pay too much attention ... which sucks when listening to podcasts.

That's fair.  When I got burned out on trying to grind the higher difficulties but still wanted to play I did Downfall (which you should have for free if you have StS) or some of the workshop mods.  I also made a game of running all four classes at no ascension, and for each victory I would up the ascension level by 1 and then run all four again.

[Syt]

So every weekend I'm like, "ok, let's go on with Baldur's Gate III" and then end up playing more Slay the Spire or Dorfromantik while listening to podcasts.

I did try out some other games, though.

GalCiv IV on Steam is now fully released. It sucks for everyone who bought it on Epic Games Store, though. They released on Epic in Early Access, then when they released on Steam Early Access they did so as "Supernova Edition" which sold at the same price as the original on Epic ... except that the Epic purchasers had to buy an "upgrade" to get the new features.

I dabbled around with it, and it's alright. Better than GC3 at launch IMO. It has some neat ideas, and feels in some ways definitely more "beer & pretzels" than Stellaris or Distant Worlds Universe. They try to tutorialize the game, but TBH some stuff seemed fairly weird to figure out.

"Oh, my ships have ranged attacks now on the map without having to go into a full battle!" (Your missiles can attack from 4 hexes away, beam weapons from 2 hexes away.)

You still have little planet hex maps where you build improvements. But it took me a while to figure out that the buildings on the right hand menu are only "specials". Standard buildings (farms, manufacturing, research etc.) are built by clicking an empty hex. Either have ALL buildings on the right side menu or have them ALL in the pop up when clicking a hex, maybe?

Upgrading starbases. You have to build "modules" in your planets or shipyards. Each upgrade = 1 module. Weird restriction IMO. You can manufacture a stockpile of modules, though.

Not much else to report yet. I like that not every colony needs to be micro managed (until you assign a governor and make them a core world, which you can only do on planets size 10+, they're colonies who deliver their resources to the "core worlds"). Instead of one big galaxy map you have separate smaller maps connected by "stream"(?) chokepoints.

Characters play a much larger role - you need them as governors, ministers, faction leaders, diplomats, to spawn hero ships ...

Their AI powered race generation is still basic. You can give a short description and the game will generate a description and some basic stats for you, and pick an image it hopes is appropriate from Stardock's AI generated avatar library. But there's still plenty stats you have to assign manually. I've toyed a bit with it, but it's a bit of a gimmick for now IMO.

Still, has a bit of "one more turn" vibe going. Oh, and Stardock created a feature chart of what which edition had at launch.







Also been playing a few hours of https://store.steampowered.com/app/502230/Monsters_Den_Book_of_Dread/

A fairly basic dungeon crawler where your party moves room to room in a dungeon, gathering treasure and fighting monsters to level up, get more loot and fight more monsters. It's not very complex (at least up to level 5 which is how far I got) and has some risk/reward mechanics going on (can I risk one more fight, should I use one of my scarce buffs or should I go to one of the "heal up" rooms first? Fun little time waster. No idea how the other, later games are.