/games/ - Games

>>44062
Sorry, the title of this thread was supposed to say “are espers too powerful for gaming”

Seems like everything esper can do wizard can do as well, but not vice versa.

>>44064
Not quite. Wizards are restricted to mana and soul based spells meaning no reality manipulation, casual defiance of physics, or spells capable of bypassing real space. Espers don’t have the regenerative abilities that wizards have, but barrier creation and instantaneous reflexes more than make up for that. Plus espers don’t need mana, chi, stamina or “energy”, their power is all raw willpower which depending on the esper can be unlimited. Balancing something like that in a game would be very difficult

>>43931
>>43929
I do 100 agri from the start and import 100 from USA because agri initially is in a very bad spot from modifiers. Light industry is severely overinvested into, you can safely sacrifice every mod that improves it. MIC is very hard to bring back up, and heavy industry so-so. Services are the easiest IMO to improve, you can even put services expenditure to 0 and focus on tech solely, and you'll get 100 services power in no time - it's probably due to a lack of bad modifier from the start

There are negative mods on agri from a dedicated modifier (60% cap on power), and a dedicated mod from lack of workers (80-90% caps on various industries). And from my understanding, this means having those powers above cap values gives no benefits. Don't quote me on that, it just feels that way after you get rid of a mod and economy suddenly jumps up 20-40%

>>43929
>>43931
>>43932
Essentials are kind of a secondary stat from what I understand, there is a hidden mechanism that improves it based on other stats. So, competitiveness improves it for sure. Market coverage, competitiveness from sliders are a trap, it means you are essentially subsidizing those, not developing industries to provide competitiveness and market coverage, if it makes sense
There's also probably a hidden mod of aggregate quality of workers, education multiplied by healthcare and something else, which should be improving industries

Okay, I found the "90s slowdown" effect. For me, it's solved by unifying Soviet bloc economy, it gives 2x money from trade compared to previous level, but the decision is locked behind 250 price Brezhnev policy. Also, decreasing 40 hours week to 48 is pretty good, but you need to offset it by something like UBIncome.

Attachment to factories gives a decision to force +5% income and +3 powers monthly at the cost of healthcare for a year and 100 political power. Lowest level immigration policy gives a decision to import workforce, where you can choose either +3 powers +competitiveness and something else, OR -3 corruption and -3 forgery monthly, or quick fix to radical opposition -3 monthly. These two decisions can save your run easily

Filling Aral sea with Russian rivers gives NOTHING. Very sad, you just get a malus forever, no transformation of nature ot make the land green, no decision to dig channel to the Caspian sea to connect Siberia to the Soviet navigable river network, no nothing. Very ahistorical realization of the 1948 idea!

And early game forgery + corruption solution is Soviet democracy law (opposite of personal dictatorship). It flatly gives 3 and 3 reduction to both

I have no fucking clue how to speed up the wars, though. Iran war is just stuck at 87% in favor of Iran, and that's it. Afghanistan has miraculously ended in 1991, despite me putting every decision on

Oh, and also, for the next run, I'll try to move breznev policy up once to unify SEZ for maximum profits, then two policies down by 1989 (or what was it when you can sign friendship treaty?) to befriend China and drag them into SEZ by the ear. And then hopefully force them to switch sides in all wars

And also France. Man, diplomacy in this game is stupid because it's event driven

>>43453
First game had disaster tied to ecology level, IIRC. In this one, it's probably either money getting put into research (160 accoridng to the guide) or modernizing reactors through science? In any case, reactor science is pretty great for speeding up other research

Okay, I think I get it now why there's such wonkiness with economics

When I switched from authoritarian parliament to soviet democracy, from +8 to -25 political power, Instead of losing 33 political power of a total income of like 150 per turn, instead I got into -100 range. Meaning that there are multipliers in play - pluses/minuses in budget screen are not +0.05 or something but rather +5%

Say, I had 400 state expenditures, meaning 80 pluses, meaning that if one plus is equal to 5%, +400% to political power, meaning instead of a 33 drop I got like 132 drop. There are other ++political power places to get to 250 total, but you get the idea. So, republics loyalties flipping from +1 to -3 political power randomly hits you quite hard on higher budgets

So, there are two questions for this kind of a system, if it indeed works like this: 0 base income or what happens when you go below 1 to -1, and going from 100% to 0% and 0% to -100%.

Depending on how it works, it might be actually beneficial to stack as much positive or negative base income, and then fix it with budget. Say, if you have +2 corruption and you get 20 minuses to corruption then it would be equivalent to -1 corruption base income without pluses or minuses. Essentially, 100 in state expenditures might be worth as much as a full -3 corruption base modifier. I'll need to try a full authoritarian and a full democratic runs to test this shit out, but it makes sense to me with how game behaves. Though, pluses probably get less than 5% effect when there's a lot of them and this malus gets listed as overgrowth effect (or whatever it's called in english) in the tooltip

Okay, my final AAR (i swear)

1990s slump is due to game having a hard limit on industrial output. It's probably around 100 for each industry, modified by "+25% to industry incomes" mods. You just won't get any improvement beyond that, and that's why there's a slump. When that happens, you can earn some pennies by fighting corruption, but better approach is to either unify SEZ, solidify republics with a law (requires high loyalties of everyone), or get into taking over Africa and South America for trade deals

Market share and competitiveness are really important. Dropping service industries to zero at the start like in the guide is a working strategy, but eventually you need to hike that back up to 100 to get a better market share

Beyond a certain market share threshold, you replace dollar with ruble as a world reserve currency, and you get a x3 modifier to every country's trade i.e. you get triple the income from trade. Maybe the amount of countries in SEZ matters also, but I doubt it. This is how you get to 4000+ GDP as USSR, too, the levels USA has at the start

The best economic strategy is to advance science. That's about it. You have hard caps on mechanical improvements, you have no way to improve meaningfully except for events and science decisions

500 reserve demand for better relations from policies doesn't matter for active help and world revolution foreign policies. It matters for sucking up to Westoids, though. You also CANNOT have both good relations with the West and have good influence on the rest of the world, even if you spend ~1000 on diplomacy, you STILL cannot win over Europeans without proper state policies. Without proactive diplomacy stance on world revolution, don't even bother influencing Mexico, you'll spend a lot of resources for nothing

Europeans do offer a good trade, but they are kind of unnecessary. I have no idea how to get them out of American sphere without destroying USA first, though. You'd need to support communists from the start of the game at the very least. France had a path with supporting gaullists/far-right that made them leave NATO in the first game, but here I dunno, decision's not shown from the start. It probably does still exist. It seems like France gets a USA military base if centrists win, or maybe at a certain date. They do this without an event, so I have no idea when this happens. French sphere of influence depends on influence points you give therm bPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>43963
>you can only name a bunch of really old freeware passion project games
Fine, let's look at common tropes of the JRPGs. Turn-based battles are their main point of player interaction and they primarily achieve build variety through pre-made characters, equipment, a lot of consumables and sometimes skill acquisiton and/or materia some kind of aspect slot system. This type of character building is complex in its own right, despite being unwieldy with pen and paper, considering the amount of options most games throw at you, and clearly the point of JRPG combat. You can find a lot of people complaining about FFVII, because it reduced the maximum party size in ATBs from 4 to 3.

>>43964
"Build complexity" doesn't really mean anything in the "RPG flavor" context if ultimately all "build complexity" amounts to is the numbers going up.

>>43969
Yeah, that's why in pokemon combat rare skills, items like heat orb or focus sash and the monsters themselves are the most interesting aspects of combat, while nature marginally so and everything else a matter of mindless optimization. It's about linear upgrade paths you would see in a bad rpgmaker game vs. interesting tradeoffs or other unique rules that increase complexity exponentially. Ideally the complexity isn't collapsed into dumb number checks, the way speech skills usually work, but determines the way the player interacts with another system accomodating to it, usually combat.

>>43952
Larian is actually an example.

While I liked Divinity: Original Sin 2, and messing around with the various elemental abilities and how they interact with each other can be fun, its a game about being a sorcerer where you don't really get to do much sorcerer stuff beyond doing damage in various ways, and the meta was actually focusing on physical damage over spells. In addition, it's all based around a classless system which I've never been a big fan of since they're kind of boring.

Then they make Baldur's Gate 3, which is tied to the D&D 5e ruleset, and suddenly all the cool wizard shit is back in, along with classes and all the flavor those classes bring.

>>43974
I'm still waiting for Larian Studios space opera kino, I hope it turns out well.

Steel Battalion looks cool.

>>43898
siht, this looks rly cool

Signalis immediately comes to mind :)

>>43898
Dude steel battalion is really cool. It's just a shame no one will ever make one with another huge controller.

>>43898
I wish I could play Steel Battalion so much… I think the only way this kind of game is going to be done now is through VR or something. Mechwarrior is kind of like it at least, it is very immersive being in the cockpit, but I just can't get over how the mechs have open cockpits with canopies, I just headcanon when I play that the pilot is sitting in somewhere more defended and the canopy is actually a set of screens.
>>43901
The Signalis UI is so fantastic, I love especially the weird unexplained tabs in the character screen. I think it is the best example of this kind of UI but Nier Automata also does a good job (even if IMO the UI getting damaged is underused). I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 and it also has this kind of thing, all 3 games do an error message on death, which is just so cool.

>>43889
"superheros" price and soap, and that other sas guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXy1b-wn1c0&ab_channel=Sapprem
Like point to me an earlier cod that had something as ridiclous as this

Modern Warfare is the last time the series did something new and interesting. Since then it has been 20 years of stagnation.

>>43891
It's kind of funny that the developers only seem to have seen Enemy at the Gates

>>43909
>>43891
hey now, world at war innovated as a grimdark deconstruction of the old cods…
And mw2 at least innvovated by being the start of super hero action blockbuster cods.
Everything after was just a rehash….

>>40487
play dominions 6

Tbh I really liked Thrones of Brittania. Idk why so many people hate it, this was the only time I've had fun with Total War since Rome. Gwynedd (why did they change the name?) was really fun, it was an actual challenge fighting Wessex at least at the beginning until it got to the point where I was just map painting. My only issue was Powys back capping me so hard it was insane and they captured all of my farms so I had a famine, but apart from dealing with them I was maxxed out on food. The siege battles were a highlight though (which if kind of funny considering the time period). It was fun role play but idk how you were meant to unite Cymru diplomatically.

Shogun 2 was good visually but it didn't really keep me playing, and I just don't get why you would play the fantasy ones. Warhammer total war is one of my least favourite strategy games of all time because the infantry doesn't even matter, the big super duper epic dragon units just kill your entire army. What's even the point of having an army if a single hero can kill it all anyway and its only them who actually matter? I don't think the franchise has really improved that much since Rome total war. That game was so perfect and everything since has just been very incremental steps (like Shogun and Thrones of Brittania) or going backwards like Warhammer.

>>43792
maybe it's because I played pretty much only with SFO,but the ebin dragons get absolutely murdered by like two units of halberd stopping them from flying away.
also guns in general melt single entities,and being a big monster is terrible to not get hit.
Only talking about warhammer 3 tho,never played the first one and I don't remember 2

>>43792
It does seem like they've only compounded the worst parts of empire since it came out.

I think the biggest issue Total War games all suffer from is too much fighting, which makes individual battles feel meaningless. Soldiers train fast, manpower is conjured out of thin air, money is plentiful, so the result is a neverending stream of soldiers constantly coming your way, grinding the pacing to the halt. The best Total War experience I had was with SSHIP mod for Medieval 2, which severely increases unit wage plus adds bunch of other expenses, unit pool replenishment takes long time, so when I played as Lithuania at the beginning of the game half a stack was a major army, and defeating it actually had an impact on the overall war because neither me nor computer can just shit out another one in a turn.

>>43787
I already know of Puss!(sic) but will be checking out Severed Steel, thanks anon!!!
Also I'm checking out Returnal

>>43780
im assuming youve played Hotline Miami. only game ive that comes to mind based on what ive played and enjoyed, but i am a casual

>>43780
my ADHD sensibilities demand experiences, i guess i am built different :)

>>43845
Do you perchange have experience with playing Hotline on linux? I got the updated version running with the correct resolution over wine, but after finishing the prologue the game gets stuck on a black screen.

>>43850
nah sorry i dont use linux

>>43782
I AM 30
ugh that's not much better is it?
>>43774
Holy no arguments batman!
Though i will confess the Linkara hate was clickbait. He's alright.

>>43782
>>43785
40 is just a number if you were loser at 30 you'll probably be one at 40 and vice versa probably. I didn't feel much different just a bit more down but I've always been a bit down. But it's great not being broke

>>43785
>no arguments
noo need.
ur gay, becuased spoony and linkana based
u dislike based reviewer story

>>43763
Spoony did nothing wrong And he was the only person on Cannel Awesome that actually had a good attitude towards what he was doing and wasn't a delusional careerist retard.

He seemed to regard Cannel Awesome as essentially his internet buddies that he was goofing around and hanging out with, while everyone else seemed to believe that that shit site was going to be the next big media phenomenon. It was hilarious seeing Lord Kat shit his pants over the completely delusional idea that Cannel Awesome was right about to be taken seriously as a media outlet if it wasn't for that dang dirty Spoony doing a goof at a con. And then they all fucking backstabbed him over a two or three year old joke, clearly in the hopes that getting rid of him would allow one them to be second place in Doug Walker's big gaggle of chucklefucks.

>>43714
it's a boywomb

>>43705
This video would have gone hard in 2007

>>43724 i want to unread this word

>>43724
What connects a boywomb to the boy pussy?

>>43738
the large intestine