/games/ - Games

>>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.

Wooh game got some nice updates this year

I will not play the vanilla game at all and will possibly only get it when it gets some mods

>>47961
>I bet socialism and communism are going to be entirely absent from any of this of course
Probably but i am sure I read that they said this game will have their most advanced modding support yet, I bet some very interesting mods could come for this game, as someone who enjoys modding myself i am looking forward to it.
HOpe somebody does Europe, which i'd rather play in as a setting, but i'm not looking forward to a paradox-brained Europe mod, with the expected allusions to the Holy Roman Empire and a bunch of meme shit.

>>48037
anon that is a different game

>>47961
Maybe it will be like "christian socialism" since the game wants to do le epic schizo religious ideologies

>>47363
a capitalist is a person who owns means of production and exploits workers. people like being capitalist because it makes them a lot of money. a capitalist is not simply a worker who "believes capitalism is the best system". that's called false consciousness.

>>47324
>caring about physical media
This is childish discourse. DRM is what should be talked about. For fucking decades physical releases have meant jack shit. So many physical games require online authentification and in today's age with the normalizing of half-ass releases and "redemption-arcs" so many games on release will be updated coutless time, having a physical 1.0 copy just doesn't make much sense unless publishers just want to make some extra coin off collectionists via fomo.

Crack a final version of a game to make it drm free, put it on a disk or portable drive. There you go, physical media. Hell, for a little extra money pay someone on etsy to make you a replica or custom box/case. The outcry for physical media is the outcry for corporate handholding. We don't need the corpos to enjoy games.

sony just cancelled the kojima game physint and i'm starting to suspect that the ps6, if it ever gets released, will be a portable console.

like it makes perfect sense, people actually don't expect portable mini pcs to support physical media, i'd like to see the people currently protesting staying true to their cause when sony releases a AAA-gaming "hybrid" console, in fact many people protesting will perform incredible sony apologetics if that happens.

>>47501
Yes, DRM is the problem. Every game should just be a file that you run. No more launchers, no anti-cheat.

>>48053
The next step is making games in portable VM formats like Z-code. Electron apps don't count!

Sokoban clone Kwirk on the original Game Boy. (You shove around various shapes, not just boxes. There are holes you shove things into to walk over them, there are things that rotate 90° when you brush against, and there are levels where you control two people. That's pretty much it.) And Baba Is You', which I classify as half a Sokoban, half something else.

I'm also moderately excited about gigadouche Jonathan Blown's next game, Order of the Sinking Star.

>>48048 (me)
I fashion myself a gifted thinker and puzzle solver, yet here I stand with trousers down in public committing errors in basic formatting.

we are charlie kwirk. i've yet to play jonathan blowhard's the witness, maybe this weekend.

>>48025
>i think it's mostly old millenials
<people who grew up with piece of media and have nostalgia are critical of pointless remake
shocker.

>>48020
>It is clearly oriented towards being played by new people, especially children
fuck them kids. it doesn't even look like "something that would appeal to children", like flat out, that's cope from some youtube shorts guy who found rococo in a dictionary. the unreal engine 5 demo look is obviously meant for the 40 year old manchildren fanboys who had wanted exactly this since the gamecube got released

>>48025
I can't explain it but I just don't like how it looks. I'm not even super precious about the awful 64 graphics either.

>we intentionally kept loading screens
soul reaver 2 was able to do away with loading screens 25 years ago

>>48003
It's a story driven game you ADHD zoomer how about you play through the whole thing before forming an opinion bitch

>>48003
yeah, how about you play through the whole thing before forming an opinion you adhd zoomer bitch, how about that?!?

>>47997
i only ever had fun when i installed a mod that lets me have sandevistan and hacking at the same time, and a bunch of difficulty mods, and cranked everything all the way to very hard and did the dumb "secret" mission to raid arasaka. that was the only time anything in that piece of shit game felt exciting, and even then there was a lot of bunkering waiting for the asthma inhaler to reload or whatever

>>48042
also the fact that the raid arasaka mission was "secret" shows that cdpr are truly fucking stupid and fail to understand their own game, because it's thematically the most fitting outcome. it should have been the default option, perhaps behind the actual suicide ending. like yeah if you fail to make friends, your options should be either killing yourself, or smashing your face against a meatgrinder. the third option to make a deal with arasaka should just kill you offscreen.

>>48043
Making a deal with arasaka is the shit ending tho, you lose all your friends if you do it, and you're basically never gonna be able to do anything exciting for your entire extremely shortened life, it's a spiritual suicide instead of litteral

>>35934
it's worse because most of those games are also financial failures, so the effort is completely wasted. they see the insane RoI margins on fortnite and think they can just do their own fortnite. like technically they can but they also can't just manifest the paypigs from the ether. we can't have the financial flops that are also highly ambitious and niche concepts, unless it's from studios or auteurs that spent like a decade building goodwill and recognition with their audience.

>>47672
>it's worse because most of those games are also financial failures, so the effort is completely wasted.

Like concord

>>48029
the answer is to RETVRN to decentralized servers ran by the players with their own mod teams, let it sink or swim based on that.

>>48029
Reducing the amount of cheaters to 0.01% of the playerbase is good enough tbh

Arma reforger is goated

>>48028

i love SPTarkov but i'm waiting for it to update to V1.5

>>48030
it actually is, no doubt about it. matchmaking and all the shenanigans with MMR and whatever happens in the backend serves exactly one purpose: maximizing playtime and incentivizing players to spend on micro transactions

TWR larpfest ended

>>47948
Wow. He looks like he got on the SSRI's, god damn.
Always seemed like he was a little bit less deranged than the rest of these freaks but that's not saying a lot.

>>47911
Has twr added anything new? Last I remember was the israel update

>>47367
Some recent Devlogs. Gotta say i'm looking foraward to this game:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1670650/view/711157251640918615

>>47935
okay im speaking in good faith aka trying to understand you
But how is something lionizing when the military invasion ends with a nuclear explosion. That implies the usa invasion ultimately ended with achieving nothing. Except for the deaths of the marines and the whole city they just invaded.
The british campaign sure did lionize things with the whole we got the bad guy. But the usa campaign ends with your character dying in a irradiated wasteland. Achieving nothing in the end

>>47979
Did you miss the part where the mission opens with the us military rolling in in an overwhelming show of technological military force, where it effortlessly brushes aside all resistance and the player character is an invincible superhero? The reason you get nuked in the first place is because you voluntarily stay behind on some retarded "No one gets left behind" suicide mission. You getting nuked isn't meant to show the consequences of us military hubris, it's an example of the barbaric brutality of America's enemies, and that bullshit with you wandering around after initially surviving a nuclear blast is only underscores that.

>>47986
>Did you miss the part where the mission opens with the us military rolling in in an overwhelming show of technological military force, where it effortlessly brushes aside all resistance and the
which can be seen as building up the foundations for later deconstruction. The beginning is meant to build up all the common tropes of america might and technological domination.
Then later missions of the campaign deconstruct it by having such military might be wiped away to a pointless nothing. To become ash. (nuke)

>The reason you get nuked in the first place is because you voluntarily stay behind on some retarded "No one gets left behind" suicide mission.
Which is the game deconstructing the america saves the day trope. With your player character doing america military "hero" shit and then shortly after getting punished for that. (NUKED)

>You getting nuked isn't meant to show the consequences of us military hubris, it's an example of the barbaric brutality of America's enemies,
But the main reason why the enemy does the nuke is because the invasion happened. The only reason why things escalated to that point was because of the invasion.

>that bullshit with you wandering around after initially surviving a nuclear blast is only underscores that
I disagree. I think that scene was meant to show that despite how powerful the usa is, in the end the usa still achieves nothing. That despite how much miltiary strength the usa brought in the beginning of the campaign, in the end all there was is just ash. With your player character being a witness to it as he crawls out of the destroyed helicopter and sees not usa glory but just destruction

>>47988
>which can be seen as building up the foundations for later deconstruction

There isn't any deconstruction. The narrative intention you're imagining doesn't exist. The entire game only reinforces the perception of western military power. That's the point. You're playing the yankee propaganda game. It's the narrative equivalent of Rocky Balboa getting knocked down. It makes him getting back up and overcoming the challenge even more heroic.

>But the main reason why the enemy does the nuke is because the invasion happened.

No, the main reason the nuke happened is because the sas kill squad botched their assassination job and failed to murder Zakhaev, the insane Russian villain that orchestrated the entire sequence of events. The middle east nuke isn't there to "deconstruct" American power but to underscore the need for its use, an intention which is underscored by the Russian madman attempting to nuke the US, which is only narrowly averted by nato superheroes.

There isn't a single moment in this game where the use of force by nato or its military dominance is ever in question. From start to finish its justified by its opponents being insane murderers who if left to their own devices will gladly kill millions. From start to finish it is shouting WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS AND YOU HAVE TO KILL THE BAD GUYS AND YOU ARE RIGHT AND JUSTIFIED AND A BADASS AND AWESOME FOR DOING SO at the very top of its lungs.

>>47998 (last time I edit and then repost this)
>It's the narrative equivalent of Rocky Balboa getting knocked down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNaTy5K4Pr0
But in the rocky example you yourself stated that rocky gets back up and overcomes the challenge. Therefore making the getting back up heroic.
Meanwhile, In the usa campaign this does not happen at all. The mc you play as and the overall us invasion force is annihlated.

After that, theres no heroic overcoming in the us campaign. As shown by the usa campaign ending with your mc dying slowly while he's surrounded by the dead bodies of his comrades. Dying in a ruined city
Its as if rocky was knocked down and then slowly died due to his physical injuries.

>There isn't a single moment in this game where the use of force by nato or its military dominance is ever in question.

the villians speeches do question the intentions of nato and the west
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHNlia4SK0M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpY82vSFMUU
Zakhaev talks about how the west destroyed their economies, destroyed their culture, and just overall destroyed their nations (zakhaev)
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