/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.

the welsh uyghas of gwynedd offer me to give them back their own king 200 pennies. for refrence that's the same price as two pigs or one jar of honey.

lol, lmao even

South Korea made valve ban a steam warband mod for depiction of "historical revisionism" over the Gwangju massacre

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/valve-cooperates-in-banning-steam-mod-for-depicting-historical-revisionism/

>>43304
It's a shame you can't accept it and send them back a finger. "You get what you pay for."

>>43304
lmao

bump

>>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.

Why don't you make it?
I'll help where I can

I really wanna get into this but it seems to have a higher learning curve than the OG dwarf fort.

>>42770
booted it up the other day and had no fucking idea what I was doing. Like most agents of anarchy.

>>42574
I was a hardcore conservative back in the early to mid 2000's and this game played a big role in mentally aligning me to the left.
It's satirical to a point, sure, but it nudged me to re-frame how I saw certain issues.

>>42770
nah it really isn't that complicated.

>>43972
based

>>42574
>lcs is reactionary slop, the game was made by a fascist to mock the opposition to bush,

where's the proofs? obviously the game makes fun of the left a bit but they're clearly portrayed as the good guys overall

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.

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

Hilarious looking back at this series how they were hyping up Russia as this ultra powerful country that would even launch an invasion of America and a few decades later cucktin is stuck in Ukraine like idiot who decided to take on a bet to fight a weaker kid and got the shit kicked out of him.

>>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.

Every Dark Souls game
Borderlands
Bioshock, all of then
Helldivers 2
World of Warcraft
The Witcher 2
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Half Life 1 and 2
Halo, all of them
Pokemon, but depends on which gen
Earth Bound, neat game but it’s really Mother 1 with quality of life improvements if you think about it
Far Cry series

>>43869
> It turns out the city is small and ugly, the characters have very repetitive dialogue
Idk how you play Shenmue without knowing about the memes around how janky it is

>>43878
I knew it was a bit janky but I thought it was mostly because of the English voice acting and that if I would play it with the original Japanese voices it would be okay, but it turns out even then the game is janky.
I think the dialogue system made it that way, since so many people have so different lines, and you always ask them questions about a specific goal, I think it's understandable that it is this way.

Maybe I should bite the bullet, play it with the English dub and embrace the jank.

System Shock 2
Dark Souls
Celeste
Civilization
Age of Empires
every EA game
every Paradox game
every Sega game
every fighting game.

>>43720
GTA SA is so overrated

Not to be a German Idealist but games have been getting better and better over time (the biggest improvement was in the 90s). The 2010s and 2020s have produced the best games because the technological and social conditions around games allowed the indie scene to really thrive, producing the best games ever made.

Nostalgia is reactionary

They still make those

Golden age it's now. Sorry nostalgia addicts

They are yet to make a single good game. There was never a golden age and it's unlikely to ever happen.