/games/ - Games

I’ve only played the napoleon one which is fun but after a while i just end up creating “meat grinders” (positioning troops in a line and waiting) and picking off generals with my cannons

Anybody have any advice on how to play the game properly?

>>44131
I used to play this realism mod with my friend online. I remember it was hard as shit. You'll find your troops getting wasted potentially in a few volleys.

I think it was Darthmod and I played it a few times with the creator. You got to be good or you get stomped in online.

>>44131
>>44132
Oh, but they still had to have a "no general sniping" rule in MP because it's so easy to cheese the game like that.

>>44130
It's would be fun without the shit UI

>>44129
this is what i posted in the other TW thread

idk i always come back to TW but it never holds my attention for too long. the problem for me hasnt ever necessarily been the particular problems title to title but the overall gameplay loop. the strategic campaign/tactical combat is a massive draw and has so much potential, but it always ends up feeling kind of clunky and unsatisfying. like its strangely rare to actually feel like the tactical combat is a hig stakes, pivotal battle. if youre playing the campaign right youre moving around with a couple big stacks and not overextending yourself, and then the most challenging battles are playing as a garrison fighting off a small enemy army that snuck behind your borders. even if its a fun combat, it ends up feeling tedious. ultimately everything is just about managing a very linear economy to maintain enough garrisons to go on the offensive. which doesnt sound terrible in theory, but in practice youre constantly jumping between relatively inconsequential economic decisions (upgrade building now or later) and relatively inconsequential battles (need to spend 30 minutes defending a location peripheral to the main action). and halfway optimal play means you need to micromanage all of it, which means spending a few hours jumping between decisions that rarely feel like they tie together and payoff.

then they add in this half-baked dynastic politics that isnt important enough to be satisfying but is too important to ignore completely.

i think Total War might benefit from leaning in to the more focused premises, and adjusting the priorities of campaign strategy so that attrition/training of your armies is more of a priority than managing country economy. in Napolean youre either trying to defeat Napolean or conquer Europe as Napolean. in Attila youre either trying to survive the hordes or you are the hordes. even with the other flaws present, at least when the campaign has this clear context it feels like what youre doing has some stakes and narrative so that its easier to enjoy the process

>>44140
>jrpgs
trve. the success of octoslop nothingburger says all there is to say about the state of the genre

>>44171
Gta San Andreas is the best game of all times and was released in mid 2000s
The Sims series had its peak (The Sims 2) in this time too

>>44165
Rollslop, gachaslop, multiplayer shooters (horde shooters and Battle royale mostly) and boomer shooters.

>>44163
I miss vehicular combat games so much

Have they made any games like Blast Corps where you wreck shit.

what

>>43683
Persona, and SMT games in general, are like Pokemon. There are plenty of Pokemon clones, no?

>>44115
There aren't many Pokemon clones if at all and SMT games aren't like Pokemon insofar as you aren't encouraged to collect demons or whatever, rather use them as fodder for more powerful demons

>>44115
>>44117 (me)
And when people say they want a Persona clone, they mean an RPG tacked to a Tokimeki Memorial style dating sim

There's a game called demonschool that does a similar school life/relationship thing to persona but it's a tactics rpg and the sprite aesthetics look closer to p1/p2 than the other games in the series, but according the the devs they never played persona and the similarities are just a coincidence. It's not out yet though (and got delayed because of silksong)

>>44106
>I want to fully exploit the very very slight implication or interpretation that the persona 3 protagonist is sociopathic and "fakes" personalities through his personas to build his social links,
That's basically what its like to be a subject of neoliberal ideology. The ideal entrepreneurial subject is when you have like three part time jobs ("gigs") who instrumentalizes people for their rational self interest

>>44069
>people play-acting as tortured geniuses on the promise that their work will be worth millions
That problem has more to do with producing art as a commodity. I see all art in the way Scaruffi talks about music: Things that manage to express specific emotions are more interesting than those that are technically impressive for whatever reason. The latter is how exchange value is assigned, while the former has, despite appearances, little to do with speculative pricing, which is an entirely different can of worms.
<The Velvet Underground were among the first bands to conceive rock music as creative art, not as a commercial product to sell in this or that format. As a consequence, they were also among the first bands to show total disregard for the charts. The aim of their music was to transmit emotions, to express uneasiness, to communicate within their environment. The early albums are first and foremost examples of creative freedom: the band wrote what it felt like, arranged it as it pleased, and played it how it wanted. The only rule was not to play blues, because too many bands were already doing it.

>>44074
speak for yourself

>>44070
Of course, it was an exaggeration. But I find it fascinating how much of the buzz around new releases seems to be drama bullshit. Makea one wonder how much of it is manufactured by advertisers.

>>44083
I dont think it is actively astrosurfed, more of a symbiothic relationship between corporate product marketing and right wing outrage media.

>>44077
I know that's what art people like to say, but high modern art fails even in that regard. Most modern art doesn't make you feel anything, it's just incomprehensible nonsense. It's incomprehensible nonsense made by people essentially LARPing as tortured geniuses on the model of Van Gogh because his works sold for cheap and are now worth millions, which caught the attention of rich people. The point isn't to evoke emotions. The point is to appear avant garde for the sake of appearing avant garde.

>>44057
idk, i dont really care about the drama around this and never watched the entirety of the original video, but im glad this channel was self-critical about their framing of the circumstances being too apologetic to the companies involved. it is really crazy how quickly "guy acts arrogant" and "kind of an asshole" gets so easily spun into treating someone like an abuser and threat to society who gets whats coming to him.

>>44057
watch for urself
first part gay in mi oprions

>>44033
wow big allegation. the author of untitled 12 is saying robert kurwitz is the original author

>>44057
jesus what a clusterfuck. i'm just left with the feeling that IP sucks and should be abolished and lawyers and money people (investors, share holders, middle managers) are parasites.

i love this game so much

>>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

The way you're playing it, OP, turns FC2 from 6.5/7 to a 10, maybe an 11/10. Turn the in game music off for even more kino.

Guess whos back. Since my last attempt I did some shopping so now I can dress like this IRL.

>>41961
I do play with music turned off. I actually like the soundtrack a lot, but because it changes depending on what is going on in the game, it keeps alerting you to hostile presence.

>>43860
Killed myself by miscalculating explosion radius of objective I was supposed to destroy. Fuck. I am temped to just reload this time because it didnt do shit when I attempted to blow the thing up with grenade and explosive barrel, but when I shot it through window it exploded. Damn it, I cleaned the area (automobile depo) like a pro, despite being the most difficult place for mission in map 1, in a middle of a jungle so you cant see anything through foliage (a disadvantage AI does not share), filled with debris, no good sniper position around. Had to circle the entire place, pick mercs one by one, run away the moment I made noise before enemy manages to close in on my location and approach from different angle. I mean look at this shit. Bullshit.

>>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.