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[Frumple]

I've only sorta' noticed that's even a feature, and it certainly wasn't obvious from first impressions, heh. Even after a handful for restarts to look at different classes in action, I still haven't actually seen that pick up prompt in the main campaign, just from short dip into that island thing to see what it meant by roguelike-y. I wasn't sure if it was a feature specific to that DLC or not, tbh.

... it does lessen the nuisance somewhat, but taking advantage of it means you weren't being an obsessive loot goblin, and that's a deeply unsatisfying ask when there's so much loot to loot goblin at. It's not a deal breaker, but it was a "install a handful of mods before you even get through the first area of the game so you can unfuck a poor UI decision" breaker :V

[n9103]

I'm not sure, but door opening might also be influenced by your party's marching order. (So person with the shortest time to open wins)
You could set that in the party order screen... wherever that is? I forget, but played around with it at the beginning, as well as when I got my first mount.

If modding is in your future, consider Bubble Buff or something, which allows you to set up an out of combat buff button for one click casting.

[Frumple]

Already got it installed

... haven't done it yet, but other than QoL/UI stuff I've got now, I'm also kinda' considering the toybox option that more or less turns off the vancian crap. It's a system I can work with, but I've never liked it, and if you give me an option to not there's pretty strong odds sooner or later I'mma go, "Yeah, sod this mess, just let me throw spells you jerks." There's a restore uses after battle option that's pretty tempting.

E: Though after seeing the cinematic for the nth time, I just realized why that bug dude looks so damn doofy to me. They gave that guy the head a muppet. Blighter is friggin' edgy elmo the bugman, and it has completely destroyed my ability to take their threat seriously.

[Robsoie]

Went on a Total Annihilation AI skirmish fun after reinstalling it.

- was quickly reminded how bad the default AI was unfortunately, basically the AI can't maintain a basic economy and stall a lot due to it, leading the AI to be unable to build an actual threatening army, so even if it had been a while and i am very likely rusty i simply played on the Metal Heck map and walked all over the hardest AI without any trouble. There's an article that points several of the default AI problems here : https://www.tauniverse.com/articles/tutorials/ai.html

- went to download a custom non-cheating AI as i remembered there was some very good stuff for skirmish there
https://aicentral.tauniverse.com/
I had a lot of positive memories of MostlyHarmless and Queller, went to use MostlyHarmless as it was the AI i used the most last time i played.

Started a skirmish on same map and same conditions and wow, it was a true battle and quickly on both my side and the AI side it was a slaughter, managed to win by the skin of my teeth thanks to lots of guardians turrets to support my troops, but still if i would have been slower on the start things could have easily gone the AI way.

- decided to give a try to Escalation, it's been a very long time since i last played it, but from what i read since that time they re-added the T4 tier (last time i played they had retired that tier of units because they were rebalancing the whole mod and T4 required more attention) with their huge units and even better they made an improved AI (though it is a cheating one from what i read) as in the old Escalation it was nearly as easy to beat as the default AI.

Started a skirmish in same conditions again.
... and double-wow the AI destroyed me, i was happy to manage to put some good fight in the early game thanks to tons of light artillery vehicles (they're rather amazing), but the AI started to outnumber my troops and artillery fielding better units at some point and by midgame it managed to break my last defensive lines and properly razed my many production buildings to end the game.
And that without even reaching those T4 tier units i wanted to see.

Will have to lower the difficulty settings or give me some AI ally, the AI definitively is way too strong at max difficulty for me in Escalation but that was such a fantastic battle that challenged me from start to end so it didn't matter it was plenty of fun

Note : after installing Total Annihilation, make sure to install this unofficial patch :
https://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=46765
It fixes bugs, add some very good QoL features (like the Supreme Commander-like satellite view map) and more importantly makes TA perfectly compatible with modern OS without any more tweaking, just had to drop that in my TA directory and played without any bug or crashes.

Note 2 : said unofficial patch also contains updated compatibility with modern OS and fixes for the Total Annihilation big mods (like Escalation) in case you crash with them if you install those mods on a TA with the unofficial patch installed.

[Frumple]

TA's held up remarkably well over the years, really. Spring breathed some extra life into it, but even the original (especially + some mods) is solid to this day.

[Robsoie]

I often read people mentionning "Beyond all Reason" and "Zero-K" as the best Spring-based games to follow on Total Annihilation
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
https://zero-k.info/

Still i find the original TA (with mods like Escalation) truly great

[Frumple]

Haven't looked into BAR very much, but Zero-K is indeed pretty neat. It's not Escalation neat, but it's still pretty good stuff.

... only problem is the published build apparently occasionally gets infected with malware, so, uh. Well, I uninstalled it and haven't looked back, heh.

[Jopax]

Can confirm that BAR is pretty good, has a lively multiplayer community too, as well as half decent bots if you prefer comp-stomps.

[Robsoie]

This month new updates for the excellent WinSP:MBT and WinSP:WW2 , updates are available for both for free and enhanced editions
https://www.shrapnelgames.com/Camo_Workshop/MBT/MBT_page.html
https://www.shrapnelgames.com/Camo_Workshop/WW2/WW2_page.html

Camo Workshop has been regularly delivering updates for those games since 25 years!
Now that's some amazing dedication

[Robsoie]

It's been several years i hadn't heard about it, but it looks like Speed Dreams (an opensource motorsport racing game built on the TORCS engine) is still alive and even released a new version a couple of months ago !
https://www.speed-dreams.net/en/

It sure seem to have improved a lot since i last played it around 2018 from what i see in the video.

[nenjin]

The Early Access of Starship Troops Extermination just dropped.

It's purty good! A bit rough and with a limited amount of content. But it captures the batshit crazy intensity of the movies. Lots of screen shake, explosions, aliens screeching, gun fire, people shouting stuff. It has the same vibe Earth Defense Force but somewhat less janky. Base and defense building is part of the gameplay which is kind of interesting with 16 people. You typically go from point to point doing a few objectives before building a small base at the final point,defending it, then making it to an evac drop ship. The evac to the dropship is always chaotic and a lot of fun.

It's got a limited amount of classes, progression, maps and gameplay modes. And it needs a serious amount of optimization. But I played over an hour and had a pretty good time all around.

[Aoi]

Ghostlore... think isometric pixel ARPG, with an Asian flair. It's... okay?

What's most interesting is the skill, and rune grid-- you socket skills onto the skill grid, and a finite amount modifiers to the skill in the same row or column. For example, half of my skill grid is occupied with making three summoning skills triggering each other on-hit, and eliminating their cooldown, so I'm constantly running around with a full army. The downside is, due to the placement required, the other half of the skill grid has something like -70%damage effects, so anything that deals direct damage is useless.

The rune grid is your stat bread and butter, and mostly consists of praying you get decent pentaminos to shove in the grid, and fill in with various runes to activate its effect. (Alternatively phrased: You have a grid you need to fill with Tetris pieces, and you have mods that you need to shove into those Tetris pieces. All of which have their own layers of RNG.)

Unfortunately: Despite some interesting ideas, it, as a whole, just doesn't feel very interesting. Basically just pick a few core skills, build around them, and you're off! Even post-story content is of faceroll difficulty*... and it only takes a few hours to get there. A pity, because I rather like the art.

Spoiler: *A few notes. (click to show/hide)

I've clocked two deaths-- one I THINK is required by the narrative, and the other is in an endless challenge area when I afk'd for a phone call in what I thought was a cleared map.

Also, there's some kiiiiind of awkward serverside interaction-- you can upload your character, and have it summoned into other peoples' games... as well as throw an item into the void, and get a different one, of comparable tier, back, with label-- Bob's Wooden Mallet, so to speak. Of the ~20 items I've thrown in, every item I got back was from the illustrious hero... SKIDROW. 

[LoSboccacc]

warhammer 40k boltgun is out, it's a retro first person shooter.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2005010/Warhammer_40000_Boltgun/


I've got mixed feelings. for one, the game has been a load of fun. they call it doom like, but I definitely feel a quake (original) wibe, with non hitscan weapons and the rainbow enemies, albeit there are some gameplay element from doom ethernal that complete it for a more modern feeling (i.e. enemy health drop)

the enemies are manageable, I've played the first three levels with the hardest difficulty and it was well balanced, it was challenging but not impossible, and the difficulty ramp up the enemy number and not the enemy tankiness, which is a welcome change so that you don't feel super weak

the level design include some amount of complex geometry, which is fun to navigate in combat and boring to find the exit afterward. there have been some cheap shot, but enemy have reasonable reaction time so even if they may spawn behind you, which is something that I generally hate with passion, here dodging in time is not particularly hard.

the setting tho is a little trite. it's smurf vs chaos, there is some enemy variety thanks to the abundance of damonic beasts, but their presence is not particularly organic with the level. there are a bunch per area and that's it. the only one placed with care are terminator in control points.

[Funk]

Warhammer Darktide, you will see every thing this game has to offer in 6 hours, you will learn the maps forwards and backwards.
There's 20 odd guns but really its more like 6.

[Robsoie]

For people that aren't fond of unity games "telemetry" rarely having an opt-out and would like to play their game without that crap :
https://github.com/R-T-B/UnityAnalyticsKiller
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/a-tool-to-kill-unity-telemetry-unityanalyticskiller.260370/
made for Kerbal, but should work for every unity games.