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[delphonso]

Sands of Salzaar has been in early access for a while and just got an English patch. From what I can tell, it's a Warband/Starsector type set in fantasy middle east. With some rogue-like elements like loadouts with more unlocked by playing more. It's on Steam.

Haven't tried it yet, but am eager to. Looks like a lot of other Chinese games - janky controls but visually pretty tight.

[Frumple]

I've been playing it for the last day or so. It's definitely neat, but also definitely pretty janky in some areas. Balance et al and general mechanical smoothness could use some work, mostly. Translation's also kinda' iffy in places, if mostly plenty functional and far from the worst I've seen.

In any case, easy starting tip: Beastmaster, despite being called harder than most other starting classes, is by and away the easiest starting class I've seen of the six or seven I've tried. 0 cost AoE on tap, massive regen, powerful starting troops. Its wolf form is busted (huge regen with a few skill points, even better AoE than base, lifesteal aura to support troops), its eagle form can perma-lock huge swathes of enemies for its duration (i.e. it's busted strong), its dragon form is a friggin' dragon with even stupider HP regen and AoE damage. I have literally no idea why it's listed as harder when it crushes basically everything else from the starting line and largely doesn't let up. If you want something to ease you into exploring the game, go beastmaster.

[delphonso]

Gave it a brief play (two hours) and yeah... Clearly some balance issues and "difficulty". I made some sort of berserker who could defeat any enemy (of any number) as long as they could be pushed or pulled thanks to the stun abilities and the fact everyone runs the same speed.

Neat and janky is the right description. Defo recommend, but also looking forward to a full release before I play much more. Nice that it has quests and story lines, though.

[Frumple]

I've reached a fairly interesting equilibrium with a character somewhere in the day 200s -- basically my army can beat just about any one enemy army (and my main character is spending most of their time beating people to death unarmed to save on repair costs ) I've encountered... but the trick is outside the bandit clan type factions you don't actually fight those, especially not fast enough to finish before reinforcements come in.

So I've hit the point I can beat any similarly sized opponent I'm finding, sometimes even twice that number, but proper knock-down drag out late-game fights don't have those kinds of fights. You get in a dustup with random character N and before the fight's over five of their friends have shown up and now you're up against 3-400 enemies, ha.

It's a pretty neat state to be in, actually. Piggybacking on proper faction fights is also quite nice, since you'll participate in fights with actually thousands of troops waiting in the wings. It's delightfully hectic.

Had one pretty amusing one last night, where I stepped in to help out a random civilian group that was getting attacked by the desert brotherhood or something, and part way through I got reinforcements. Which was neat until we thoroughly trounced the bandits and it turns out the "help" was someone that hated me and a few of their friends, who immediately turned around and ganked me

... I reloaded to a day or two prior to that after seeing the options were "lose >50% of my gold by surrendering" or "lose even more gold, a quarter or so of my inventory, and rack up a huge number of injuries from losing the fight". Gotta' be careful where you're fighting if you know hostile folks are loitering around!

[Dostoevsky]

Gave Sands of Salzaar a brief whirl and while a fair number of parts are interesting, the battles themselves are pretty awkward affairs. Ranged troop behavior means much of a given fight leads to everybody running around like headless chickens. It could really use some form of zone of control or the like. Other issues are some UI awkwardness and durability woes. For the price, though, it's a decent entry in the genre.


Been playing some Genshin Impact lately. It's... kind of like Breath of the Wild with more RPG stats and gatcha. Exploring the world is pretty nice and it's quite a beautiful world, though time will tell if the level/stat system in it will start demanding bad grinds.

The gatcha is both really tame and awful at the same time, in that the main thing behind the paywall is characters. You get a full party pretty early on and several more guaranteed characters for free, so drawing for extra characters don't seem that necessary, but if you really want waifu/husbando XYZ then the rates themselves are quite horrible and from what I hear the free draw resources are kind of stingy.

The characters are also very anime, for good and ill. At least you can change the VO on the fly between four different languages (Chinese, Japanese, English, Korean), and the VO isn't awful for any.

[Cthulhu]

Star Trek: Into Rogue Squadron One Wars is out.

It's... good?  It's fine.  It runs well, doesn't seem extremely buggy though I did run into one bad one in the multiplayer tutorial, the game didn't recognize an objective completing and I had to restart.

Very stripped down, triple-A presentation but simple.  Gameplay is simple, no microtransactions, feels like one of those "perfect 7/10" games that usually come from mid-level companies.  Fun, but not so sure about longevity.

[Mephansteras]

Star Trek: Into Rogue Squadron One Wars is out.

Uh..what game?

[Robsoie]

Reading that title, i really hoped there was a game with such name
unfortunately duckduckgo told me there was only some star wars game released.

[n9103]

I assume Star Wars: Squadrons, released on the 1st.
Why mix Star wars and star trek, I have no idea.

[Frumple]

Man, that Salazar thing is getting weirder. Sultan attempt is turning out odd/interesting, in any case. I've taken over pretty much the entirety of twinluna from the Nasir (after everyone except the horse guys and the thur went and declared war on me with no provocation or, with the dhib and dahkn, even any interaction whatsoever) extremely early (like 2-3 months in, with an army that can take their functionally undefended towns but would get whooped if they sent even one character) and they're just... not responding to it. They didn't send help when I sequentially sieged all but two of their twinluna towns (which the horse fellows snuck before I got to them). They haven't sent anything in the week or two since I took the last town in the area.

I'm guessing what's happening is they're actually tied up with some fight in one of the other regions and basically had bigger problems that a one character faction with all of fourteen or so squads (versus their 7+ characters and 200+ squads ), which would make for some amazing accidental opportunism (oops, one random hick with a passel of half baked mercs and a few other things just stole half your empire lol) from me, but... still.

Feels almost buggy, like the AI considers me so little of a threat it's not worth taking the cities back from me. And, like. Fairness where it's due. I have less than twenty sub level 20 squads, several unpromoted, and all of a single hero character (albeit one that's got absolutely brutal AoE -- the mechanist skill tree is pretty damn vicious and will only get nastier if I ever figure out how to build the friggin' library) that hasn't even hit the level cap. I absolutely am not an actual threat relative to the established factions, yet.

Becoming one's coming along a lot faster when I'm raking in 2k(+, considering caravans) money and hundreds of iron and wood per income period thanks to having yoinked half the nasir's empire, though :V

[Iduno]

No thread, because it isn't out yet, but it sounds like we're getting that old-school Baldur's Gate vibe with this new one.

https://twitter.com/adashtra/status/1313545695316635656

Remember having to use the LUA console all of the time to fix broken quests (or just not knowing why you couldn't find the next step in a quest, or having leftover quest items that you didn't know what to do with)?

[Mephisto]

It's sort of out.

EA version is like 86 gigs. There's also some background stuff WRT Mike Mearls but I won't shit up the thread  with that talk - it's all easily discoverable if you're interested.

[Uristides]

Been playing mostly Ratropolis lately. It's sort of a side-scrolling, deck-based, cutesy They are Billions. It's honest, good fun and can be played in short bursts because until you git gud most sessions won't last much more than 10 minutes.

[Robsoie]

Been replaying a bit of excellent Circadian Dice after reading that the developper is aiming for a big expansion :
https://shuffleup.itch.io/circadian-dice/devlog/184005/small-bug-fix-expansion-plans

Only stuff i have still not unlocked is most of the Hard mode scenarios (and each class own hard mode unlockable items).

So i took the character i usually have the best results with (the barbarian) and managed to defeat the 2 first hard mode scenario with him (after tons and tons of defeat) with a surprising 4 stars each (surprising to me considering how much harder those scenario were than i thought).

Hmm, only 2 stars to go to finally unlock the hard mode item for the barbarian class. Let's try the 2 new scenarios that just unlocked (forgotten island and infested sewers), maybe i'll be able to get those 2 remaining stars.

.... after dozens of losses, wow those are hideously hard , can't believe how my character is trashed so fast, didn't even reached the last waves (and so the boss) for each of those 2 scenarios, after trying a few combination of items it still looks like way too hard for me
Maybe if there wasn't such severe limited amount of opened slot on those early hard mode scenario i could somehow manage, but they all seem so crazy hard.

I guess i'll have to forget about those hard mode items.

Back in playing normal mode to heal my wounded ego   the game is still really fun.

[Mephansteras]

Nice to hear that there is going to be more content for that one. It's a good little game.