Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Robsoie]

Gave a try to "Thea 2" gog's freebie (to claim for less than 48 hours)

I noticed that it's on the unity engine and really i don't know if nearly none using that engine can optimise their code or if it's the engine that isn't good, but despite it is very unimpressive graphically it seems to run oddly slow despite nothing looks "hd" at all (and the game is turn based), even navigating the various overly busy (as they make the game look more complicated than it actuall is) menu feels "floaty" despite it's only in 2D.
Additionally it eats a lot of memory ( huh ? why ?) and a lot of GPU (odd considering how it looks rather low res, and in the same time there's nearly no graphic option to tweak and the "beautifull" and "fast" setting looks nearly the same without any performance difference too)

Every turns takes near to a dozen of seconds to complete after you press the next turn button for some reason (despite from what i read AI factions stay on their ground and never expand, so out of a few monster party roaming aroud, why are turns being so long ?)

After turning off the vsync and limiting to 30fps that was recommended on some googling, the improvement is not very noticable but it still is there.

Oh well, despite those sad technical issues, the game has a good potential as it combine survival elements, 4X and roleplaying, the combats works with a card system (your poeple being the cards and they have various abilities).
There are deities to unlock for further new games (at the start there are only 2 choices)

But man i wish people making games would optimise them a bit ...

[nenjin]

Kinda the reason developers pick Unity though. You can make a game in it very easily. Doesn't mean you made a well optimized game.

[Il Palazzo]

I thought Thea was all kinds of excellent. But Thea 2 felt limp and watered down.

[Robsoie]

Played 70 turns and unfortunately i found this Thea 2 not really great for my 4X or heroic fantasy rpg taste .

There's a lot of "doing nothing" turns to research, time spent to gather and craft stuff instead of exploring and adventuring, and even those turns doing nothing still have those 10 seconds of waiting for the end turn for no obvious reason other than slow code (as nothing is happening at all on the island i've explored).

The few times i adventured out of my newly built town , i found it was mostly to gather away ressources (so more turns spent doing nothing) more than actually adventuring, as the few "dungeons" that spawn around weren't really more than just a text leading to a fight , either a fight against an enemy party or a fight against symbols (example of symbolic fight : there's a heavy storm and you're running for cover, so you have that fight against "things" to simulate you're not getting trashed by the storm). 

At least sometime the reward for victory can be good (as in ressources i have no access for now). Apparently the atmosphere is supposed to be using slavic myths, but honestly out of the small demons with "funny names" nothing really make a difference between this and a generic heroic fantasy world.

For the fight, there's an appearance of depth with the cards and card abilities that represent your characters or enemies or symbolic stuff, but after those fights i found out that it's actually very simple just made complicated by the amount of clicks to place everything in the pre-fight rounds.

After spending time placing your card and selecting amongst the (very few) abilities to use to buff/protect your cards, the actual automated card fight play alone for 2 rounds and then instead of leaving the survivors on the playfield (so you could have kept things, or removed/replaced what you wanted only), it will then remove all the cards and you have to place them again (and the abilities) manually.

A lot of people seems to share that opinion about Thea 1 being much better than Thea 2 from my googling around (and apparently mention that it does not have all those silly technical issue with heating your GPU for nothing or being that heavy on ressource, like why the hell a 2D menu can 90% your GPU ? despite it's turn based and not looking really good).
There are lot of potential, but out of the technical part it would need a rework of the pacing to live up to that potential : the developping story mention some high stakes regarding the Shattering but i don't feel it at all in the game by example.

noticed that Thea 2 "fullscreen" isn't true fullscreen, it's just borderless fullscreen but in Thea 2 this borderless resolution -is forced- to your monitor resolution (and so will ignore whatever resolution you setup in the launcher), the custom resolution only work if you play windowed.
no wonder even changing the resolution had no impact, because the game does not even take your desired res in account in "fullscreen".

[Robsoie]

After winning my first quick battle (Dwarves vs Green skins) on this week epic store freebie, Total War: Warhammer (looks like i had no forgotten my old Total War  tactics despite most units felt rather alien to me in term of actual tactical use) , i was really glad to see how optimised the game is.
It was like night&day comparing to Thea 2 despite TA:W is way more visually busy and much more "high definition" and the battles not being turn based.

The total war serie has always been very impressive regarding the optimisation, i remember how very impressed i was when i played Total War: Rome (the first one, and the first of the serie in full 3D) on what was a potato PC at the time and seeing how good it looked like and how smooth it was (on par with the older Shogun and Medieval that i had no problem running at the time but that were mix of 3D for terrain and 2D for the units).

Though i had never played a Total War made after the franchise fell in sega's hand so i wasn't sure what to expect regarding the game smoothness. But it was a pleasant good surprise.

[Criptfeind]

I also played thea 2 a bit because it was free and I enjoyed thea 1 (almost said greatly or really enjoyed, but tbh those would be overselling it.) and found it really disappointing in comparison as well. Feels a lot slower, a lot more time spent doing nothing and not exploring, conflict resolution is more complicated but not in a good or interesting way. UI is super bad, clunky as hell. Pretty sad, feels like they wanted the sequel to be bigger and better, and did manage to get bigger, but totally flopped on "better"

[Robsoie]

It's sad that Thea2 missed its mark for its atmosphere and is technically so bad (still can't believe 2D menu with 100% -GPU- usage), from what i read there are even some dlc that were included directly in the gog version so the content was apparently rather big.

On a total war note, i just learned that unlike what i thought, that first Total War : Warhammer still have the denuvo drm (on top of the store drm) , i thought i had read it had been removed as the game is old (must have mistaken it for another ex-denuvo game), but sadly even on this free version it still is there.

Damn, i wish i knew that before downloading it as i boycott games featuring it, sure it's a good game but there are other good games without that crap .
Oh well uninstalled, hoping one day sega will remove it from their old stuff so i can reinstall .

[Iduno]

I also got the first Warhamster game on Epic. Sadly, next week's is Rogue Legacy, which you can tell by the name is a platformer.

[Rolan7]

Delta-V is a top-down space mining game with newtonian physics, IE it's about conserving reaction mass and thrusting carefully etc.  I haven't played much, but the free demo has no restrictions "during the Ukraine situation" and it's pretty cheap.  It also had a funny april fool's joke (either that or they're actually releasing a furry DLC, which would be pretty sweet).

It took a few minutes for me to realize that you're supposed to rely on the autopilot instead of manually thrusting.  Selecting a target lets you set a desired relative velocity (Delta V) via mouse or arrow keys, and autopilot takes care of the details... though it's up to you to watch for other asteroids.  It's pretty cute and less than a GB.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/846030/V_Rings_of_Saturn/

[Il Palazzo]

D-V nicely scratches that super-hard-SF itch. Everything feels functional, minimal, utilitarian. Lived in. No flights of fancy or magical abilities.
For anyone who remembers that old Sean Connery film 'Outland' - the game feels like you're one of the ordinary schmoes working in the background, no grand plot for you, just another day making a living in a glorified mine. Or, what The Expanse wants the Belters to be.

Which is also kinda the problem with it. There's very little to work towards. No goals, no story line. No clear upgrade ladder. Just mining some ore. A bit of salvaging or fighting on the side (but again, why do it?).

At least that's how it looked liked maybe a year ago. I've been occasionally reading the updates, and so far haven't seen a whole lot of changes in that area (but then again, it's easy to miss when they're adding something, since they're writing those in-character). The version number is still <0.5, though. So it's kinda still in alpha.

But for ye olde zen-like space mining it's better than Elite (and cheaper).

[JWNoctis]

For those who want dV DRM-free, the game's also available on itch.io and GOG - I think you also get a Steam key if you get it on the former.

Supposedly there is a storyline, though I haven't found much clue yet, and it's supposedly optional. Regarding the version number, it's supposed to be largely feature-complete as far as the itch.io page went.

There's also combat that reminded me a lot of Children of a Dead Earth - Hypervelocity mass-driver slugs make short work of mostly any ship, and there aren't any useful defensive upgrades at all - On the open market as far as I've seen, at least. I have a feeling that the combat AI is intentionally tuned down so as to not insta-frag the player two screens away before they even saw a pirate. Maybe they just don't want to kill unless they have to, unlike the players who may have less qualms for anything without a transponder.

It's also useful to get acquainted with manual control, since some of the more dangerous adversaries -will- fry and stun-lock your ship's computer with microwave first, which will disable HUD, targeting, and autopilot. You could do the same.

Thrusters, especially the main engines, are also one of the most powerful if too short-ranged weapons that come standard on any ship. There's even an appropriately-named forward-facing thruster mounted on weapons hardpoint. They also make for nice mining tool that does not dump much excessive momentum on the valuable ores at all.

[delphonso]

I just set up FUMBBL. Anybody here play Blood Bowl and interested in games that I might have to concede after about 20 minutes? Having a kid and a hobby at the same time is rough.

[Robsoie]

Reminder that there's AIBowl in case you find none for just 20mn and stop for the kids match but needs something that can beat you brutally in fumbbl :
https://fumbbl.com/p/blog&c=Grod&id=14742

Features

    Play a complete LRB5/6 client.
    Select different team rosters. Download your own favourite rosters from FUMBBL and add them to the "teams" directory to see them in action.
    Make your own Bot! Check out the open source example that is provided. Everything is available to make a fully featured Bot, including the source code of the GrodBot to use as a starting point.
    Play against a Bot, or play two Bots off against each other! The packaged Bot (GrodBot) is not too bad. Probably plays an average defense, and below average offense.


Instructions to play AIBowl

Simply dowload the package from the URL above. Unzip it. Click on the file "AIBowl.jar" to launch the game, or (using a command prompt for example) navigate to the directory and type java -jar AIBowl.jar

Instructions for Bot developers

Download the program from the above link and unzip it. Look for a file in the main directory: "instructions_to_Bot_Building.txt". This describes in detail how to get started in the world of BloodBowl AI Bot making! Note that I would start with the "GrodBotAdvanced" which has been cleaned up a bit with comments and been given the latest code updates. If anyone would like to be on a FUMBBL mailing list to be notified of updates, please let me know.

I recently learned that some guys have been making a "Botbowl" python thingy to make tournaments with AI vs AI
https://github.com/njustesen/botbowl

The 3rd AI competition (with sponsors and etc involved) happened last year :
https://github.com/njustesen/botbowl/blob/main/docs/bot-bowl-iii.md

[delphonso]

This is excellent, Rob. Playing against myself in FUMBBL's test mode was enough for today. I have a few friends both here and abroad who might may play with me - knowing that I've got a kid helps, and unfortunately the FUMBBL java client's chat doesn't work for me.

[Robsoie]

I'm very far from being experienced in blood bowl (mostly only know the basics), but i have been rather impressed by the AI in the AIBowl application i linked to, not only because it was kicking my sorry bottom a lot but because it was also using the tactics actual people use a lot in that game (like that famous "cage" )  .

I think the AI strength is also helped by how Blood Bowl is very dice based with how pure luck can easily destroy a well built strategy or transform your poor tactical knowledge into near legendary touchdowns