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[nenjin]

SHTEEL RHEIGN.

[Kagus]

Meanwhile the Necrons have their normal levels of hilarity with powerful honor guards (that can be both resurrected and even multiplied with the orb), in addition to now having an option that lets them say "Lol I win now" by teleporting an entire army of anti-building specialists directly on top of the HQ building you need to destroy in order to win.

My assault on the Eldar stronghold as the Necrons took me 20 minutes of solid fighting in their fortified "capital area". Their artillery would knock my necrons down, but since even my basic infantry groups had 2k HP, no morale, regeneration, and leader bonuses on top of that they would just heal and stand back up again completely fine again like 3 seconds later... only to be knocked down again after another 0.1 seconds. Sometimes they even got a shot off before they fell back down. They very very slowly managed to whittle down the defensive units and fortifications of the base, and not a single one of these infantry groups actually died. (They did slaughter all the vehicles I sent in during the course of the battle though).

The fight lasted so long that my Monolith even had the time to very slowly inch its across the entire map to get to the battle, and it combined with the base already having taken significant damage was enough to end the fight.

I did actually have some issues with the Eldar stronghold as Necrons, but that was due to one particular quirk with my strategy... Namely, the fact that the Essence of the Deceiver does not, in fact, have detection.

So I teleported the lord in, saw all the base with his detection, transformed into the Deceiver to call for the boys, called the boys in, and... Everything went stealth. 8 full squads of immortals just stood around aimlessly getting shot at by sneaky D-cannons for the remainder of the Deceiver timer, before reverting to the lord and regaining vision...

...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you take the Resurrection Orb


Just knocked out the Orks in my Chaos campaign, which ended up being way less painful than I'd anticipated, due primarily to the fact that orks have terrible detection options. And also possessed flames absolutely shatter orky morale, meaning that one squad could almost singlehandedly defend the killy spot from the flood of MANz coming down the hill. This is pretty much rounding out all the wargeear slots for Carron, which means I'm bumping into the options in his upgrades that actually reduce his damage and usefulness rather than improve it...

Soulstorm was fine as a game, iirc... not particularly better than dark crusade, but not meaningfully worse, either.

I mean, it is kind of a bad look when several of the wargear/honor guard options erroneously refer to the Dark Crusade faction leaders rather than the ones in Soulstorm, and stuff like the Eldar seer council accidentally getting one of the guardsmen's lines when attacking the Chaos stronghold... Seer council? More like Suh! council, amirite?

[Jopax]

My favorite bug back on release of Soulstorm was how poorly flying units were implemented. As it was a completely new kind of unit, implemented by different devs with no prior experience in the genre or game in question they just sorta faked it. So flying units weren't actually considered truly flying, they were just regular ground units whose model was a bit higher off the ground compared to everyone else.

This lead to some silliness as you can expect, like bombers following ramps to get to higher ground, or aircraft getting knocked back by explosions and into impassable terrain, leaving them stuck for the rest of the game.

Didn't help that the first patches came in months after the game release, leaving a fairly bad impression with a lot of people.

[Kagus]

They're still pretty janky, so even if they technically can travel over (most) impassable terrain now, they're really really weird about it... Taking ages to travel over uneven landscapes because they try to hug the ground inside every dip and contour, and sometimes just get flat-out stuck on something. I've also had several occasions now where I've had to send air units back to circle around and try attacking a target again from a new angle, because if they went up the one side of a rise the model would be pointing so sharply upwards that they wouldn't actually be able to use any of their weapons against the target and would just float there in range without doing anything.

[AlStar]

I'd heard generally positive things about Against the Storm, and noticed that it had a decent discount on it (35%, so down to $19.49) so I picked it up, despite having tons of other things in my backlog that I really should be finishing off instead.

I've put in 9 hours so far, but I'm really digging the "Serf City, but on a timer" gameplay.

Spoiler: Game Overview (click to show/hide)

Quick overview - basically, you're given a little plot of land in the middle of a forest, a flame shrine that needs to constantly have a fire going (or bad things© happen), a handful of settlers (of various fantasy races), and some starting goods. You've got two bars - progress, and royal impatience. Fill up the progress bar and you'll unlock new buildings, and eventually win the level. Game's over if royal impatience maxes out, and it's steadily increasing every day.

You're given some starting quests, as well as additional quests that are doled out at timed intervals. Each is the player's pick of two choices, each of which has different conditions that need to be met, and gives different bonuses for completing them. Usually it's a choice between easier-to-complete, but with worse rewards vs. harder but better; but not always. Completing quests will also lower the royal impatience, so that can be another reason to work towards them.

As I mentioned, your rewards for filling up the progress bar is new buildings - but it's a choice of one from three - and that's where I think the game gets really interesting. There's a lot of overlap between the buildings, and you've got some base buildings that can make the basics (at low utility) so you're usually not completely screwed over if you keep getting buildings you don't want, but it's all about taking what you're given and making it work.

Like I mentioned before, you're in the middle of a forest. Surrounding your main town is a bunch of shrouded glades. Chopping down the trees will let you see what's inside. Maybe something good, maybe something bad. You're warned ahead of time of more challenging glades, which usually contain a lot more goodies.

Challenging areas contain things like abandoned temples, where you can either burn them down (but have the spirits haunt your townsfolk), or restore the temple, giving a boost, but costing high-level materials... or you can ignore it, and bad things happen... usually involving the death of your townsfolk.

I'm only on my fifth city so far (third after the two tutorial towns, where they basically spoon-feed you how to play), but I'm finding that I'm really liking the "city builder, but you're done in about an hour, and also with roguelike unlocks."

[Haspen]

The Signal State or at least the demo, for now.

Its electronics and math and cables puzzle and it made me think. Me likey.

[EuchreJack]

I'll be playing some Cataclysm DDA. Since discussion is forbidden, and usually playing it has me wanting to discuss it, I've created a discussion topic off-site.
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/cataclysm-game.1493807/

[King Zultan]

Toady made it seem like the ban was temporary maybe we should ask him if we could get a new one.

[Kagus]

Toady made it seem like the ban was temporary maybe we should ask him if we could get a new one.

A new ban? I'm sure that can be arranged.

[Telgin]

I picked up Tunic a couple of weeks ago and finished it last night.  Overall I liked it but I have a few mixed feelings on it.  I'd probably give it 8/10 overall.

Spoiler: My thoughts (click to show/hide)

I got it because it looked like a cute Zelda-like with a little fox character, and for a while it does hold up to that.  It starts out with a bit of exploration, light puzzle solving and some combat.  My first impression was a little colored by the difficulty though.  Even early on, combat is surprisingly very hard, and it stays that way until you manage to get some stat upgrades.  Using a controller instead of a keyboard probably helps, but if you're stuck with a keyboard, it's just going to be hard.

The fact that the game trickle feeds information to you with images and broken text is kind of cool, and it's fun to figure stuff out that way.  I really liked this aspect.  I managed to figure out the first half of the game on my own, and it took about 10 hours.

That's around where the game changes, and I have mixed feelings on these changes.  It goes from being a conventional Zelda-like to a pure puzzle game, and some of the puzzles in the end game are probably just too obscure.  I don't think many people figured them all out on their own.  I certainly didn't.  You technically don't have to translate the fake "Trunic" language back to English, but in the end game you're given enough clues to do that and it makes some of the puzzles easier.  Conceptually I love this, but if you want the good ending, it means you're going to sink dozens of extra hours into the game or google things, which kind of sucks.

Also, the final boss was just too hard.  It wasn't "this is a fun challenge" kind of hard so much as "this is making me very angry" hard.  It's very unforgiving, where a single mistake can eat over half of your HP, and using your potions in the fight is dangerous because you're likely to get hit again.  They don't even restore much health.  I tried for about 6 hours off and on before cheesing it with an item that lures enemies to it instead of you, which changed the fight from impossible for me to a joke.  That was a let down, but there's also a "no fail" mode you can toggle if you can't handle the combat so I guess the devs figured they were effectively making it Dark Souls hard for people who wanted it and let others opt out.  I wanted something more reasonable.

One other frustration I had was that sometimes getting around the map felt much harder than it needed to be.  You can open up shortcuts at different points, but they don't connect some parts of the map that I wish they did.  More than once I found myself really wishing I could jump down a ledge and instead had to spend 30-60 seconds taking a long detour just to get down there, or even outright forgetting how to get up or down because it had been a while since I did it.

Anyway, overall I did still really like the game and what it was trying to do.  I'd like to see something else like it that iterates on the idea and maybe smooths some of the rough edges out a bit more, spreading some of the puzzles out through the game a bit better, making navigation less of a chore, and making combat less infuriating.

[King Zultan]

Toady made it seem like the ban was temporary maybe we should ask him if we could get a new one.

A new ban? I'm sure that can be arranged.

I'd rather there not be a new ban but I would like a new thread.

[nenjin]

Punch Club 2. If you enjoyed the first one, it's more of the same but with better pixel art, more to do and an absolutely banging sound track. I beat the first one in 20 hours-ish. 9 hours into the sequel and haven't even finished Chapter 1. The fights feel less random than the first game, and there's a lot more fighting in general. Overall, a solid value for $20, and I liked the soundtrack enough I bought it too.

[EuchreJack]

Toady made it seem like the ban was temporary maybe we should ask him if we could get a new one.

A new ban? I'm sure that can be arranged.

I'd rather there not be a new ban but I would like a new thread.

Can we get one without the other?
Frankly, I'm worried this discussion could lead to a scrubbing.

[King Zultan]

Toady made it seem like the ban was temporary maybe we should ask him if we could get a new one.

A new ban? I'm sure that can be arranged.

I'd rather there not be a new ban but I would like a new thread.

Can we get one without the other?
Frankly, I'm worried this discussion could lead to a scrubbing.

That's why we need two threads, gotta keep the different forks separate to lessen the drama.

[Robsoie]

Even when there was no fork the threads still got closed.

And frankly the drama getting out of hand has been vastly exaggerated, nearly every time the threads got closed said drama was dying down by itself or wasn't really exploding as it was only on a "arguing" level, it's just that some people are overprotective of their prefered version and spam the "report to moderator" getting enough reports to annoy Toady and trigger his Hammer of Threadclosing