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[Rolan7]

The developers admitted a sweet spot for trichordates in the manual (or strategy guide?).  They're mechanically pretty awful, but they were my favorite too.  I guess I shared the devs' interest in what could have been.

At least they aren't the jellyfish, trying to form civilization exclusively in swamps, heh.  Fortunately their civilizations usually died off quickly even without divine intervention.
I had a carnifern civilization once, but it was tough.
Being a young child, I particularly enjoyed the...  post-game civilization, and boiling the oceans to accommodate it.

[Culise]

I'm finally giving Horizons a proper whirl, with a minor additional tweak on my part that doubles all damage dealt and received.  Combined with the design intent behind Horizon to make combat less bullet-spongy, this generally makes things extra-interesting for the player.  So, minor note about the game: in vanilla, certain types of enemies don't spawn until you're at very high levels.  For a particular example, an enemy that doesn't spawn until the player is level 81 is the Chameleon Deathclaw, a nasty big bundle of scales, claws, and serious anger problems that also happen to be invisible.  Horizon doesn't have this restriction on enemy spawns, something which eluded my notice.

Needless to say, I blundered into a nasty big bundle of scales, claws, and serious anger problems that also happened to be invisible.  Before I even reached level 15.  I took precisely one hit to go down.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Fallout 4

[StagnantSoul]

A 1/1 with skulk and lifelink, after I wasted all my removals on big stompy creatures.

Magic The Gathering.

[Akura]

Did the catapult construction tutorial. Other than the flipping around the two catch block variants for the arming mechanism(which only required that I use Shift-F to turn, not just F), I do it just like the provided pictures.

I save, and turn it towards my wooden keep to test fire. Turns out, if you place the projectiles so it snaps to the bucket, it is glued to the bucket and doesn't release. Next try, the shot isn't released until the end of the throw instead of the apex of the throwing arc - that is, it goes with forwards and down. Mostly down. Even when I got a close range hit on the palisades, it did no damage, and when the same shot rolled down the hill to my flax field, it bounced off the fence.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Medieval Engineers. Definitely needs another arm to stop the throwing arm. Another improvement would be using locking catch blocks for the wheels, so that it's possible to park the damn thing so that it doesn't roll away while I'm lining up a shot.

[Rolan7]

Nara of Amber was slain by a giant flea on floor 14.
You'd think the invisible beasty which kept summoning hordes of skaven every time I dimension-doored would get some credit, but nah, it was a flea
The RNG also gets some credit - I *knew* teleport, it just failed twice in a row at ~15%.  And a third time due to insufficient mana, which paralyzed me until death.

My only regret is that I didn't try casting "shuffle".  But really, Trump magic kinda sucks at low level.

Zangband

[smjjames]

What even is 'trump magic'? Makes me think of Donald Trump than any sort of magic discipline.

[Arcvasti]

In the Chronicle of Amber series, the Princes of Amber can use special cards to communicate with each other. Each deck has trump cards which represent the oher Princes of Amber. I remember them also being used for transportation and other weirder things later on in the series, but not enough for details.

I have no idea how this relates to Zangband, however.

[Culise]

Zangband is based on the Chronicles of Amber, so it is indeed tarot magic through the heart of the cards.  Basically, instead of tarot as divination, imagine tarot as a method to summon monsters and teleport around.  The trump cards in any tarot deck are the most famous cards, the major arcana, plus the fool.

[Greiger]

Designed a ship with a particle accelerator.   A really beefy one.  Decided to do a battle test against a few other ships I designed just to smooth out any issues and found an issue immediately.

My little torpedo boat managed to take out a bit of one of the particle accelerator arms at a corner on it's first salvo.  A little bit of unarmored section.  Particle accelerators big weakness is that any disconnected arms will backfire whenever the main gun is fired.  The weak point in the particle accelerator arm was perfectly placed to instantly core it's own ship next time it was fired, destroying the whole thing.

Hoping it was a fluke I retested, and it happened again almost immediately.  Just something about the armor placement just makes that spot a torpedo magnet.

From the Depths

[Akura]

Are the torpedoes magnetic? Given that a particle accelerator in real life uses powerful magnets to accelerate the particles, they could very well be attracting the torpedoes to the least armored spot.

I'd be surprised if that's how it actually worked in FtD, but who knows.


EDIT: Some pirates showed up in some backwater system. I jumped a 1024-scale battleship halfway across the galaxy, to have fun with scale 10-12(most of them) pirate ships.

The thing is, ships do not have any inherent defense against boarding. At all. And shields do not stop boarding pods. They only have defense against boarding if they have crew quarters and internal defense components. And I've just been putting a highly advanced computer core to pilot these things rather than take up the extra space of a live crew.

So! A few minutes later, I discovered that my former battleship was razing the worlds in that system. The only good thing was that the ship was a few tech levels out of date, and was therefore no match for the combined firepower of the two ships I jumped in to deal with it, and I did learn about the effectiveness of  armor and heavy shielding in any case as well as boarding defense.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Star Ruler.

[wobbly]

My only regret is that I didn't try casting "shuffle".  But really, Trump magic kinda sucks at low level.

Zangband

Eh what? I'd rate trump 1 as literally the best 1st spell book in the game. (assuming it's the same as poscheng, from memory it's pretty close). Teleport, TO, telepathy, phase. All in 1 book at much lower level than there sorcery equivalent. Sucks for killing things but mages get a 2nd realm & trump rogues just hit things. What's wrong with trump?

[Baffler]

EDIT: Some pirates showed up in some backwater system. I jumped a 1024-scale battleship halfway across the galaxy, to have fun with scale 10-12(most of them) pirate ships.

The thing is, ships do not have any inherent defense against boarding. At all. And shields do not stop boarding pods. They only have defense against boarding if they have crew quarters and internal defense components. And I've just been putting a highly advanced computer core to pilot these things rather than take up the extra space of a live crew.

So! A few minutes later, I discovered that my former battleship was razing the worlds in that system. The only good thing was that the ship was a few tech levels out of date, and was therefore no match for the combined firepower of the two ships I jumped in to deal with it, and I did learn about the effectiveness of  armor and heavy shielding in any case as well as boarding defense.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Star Ruler.

Imagine the faces on the boarding party when they land on the superpowered (compared to what they're packing) battleship expecting a brutal fight to capture it before it can completely destroy their own ships, only to find that all they had to do to take it was walk to the control room.

[Rolan7]

My only regret is that I didn't try casting "shuffle".  But really, Trump magic kinda sucks at low level.

Zangband

Eh what? I'd rate trump 1 as literally the best 1st spell book in the game. (assuming it's the same as poscheng, from memory it's pretty close). Teleport, TO, telepathy, phase. All in 1 book at much lower level than there sorcery equivalent. Sucks for killing things but mages get a 2nd realm & trump rogues just hit things. What's wrong with trump?

In Zangband it even has Mind Blast as the second spell, level 4
Yeah it's not bad, I was being overdramatic.  The problem is that having any sort of fail chance on Dimension Door or Teleport make them dramatically less useful for emergencies.

It was really my fault for not having a teleport scroll (and some mushrooms of cure blindness... and fire resist...).  But this was very low level, and such necessities seem oddly rare in Zangband compared to ToME3 or Steamband.  YASD (or 6, lol)

Last death was kinda annoying, actually.  Met at least 2 giant slugs on dungeon level 3, normally found on 11.  I was a level 9 dwarf cleric so I wasn't too worried, but one breathed acid for over half my health from offscreen.  While I was under half health.  Might have been a vault, but I didn't see it...

Zangband

[Akura]

Built a small wooden sailboat, armed with 20 guns(light CRAMs) and tested against some of the lighter DWG ships. Couldn't do much damage since for some reason the two guns on the rear were the only ones firing. I figure they don't have a large enough firing arc so I rebuild the cannon barrels to use motor/elevation barrels instead of recoil-suppression.

...Then I notice that I don't have a fire control on the ship. The reason the two guns were firing is because they they were close enough to where I was standing to be controlled directly. Whoops.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

From the Depths. ~14k and no maintenance beyond repairs a good cost for what is essentially a start-of-campaign type of ship? That cost should probably go up if I add cargo and self-repair capability. It can move around 11m/s in good wind, but tends to roll(hasn't capsized yet).

[MrRoboto75]

I think in the campaign if you scuttle the tiny starter boat they give you, you end up with around 15k material.  That said the campaign also gives you a two hour grace period before the DWG start invading you.  Usually the first thing they attack you with is a Marauder and a Riverhome.  The biggest obsticle for a starter ship is probably going to be the marauder's front mounted derp gun.