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[Robsoie]

Sailing around i finally found a single raptor ! that will be a worthy addition to my dino squad as so far the previous ones i found were in too dangerous packs of predators to even try a capture.

Taking my good crossbow and tranq arrows, i then sail to what i think was a safe enough distance, as i could then jump and run to the rocks on the other side in case of a problem.

I start to shoot at the ugly beast, then shoot and shoot again and again while retreating as fast as i can, that's a lot of tranq arrow in his head and the thing isn't stopping, also it seems faster than the last raptors i spotted and escaped from.

Hmm, what's that odd brown smoke that seems to come from it ?
googling after being utterly destroyed by that thing, oh so that's an "Alpha" and it can't be tamed.

Ark: Survival Evolved.

[Akura]

Made two attempts to play as the Tarka. Normally, I play Humans. Never actually played Tarka, despite them being the "easiest" faction to play as.

First attempt, started to get rapidly overwhelmed by a fellow Tarka empire. Also got pretty screwed by the tech RNG; only the first two colonization/terraforming techs, nothing else, not even cruiser-sized colonizers.

Second attempt, attacked by a Hiver force of one cruiser and one point-defense destroyer. There was another destroyer, but I assume that was the gate-ship. I had about half a dozen Shield-Armor cruisers armed with heavy drivers. First, spent way too long before realizing that my ships were set to hold fire for some reason(it was first contact battle, no ceasefire or NAP), then lost more than half my fleet before the Hiver cruiser lost its mission section. Shields did nothing except drop after a single hit.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sword of the Stars.

[Robsoie]

Playing Ark,

Exploring a bit of the snowy biome in the north western part of The Island, while walking in the forest surrounding the big mountain i ran into a dinosaur i never saw before, as big as an Allosaurus but covered with something looking like fur (no idea if it was actual fur or feather, playing on low res makes it harder to see details from away) , i unleashed my "murder kill squad" that i used as bodyguards in this exploration that were a team of 1 Allosaurus and 2 Therizinosaur (setting them to aggressive) so they ran toward the new big bad.

I wasn't expecting any problems, as after many explorations they leveled up enough to become pure killing machines filled with hatred manifested into claws and tooth, like they showed me when they took out a Tyrannosaurus in a few seconds on a previous trip elsewhere.

But at that point i had no idea ...  after googling what the hell was that thing, it's called a "Yutyrannus" and in the game it possess a special ability that :
- scare away nearby dinos for several seconds
- attract as his own bodyguards surrounding wild dinos.

So the less i can say is that it was funny to see my troopers going randomly around instead of murdering my target.
But it was less fun when i also spotted 3 Carnotaurus (one of them was an alpha) running toward me at full speed.

Poor character didn't last long, but on returning on zone (was rather FUN! ) to recover my dinos and my equipment, i noticed the Allosaurus had been killed but the 2 Therizinosaur were still alive, no idea what happened to that damned Yutyrannus and his Carnotaurus lackeys.

[Rolan7]

Attempting the daily which ends in 15 minutes, what've I got:
Technophobe of course
Glitch sickness, oof
Shaky, okay
A concussion hammer!
The Ex-Sovereign trait with no sword and no enemies with swords

What am I up against on the first stage:
Armored enemies with no AP options
A Jammer who would matter more if I wasn't a technophobe
A Defender
A glitch-dasher hanging out near the Defender and in a jammer-field

I almost juked that last foe but they glitched next to me right before I turned the corner, and wrenched my face
So basically I got owned by a less-lethal Predator
I feel like that challenge was a bit much, but challenges should be challenging sometimes!

Heat Signature

[Great Order]

After a lot of digging, made more difficult by the fact I was working against gravity, I finally breached the surface.

I realised two things:

1) The whole surface is corrupt
2) The Eaters of Souls are fucking strong

Terraria, Don't Dig Up seed.

[Robsoie]

Sometime (well most of the time actually) in Gloomhaven the scenario design is very frustrating : so many rooms, so many enemies, HP of those enemies going up while you're leveling but your damage is still the same and extremely tight hidden turn limit, boss that all had immunity to any possible effect for some reasons...
Without mentionning how hyper slow the AI turns are for no reason (considering how small the playfield are, how no brainer the AI cards are, there's nothing justifying that it takes so much time to play, and when you have so many AI on a mission each taking awfull amount of time to play their turn ... )

And of course RNG influencing how your damage goes against the enemies (and how they damage you) : see by example, after managing to drop the boss insane amount of HP you manage then to play your best damaging card on your very last turn of what is one of the most frustrating and horribly designed scenario you played in that game so far ( Town Square A )

How about the game then decide it's this time it will play the x0 disadvantage card from the random advantage/disadvantage card pile (there's only 1 of the x0 cards fortunately in those piles) ... suddenly all the damage that would allow you to complete the scenario on your last turn is multiplied by 0

Spoiler: damn you Gloomhaven (click to show/hide)

yeah, the boss was down on 1 HP and the X0 disadvantage decided to come there, of all the time on my last turn before that stupid exhausation, on that super long scenario with insane amount of enemy elite AI and tons of completely useless allied AI (that each take lots of time to complete their near useless turn).
Gloomhaven is one of those rare game that you sometime really like, and at the same time dislike immensely.

[nenjin]

My friend who is into boarding gaming tried the table top of it and was like "pass. The game goes out of its way to abuse you and setup arbitrary fails." I've seen the Steam game a couple times and this didn't do me any favors in regards to considering purchasing it.

[Robsoie]

It's sad actually, because in Gloomhaven there's some very good gameplay, the classes play very differently and during the course of the campaign when mercs retire (after reaching their personnal goals) you can hire completely new classes to add a lot of variety to the card building.

But the scenario design that does not allow you to do anything other than the absolutely optimal card play (at least if you want to win those, very long to play, scenarios) is really frankly horrible to me as it transforms too much what could be a very good strategy/tactical game with card building into "only" a puzzle game in which there's only 1 solution to find.

Basically Gloomhaven is designed for those that really like the "find the correct combination and order to play cards to win" type of game as so far from all the scenario i played and managed to win, everything else is doomed to fail. 

I really wonder how the boardgame can play with more than 1 player, i mean you need to coordinate mostly exactly your mercs positionning (the scoundrel class has many cards that actually depend of your ally or enemy position to do their best results) and when to play their own cards and in which order if you want to complete objectives before exhausting your mercs decks, something that is doable if you're managing all the mercs on the board, but with multiple people with each their own ideas on what card they want to play and where they want to move their mercenary... that must be hell if you hope to win each scenario

But in the actual boardgame , like in any boardgame, you can come up with your own modified rules to take care of the design shortcomings and unfun parts, something you can't do in the videogame sadly.

At least a good point of failing is that Gloomhaven does not remove the gained XP and Gold looted, and also does not remove whatever you found in a chest, so even failing your mercenaries will still gain more power (and the enemies will too as their health is based on your "party level" )

Now if only the AI decision code and scripts were faster, scenarios already take a long time by default and those extremely slow to do anything AI really increase the scenario length a lot uselessly, making replaying them more of a pain than something fun.

[Great Order]

Hopped back to CKII after something like two years of not playing it.

I'm dying a lot more easily than I remember. And it's harder to drag relations up when someone's pissed off at you.

They really did make CKIII easier.

Crusader Kings II

[Akura]

Twice now lost some progress because the game locks up pretty hard if it loses focus. First to Alt-Tab, second to accidentally hitting the Windows key. The first time, I did not realize I had turned off autosaves and lost roughly half an hour.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. In this particular instance, I'm doing a riverside farming village to start with, with the goal of using riverine transport to export crops and, eventually, other goods. It's a different thing of just cash-building construction and steel industries and getting bored. Plus, I can never quite figure out how many houses I need, and as a result my bus stations never had enough workers going anywhere. I'm hoping this different start helps me with that.

Unfortunately, I also just cash-built most of the construction industry. On the plus side, I did just discover that some buildings have alternate orientations(press T), making placing industrial parks without a spaghetti of conveyors(if that's even possible) much, much easier.

[Telgin]

It's been a little while since I played Gloomhaven (the boardgame), but I do remember it being brutally hard.  I played with my brother and it took us 3 tries to beat the first scenario, I think.  We did pretty well after that but definitely encountered repeated scenarios that were just impossible with our characters.  We got really close to beating the final boss, but for various reasons never finished the campaign.

As a concept I really liked the game though.  Very cool and original, if just very, very hard.

[Robsoie]

Looking back, i guess what disapointed me with Gloomhaven is that i thought it was going to be something similar to old Warhammer Quest or Heroquest but with some mercenary guild management in between missions as screenshots of the game and photo of the boardgame really reminded me of those.

But it was nothing like that at all, in the end Gloomhaven is in fact a puzzle game with some additional features around but at its core it's a puzzle in which you need to find the optimal sequence and play order of your cards and character position in order to complete a scenario, and if you don't find that optimal card usage and play order or have your character not moving where he should, you'll lose.

[Aoi]

My sister killed my first character by stabbing me in the chest, then chased my second until I fell to my death. 

Only two deaths in the playthrough, and she did it to both my characters.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Man of Medan

[hector13]

That’s pretty good stuff. Those games are unbelievably forgiving of mistakes.

Edit: in saying that, if they’re what I’m thinking of, only one of those deaths is avoidable.

[nenjin]

My sister killed my first character by stabbing me in the chest, then chased my second until I fell to my death. 

Only two deaths in the playthrough, and she did it to both my characters.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Man of Medan

My friends and I do a movie night every weekend, and I pitched playing one of the Dark Anthology games as a group for Halloween. We're gonna try Man of Medan next weekend. I watched a playrhough of Until Dawn and a wee bit of Man of Medan. They're like somewhat bad college horror movies. Looking forward to it. It's not something I would have picked up to play myself seeing how Until Dawn is, but with a group of people who like horror movies it should be fun!