CF-WRUP V: Good play. Nice talk.

I'm ready go tonight. There's a party, alright. We don't need the raisin for joy, oh yeah. Tick down to midnight.
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True Perception
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by True Perception » Sun Apr 08, 2018 9:27 am

Uh oh. That's giving me FFXIII flashbacks...

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Delthazar
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Sun Apr 08, 2018 3:36 pm

How... how long is each chapter, because that's making me a bit nervous.

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Bier_Engel
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Bier_Engel » Sun Apr 08, 2018 8:58 pm

Not long at all. I would not have realized that I was in chapter 18 if not for me wondering "when does this pick up?" because otherwise, I would have guessed that I was on maybe chapter 5.

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Delthazar
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Wed Apr 25, 2018 12:42 am

Yo Falcon how's Battletech workin' for ya. I've definitely got that itch in the back of my mind tellin' me to pick it up.

One thing I keep reading though is that it's very slow and I'm not sure exactly what to make of that criticism.

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Bier_Engel
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Bier_Engel » Wed Apr 25, 2018 6:24 am

Heh, it's been almost 20 days since my last post and I've hardly touched Alliance Alive since. To be fair, haven't touched ToB much either. Near the end and doing sidequests, etc.

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Falcon Critical » Wed Apr 25, 2018 1:17 pm

Delthazar wrote:Yo Falcon how's Battletech workin' for ya. I've definitely got that itch in the back of my mind tellin' me to pick it up.

One thing I keep reading though is that it's very slow and I'm not sure exactly what to make of that criticism.
Good man, I don't mind the slow part since there's a lot of systems to get used to. The battles seem to be lengthy, even the kind of story/tutorial mission was multiple phases with no chance to repair, so it's a crash course in target priority, battlefield control and making sure your suits stand facing to the left so you don't expose your heavily damaged right torso. You might (hypothetically) lose an arm.

It has the XCOM thing though where you shouldn't degroup. I finished what I thought was the final fight and started moving towards an evac, only to have new enemies drop in while one of my mecha was waaaaay out of range.

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Falcon Critical » Wed Apr 25, 2018 5:56 pm

Rob's review on Waypoint gives me life when thinking about how my Battletech campaign might play out:
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article ... ech-review

It's interesting how people that love it talk about the feeling of it and how it's not XCOM and you don't ever come out of combat unscathed. I wonder if people who are having a hard time with it are having trouble with that aspect, conciously or sub.

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Delthazar
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Wed Apr 25, 2018 8:17 pm

Yo D and other tabletop people: here's a fun compilation of horror stories

https://kotaku.com/historically-accurat ... 1825538325

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by DHerder222 » Wed Apr 25, 2018 8:32 pm

Hah! Nice stuff. I think every tabletop person has a proper horror experience.

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Delthazar
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Mon May 07, 2018 8:09 pm

After watching that old GBE playdate I decided to jump into Europa Universalis 4 to see if I could figure it out. I dunno when exactly that was but suddenly my Steam time counter says 21 hours and I have little or no memory of any of it, like an X-Files episode about alien abductions and missing time.

So I guess you could say it's clicking! But maaan is it complex, or at least deceptively complex, I guess. It makes something like Civilization or the Endless games look like idle clickers. But once you really get in there and poke around a lot of the extraneous information starts to fall away and you kinda only see whatever's relevant to your situation. Usually. The UI doesn't quite help as much as I'd like.

The smartest thing Stellaris did was explicitly shoot for the 4x/Grand Strategy hybrid rather than trying to be exactly a EU4/CK2 infodump simulation in space. I'd really like to see if the next EU/CK thing rolls in those lessons or if it just remains exactly as outwardly impenetrable as always.

Anyway. I started my first game as Scotland (coincidentally, so did the 136-part tutorial LP I found afterwards, which is a nice guide to have running on my second monitor) and after about 40 years of running razor-thin deficits and hardly ever being able to build anything because I still haven't figured out this game's economics systems, I've managed to take a few border provinces from England in a long war started by my French allies, grabbed the northern islands from Norway, and now my attempt to gain a foothold in Northern Ireland seems to have accidentally kicked-off an all-out deathmatch between the half-dozen single-province lords on the island (and England just had to get involved, annoyingly.) I have royal marriages with France and Burgundy and my spy networks in England and Denmark are stirring up some pretty successful rebel uprisings - one of 'em actually usurped the English throne for a while.

There's no Suikoden mod but there is a Fallout mod. Hmm.

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Falcon Critical » Tue May 08, 2018 12:34 pm

Fallout seems a weird universe for the political grand strategy sim genre. I'm not sure the Brotherhood of Steel are looking to marry into an alliance with the NCR. :pac

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Tue May 08, 2018 1:39 pm

Heh, some big total conversion mods will cut entire systems while adding others so it feels like the Fallout thing might be another of those. The base game might already section some options off depending on your government type.

Things like royal marriages probably wouldn't be a thing with NCR but could still be in play for the big name raider gangs like the Khans or maybe some of the tribal groups.

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True Perception
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by True Perception » Tue May 08, 2018 9:26 pm

Ah, AC! How I've missed you. So, I'm running around as Evie. I run up a wooden fence, and drop down once I hit the top. In doing so, I notice a telltale red outline, and jam the attack button. And land a double assassination. :awesome

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True Perception
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by True Perception » Tue May 08, 2018 10:06 pm

So, even though I bought this used, and the free DLC code was supposed to have expired over two years ago, it worked! Yay me for trying.

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Delthazar
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Wed May 09, 2018 6:17 pm

EU4 Scotland run: Norway attempted to gain independence from Denmark, so I tried to take advantage of the situation and declared on Norway to take the Faroes and Iceland. This was a mistake.

I wasn't adequately prepared to ferry enough troops across the sea at the beginning of the war, so my initial invasion didn't last long. To make matters far far worse, the Danish managed to rebuff the Norwegians and ended their war extremely quickly, which meant Denmark regained control and I immediately found myself fighting them, Norway, Sweden, and several smaller powers, with my principal allies in Kildare and France unwilling to help me out due to distance or attrition.

So I spent the next seventeen years under blockade by the far superior Danish navy while I very slowly managed bank loans and interest to build more ships while sinking admin power into stabilizing war exhaustion and rejecting monthly peace demands that would've given my former conquests in the previous war back to Norway. Eventually, Denmark's smaller allies got exhausted and sued for white peace one by one, and the Danish were never able to match my land power, so I finally took advantage of some poor blockade positioning to land troops on the Faroes which gave me the warscore I needed to claim those isles and half of Iceland. GOOD ENOUGH.

Years later my king died and there was some brief fears of a possible succession war which somehow would've put my allies in Kildare up against Denmark for control of the Scottish throne, which would've been pretty wild, but thankfully I found an heir in time.

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Bier_Engel
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Bier_Engel » Mon May 14, 2018 8:27 pm

The Strange Journey remake is out tomorrow and en route to me, and I still need to finish Tales of Berseria. However, I made the very sane decision of starting a new Fire Emblem Path of Radiance run tonight, because ???

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Flarecake » Tue May 15, 2018 4:23 pm

Anyone else here hopped on the Fortnite train?

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Delthazar
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Tue May 15, 2018 4:28 pm

Nah. Not yet, at least. I'm tempted to stream a little for some raisin, plus I already have some battle royale experience from PUBG and Radical Heights (rip) so why not add one more

I'm still kinda waiting for someone to find the true middle ground between Fortnite and PUBG but who knows if that'll ever really happen.

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Bier_Engel
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Bier_Engel » Sat May 19, 2018 8:11 pm

Strange Journey is seriously addictive, holy fuck.

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Sat May 19, 2018 8:37 pm

I wanna give that a shot sometime just 'cause it looks batshit weird even by non-Persona SMT spinoff standards.

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Sat May 19, 2018 9:39 pm

Speaking of addiction, somehow dozens of hours of my life fell into the Europa Universalis hole over the last few weeks if Steam's time counter is to be believed. It's very much a second monitor game though, I probably got through a ton of articles and pods and stuff at the same time since like most grand strategy games a lot of EU4 is spent waiting for notifications unless you're at war or something.

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Football = Unrest.
My newbie run as Scotland went okay. The provinces I took from England early on eventually got taken back, annoyingly, which I guess is sorta inevitable unless you castrate England as soon as possible, otherwise they'll generally always be a huge threat. I held onto Iceland and Greenland and used them to expand into North America, forming Nova Scotia across most of what we know as Quebec, Labrador, northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. This felt kinda weird, which I'll get into later.

It's kinda fun to see how wildly different that stuff can diverge from actual history despite a ton of historical trigger events being in the game somewhere for the player or AI to follow or ignore. In this case, the Thirteen Colonies were never large or strong enough to become the United States, the English and French were way more interested in South America for whatever raisin, and Spain and Portugal carved up most of the North. The colonial powers kinda stuck their dick into everything everywhere, well beyond the actual history, like even making inroads into Korea and Japan eventually.

I have mixed feelings about this part of the game in general for all kinds of raisins. I'd probably be more into it if there were more/bigger checks against the European powers in the colonial stage so you're not necessarily staring at a world map covered in English/French/Spanish/Portuguese/Dutch colours absolutely everywhere. The event choices you get don't really go far enough for RP purposes either, at least not in vanilla, nor do the big global events which spur huge changes like the colonial rush ever seem to spawn outside Europe unless a human player in Asia or something is trying very very hard to make that happen. There are so many expansions which might address this stuff but I dunno if I'll ever invest in more than a couple of 'em.

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While it's neat to see such a large Korean empire in the 1800s, Portugal occupying Hokkaido and Spain taking a big chunk of Kyushu just feels weird and wrong to me, even if the possibility of Japan unifying all its daimyos and then collapsing again is interesting. (btw, if you roll as Japan, considering the game starts in the 1400s, have fun managing the Sengoku daimyo madness - it's wild.)

...for bigger offputting stuff, at least in the unexpanded game, when you colonize your first "unoccupied" province, you're given a kinda-sorta false choice of three options which are mostly just shades of "how much of an asshole do you wanna be to the indigenous people" which is pretty not great if you're just looking for a way to peacefully grow your blob without going to war over old world provinces or being some flavour of violent colonizer/"benevolent assimilator." Even on the supposedly tamest setting you're still fighting off uprisings in growing colonies at least once per province so I'm not sure why that choice is there at all unless it's a hook for DLC content I don't have.

On the other side of the coin, it doesn't sound like the unique mechanics for indigenous nations are strong enough to counter the colonial powers in time without intense micromanagement and savescumming, which I imagine is probably also an issue if you're starting anywhere in Africa - worse, maybe, since you'd be staring down not only the big five/six European powers but also potentially the Ottomans and a few other big time players. There is DLC to diversify and strengthen gameplay outside Europe but I dunno how far it goes or if the AI is capable of taking full advantage of the new options.

This ain't Civ, where playing on an Earth map and discovering the Americas will often reveal a massive and powerful Aztec empire more than capable of stomping Spain, but seeing something more than the scattered single province minor powers would be nice no matter how ahistorical. Maybe there's mods which handle all these issues and more even without the expansions. That might be the next thing I check out unless the Fallout mod finds itself downloaded first.

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That time the French became "enlightened despots" and then fell under Spanish dynastic rule somehow. Always take royal marriage offers: you never know what might happen!

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Falcon Critical » Sun May 20, 2018 12:34 pm

Interesting stuff, I wonder if Crusader Kings would feel better to you since it's smaller scale and an earlier time period. I can imagine that it would be interesting to see how the world may have developed differently, but if it just means different european powers blobbing all over the place perhaps that's not so interesting.

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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Flarecake » Wed May 30, 2018 10:40 am

So, I need suggestions of new PS4 games to try. I basically just keep going between Skyrim and Fallout 4. I can't spend too much, so probably an older game or something.

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Delthazar
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Wed May 30, 2018 10:46 am

If you can find Horizon Zero Dawn at a price in your range, grab it, it's fantastic. The more I think about Horizon the more I think it's probably my GOTY 2017 even over Persona 5 (another good get) though Night in the Woods (also a strong rec) chomps at its heels a lot, too.

Horizon also has a Complete edition which includes the significantly large Frozen Wilds expansion. That's definitely the version to get and it probably shouldn't be too much pricier than Horizon vanilla at this point - at least it wasn't when Complete launched, anyway.

Otherwise... I liked Uncharted 4 more than I expected as someone who never played the first three games, but it's longer than it needed to be. I think I'd actually recommend Uncharted Lost Legacy over 4 'cause it knew when to end and it's got better character work.

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Delthazar
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Re: CF-WRUP IV: play stuff, talk about it.

Post by Delthazar » Wed May 30, 2018 1:20 pm

oh christ what am I doing

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I'm too old for this, I know I'm too old for this, but I'm doing it anyway

RIP future Del, killed by toddlers