I’ve been playing a lot of Cultist Simulator recently. It’s essentially a digital card game which relies on experimentation to figure out the best way to establish a successful cult without dying/going insane/being arrested.
It’s got a similar feel to the old point-and-click adventure games, which suits my inclination to push all the buttons to see what happens.
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Playing Solasta, which is a new rpg based heavily on 5e D&D rules (but without the IP). It’s just out of early access and still a bit buggy (character faces are terrible, difficulty of random encounters varies wildly) but overall a really good framework for 5e D&D and very similar to Baldur’s Gate / Pillars of Eternity.
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Civ6 with he latest DLC and some of the fun new modifiers. I upgraded to King difficulty and playing Kublai Khan (Mongolia variant), and I am barely hanging in there after two restarts. I have recently completed two games and won with Diplomatic Victory both times which is my default and far too easy to pull off… if I win with this on King I will have to turn off that particular victory conditions. I have never won a game on a higher difficulty than King and I don’t plan to even try. This is as good as I get.
I had to turn off the zombie hordes btw. Those are probably fun on lower levels.
I kept the heroes, the industry specializations and the cults. The „no normal ages“ modifier ruined several of my opponents last game and I had to „retrieve“ several rebellious cities after I fell into a Dark Age once… that one is just a bit too harsh but fun. Rerolling the tech tree did nothing interesting for me. Worse disasters is like the zombies: a complication I don’t need.
Overall, I like the DLC and feel the bad reviews on Steam are not quite warranted. The game is already great without it and the additions are gimmicks that only people need who have played the base game too much already. So there is that.
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I think that these kind of games are fun at the lowest difficulty tiers, and then they become hard work. Which no one needs.
I tried Civ 6 a while ago, but like all Civs, never hooked me pass a couple of victories.
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First you get people relying on your boardgaming/RPG discussion forum.
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Started an amazing mobile game called Hoplite. You’re a little Spartan warrior fighting demonic hoards in a turn based roguelite dungeon crawler puzzle. It makes a lot of simple systems: stab for melee, throw spear for ranged (which you then have to pick up again to reload) and bash with shield to push an enemy away. Each level you get one upgrade, and it uses health as a currency to get the cooler upgrades. All the enemies are the usual tropes: soldier, grenadier, ranger. It’s really really neat. Thoroughly recommended.
It’s free to play down to the 16th floor, which is plenty to decide if you like the game enough to buy or not.
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I’m a big fan of Hoplite. It’s absolutely brilliant
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Cultist Simulator is really cool, but I wish it were a bit less grindy/repetitive to experiment with. (Also, Alexis Kennedy, who’s the primary creative and company owner, has credible sexual misconduct allegations against him. So having backed the KS long ago, I get any new content for it for life anyway, but I’m probably out for anything else they do. Alas.)
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Why must people be so terrible?
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I don’t know, but I wish they’d stop.
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I’ve started playing Undermine a roguelite that is Zelda does Spelunky? I’ve just hit the grind phase where my upgrades aren’t good enough to progress, but I can reliably reach the rock solid boss. It’s fun and satisfying, if nothing revolutionary. The upgrades aren’t ‘Dead Cells crazy’ (yet?) but I enjoy the simplicity.
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I got as close to 100% that I am ever going to get with Super Mario Odyssey. 640 power moons found (999 is a complete game), 100% of the special coins, and the absolutely sadistic secret final level beaten. It’s bittersweet. Such an incredible game in every respect. Mario handles near flawless, each kingdom is a feast for the eyes and ears, and there’s such joy and wonder in every new idea.
I am going to put it to bed for some significant time to hopefully forget as much as possible, then play it again.
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I have started playing Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5… or is that Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries? One or the other, I’m playing that.
It’s a surprisingly neat little game, and it obviously lifted enormous tracts of land from one of my favourite games, the new Battletech. I still prefer Battletech because it’s turn-based and there is a much wider selection of missions (MM5… or M5M… seems to have about 4 mission archetypes, whereas BT has about a dozen). And it has the same occasional problem as BT: the difficulty is all over the place depending on RNG… basically, the computer will pick a tonnage of enemies you have to face (let’s say 200 tonnes). But that’s a big difference between 8 25-tonne mechs or two 100-tonne mechs… and even in the case of the two 100-tonners, if they show up at the same time or separated… whether the first one gets a lucky crit that causes your left arm to blow off, etc… etc…
I get that this element of randomness is a big draw for some players, but it can be really frustrating. I had to retry a mission 5 times because my (70-tonne) Jagermech kept losing an arm partway through against 6 waves of light mechs (Locusts and Fleas, mostly). The final attempt that I succeeded at was a cakewalk, despite exactly the same enemies, because I got through the first 5 waves without losing an arm (at which point I ran out of ammo and lost both arms, but who cares because I loaded out my Jager with 4 AC2s which are just pretty tubes without ammo!).
Anyway, I’m having a lot of fun with it, but part of that is just the desire to play more Battletech but there not being any more Battletech to play. It’s good. Not great, but good, and I’m enjoying it.
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Oh boy yes.
And in the boardgame effectiveness is somewhere between tonnage and tonnage², with some tweaky edge cases like the Savannah Master (really tiny hovercraft, moves fast so hard to hit, practically any weapon hit will overkill it but the rest of the swam is still out there).
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@Marx asked for a die roll:
Keeping in mind I still haven’t played any of the Tabletop versions aside from once almost 30 years ago, “Guerrilla Miniature Games” has some really fun to watch batreps of Alpha Strike where they go over some of the problems with tonnage-as-balance. The one I’ve linked is a bunch of elite Clan mechs going up against a swarm of rookie militia… it’s amusing to watch, but the conclusion is basically foregone after turn 2.
Part of the problem is the way weapon damage is calculated in Alpha Strike: by the default rules, you roll once (2d6), and if you hit, everything hits, and if you miss, everything misses. This usually results in very feast-or-famine results, especially for Clan mechs that can carry staggering amounts of firepower… enough to wipe out an Inner medium mech in a single hit, but if you miss… yeah, nothing. The guys at “Death From Above Gaming” (a specifically Battletech focused Youtube channel) suggest using 2d6 per point of damage: so a Madcat firing 7 points of damage would roll 7 pairs of 2d6, and each hit is calculated individually. Ash from GMG (the guy in the video linked) found that too clunky, because you need each pair of d6 to be distinct (you can’t just roll 14d6 and match up the dice afterwards however you want), and so originally rolled 1d6 “for the pilot” and then 1d6 per weapon (so the Madcat above would roll a big, obvious d6 for the pilot and then 7d6 for the weapons, and then you combine the pilot result with each weapon result individually). That doesn’t work because it skews really heavily towards critical hits (pairs and 12s), so he abandon that in favour of the current system, which is to use 1d12 per weapon point (the Madcat would roll 7d12 for its loadout). The problem with that is that it tends to favour volume-of-fire instead of skilled fire: 2d6 has a Gaussian curve to its distribution of numbers, but 1d12 doesn’t, which means modifiers (+1 to hit) tend to be much better on 2d6. His solution to that problem…
He doesn’t have one. 
@Marx asked for a die roll:
I did NOT ask for a die roll, and now I can’t edit my post, but whatever… turns out THIS is the mixed-arms episode of GMG I was thinking about, not the other one (which I also watched and enjoyed, but that one actually has mechs, whereas THIS one Owen is running exclusively vehicles and infantry).
Fixed the post ownership.
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Yeah, a Canadian friend who isn’t here liked to have 6-7 pairs of visually distinct d6 to be rolled all at once.
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That is my plan. I have the authorized Battletech dice for each of the great houses (Steiner, Davion, Liao, Kurita, Marik), so I can roll up to 5 distinct weapons simultaneously, and then buckets of varied d6 for the odd mech that runs more than that.
Played Yoku’s Island Express this weekend. What a lovely game! Not too long and a joy throughout.
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