Replaying Solasta, decided to make a party with 4 fighters to see how it would do. Turns out that if you make a party with no Cleric or Wizard in it, you get a Steam achievement called “I CAST FIST!”
5 Likes
“Summon blunt-force trauma!”
“Channel stabbing!”
It does remind me of that (obviously made-up) story about the paladin who used “Lay on Hands” by slapping the recipient and shouting “Get back in there, you wuss!”
1 Like
Update: in the early game so far, these 4 fighters are absolutely steamrollering it. Action surge per short rest means they essentially all start with 2 attacks per round, and I’ve got them all kitted out as stealth longbow archers so they’re just cutting down everything before it even reaches them. We’ll see if the lack of healing (outside of Second Wind) becomes serious later on.
2 Likes
In high school, one of my friends played a paladin who performed laying of hands by slapping.
2 Likes
Well, I spent half my day playing Diablo 4. It’s pretty good fun. I levelled one character to about 10, then died a couple of times during a boss fight. I respecced (for lightning instead of fire), and that seemed to go better.
Then I made a druid, because who doesn’t want to be a werebear? Same boss fight, died a couple of times and figured I’d had enough Diablo for the day. Although I’ll probably take another shot at it tonight.
All runs well on my pretty modest system. Sucks that you could get a good deal on the console editions, but there is only one place to buy it on PC, and that’s straight from Blizzard.
2 Likes
Been playing tears of the kingdom and just came across a character called Rahdo, is this a common name?
2 Likes
Really? I have not met this character… lol 
Does Radho talk a lot?
Also still playing ToTK but I have progressed quite far on the main quest now I think—might be over too soon, so I am delaying. But I am at about 114 shrines… (this is the Zelda level meter, right?), so not sure how much longer I can delay the inevitable. There are still some things to explore some shrines to solve, some … to find … some … to activate and some side quests to finish but I think I am almost done.
Had a very exciting moment yesterday where I came back to a location I had explored in a different context the previous day and it all came together so beautifully and I was just shouting across the apartment in joy The neighbors must think I am insane.
Also I did some other thing yesterday finally and got notified that I did things in an unusual order oO. Well, the game lets me. Character X says to me „hey you should go find the Master Sword. Oh you already have the Master Sword, oh well, good job Link!“
4 Likes
Got Diablo IV. It’s good so far. I started as a Druid throwing lightning, now I’m a werebear.
1 Like
I was playing Tears of the Kingdom but my brain was kinda tired of open-world games after just finishing Jedi: Survivor so I took a few days to return to Gunfire Reborn then my youngest daughter (5 y/o) basically claimed the Switch to play Animal Crossing.
So instead of playing Zelda I found myself playing Street Fighter 6, which surprised me because I am not a fighting game person. But the story mode sounded fun–and it is. Who knew a silly action RPG using SF mechanics for battles could be so enjoyable–but what’s hooked me is their new Modern control scheme that simplifies inputs and combos, so I can move past my execution issues and engage with areas of fighting game strategy I’ve never been able to approach before.
I’ve fought (and won) more ranked matches than I ever did in SFIV and have really been enjoying it.
And now it looks like I’m also playing Diablo IV with some friends. I’m not the biggest Diablo fan (though, did get into the Switch version of D3 with the same friends), or really that style of ARPG. I tend to get bored. But so far I’m enjoying it more than when we tried Diablo II:Resurrection a couple months ago. We’ll see if it hooks me long enough to top the 150 hours I put into D3.
3 Likes
Hey Ross,
You know how you love Star Trek : Birth of the Federation? Wouldn’t it be great if Paradox made a simplified version of stellaris set in the Star Trek universe?
That would be great! But isn’t that just a mod for stellaris?
It does sound like it. What would you pay for that?
Oh goodness, far too much.
5 Likes
I’ve been off work sick for a few days, and spent some of my convalescing time playing Disco Elysium. I liked it a lot, very weird and philosophical. I also liked the mechanics for building skills and accessing different parts of the narrative using dice checks. My character had a very low skill ceiling for the intellectual skills, so he ended up wearing a very logical outfit to get through some of the deductions 
I might play again at some point to explore some of the other character types and play styles, but probably not for a while since I think I’d find going through all that text again a bit frustrating!
7 Likes
I’ve been playing a fair bir of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - specifically its low level survival based dlc, Through the Ashes. Has a very different vibe to the main campaign but I’ve rather enjoyed the little side story it offers.
Low levels in Pathfider can be brutal, though, lots of reloading along the way, especially in the beginning. I did like its encouragement to bypass combat rather than clearing all the maps. I’m surprised how few people have completed it - I enjoyed my play of it a lot!
Now back into the main game - I’m in the second act with my second playthrough after an aborted first play and lots of experimental starts.
I’ve also picked up Brotato, which is decent. I’m not sure its as good as its peers and inspirations but enjoyable nonetheless.
1 Like
I finished Zelda: TotK. I was putting it off. Didn‘t want it to end. I could have taken on Ganon ages ago… not that the fight was trivial but I did not need 12 spare weapons, not 200 arrows and not a whole inventory full of food. I do think that upgrading on set of armor to maximum defense was really useful.
I really enjoyed the last 2-3 hours of play though. It was really great. I think I enjoyed it even more than the finale of BotW (it might have been a little easier than BotW or I might have had more practice…)
5 Likes
After playing a ton of Diablo IV and Marvel Midnight Suns, I bought - for at least the 4th time since the original was on the Amiga - Eye of the Beholder 1-3. So I’m playing that.
3 Likes
Oh those EoB games were great! Well, the first two were. I remember 3 being much less good, was moved to another studio I think (Westwood did the first two?). Still hmm tempting to revisit!
2 Likes
Yes, 3 was terrible by comparison but 1+2 are classics. You do basically need the walkthrough book to have any chance of completing them, but the new “FR Archives” edition on Steam includes it! And an automapper!
1 Like
I’ve been on a bit of a 4x hit recently, spurred on by getting Humankind free in Gamepass some time ago and finally getting round to trying it. I thought I’d try three of the ‘biggies’ and see which one I preferred, so I’ve run through whole campaigns of Civilization 6, Humankind and Old World, to see which gelled with me.
Civ 6 is the big-balled beast at the ballet (as the kids say). I used to love Civ a lot, but the last time I -really- gelled with it was Civ 2, which may give you some idea of my age;I’ve tried all the others and liked them lots, I even liked Civ 5 which lots of people don’t, probably because I’m a casual gamer at heart, despite my long-standing association with the series. My partner loves Civ 6 and frequently plays in league games - I’ve never really been a huge fan of multiplayer 4x, though (in computer form, at least - I love Star Trek: Thingy and Xia), but after this playthrough I’m remembering why the idea of a shorter game appeals.
In this playthrough I was the Mesopotamians (which menat for the whole time I was humming the They Might be Giants tune, but this is not a bad thing. It’s slick and very pretty, and I love the early game, the mid-game. Typically for me, I mostly didn’t attack anyone except when they started on me - I prefer the zen of holding my own territory in Civ (mostly because I find wars in Civ really tedious and often frustrating, and this hasn’t changed for me in any of its iterations). I was enjoying it lot, and then came the late game… turn… after turn… after turn. I was the clear cultural winner for a long time, also very close to a diplomatic victory, but the process of -actually- winning took forever, and as I was playing I remembered which I hadn’t played Civ 6 in a while. It’s fun at first to start firing rock bands into enemy territory and promoting them, but then it becomes a little dull. Then deeply dull. I suppose I could have stopped playing when it was clear I was winning except that… I couldn’t, because I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I went around doing that sort of flagrant sensible thing. Finally, after many hours, the game ended, but it didn’t feel like a victory as I crawled into bed with the sunlight cheering my buttocks on their way (long story).
Then on to Humankind. This, by the folks who made Endless Legend, I think, is almost as close and cheeky to Civ as Pathfinder is to DnD 3E, but it has a few interesting changes, notably that you can change civilization (or ‘culture’, I think they’re called) in every era. At first it seems cool and that it might give you variety, but in practice it ultimately distanced me from my civilization, so I never really felt much affection for it. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it lots and it runs along at a reasonable pace, I prefer the scoring system to all the different victories in Civ. Also, unusually for me, I started a war with my neighbour (again, I forget what culture they were, as they kept changing, but they were yellow, I remember that bit). It actually went great and I had a really fun time, losing a little, winning a lot… soon I had all of their cities under my sexy sexy umbrella.
And then… and then I noticed the city cap. I’d be vaguely keeping an eye on it, because, in an effort to reduce the city spamming of the civ series, your civ is capped at how many cities you can have, and the ways you can increase this cap are few and far between. My cap was 6, and I’d kept to it because honestly I wasnt sure what happened when you went over it, but I’d just won a bunch of cities in the war. Now I had 12, and I pretty quickly found out what happened.
See, the thing you’re supposed to do it either raze the cities to the ground, which seems crazy to me, or combine them with some of your existing cities - this costs influence, one of the games main resources. You can’t use any of the other types of resource to do it. And can you guess what happens if you go over the citiy cap? Yes. That’s right, an influence penalty. I had 12,000 influence at the end of the war, but by the time I noticed what was happening (a few turns later) the influence penalty I had taken had already dropped my influence -below- the minimum amount to merge another city. A turn later I had negative influence and no way of getting out of the bad influence spiral (it’s just like my teenage years, really). The only thing I could do was reload an earlier saved game and rapidly merge as many cities as I could and burn the rest down. I ended up winning the game but it left such a sour taste in my mouth that it’s put me off trying again.
Finally, Old World - set entirely in antiquity, but this one feels quite different to the other few. You get a set number of ‘orders’ each turn, which you use to move troops, promote them, imprison your husband, etc. Its a nice mechanic because it keeps the turns brisk and also forces you to focus between infastructure and war.
‘Imprison your husband’? Oh yes, the other fun part of the game is that it’s tied in with a Crusader Kings- style dynasty system - you control a particular monarch, and there is an events system full of interesting happenings, moral quandries and public health emergencies -in general, with these events, the more you lean towards modern liberalism, the lower your ‘legitimacy’ gets, and as it’s this that caluclates how many orders you get around, you want to have pretty good reason not to look like the strong king. The game is also limited to 200 turns, and I approve of this the same way I approve of films less that 2 hours long.
I was enjoying my time as the Babylonians greatly, but then came the time of waiting.
You see, in Old World, you have to have an heir. Any will do, but if your main monarch pops their clogs without anyone in waiting, it’s game over.
Mari ascended to the throne at the tender age of 13, when her mother unexpectedly died. She had several uncles and aunties but no brothers or sisters. I wasn’t too worried, plenty of time. Mari tied the knot with a handsome (but cruel) Egyptian noble at 19, and I sat back and waited for the babies.
And waited.
And waited.
When Mari was 35, I started to get worried. Then she discovered her husband was involved in a minor plot against her… it wasn’t much, a bit of stolen food, but it gave me a chance. I arrested and then assassinated him (hey, food is food!) and cast around for the next possible husband.
There was a clue in the name with Marius the Weak, I know, but I gave it a try. He was dead within 2 years, and I started to really worry how many women in antiquity had children in their late thirties. Then… early forties. Mari married again, not for love, but out of desperation. It didn’t work. She Elizabeth the firsted it all the way into her 70s. When she was sixty she developed hedonism and spent a lot of time in brothels, but no luck. I kept hoping the game would send me a foster child, a surprise cousin, even a goat in a crown would do. Nothing. In turn 175, aged 75, Mari died. The game ended.
Tricky. Old World is genuinely fun to play and I enjoyed it more than either of the others. It’s great at generating stories, I enjoyed warring in it, and I have happy memories of my civilization.
But… but I do like to get to the end of a game. And to abitrarily lose because my cool Queen Mari didn’t happen to have children, without explaining why or throwing me a bone… honestly it didn’t feel great.
So… after all, what is my favourite 4x? Well, of course, it’s Stellaris. But I have to admit I’ll be giving Old World another try. When the pain of the years of waiting have faded.
6 Likes
I agree that Old World is the best of the three, it does a lot of things right. I still don’t actually want to sink much time into it though.
I believe you had another option to avoid the game ending by changing the laws of succession, but my recall is hazy.
2 Likes
There is apparently a way to do this, but I didn’t have the right tech and didn’t have time to change it - believe me, I tried everything. The problem is that by the time you realise you’re not going to have any offspring, it’s too late to do much about it.
2 Likes
This is similar to my Civ experiences. I’ve abandoned so many games because I got bored with the late game. Eventually I started choosing early-game aggressive civs (e.g. Sumer) and starting a lot of wars, which is very contrary to my usual play style!
…
Recently I’ve been playing Murder by Numbers which is a puzzle game consisting of nonograms loosely strung together with a murder mystery. The story isn’t much to write home about but I love logic puzzles 
I’ve also been playing a lot of Two Point Hospital which is basically a Theme Hospital clone. It seems to lack the contagious vomiting which could plague you in Theme Hospital, which is a mercy!
1 Like