Youtube randomly gave me a Civilisation VI video, and then today Civ6 is on Steam sale for £5 instead of £50 (or the whole Anthology bundle for £20 instead of… £180? What?) So I bought that.
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Pew pew! Still playing Helldivers 2. They just added mechs, so they have been a ton of fun to drive around in. And a new warbond (which are like season passes). You don’t have to pay money, but I did because I was impatient and wanted to try out a new weapon.
Played earlier with my group, we had a go at a higher difficulty (Suicidal), which didn’t go particularly well. From doing a bit of reading, the key appears to be to avoid fights as much as possible. Attack too much, and you just get stomped by big bugs, and a plethora of smaller ones. But of course it’s a lot of fun to unleash the mechs minigun at the hordes of enemies.
And the reason we were on that difficulty (apart from being tough), is that the super rare samples are found there, and you use those to upgrade your ship systems to help you out. Most of the upgrades let you be more efficient in some way - like having your stratagems deploy faster.
The game is still a ton of fun, and I recommend it to anyone.
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I’ve been continuing to enjoy Crusader Kings 3 (basically a mediaeval soap opera pretending to be a 4x game, but I realised I needed something to give me more of a stake in it…. So I decided to found my own dynasty, using our Whartson Hall gaming group, and our esteemed @RogerBW as the founder. Let’s see how this pans out…
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True to life, as ever, our founder @RogerBW is brave, lustful and arbitrary. His overall personality is ‘amateurish plotter’.
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Oh, that’s just what you’re meant to think. Heh, heh.
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Obscure, leaning into Insignificant, certainly seems to describe us accurately.
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Well, we‘ll want to know all about the extended family and who gets poisoned, stabbed in the back and so on.
(My own attempts at both Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis were all very short-lived.)
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I bounced off previous iterations of **CK ** and Europa Thingy, but the tutorial of CK3 is really quite good. What worked for me in the end was releasing there’s no point trying to ‘win’ like in another game, just roleplay your character, come up with schemes and then enjoy reversing them all when their offspring ascends to the throne. I doubt I’ll play through to end game unless I get very invested in a family, but it’s a fantastic story generator for the mediaeval period (on a relatated side issue, it’s far far better at telling stories than I found Oath to do, but maybe that’s an unfair comparison).
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I think it’s a fair comparison–insofar as it illustrates at where Oath stories are coming from and what kind they could be. That a computer game has more possibilities doing so is not surprising 
There is all kinds of upkeep the computer can do for you and complexities it hides and automations that are impossible to do on a table. This does not mean Oath should have been a computer game but maybe it attempts something that requires people do fill in all these missing pieces … that a computer could fill in more easily.
I have tried Crusader Kings and the Europa Thingy… and I feel that if I have to watch tutorials for a game to grok even small parts of it, I’d rather play Oxygen not Included, Surviving Mars or Dyson Sphere Program.
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See, I don’t expect a board game to generate stories, because I’m a role-player too and if I want that kind of dynastic story I’ll play Pendragon (ideally tweaking it a bit so that not everybody dies). That’s why I still have fondness for FIrefly, because in spite of quite simple mechanics it does generate stories just by shuffling characters and putting them in unexpected situations.
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Agreed, and I wouldn’t normally make the comparison except that it seems to be one of the main selling points of Oath, which I feel is a bit misguided - or, at least, might give a misguided impression of what it actually does.
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I wouldn’t exactly say misguided but … Oath is overselling something that is very ephemeral and circumstantial. The potential is there but only rarely glimpsed. I have glimpsed it. But my guess is most people that get to play Oath don’t see that at all.
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Weeelll it’s all over for @RogerBW . His wife tried the difficult cure for typhus and let’s just say the patient is now in a stable condtion. He had a glorious life, of course, winning control of many counties to become King of Wales (only slightly having to murder one queen to prevent France getting involved in a bijou warette). He had a wonderful warhouse, Bucephalus, that died because he wanted to spend the money elsewhere. He died during a war with the Duke of Northumberland who has decided he has a claim on South Wales, and so the chalice passes to the noble King @BigJackBrass, a compassionate, calm, arrogant insightful thinker. Will he be up to the task of resisting Northumberland and saving Wales for his progeny?
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I am playing Balatro that rogue-like “Poker” deck builder thingy. It’s fun, addictive and … somewhat difficult depending on deck and luck. I am getting better but there is very little in the way of mitigation–overall, I have built some setups that worked really well with pairs and high cards but if you get the that setup is very luckbased–and the endless mode is very endful.
This is really a rogue-like. You don’t get to improve your stuff like Hades or Slay the Spire. You just get access to a few additional items over time. I have got better at it. But whether or not I get a good setup is largely based on random appearance of jokers and arcana cards. With some of the starting conditions I still die in the first round of blinds regularly.
It’s still fun. But I hate that there is no gallery of your runs. No way to preserve at least a little bit of what kind of setup worked. No way to show off a cool run. There is nothing but the “hey I made it this far” at the end of any game.
Which tells me (once again), that I very much perefer rogue-lite over rogue-like.
But it’s a very good time waster if you have time to waste. (f.e. “compiling…”) A run takes between 2 minutes and half an hour (rarely).
My favorite run so far was titled (by me) “Kings of Metal” btw, and I really wish I could show a nice screen of the final deck and joker setup. But I can’t. Because once its over its over and always very suddenly.
PS: I have begun optimizing my way through a seeded run, just to see if I can take it anywhere.
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I tend to go very heavy on a single suit (and level up “Flush,” “Straight Flush,” and “Flush House”) in my successful runs. Plus focusing on Jokers that multiply the multiplier, whenever possible, as opposed to upgrades that improve the Chips.
Trouble, of course, is getting Arcana that focus on only one or two suits can be tricky (and lots of Hangman to remove low off-suit cards).
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my best runs so far were heavy on Pair and HighCard with Splash / Supernova and maybe Constellation. in that context Stone Cards and Half Joker are quite nice. I have also tried to go heavy on Steel cards with Kings + Red Seals and the Joker that gives you additional “Mult” per King in hand. I have not had much success with “big hands” as opposed to the smaller ones.
I had one that ran very successfully with streets with just 4 cards and just when I got the joker that allowed me to have holes in my streets as well… I died.
As stated, I wish I could review or store my best runs somehow… it would be so much nicer.
And I have given up trying to get one seed to a better run. It’s just a stupid memory game then.
Maybe I am just frustrated with the Black Deck–starting with just 3 hands is so hard.
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Reviewing or storing runs is something many roguelikes do, rather than being a roguelite feature. Balatro apparently just lacks this, for some reason.
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Having fun with Noita, which feels a bit like Spelunky, if you could levitate and cast spells, and there wasn’t a ghost rushing you along.
Every so often, you get to craft wands, and they appear to be able to do some very interesting and suicidal things. So far about half my deaths have been self-inflicted.
The deepest I got was with teleportitis, until I teleported into lava. The strongest I felt was with invisibility, until my other ability to freeze liquids got me trapped in a shower of blood that I tried to explode, with predictable results. The coolest thing I’ve done was to use rain on a lava lake to form a bridge across it.
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I didn’t put my words very well to convey that I meant that more or less per definition at the end of a run in a rogue-lite you get some kind of reward and that having at least a recording of a run and or achievements might be among the few possible rewards for a rogue-like where the game starts more or less with identical premises (there are the unlocks after all). But Balatro has a very small number of achievements, a finite number of unlocks that seem to be arriving quickly and no gallery of past runs.
The only reward is in “getting good” but I know myself there is a ceiling for my skill-level with this type of game. And then it fizzles out.
I think the rogue-lites with their continuous progress may have more longevity for me. I understand this is not how everyone will feel about this.
PS: my last run was fun, I’ll call it “The Fours are with me”
(Minor spoilers)
Guess my most played hand?
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