Oooh I bought this in the steam sale, I need to try it more!
3 Likes
I think I finished Qud on my 3rd try. It is very sandboxey, and you can manipulate things to make a very overpowering character, and/or grind indefinitely to become one.
3rd character was a chimera who snowballed into a blob of axes and just dismembered everything. I think I got reasonably lucky in that I never met anything that couldn’t be hacked to death.
4th character is currently on hiatus because I got bored, but is well on his (her) way to a second win. This is totally broken, so I’ll spoiler it: dominate specialist mutant start, find the mayor of your starting village, dominate them, shoot yourself, and you’ll be trapped in your new body. Mayors have a legendary statline and random mutations. Mine ended up as a two-headed laser-eyed, forcefield bubble monster who could a) kill most anything in zero time with the laser and b) force bubble indefinitely to be immune to everything else.
4 Likes
Interesting to read. I am playing all random so may luck out in one of these, but very much enjoying the exploration and finding things out.
2 Likes
Just finished Witch Spring R. It was… interesting.
Solid story, although obviously some massive plot holes (I mean, standard anime stuff, including a 4th act “Here’s the villain oh no actually HERE’S the villain ha got you this third guy you’ve never heard of is actually the villain”), and some quite-literal deus ex machina.
It was cute, though. And there was a fair amount of “Well, I can’t end the game yet, I haven’t been to all the places yet…” which was nice. Overall, glad I bought it on sale and that I’m now done with it.
I am now putting time into Marvel Spider-Man, and it’s very good. Bounced off it pretty hard the first time, but having finished the Tutorial Mission, the city is kinda fun to play around in. Honestly, I think the old Infamous was better, for the most part? But the combat in this is a bit more responsive, overall, and there is definitely a lot of New York to play around in. I’ll happily spend some time web-slinging. After this, I might dive back into Star Wars Jedi Survivor? Maybe? It didn’t grab me nearly as hard as the original did.
My 1-in, 1-out system for video games seems to be working pretty well! We’ll see how long I can keep it up!
5 Likes
Survivor’s definitely worth making it to the end. I absolutely love Cal’s growth in the game. I didn’t much care for him in Fallen Order, he was a bit bland (and I still wish we could play a cool alien vs. another white dude) but I absolutely love him now. And his relationship with BD-1 is the best.
Overall I feel it improved on almost all aspects of Fallen Order, but, I preferred Fallen Order’s level structure. I prefer the more linear levels compared to the open world segments in Survivor.
Plus, Survivor is peak Star Wars droid content, and I love droids.
2 Likes
Still playing the 6-player hotseat Civ6 game, of course, and I’m warming to it.
I’m ahead on points, but it’s totally unlike a singleplayer game, and really tense!
A city state that I was suzerain of became a war target for Germany and England on the same turn. No way I could defend it, and it was interesting to see Germany and England hash out a “limited war” to be the first to hold Valetta for 5 consecutive turns.
Meanwhile I couldn’t continue my unchecked expansion, because I’m kind of sandwiched on 3 sides by other players (and the sea to the south). My Norwegian neighbours, in particular, are a real threat that I have to be constantly wary of. They have no other neighbours, took another city state, have a really compact and defensible city spread with equivalent production and armies to my own empire, and could be absolutely devastating if they chose to dominate the coast and raid everything. I have a slight tech edge, so I’m constantly wavering on whether or not to try crushing them, but held back by knowing it would be really difficult and expensive even if I could win, and that uncertainty is never present in single-player civ. Similarly, I’m tempted to steamroll one of my weaker neighbours, but held in check by the knowledge that the Norwegians would surely take the opportunity to open up a second war front, which could be disastrous for me.
So uh, this all boils down to more turtling, I think, but it’s still tense trying to optimise everything to stay one step ahead of intelligent opposition on the same footing.
If this were a single-player game, every other civ would have declared war on me already, and I would just be working out which order to crush them in, while fending off ineffective half-arsed attacks. Or, on the highest difficulty, I probably would have had to proactively take over at least one civ early on to keep up.
EDIT: I also find it funny entering the renaissance era in 100 BC. Highly optimised play is so far ahead of the curve.
7 Likes
Citizen Sleeper is really, really good.
5 Likes
The sequel just dropped on Gamepass; looking forward to trying it as I loved the first one.
2 Likes
Still playing the Civ6 game, and although still interesting, I’m kind of disappointed.
So last post was all about tension, right? In the lead, but everything on a knife edge. Well, after losing out on two key settlement locations and feeling very cramped and unable to expand in any direction I decided to preempt my viking neighbour and launched a Buddhist samurai “crusade”… only to find almost zero resistance. No berserker horde massing on my doorstep, not even what I’d consider the bare minimum of border defence.
What followed was really awkward negotiations. He didn’t want to be knocked out of the game, and I didn’t really want to be the dick that knocked him out of the game. But I had invested a lot into an army that will only be relevant for this one war, and I need a return on that investment. Eventually I agreed to limit the war to 25 turns, after which he’d cede any lost territory, and we’d enter an alliance until the end of the game. I’m in a reasonable position to go for a cultural win instead of a dominance win, and this should be more socially acceptable all round.
Maybe I need to reframe this from being a disappointment to being successful gunboat diplomacy, but I misjudged everything. I think only one other player actually has a realistic plan to win.
6 Likes
On a similar note… I have completed a first game of Civilization 7. I want to note this is NOT an early access game. This is the actual release. 
- I played Civ 1 and was enthusiastic despite having a buggy pirated copy that always killed the game at the end
- I played Civ 2 and it was even better (and I actually bought a copy) --I got my first own computer to play this and spend many many many hours on it
- Civ 3 was an improvement yet again
- I liked Civ 4.
- Civ 5 is great in my memory and
- Civ 6 was even better … the most fun yet.
I liked every single game in the franchise.
Up to now.
If you thought Cyberpunk was a disaster…
Civilization 7 seems worse:
- It’s buggy
- The UI is meh
- And the way this puts you on railroad tracks belies the sandbox nature of the game.
I almost didn’t want to finish the first game. (which took about 10 hours of playtime)
I am still trying to put my finger on what’s wrong with it outside of the bugs.
It has to be the feeling that I am playing a series of games instead of a single game. Each age is now a distinct game. Yes you keep the map. But a lot of things reset in between ages. This makes it so you won’t fight with planes against spear troops. But that’s about the ONLY thing that this improves.
And I chose to go with the economic route at the start and from then on the game forces you to continue that way. And it gives you stupid quests to complete so you can advance on that track. WTF? How is that civilization?
What has improved (a bit) is the more transparent diplomacy but in the end it is still incredibly limited and once you go with democracy and the others with another ideology there is no way to get back together.
Religion may have been controversial in previous installments. In this one they outright KILLED it. It plays no role at all anymore in the modern age and whatever it does in the middle part … it didn’t feel significant in any way.
This is a sad sad day… I am going back to playing Path of Exile 2 now and hope that they will fix it. I am not a paying ALPHA tester.
3 Likes
But isn’t that part of the fun of the game, at least in that last phase before you declare victory?
4 Likes
this only happens if you play on the wrong difficulty level. it was not really problem to begin with in my opinion.
I never felt that a Civlization game could be patronizing but that‘s what it is…
3 Likes
I must add that my Civilization playing friend says he enjoys the game being split into eras.
He also said the UI seemed unfinished and there were some stupid bugs but he like the general gameplay. „They couldn‘t very well remake Civ6, could they?“
My answer to that was: „they should have“ 
So my advice: wait for them to fix the bugs and the UI and then see if you like the latest iteration. I will give it another chance once there have been a few patches… (there was a big one today but that introduced a new bug at least in my game)
2 Likes
I am pleased I paid about £5 for Civ6 a while ago. I have no idea what I’m doing in it, but all the opinions seem to say it’s the best one.
3 Likes
Up to now I always thought the latest one was the best one.
I retain some hope that once the bugs are fixed and the promised UI improvements have been delivered that I will somehow figure out that the 3 act structure is good after all… but I have my doubts.
1 Like
Interesting, my very-into-Civilization friend thinks Civ 4 is the best one, an opinion shared by the author of the one review of Civ 7 that I’ve read (Ars Technica, mostly positive review). I haven’t heard what my friend thinks of Civ 7 yet.
I think my friend also said that the expansion packs made Civ 5 and Civ 6 substantially better games than when they first launched. Perhaps the same will happen with Civ 7?
Personally I’ve only played 2, 3, and 6, and really enjoyed them all.
2 Likes
Maybe one day I will go back and play games in all the Civ iterations I have in my Steam library for comparison. (3-7, I am missing 1 and 2 probably because they aren’t on Steam)
1 Like
All of this Civ talk just makes me miss Civ3, the last one I really played (and not liking Civ 4).
More than that, I miss Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri more.
3 Likes
Alpha Centauri is great, I still regularly go back to that one.
4 Likes
Civ4 is the last Civ that the computer opponents could handle reasonably well, and had some great full conversion mods too, so it’s the best single-player Civ.
Civ6 is the most interesting iteration without mods, so it would be best if the computer could play it. In that sense, it’s probably the best multiplayer civ.
I heard that someone with boardgame design chops was lead designer for civ7, so I hope it gets up to speed at some point. The three age design sounds like a good solution to one of civs greatest flaws, so I’ll be keeping an eye on how the game develops and will hopefully play it once it’s in better shape.
4 Likes