Kissamies

I agree, more practical designs, less outlandish. This being isometric view, small exaggerations such as slightly oversized weapons to make the details noticeable might be OK, though. Now my personal anally retentive pet peeve is equipping every soldier with plate armour. Plate is expensive, damnit! Maybe less so in a setting with magical metallurgy, but still. A common footsoldier might not be able to afford chain or brigandine.

Some Space Pirates and Zombies and much AirBuccaneers HD. It has had a small popularity boost recently so if anyone tried it and put it away because no one was playing, now is a good time to give it another go. Useful site for catching those big games: http://www.rawcritics.com/community/tools/isanyoneonairbuccaneers/

It's been a while I played the Half-Life single player campaign too, but I think in HL1 the other characters just ignored and downplayed Gordon's muteness. On the other hand, in HL2 it's even lampshaded a couple of times. Valve likes to go for this mute protagonist route because they believe it breaks the immersion if the character does anything the player has no control over.

Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. It's really just simplified and streamlined Jagged Alliance 2 with missing features and better graphics. Still enjoyable enough, but not really worth it if you can play the original. AirBuccaneers HD. A Multiplayer indie game. The ABu mod for UT2kX was the second best mod for any game I've ever played (the best being Action Half-Life). This new standalone game continues and enchances the greatness and you can download the early version what they carefully call pre-alphas from their page for free: http://www.ludocraft.com/games/airbuccaneers/

Zahn (except for the Allegiance), Allston and Denning. Stackpole too a little bit, though he tends to be bland. I agree about KJA.

Yeah! TIE and DF2! Obviously he doesn't know what he's talking about. Many of the books are awesome too, IMO. There are a few really bad ones too, but if you pick the ones by right writers, you won't be dissapointed.

My experience is same as Raithe's. It's nice and all, but doesn't really draw me in. Now that it started freezing so bad that I had to hit the reset button, I had no problem putting it down and playing something else to wait and see if it will be better after a few patches.

I liberated Washington from the Russians and he soon declared war on me. Still voted for me, though. Here's an interesting viewpoint: http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=92858 I think he's got something there. The game certainly is very streamlined now.

I've had enemies offering me half of their remaining empires of even all their remaining cities minus the capital with their peace offers. I don't usually ask, so I don't know about that. Sometimes I refuse those offers. Too much happiness hit. The happiness system is probably the biggest stumbling block for old civ players. It's global, so it could cripple you completely. You can't just adjust sliders to fix it, so you have to keep an eye on it. After happiness it's usually economy, though that's easier. All those happiness buildings cost money to maintain. I think this civ might have the best balance between expanding empires and small, well built empires. Not sure if both are equally viable yet, but at least there's lots of mechanisms to support the smaller guy. It does increase the city's defense stat a little, but usually the unit can be much more useful when it's out of the city fighting. The real reason to put units in cities is to take advantage of the 3 HP/turn healing. When defending, you can also put your artillery there if you are afraid that it might get flanked. It packs more punch than the city's ranged attack.

This is a bit like Civ 3. Some good ideas, bad implementation. Some radical changes like getting rid of "commerce" that gets transformed into gold, science or culture by sliders. I like that one. I was somewhat sceptical about those social policies, but they seem nice. It's like another tech tree and I'm always a sucker for tech trees. Made me care about culture like never before. City states I like, just like I thought I would. Should be more ways to interact with them, though. IMO the game suffers from oversimplification, just like Civ 4 did a bit. However, 4 was still pretty good and BtS fixed it pretty nicely. Not sure if expansions can fix it this time, though. AI doesn't seem to be that smart, especially the war AI. Pretty easy to beat. Could be that the 1 unit/hex is too much for its pathfinding or something. I just get the impression that it's being overly careful and doesn't unleash the hordes like it should. I've beaten many superior armies just because they come at me piecemeal. Maybe they can improve it. So Civ 5 is pretty nice... but can it stand the test of time?

I like the learn-by-doing system in theory, but in practice it's almost always too grindy, or encourages grinding too much. I'd like a hybrid system. You invest your skill points on level ups, but you also get discounts on skills you used most in the least level. If there's, for example, 10 skills, you could get discounts for 3 most used skills.

Kissing ass diplomatically is what I usually do, but it usually involves picking sides and I tend to be averse of doing that. Or maybe just greedy for those trades. Luckily, the religions make natural "teams" and I've gotten somewhat over the obsession of switching to Free Religion ASAP. After all, there are wonders that get benefits from state religion buildings. As they say, city specialization is important, or having those specialist cities even if the rest are unspecialized. It matters where you put those national wonders.

Heh, I'm always so busy maxing out my research that I don't have time to build these things. I do have increased presence at the borders, but never 5 units. It's mainly just the counter attack forces. Of course, this leads to the more oppoturnistic AI leaders thinking I'm ripe pickings and attacking me. I usually turn the tables with my superior tech quite easily, unless other leaders see my plight and join the fun. They tend to look the overall military strength for that, not what's actually going on the field. I'm a builder that dreams of being a warmonger. There's always one more university or factory to build to gain more edge and the army is left unbuilt. I'm also somewhat obsessed about keeping my units upgraded. Too bad there isn't Leonardo's Workshop any more.

My sources say he got head-butted and broke his glasses.

Lax immigration policies is what happened. That and the childlike belief that everyone would be willing to integrate to their society. I've heard, not from that reliable sources, mind you, that 22% of their budget goes to paying this multiculturalism. Places like Roseng

Might as well buy it on Steam then. I don't like it, but my dislike isn't strong enough to keep me from buying it. Not bothering to get a physical copy of series I respect is a step to that direction, though. So far I've only bought discount games I didn't care about so much on Steam.

We should have used a Spiritual leader so that everyone could have switched to their favorite civics on will.

Patch getting rid of the thing eventually, eh? It isn't so bad then. It sounds so watered down that I have to wonder what's the point of cluttering my registry with that junk, tho. Well, I'm not complaining because it sounds reasonable overall.

I played some of those those After(whatever) UFO games that had that "stopwatch" real time system. It was kind of nifty at first, but got tedious in the long run. IIRC, you have to do a lot of missions in those games. I think I preferred Apocalypse's choice of turns or real time. I used both in that game. Turns when I want to be a control freak and RT for the milk runs. Then there was UFO Extraterrestials which was a bit lackluster. No proper atmosphere, I think. So yes, I wouldn't mind a new "big title" TB tactical X-Com game.

Yeah, the updates may get cracked, but most of the big pirate groups just care about the prestige of being the first one to crack a new game. Updates to an older game are much less interesting. Some of the players also downloaded it just because it was free and don't care about the game enough to look for updates, so they get circulated much less. Still, that Paradox method is pretty good. I've encountered it once or twice and it's not bad.

Online activation: dislike. Online activation with limited installations: very dislike. Requiring online connection to play the game: intolerable. If it's a good game, online activation even with limited installs is not a showstopper, but I don't like it. I'd rather have DRM that requires a disk in drive. I guess it would be all right if they eventually, when the game is old, released a patch that removes the activation, but what are the chances of that happening? I guess we'll just have to hope that when the time comes they no longer feel like keeping the activation servers up, there'll be a hack available. Hmm, maybe I should get the Steam version. Seems like the lesser of two evils in this case because it's the evil I already have installed.

Think? No. Wish? Yes. I don't think an X-COM fps is a totally impossible concept, but it's sure hard to create the great atmosphere of the first game with that format, and if it ain't got the atmosphere, it might as well be some other game. Anyways, there has been enough "spiritual successors" by Eastern European developers so I'm not exactly hungry for a tactical TBS anyways. Isn't there a new Jagged Alliance in the works as well?

I think it is pretty awesome. Nice bits and pieces here and there, the HK factory, Malachor V is still a shattered mess, but at least now there's a sort of red thread in the plot you can follow. Things are not left hanging nearly as much. Good work, I say.

Oh, they changed it. Good, I prefer limited ammo. Adds its own little dimension into game.

The PnP systems I started with were all attribute and skill based instead of class and level based. This is probably why I never liked the class based systems that much. I accept them as reasonable simplification on some PnP systems, but always disliked how many CRPGs use them. My reasoning is that you don't need that much simplification when computer is doing the "under the hood" calculations. My thinking is that CRPGs use levels because they are familiar and they give that reward that player craves every once in a while for clicking the mouse X times. The idea of binding it all to gameplay is interesting, but the implementation has proved... challenging so far. Within reason, I like fiddling with stats. It's part of the gameplay for me.