Humanoid

I vaguely recall that credit/refunds were made available for people who took up the pre-release access as addons. Not sure what the impact on people who just had tiers with that access by default though.

I'm pretty sure I tossed a little money towards it during their KS, but not enough to get into the alpha/beta tiers. I can wait. Unless I'm mixing up my projects, I think they might have opened up alpha access to all KS backers.

Broken Age. Thoroughly charmed. Which is a thing to say about a story about a Lovecraftian elder god.

That is odd, even on the US Steam store it's simply $20 down to $10 on sale. But odd in a good way. I've extended my shunning of Steam to never again buy directly from the Steam storefront: even if it involves a price premium I will go through a third party, be it Amazon, the Humble Store, GreenManGaming, Gamersgate or whoever.

Couple short stints in the Banner Saga and I have to say I don't really get the combat metagame. Fundamentally it's understandable enough, and I very much like the fact that health equals damage. What I don't get is the tactical implications of the hard-coded alternating turns, which if anything seems to hobble the player with more units. As my party gets bigger, I feel significantly weaker because my big damage dealer now gets turns far less often and instead I get to take actions with the worthless little guys who do 1-2 damage. I just don't understand the rationale at work here at all. Why on earth would you design a turn structure like that?

Spam filter ate the email Humble Bundle sent me.

Both Steam and most of its games are on a dedicated SSD for me - drive F - with a few stragglers installed on the spindle drive. Until my most recent install I did it via symlinks and later the Steam Mover third party tool, but that's apparently no longer necessary. That said, I tried copying an XCOM install over to a different PC lately, and after doing the copying and running the Steam install routine, it decided to empty out the XCOM directory instead and attempt to redownload the whole thing from scratch. Even over a local network, 20gb isn't a quick copy, grrrr. Terminating the download, recopying everything, then resuming worked, but it's still an iffy process.

Not Created Equal is interesting at first glance, but in reality all it does is lead the player to cherry-pick the best rookies and bench the rest. I suspect it ends up making the game a bit easier as it's more than likely that you can find six of your starting roster who start with above-average stats. Class selection for EW (yes, the expansion overhauled the system) was only cracked recently, and is somewhat tricky to explain. Luckily someone else has done so - here

There are four, as far as I know: for finishing, for finishing classic, for finishing impossible, and for ironman.

Yeah, one of the chief flaws of the game is that the late game switches tactical focus from mobility and defensive positioning to simple massing of firepower, which is far less interesting. I've stopped playing several playthroughs in which I was well on the way to winning because it just turned into a chore. That said, heavies are a fine choice but I find Assaults to offer greater versatility late-game. Chiefly this is because Heavies are restricted in mobility - you need to not move in order to use any of the class' defining abilities, and that counteracts the desire to get in close to compensate for the poor aim. Assaults retain full firepower after moving - indeed after dashing - and that is invaluable in situations where somethings absolutely needs to die. Snipers continue to be fantastic throughout the game too, to the extent that I restrict myself to one per mission in order to encourage more mobile and more interesting gameplay. Sure the removal of the ability for Squad Sight shots to crit have weakened the all-seeing Archangel Sniper tactic somewhat (it being the god-king strategy of the base game), but Double Tap remains a "this thing dies now" ability, and there are some fun combo strategies to be had with alternative Sniper builds, such as In The Zone synergies. An underappreciated feature of Snipers which is not readily evident when starting out is that it's often the only 'safe' way to kill awkwardly positioned enemies. By that I don't necessarily mean those hiding in hard-to-reach areas, but rather those where taking conventional shots can often mean activating additional alien packs. This is crucial because on Classic and Impossible difficulties, the hard cap of five active alien combatants at any one time is removed: every alien you activate is out for your blood - not to mention that there's more of them on each map, making contact more likely. To clarify, on Normal/Easy, no matter how many aliens you've activated, only up to five will actually engage you, the rest will run away and wait for some of their buddies to die before joining the fight. If I was powergaming.... I'd go with a heavy duty squad of something like two or three each of colonel-sniper-turned-mechs and Assaults, and a Sniper or two. But that's boring. Perhaps counterintuitively though, I reckon I'd have a lot of fun with a 6x Assault team. More conventionally though, my typical loadout looked like 2xAssault, Heavy, Sniper, SniperMech, plus one whatever - generally some newbie to level up. Probably another Mech if not training. Dropping supports entirely is somewhat controversial, but hardly unprecedented. P.S. That said, I've only ever gotten access to Blaster Launchers once, on my first playthrough at normal/non-ironman difficulty. Never got to assault a Battleship for the requisite fusion core item required to research the launchers in my subsequent games. I'm probably far too far into my current game to make any changes, but what does the original base class of a character do for MECs? For instance, what would a sniper-turned-MEC bring to the table that a heavy-turned-MEC wouldn't? Two things - the soldier's aim score and one special ability depending on class alone. Assault - damage from enemies within 4 tiles is reduced by a third Heavy - 20 aim penalty for the nearest enemy, who also cannot crit Support - 10 bonus defense for your squad within a moderate radius Sniper - Shooting before moving gives a +10 aim and +10 crit bonus The Assault's ability doesn't tend to come up very often, as a "tankish" ability, it's far overshadowed by the Heavy. That, and Assaults are too awesome with their regular skillset to give up. The Heavy is unique in that they're the only class with aim progression *worse* than MECs. This means it's the only class where it's advantageous to convert them early - in min-maxing terms, you want to do the conversion at or before Lieutenant rank in order to extract the maximum possible aim (for all other classes, converting at Colonel is optimal). The Support's ability is interesting but somewhat fiddly to use. +10 defense is great, but pointless in situations where your MEC is exposed, because it means the enemies will shoot at the MEC (which is the usual thing, they target the easiest thing to hit). So to take advantage of the bonus, you need to ensure your MEC is out of line-of-sight. Now while that's not a bad idea in general, it tends to limit your options when moving your MEC more than usual. The Sniper's ability tends to be a late-game thing, and even then is fairly unimportant. The real reason to take a sniper is the massive aim advantage colonel snipers have over anyone else. A maxed out Sniper-MEC has 105 aim. Assaults 89, Supports 90, Heavies 78. TL;DR - conventional wisdom has it that your first MEC is a Heavy, and that further ones are Snipers. But necessity and random factors can and will override that.

Reads to me that the next 'proper' Hitman is still business as usual, just that the pseudo-spinoff (in the manner of CoD) one that was to be up next is no longer.

Both companies future plans are absolutely dependent not on their designs, but on TSMC's (who actually make the chips) ability to deliver increasingly smaller process nodes without screwing up horribly. It's not a case of designing the fastest thing on paper, but on making the fastest thing that your manufacturing partner can actually deliver with the tools they have. It's the reason both companies flagships are so close right now. They're both pushing the limit of what the current 28nm process can viably do, and as such, neither is actually able to make anything more than minor tweaks until TSMC have their 20nm stuff ready to go.

Yeah, one of the chief flaws of the game is that the late game switches tactical focus from mobility and defensive positioning to simple massing of firepower, which is far less interesting. I've stopped playing several playthroughs in which I was well on the way to winning because it just turned into a chore. That said, heavies are a fine choice but I find Assaults to offer greater versatility late-game. Chiefly this is because Heavies are restricted in mobility - you need to not move in order to use any of the class' defining abilities, and that counteracts the desire to get in close to compensate for the poor aim. Assaults retain full firepower after moving - indeed after dashing - and that is invaluable in situations where somethings absolutely needs to die. Snipers continue to be fantastic throughout the game too, to the extent that I restrict myself to one per mission in order to encourage more mobile and more interesting gameplay. Sure the removal of the ability for Squad Sight shots to crit have weakened the all-seeing Archangel Sniper tactic somewhat (it being the god-king strategy of the base game), but Double Tap remains a "this thing dies now" ability, and there are some fun combo strategies to be had with alternative Sniper builds, such as In The Zone synergies. An underappreciated feature of Snipers which is not readily evident when starting out is that it's often the only 'safe' way to kill awkwardly positioned enemies. By that I don't necessarily mean those hiding in hard-to-reach areas, but rather those where taking conventional shots can often mean activating additional alien packs. This is crucial because on Classic and Impossible difficulties, the hard cap of five active alien combatants at any one time is removed: every alien you activate is out for your blood - not to mention that there's more of them on each map, making contact more likely. To clarify, on Normal/Easy, no matter how many aliens you've activated, only up to five will actually engage you, the rest will run away and wait for some of their buddies to die before joining the fight. If I was powergaming.... I'd go with a heavy duty squad of something like two or three each of colonel-sniper-turned-mechs and Assaults, and a Sniper or two. But that's boring. Perhaps counterintuitively though, I reckon I'd have a lot of fun with a 6x Assault team. More conventionally though, my typical loadout looked like 2xAssault, Heavy, Sniper, SniperMech, plus one whatever - generally some newbie to level up. Probably another Mech if not training. Dropping supports entirely is somewhat controversial, but hardly unprecedented. P.S. That said, I've only ever gotten access to Blaster Launchers once, on my first playthrough at normal/non-ironman difficulty. Never got to assault a Battleship for the requisite fusion core item required to research the launchers in my subsequent games.

Delayed because EA are apparently scrambling to fix BF4 properly first (as far as I know nothing related to the Mantle implementation, just BF4's general suckiness).

For your first MEC (or two), use a Heavy of Lieutenant rank or lower. The aim progression is such that you actually end up with *more* aim on them doing it early rather than late. For every other class, you lose on significant chunks of aim if you do it below Colonel, though it can still be situationally worth it - e.g. a Support-turned-MEC can with careful use be pretty valuable early game, but it's pretty fiddly ensuring they're in range to provide the bonus to the rest of your squad while hiding out of line-of-sight yourself. Simplistic advice is to get one Heavy MEC or two when you first gain access to MECs, though Heavies are so good early game that I make sure I keep at least one. Then all subsequent MECs are created from Colonel Snipers. (There's a possible tradeoff here in that if you use a Major Sniper, you gain 1hp once they're promoted, at the cost of 7 aim. I take the extra aim every time though.)

Prior to playing Josh's mod, the Courier's Stash in particular was a big hindrance such that despite having it, I chose to delete the mod files from my install so that they'd be disabled (Steam really needs a more elegant way of handling DLC). So yeah, as above, it's basically an early-game cheat mode in vanilla. Gun Runners' Arsenal, eh, it's relatively unobtrusive but expands the part of the game I have the least interest in (the last thing I want to do more of is gear management). But it's easy enough to avoid in that the new stuff needs to be explicitly bought from vendors rather than having it pollute general world/dropped loot. So at least it won't potentially wreck game balance like the stash does.

Hit chances in XCOM are a simple beast, but not immediately intuitive. Fundamentally it's simply the attacker's aim score minus the target's defense score (typically zero plus the value of cover). This is easily demonstrable - in the typical first mission of each campaign, where it's rookies vs sectoids, you'll likely see hit chances being one of 65%, 45%, or 25%. This is because rookies always have an aim score of 65 (unless the "Not Created Equal" second wave option is enabled), shooting at sectoids with zero inherent defense who are either behind high cover (40 defense), half cover (20 defense), or exposed/flanked (no hit modifier) Missing the 92% chance is pure bad luck. You take hundreds of shots in a typical session, so missing a few of those is to be expected. I've missed both shots of a 90%+ Rapid Fire. The chances of that happening is 1%, which is actually pretty damn high considering the total number of shots taken. For what it's worth, the RNG has been tested and verified as being 'fair'. I believe it's the same RNG used in the Civilization games, which have always been shown to be fair despite suspicions driven by confirmation bias. The typical player doesn't nail a lot of low-percentage shots because they often opt not to take them in the first place. But it's not infrequent to find yourself in a situation where there's no reason not to take a low-chance pot shot ....ugh, that was a quadruple negative - what I mean to say is that an experienced player might actually end up taking more potshots than you might expect because of situations where the alternatives of hunkering down or overwatching wouldn't make a difference. There is a caveat though - on Easy and Normal difficulties, the CPU actually does cheat the hit percentages ....in the *player's* favour. Each consecutive shot the player misses grants a hidden bonus to the subsequent shot, until one hits whereupon the bonus is reset. The opposite applies to alien shots, each consecutive hit they land reduces the chance of the next one hitting. Further, on Easy, you gain massive bonuses for having your squad reduced to less than four, up to the point where if you have only one soldier active, they can reasonably expect to be able to stand out in the open and magically matrix-dodge every incoming shot, and nail every shot of their own, Rambo-style. But yeah, in classic and impossible difficulties, the percentage chances are absolutely by-the-book fair and as stated. Finally, the effect of range on accuracy. It is both simple and complex and can lead to some puzzlement such as yours. A bit of trivia is that the original X-COM had no range accuracy modifiers whatsover, and something similar but not-quite-the-same happens in the current version. Fundamentally there is no range 'penalty' - weapons besides shotguns are good to their maximum range (which is the same for all but sniper rifles), using the simple calculations shown earlier. However there is a *bonus* for ranges of less than 10 tiles (inverted into a penalty for sniper rifles). Shotguns receive a larger bonus for close range, but the distances it applies to is the same: 1-9 tiles. To break it down: Assault rifles, LMGs, pistols - flat, base accuracy from 10 tiles to maximum range (30 tiles I think?). Mild progressive bonus for closer range. Shotguns - base accuracy applies at exactly 10 tiles. Progressive, high bonus applies for closer ranges, and progressively larger penalties for larger ranges. (The bonus/penalty is actually mirrored, i.e. the bonus for 9 tiles is the same as the penalty for 11 tiles). Sniper rifles - flat, base accuracy from 10 tiles up to maximum range (99 tiles with squadsight?), mild progressive penalty for closer distances. Incidentally, this is why the Reaper Round item behaves somewhat oddly in game. It multiplies range penalties, but since only shotguns are penalised as such, there is no effective penalty for other weapons. (Actually, it multiplies the sniper rifle's penalty for proximity, which sounds a bit nonsensical, but is of little practical consequence) Despite all that though, it's still a crappy item and I'd take anything else over it. EDIT: The overwatch aim penalty was recently revealed to be a multiplicative 70%. This is at odds with the additive/subtractive nature of just about every other aim calculation in the game, but it's verified. This is multiplied by 70% again for dashes - i.e. a 49% multiplier - but that doesn't really come up in single player.

I find injuries plus the operative in Exalt missions, plus the occasional mission reward troopers, add enough so that the occasional KIA doesn't horribly wreck you. But in the event of full squad wipes, yeah, you might find SHIVs (particularly alloy ones) to be game savers. The only time I deliberately take a rookie is when the alternative is a low-ranking sniper (or latterly, any second sniper since I limit myself to one).

Good god, those aren't children, they're sectoids disguised as children!

Had no problems with mine, though the lack of the top guard did confuse me for a moment. But besides that one time I plugged it in to test it, I doubt it'll ever be used again. A case where two style-over-substance designs clash: the USB dogtags lack the upper guard for the connectors. My Samsung convertible keyboard dock has its USB ports on an angled section of the body, where half the support for the bottom part that'd normally be there is missing. (This is a terrible design and even regular USB plugs wobble badly in them) I suspect if I ever tried to use them together, I'd have to physically hold them together for the duration to even get usable contact.

It is unusual that they don't have a slacker backer type system. Though I remember a statement saying pre-release purchases with some extra goodies will be open at some point. And cheers. It's a ten-year-old avatar of a near-twenty-year-old game, so over the long years I've had it, less and less people tend to recognise it. But I have to admit it's blatantly stolen and cropped from Doug the Eagle's famous anti-walkthroughs. P.S. Also did the open for one minute then go to bed thing with this.

This'll be an interesting test of mettle. GOG's censored version of The Witcher 2 could be bypassed by simply going to your GOG user profile and setting your location to any other country. Steam locked down SR4 by switching to the censored version by geolocation, and would switch your version on the fly, so even if you were a tourist visiting Australia and just happened to log into the Steam client while here, no alien drugs for you. UPlay? Your move. That said, it sounds like this is one game where Australians might be asked by some overseas friends to provide gift copies for....

So, just discovered that you can't buy four-packs of games as gifts, you *must* redeem one copy for your own account, even if you already own it. Yeah, screw you too Steam.

Dishonored's plot DLC is outright better than the core game because you don't play a wooden plank in them.

Doesn't work on an IPS screen, amusingly. Had to boot up my decrepit old laptop with a dodgy TN panel to see it.