Humanoid

Actually I have had one night-time minor random event so far which seemed to be based on the background. I am making a fairly wild assumption here, but it seems you have a chance to unlock discussions in camp with your followers about their motivation to join you. At least one of my scholars and I had a very interesting chat. Also, the leadership skill does get a boost from followers later on, but never as much as the other skills. Leadership does not get a boost by class, but by follower rank. As you can have a max of two sergeants and one lieutenant, it seems that you can get a bonus from three followers. It also remains to be seen what the native only class "shaman" works out as. Probably the same as the spaniard only "scholar" with slightly different combat abilities. I would assume that extra soldiers are especially usefull if you are aiming for an aggressive playthrough, even though soldiers may be cautious, peacefull altruists. I went for one of each so that even if someone falls ill, gets kidnapped or whatever, I still have a spare. Somewhat misleadingly though, soldiers aren't necessarily the best combatants. Scouts are better at melee combat and hunters are better at ranged combat, making the soldier more of a generalist than anything. You'll still want at least a couple, but that's more for guard duty when camping rather than for the combat subsystem - beyond that it's a matter of preferred playstyle.

Played a bit more, with some positive and negatives: + Looks like party composition is pretty flexible, I haven't come across a situation yet where I'd tell myself "man, I really should have taken one more of this class instead of that one." Except maybe I should have taken a third hunter instead of a fourth soldier, especially as you get one extra NPC soldier right at the start of the game. I also observe that the player character counts as a doctor for the purposes of treating the injured, so there's less need to specifically recruit a backup doctor. + Combat with six actors on your side seems about the right size. Then again it's probably just habit from it being a de-facto standard for modern RPGs and tactical squad games. + I like the abstraction of equipment. There's no actual gear as such, just "equipment points" which you distribute individually amongst your crew. e.g. I have 10 EP - I give 3 points into 'ranged' for my hunter who I trust to remain safe at the back, 2 points of 'melee' and 2 points of 'armour' to my soldier who needs enough grunt to stay alive on the front, and 3 points of 'armour' to my doctor who needs to stay alive at all costs. + Experience behaves similarly, you gain a pool of experience for your party which isn't a static counter - it's a partywide resource you expend to level up your NPCs, and you can distribute the levels however you please. If you have 400xp for example, you could level up any four of your recruits to level 2 (100xp each), or level one recruit to level 3 (100 then 300xp) No having to make your doctor deliver killing blows or the like to farm XP for them, nor having to split your XP amongst a dozen people when you only ever really use half of them. It took me a while to catch on to the system however, I was walking around with a bunch of level ones for a good while, fighting level two opponents. - Map navigation tends to be hindered by a lot of solid obstacles. There are a lot of jungle tiles for example, which just serve as solid walls forcing you to go around - cutting through them is certainly not an option. So there's a bit less freedom of movement than there might seem to be at first. - The zoom level, fully zoomed out, is a bit closer than I'd like. I assume it's a conscious design decision to create a bit of a 'lost in the jungle' feel, but it still feels a bit uncomfortable. - On multiple screens, the camera edge-scrolling doesn't work on the side with the extended desktop, your mouse scrolls out of the game instead of being bounded by the game window, making the scrolling impractical. - The camp UI is annoyingly and unnecessarily compacted. It's a tiny window in the middle of the screen with four tabs to assign various things. Surely they could have just made a full-screen UI and displayed all useful information and controls at once? It's probably my biggest annoyance with the game currently given how often you have to use this panel.

I don't like grid inventories because to me it feels like oversimulation. Sure, it's a neat system for visually depicting the bulk of an item, but my feeling is, why should I care about the bulk of an item? What does it add to the gameplay?

Due this week, heh. (Called "Legendary edition")

Went through character creation too and fired up an ironman game (of course). Impressions: - Character creation is nothing special. Select gender - no portrait selection unfortunately, but at least the player character portrait is nicely ambiguous while still being nicely finished, Enter first and last names, each with a handy random name generator. Again, nice touch to have the name structured properly, allowing NPCs to appropriately address you. Finally, assign stats which are a linear point buy, 38 points to distribute amongst six skills on a range of 1-10. Unfortunately the effect of each point is not made explicit in-game, so you're initially just guessing how many points in a given skill is ideal - I'm assuming the gain from each point is linear for now. Still, no biggie, and I put points in purely based on my character concept rather than the mechanics behind them. The game does advise that specialising instead of being a jack-of-all-trades is a good move, however. - Party recruitment is mechanically simple, but a far more involved process. NPCs fall into one of five classes, each of which correspond to one of your own character's skills, except for leadership. (The genre-savvy will suspect that leadership, the unlinked skill, will be the best skill to max based on this) Statswise within each class there is no variation, save for doctors and hunters who either come with a bow or a gun, and soldiers who come with either a sword or a polearm. Otherwise, despite ranging in age from teenagers to fiftysomethings, they all start at level one with the same base numbers. Each has their own short biography covering their origin and motivation for joining your expedition, which is a nice touch. But I suspect the most important thing here will be the personality traits each have. Each character has three and only three traits, which three is fixed for each character, but none are unique traits. These can be perceived to be positive or negative things, such as piousness, caution and racism, but I don't think they're mechanically meant to work as such. Instead, they're indicators on how they will react to your character's decisions. Shun the Christian god and your pious NPCs will get restless, rush headlong into situations and your cautious NPCs will get nervous, and so forth. Obviously then the intention here is to try to ensure your party shares most common values with both yourself and the other NPCs, but the number of combinations is high enough such that there will invariably be conflicts - and that's surely a good thing. Anyway, select a crew of ten from a pool of NPCs. None of them are randomised - every game has the same pool of NPCs to recruit, each with their individually written biography and three personality traits.(and did I mention I liked the portrait art style?) The balance here is a bit confusing: there are four doctors, six hunters, five scholars, six scouts, and ten soldiers to choose from. It's not obvious whether it is intended that you select your crew in roughly those proportions, or whether you can balance your party however you please. (Well, you definitely *can*, but I mean whether it's viable to do so). As implied in mel's screenshot above, each NPC gives you +2 to one of your stats - he's obviously taken two of each. I on the other hand, loaded up with extra soldiers and stuck to one doctor and one scholar. We'll see how that goes... - You then, after a brief cutscene, start the game having landed in the New World. This is the Adventure Map, much like that in Heroes of Might and Magic, and perhaps more closely again, like that in the new King's Bounty games. There's the obligatory tutorial, which is effective enough while being a bit clunky (it's not really interactive). You walk around in discrete tiles - the game is turn-based all the way - talk to people and interact with objects/buildings, which are essentially people too since essentially all interactions will bring up a dialogue window. The plotting is nothing special in context of standard RPG beginnings: your ship is confiscated and you have to do some odd jobs for the arse of a governor to get it back. Your dialogue responses can take on various tones, but aside from a decision on whether or not to recruit one extra person, I haven't noted any differing outcomes stemming from your choice of response. Again, fairly standard - you're going to have to do that quest for that jerk no matter how you feel about it. - I've only engaged in a single battle, which was the tutorial one - a scaled down version of combat with only three units to control. Combat occurs in a different dimension to the rest of the game, as you're whisked away to a separate combat screen. Again, HoMM style hexes are the go here, with your people on one side and the enemies on the other. The actual fighting is sort of a hybrid of the various turn-based tactical games out there. Movement points are discrete and can be taken at any time during your turn, one hex at a time, but only one other action is permitted in addition to the movement (like new XCOM) - one attack or usage of a special ability (or forfeit it to get extra movement). There are the expected special rules - flanking, attacks of opportunity, and cover against ranged attacks (half cover for a defensive bonus, or full cover for immunity to attack). - Once you leave town, the adventure map remains functionally identical to movement inside town, but there is now a movement point counter - you can only move a certain number of hexes a day before having to camp for the night. This isn't just a "okay, everyone heals up and start the next turn" type event - you have to set up the overnight meals, patrols, guard duty, and organise hunters to gain supplemental, er, supplies. Thankfully there's an autoassign button for these tasks, as I don't think I'm quite ready to delve into the nuances of optimising the various tasks. Anyway, it's here I called it a night. TL;DR: Seems quite good.

Just installed it, but no real time to play it tonight. Love the fact that the hardest difficulty level is labelled Aguirre. :D

AMD's successor hasn't even been mentioned outside of unsubstantiated rumours, so I wouldn't have thought so. GTX7xx is barely able to be called a refresh, it's just an introduction of one new product (which is a cut-down version of an existing product) coupled with a general renaming of the rest of their existing product line to incorporate that new product. In the process, they've taken a bit of an advantage of the fact the 6xx series left a bit of performance on the table with their low TDPs and therefore bumped up the clock speeds a little to match the power consumption of AMD. AMD, already being at the soft limit of power consumption with their top product, can't really do the same. The 770 is a 680 overclocked just high enough to match the 7970GE, in what presumably is a very deliberate move. It's gone from 195W to 230W by doing so, therefore sacrificing the power efficiency card they had over AMD, but also smartly undercutting the price point a little. What we have then is a holding pattern. Outside of Titan and its 780 derivative, the mainstream market now is basically a dead tie at almost all price points. I suspect both vendors will be okay with that situation until both are ready to say more about their genuine next-gen products, probably Q1 next year.

I think it's Redneck Rampage with a flashlight. P.S. What happened to the forum favicon?

Not surprising to see the various KS devs being somewhat less extravagant with their physical goodies second time around. Safe to assume it's because of the economic reality of the costs of providing such, but still, disappointing to see there's not even a boxed copy of the game on offer at any level. Provide one at $150 and I'd be in 100%. For now I'll put in a placeholder $20 and decide on the final figure shortly before the drive ends.

You're a (fake) gangster, who cares about traffic lights?

The GTX780 itself won't, it's at a new price point where no product was before, so no adjustments necessary. The upcoming other cards in the 7xx line will, if only because of the new numbering. i.e. the 770 will almost certainly be the same as the old 680, so the 680 might see minor cuts to match and maybe slightly beat the 770.

The calculations for chance to hit are very simple, each unit has a flat chance to hit: for aliens this is hardcoded for each alien type, for your guys it's your aim stat. Then take 20% off for half-cover, and 40% off for high-cover. You may have noticed that at the start, your chance to hit is either 45% or 25%, which jives with the rookie's normal aim stat of 65. What are the alien's chances? You can check it through the UI I believe, but at normal difficulty, both of the first two types of aliens you encounter have the same hit chance as your rookies. (On classic, they all gain a flat 10% bonus, and the Thin Man another 10% by switching from a plasma pistol to a light plasma rifle) This isn't the full system - there are bonuses for point blank ranges, and different calculations for shotguns and sniper rifles, but is nonetheless true for your "standard" shootout. For the general gameplay, don't feel the need to hop from cover to cover when not in combat. Since aliens can't shoot you on first contact, there's no risk in leaving your troops out of cover. This comes with the caveat that none of them have exhausted their moves when that happens. So the best approach is to have just one scout make the exploratory first move of your turn, then ensure none of your other guys move further than your initial move. Identify the angle of approach with the most potential cover, but don't feel obligated to use every turn. Never dash unless it's an emergency.

The Microsoft Office requirement makes me think of not Alpha Protocol but another Sega owned property - Football Manager.

I've always liked that idea of PST sans character creation - appropriate thematically - and instead assign you stats gradually depending on your playstyle as the game unfolded.

I'll believe it's dead when Bokishi stops upgrading his PC.

Would have thought Tali fans alone would have gotten them over the line on day one. But eh, no idea about the game personally, but backed out of charity just now.

Easy.

You can sort of distinguish between the US and Australia by sensing which side of the road the Googlemobile is on. \\ EDIT: One and only game, 11837. Three were in interior western US, boo.

She has no compunction against slaughtering hordes of enemy soldiers so I guess their corpses will have to suffice. EDIT: Can you refine human fat into polyester?

Heh, incidentally my decrepit old notebook falls into that category. But since it's used for nothing but Internet surfing, I went for an SSD, the much lauded Samsung 830. It's an old Core2Duo but ironically it's now snappier than my much newer i5 desktop, which has a relatively sluggish first-gen Indilinx SSD. Feels like a new machine, except when I load up a game on it, it immediately falls flat on its face in a forest of 3D artefacts (the video chip has completely failed for any sort of 3D load). If I wasn't so lazy I'd swap the drives around, especially as the Samsung is twice the capacity of my desktop OS drive.

Wish I had done this a lot earlier. I play Age of Empires 2 irregularly with my sister, but strategically have been always on the back foot playing against the AI because of her refusal to kill animals for food. Well then, armed with a few hints from Google, but nothing explicit since I doubt anyone's bothered making such a silly change, I delved into the map generator script (gamedata.drs and gamedata_x1.drs) and right at the beginning the solution presented itself. #const FORAGE 59 #const FOREST_TREE 411 #const GOLD 66 #const HAWK 96 #const MACAW 816 #const MOUNTAIN1 310 #const MOUNTAIN2 311 #const OAKTREE 349 #const PALMTREE 351 #const PINETREE 350 #const SNOWPINETREE 413 #const SHEEP 594 etc. Welp, that was easy, replace 594 with 59 and now all the sheep are berry bushes instead. Now we can tackle the AI on even footing. :D

I respect the decision to hold off on getting SSDs, but just pointing again that it's more accurate to think of it as not-a-storage-device. It's not an either-or proposition between an SSD and a spindle drive (unless you're on a notebook with no provision for a second drive or mSATA), but rather, something extra you have in addition to your traditional storage. Effectively then, an SSD is a plug-in device used to speed up your PC, in the similar way a video card does. Start with a baseline of integrated graphics and sound and a spindle drive. Want better graphics? Buy a video card. Want better sound? Buy a sound card. Want better I/O responsiveness? Buy an SSD. Yes, capacity is convenience, but one that can be stepped around in a practical way. If you can live with a fixed limit on the number of games you can install on the SSD, great. If not, you can do some trickery with junction points to make use of the limited space: install all your games to your spindle drive, then copy the folders of the games you're currently playing to the SSD. Don't remove the folders from the spindle drive, just rename them, and create a junction point on the spindle drive pointing to the new folder on the SSD. When done with that game, you can just delete the folder on the SSD, delete the junction, and restore the name of the original folder.

Pretty standard for the Civilization designers to leave after their game is completed. Bruce Shelley after Civ1 left and did Age of Empires. Brian Reynolds after Civ2 and Alpha Centauri to do Rise of Nations. Soren Johnson left to help with Spore.

Yes, it's a plain old Steam key generally. Amazon only do a check against the billing address by the way, so if you put in a fake one you can buy it yourself. Though "legally" yeah, safer to get someone in the US to buy from you - and yeah, it's trivial to send cash to other people through PayPal.

He was leading up some Kickstarter project relatively recently: At the Gates