Humanoid

I may have racked up 400+ hours on the previous game, but I gloriously I failed the XCOM2 tutorial. I'm so used to how Long War does explosives (which don't do a damned thing to hard objects without perks) that I freely grenaded the truck I was standing on without a second thought. Ooops.

My copy finally arrived, I think the delay can be attributed to it arriving via New Zealand. I can tell it's an NZ copy because it has a NZ ratings sticker over the Australian one. Props to 2K for shipping the game properly on four dual-layer DVDs, i.e. basically the complete game. Feels a bit weird to praise a company for doing something that should be standard practice, but after the crap Bethesda pulled with Fallout 4, I'm just happy to see someone do the right thing. On the other hand, it's not a very physically impressive "Deluxe" edition, being just the regular edition plus an empty steelcase being stuck together in a flimsy outer box. But I guess the point is the DLC season pass that comes with it, since it's pretty much priced as the price of the regular game plus the season pass.

1440p on a 27" monitor is completely standard and is already a very fine dot pitch compared to the usual ~22"-24" 1080p, so there's no issue with the resolution at all. You'll just have a 2x2 set of pixels on the 5k monitor acting as a single pixel providing the OS does the scaling sensibly. 5k may be a gimmick for now, but at least it scales down in a reasonable way (and I assume it's impossible to buy a non-5k model now). 4k monitors of this size are dumb because when scaled down 2:1, you end up with 27" at 1080p which has effectively huge and noticeable pixels. And yeah, the iMac GPU will outperform those cheaper laptop GPUs, probably anything short of gaming-oriented or at least high-end multimedia laptops. So the only decision is on whether going for the higher spec models is worth it, and that's a matter of guessing what games you'll be playing for the next 5 or so years. For what it's worth, the gap between the M380 and M390 is a fair bit bigger than between the M390 and M395.

It'll play (the Windows-only games with bootcamp of course) since Macs these days *are* PCs, but bear in mind that iMacs use laptop GPUs so they're significantly weaker than their desktop counterparts. You'll run games at half the native resolution at best, i.e. 2560x1440 (which is completely fine, no PC can game at 5k), and often will have to drop down to medium-low settings. The main consideration is that these machines are non-upgradable for the most part, so what you spec initially is what you'll be stuck with for the rest of the life of the machine (which I assume will be 5+ years). I know you said you're only interested in the named games (Total War is probably the only system intensive one there), but over the next five years or whatever, you may find games that you really want to play but will struggle to do so. The odds of that happening, however, is not something I can answer. EDIT: Point is, a typical PC probably receives a mid-life GPU upgrade, at around 2-3 years in. This pretty much resets its age to make it fully competitive with new machines at that point. No such possibility with an iMac.

I have no idea what the reference is, but I use a custom name list that automatically grabs a random name for each soldier when I recruit them. This particular name list is just the memberlist of some other forum I participate in. There's a handy web tool here to generate the namelist in the correct format. Both of them would be scripted. I believe the June terror mission will pretty much always be zombies with some Chryssalids, which would almost always be the third terror mission as you've seen. Zombies that are pre-placed on the map never spawn more Chryssalids, so you can take all the time you want with them. I had a screenshot earlier in this thread featuring them, it looks alarming but there's no risk whatsoever. As long as you can take out the 'lids, you can hold off the zombies indefinitely. Likewise, this one I just did, is the 9th (I think, could be 11th) Terror mission which will always be all Chryssalids with one queen. By this time, the player should have enough firepower that it isn't a problem. In the screenshots above, I goofed by placing my Rocketeer in a poor position and she couldn't get a Shredder rocket off, and of course Acid doesn't work on them. But even without those modifiers, I still managed to kill it, even if just barely. Would have been trivial with Shredder.

There are non-moustache related achievements in the game?

I'll post an XCOM 1 screenshot then. I detected a rather large alien congregation inside the meat factory, so rather than a close range breach (CLOSE RANGE?!?!) I opted to park my squad on the neighbouring building and blow open the garage door with a grenade. This next part wasn't planned, but somehow none of the aliens actually activated, and I had a beautiful, 100% accurate steadied rocket I could fire right into this little tea party. I may or may not have cackled gleefully as I hit the button. Incidentally the aliens there are a pretty diverse bunch - I count a Mechtoid, two Sectoids, three Floaters, two Drones and a Muton- a wonderful example of racial harmony up to and including the point at which they all exploded. Well, actually one Sectoid survived the ordeal, so I kidnapped him instead.

Bomb Disposal missions in the previous game were infuriating for the same reason. It's telling that Long War, which made just about everything else in the game harder, actually made bomb missions easier. They're not easy as such, but they're now in line with the difficulty of other mission types, as opposed to the extreme outlier that it was previously.

Supposedly the physical release is more or less a complete install and the download component is minor. Don't think I'll get my copy in time so I can't verify, but it's nice to see not all publishers are jumping on the pathetic approach of including only a token fraction of the game on disc. Fallout 4's single single-layer 4.7GB install disc comes to mind, or better yet, MGS5's install disc which contained a grand total of 9 MEGAbytes of data.

My copy is in the mail and it's probably a 50:50 chance it even gets here before the weekend. But if it doesn't, eh, I've been pushing my Long War campaign as far as possible because it's the first time I've gotten to the point of fielding MECs and psions. Would be a shame to abandon that save cold turkey but we'll see I guess.

Brief description of CK2 Conclave gameplay: 1) Win Holy War against Muslim kingdom. 2) Pope joins a coalition with the Muslims to oppose you.

It's fairly trivial for the player to rebalance things as they please, most things are easily accessible in plain text in the game folder. That's a plus, but it does then bring into question as to why there aren't any difficulty presets. The stock answer is of course that there's a "one true vision" of what the developers want the game to be, but I'm not convinced that's a healthy philosophy to have.

http://anandtech.com/show/9856/angelbird-wings-px1-m2-adapter-review-do-ssds-need-heatsinks

Irritatingly you can't pre-plan perks while choosing your initial stats. But the only important ones for an assassin are 3 AGI to unlock the improved sneaking perk, and 7 agi to unlock the extra sneak attack damage multiplier. 4 PER for lockpicking might also be considered important for a sneaky type. Beyond that, most choices will likely depend whether you prefer doing your sniping manually or through VATS. Companions are hopeless at sneaking so you'll probably want to perks that give bonuses while alone too, 3 CHA for the main one.

Oglaf

BX200 is a downgrade from the BX100 and was done purely as a cost-cutting measure. If you can find the BX100, or the Sandisk Ultra II or the Samsung EVO 850, they'd be better picks for around the same price.

Being overlevelled doesn't really seem much of a problem with the levels being scaled now. Not my character I played "normally", sure, I hit 65 by the end of the level 50 planet, but being clamped to low-50s in terms of power means the combat didn't feel much different to doing it at-level. Also worked in my favour just now, when I did the act 2 boss which is a level 41 quest while I was still level 36. But because it was on the capital planet, both the boss and I were scaled down to level 16 and so the fight wasn't ridiculously long (with my hit chance versus a +5 level target it'd have taken quite a few minutes I suspect).

Bought the orange vendor gear and it worked well for a bit, but now the lack of XP is really starting to bite since the double XP event is presumably over. I'm on Hoth at level 35 and the enemies are level 39. Doesn't help that I'm playing a stealth class and sometimes literally fighting one enemy during my entire time on a planet (such as the last one, Quesh). I guess I'll do a few low level heroic quests to fill out XP, I really don't want to start any normal planet arc quests. The enemies aren't killing me yet, but my damage is so low that it's incredibly tedious. You say tank companions can't hold aggro? Hah, my dps is so low I can't pull aggro off my healer companion.

Funnily enough my smuggler has about a dozen synthweaving patterns in the bank (plus one for artificing and nothing for any other profession, odd), and all of them for orange gear. I can't remember how I got them, probably from doing Underworld Trading missions back in the day. ....though if those patterns are valuable, maybe I should just sell them instead, heh. Most of them are in the 300-400 skill range anyway. The blue stuff seems easy enough to make. Either way though, I've no problem with looking like a clown: I've done a fair few intentionally bad transmogs in WoW over the years.

Problem with using anything but a tank companion for my smuggler is that I'd never be able to use the Back Blast (backstab) ability, but I did just finish the smuggler storyline (so hard to care about any of it past act 1) so I'll try out the healer companions on the other classes I experiment with. Back when I last played in 2012, I tried all my companions and choosing anyone but the tank just got me killed, but that was a long time ago. Thanks for the offer but I'm on Begeren Colony. I'm reasonably well resourced with about 1m credits, so I'll see what I can buy. I have 500/500 Cybertech so mods and enhancements are doable, but have no Synthweaver or Armormech to make stuff that takes advantage of them. On the other hand, I found out that using the level 60 boost when creating a new character gives them one of those professions (depending on class) at max skill, so that'd save some effort if I can decide what class to boost. Heroic quests seem to take too long and defeat the point of my skip-everything class runs.

Tested it out, and yeah, it's very much doable with the double XP, and indeed I'm still quite a bit overlevelled having gone from 0-25 on an inquisitor in one sitting. I did exactly zero non-class missions, and maybe did one or two bonus objectives just purely by accident. I used the minor XP boost tokens as I received them. However I'm significantly slowed down by the fact that I'm squishy as hell and die repeatly unless I carefully micromanage my tank companion to make sure he picks up every enemy before I engage. The problem is that class quests only award gear for a few slots, it keeps giving me chestpieces, pants and weapons but I don't even have a belt, bracers, implants, etc. I don't have an alt capable of crafting any armour so I'm just bumbling around being an arrogant jerk (well sort of, I'm playing it as a troll trying to get executed but somehow failing) but running away whenever a fight breaks out, which kind of undermines the roleplaying aspect. EDIT: Noticing lately that the game is pretty system intensive, if I try to watch a Youtube video (with the HTML5 viewer) while playing, the game becomes choppy as hell, and this is on a pretty powerful machine, an i7 Skylake and an R9 290X. I have no problem doing the same with WoW.

I may not always agree with some of the core philosophy behind the mod, the numbers don't lie: I racked up perhaps around 100 hours of vanilla XCOM and its expansion, and 200+ hours of Long War and counting. Perhaps just as significant as the changes themselves is the vastly improved user-moddability that has been done almost as a side-effect of their changes. I remember having to do some hex-editing of the executable back in the day just to make a tiny change, nowadays the same change would literally take 10 seconds. (For those who haven't looked, most things you'd ever want to change and more are in plain text in DefaultGameCore.ini) So yeah, worth every cent and more. I donated $20 and it still feels like a steal.

We as people have to make judgement based on limited information because there are countless products out there all competing for attention and only so much time. I don't need to sit through the Star Wars movies to guess that it wouldn't be something up my alley. I don't need to play Metal Gear, or read a Stephen King novel, or listen to a Coldplay album. I can't say for certain that I'm correct in those judgements, but filtering products one is interested in has always been a probability-based process. Consequently statements like those I make about the Witcher are far from definitive, I'd call it educated guesswork. Like reading the synopsis on the back of a book, it's limited, but it is indicative. EDIT: Indeed in this case I went a bit further and explored the wiki, looking at direct full-spoiler summaries of past events, characters, places. Plus there were the lore bits from the in-game codex thingie which did a covered a lot of stuff not directly relevant to the game itself. There are a few unique things for sure, a fair few of which I surmise are inspired by Polish folklore, but in the bigger picture, what I found only just reaffirmed my first impressions. It's more of a chance than I've given the vast majority of products, so I'm fairly comfortable in my judgement at this point.

I'd accept it more readily if they just went ahead and made it their own instead. It's caught in this weird compromise where it tries to pay lip service to the old games while shoehorning those elements into the standard Bethesda Sandbox game. Bethesda sandboxes are fun to play: no one else makes games like that so I'm happy someone is doing games like that. But I really think it's the perfect opportunity now to just clear the deck: start with the post-apocalyptic 50s schtick but throw out every thing else. It won't be a "Fallout" game anymore, but it'd likely be one I could enjoy as something that stands on itself. Besides, video game reboots have been the theme of this decade so far, it'd hardly be a controversial thing. "Oblivion/Skyrim with guns" is a common pejorative used to describe Bethesda's Fallout games. But I say the problem is that they're not. Not enough, anyway. Drop the old baggage and turn it into a pure, wholly unapologetic Skyrim with guns and I think we'd be better off.