Drowsy Emperor

Thanks Hurl, good to see you too. Other things that seem like choices but really aren't: strategic resources. Each affinity tends to use one resource for its special units, and since you're going to lean towards one affinity by default, you basically have no need/opportunity to make use of the others. I think Purity relies on floatstone, Harmony on xenomass and Supremacy on geothermal or firaxite. Other resources see more use across affinities but these are basically locked, the same way unit upgrades are locked. I tested a game where I emphasize energy almost exclusively - and its as I said, I'm swimming in cash and able to buy out anything I please in two turns on average. I'm able to buy more than I need at turn 150, which is relatively early in this game (why buy production enhancing base improvements when they'll bleed my treasury?), which is basically a no no in a strategy game. If you're swimming in resources, then the game economy has basically crashed. The thing that makes this strategy even more cheesy is that it stops cities being dependent on placement. You can make any city into a money factory merely by making generators around it and spamming solar orbitals on it + picking the energy enhancing virtues. Basic resources are supposed to be co-dependent but money flat out crushes production and food is less relevant since its in your interest to have more cities with less population to keep your health level up as opposed to having each city grow uncontrollably. With more cities you get more trade routes which dump loads of free resources on you that you wouldn't otherwise get.

This is a competent, unbiased review: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2014/10/25/occasionally-thrilling-beyond-earth-cant-quite-get-beyond-civilization-v/

I did a short review of it on metacritic under the nick Varyag. The gist of it is this - its Civ V dressed up in some of the trappings of SMAC. It has neither the depth the ideas present in that game, nor the writing, none of the flavor - if it wasn't published under the Firaxis name you could be forgiven for thinking its an indie product. The budget for the game was obviously modest. No movies for secret projects, no diversity in actors for the quotes (which are embarrassingly bad this time around for the most part)... there's even no summary screen once you win a game! In fact, when you "win" all you get is a little text box... after enduring the 50 or so turns it takes to create a portal and get earth refugees through. There seems to be little variation between affinities - you basically pick one at mid game and stick with it because of the unit upgrades it'll bring you - whether you're going for that particular victory or not. All the victories are basically the same thing - multi step quest like sending the man to space + SMAC ascent to transcendence in the Harmony affinity. From a mechanical perspective the game suffers all the flaws of Civ V - tight constrained maps (I played on massive map size by the way) that are impossible for armies to navigate, leading to few cities overall. To keep the map from filling up most things take too long to build and research takes ages so you're left twiddling your thumbs particularly in the endgame where turns can last forever but there's absolutely nothing for you to do - so you'll just switch your cities to produce research and hit next turn until you win. To curtail expansion even further cities become outposts prior to growing to cities, which just means an added ten turns after plopping down a settler before you get an operative city. Like Civ V happiness, you get health as a global expansion limiting mechanic, that you can get around with some base improvements. Since you can buy anything with money there seems to be a huge dis-balance in favor of money vs production. It simply pays more to make a money making civ and buy out anything you want while at the same time producing most things almost as fast as everyone else. The AI is sh!t. There's no other word for it. I was never attacked in a 300+ turn game, even though they ganged up on another player who almost won - they were happy to let me build my way to victory. From what I saw of the AI warfare, it doesn't seem to be very good at it. The diplomacy is the same Civ V nonsense. With no tech trading, map trading and other things I'm accustomed to I had no reason to use it at all. The AI's constantly ask for exorbitant sums in any dealing, unless they come with the same deal first so there's no point offering them anything. I did have some success trading strategic resources though so I could build new units that ended up mowing the lawn at my borders. I don't recall how this was solved in previous civ games but the strategic resources are in fact a limited thing - if you say have 5 floatstone and your Purity special unit costs 5 it all gets used up on that single unit and the only way to get it back is to destroy that unit. So I had a fancy Lev tank for 5 floatstone, but if I wanted a Lev destroyer for 7 I had to destroy my tank (!) and come up with another two floatstone leaving me broke yet again. And there aren't that many of these strategic resources around. The tech web is the same as all tech trees, superficially its a non linear affair but in fact to level up your affinities you're going to get techs scattered all over the web (which means getting all the ones inbetween that lead to them) and since the cost increases as you expand outward from the center you're locked in a gradual circular expansion and end up researching almost everything anyway. By the time you've maxed your affinity you have almost all the techs barring the ones that boost other affinities. So, its nothing new or really innovative but it is a pain in the ass to navigate. The tech's themselves are boring --- getting all the way to another planet to research Physics, Biology and Computing is kinda ridiculous. They knew that the gameplay lacked depth and substance so they tacked on periodic quests to give you something to do. These quests are always the same with each playthrough and they give you a small reward. As one long time poster here would put it: Ha! Good fun! Factions are dead. Its nations now, with leaders that have no personality or uniqueness whatsoever. . They aren' based on ideology so there's no incentive to pick one over the other. They're just one bonus you'll pick when starting a game. They don't play any different. Another feature that died on the way to the new planet was social engineering. No longer can you flip the nature of your civilization within a few turns. Instead you get culture. With culture you buy Virtues. Virtues are small permanent bonuses. Anybody who played SMAC knows how thoroughly you could change things with the 16 or so options in the social engineering panel. Here there are like 50 options and out if them at least half are irrelevant trash buffs that you pick because you want the next one in line. Comprehensive terraforming - gone. Unit customization - non-existent ( you get to pick between 2 perks on upgrades, yaay, affinity levels give auto upgrades). No planetary council. Wonders are utterly useless, sometimes worse than a tile with an improvement (they usually just give a bonus to something, no game changing effects) Bottom line: Civ BE is a mediocre product by the standards of the company who made it. There can be no comparison between it and SMAC. The Civ V framework proves to be a fundamentally flawed one yet again by comparison to previous Civilizations. It is simply a game with less depth and less fun than a 15 year old title and I don't recommend wasting money on it. If it had flavor it could be decent. As it stands its just not worth recommending. PS: trade routes break the game. More bonuses on a single route than all the city tiles your're working!? Two routes out produce and out tech most cities. They're also insanely annoying.

Why couldn't you send yours in? No ready replacement? Did they ask that you send in the old one after the new one arrived, out of curiosity? They asked me to send them my old one first, but I explained that shipping and customs would cost me almost as much as a new board. I asked them to send me some keycaps, but they probably have none in stock. So they just gave me another keyboard That's...pretty exceptional. Some companies are more of the opinion that if they aren't making the product in question anymore, you're not really entitled to warranty service anymore. So that's pretty cool. Actually I think they're still making 6GV2. I don't know why they sent me APEX (they're completely different, 6GV2 is entry level bare bone mechanical, APEX is standard rubber dome but with a ton of extra keys and backlighting that you can customize) instead but the price must have been a factor since both keyboards cost roughly the same. But yes, they took my word on it all - all I had to offer them as proof was my keyboard's serial number.

Why couldn't you send yours in? No ready replacement? Did they ask that you send in the old one after the new one arrived, out of curiosity? They asked me to send them my old one first, but I explained that shipping and customs would cost me almost as much as a new board. I asked them to send me some keycaps, but they probably have none in stock. So they just gave me another keyboard

Some of you may remember my clashes with Steelseries support over my 6GV2 mechanical keyboard and issues I had with it. The story has an epilogue now - I got a brand new SS Apex keyboard in the mail today. They couldn't send me replacement keycaps and I couldn't send them my board so they gave me a new one. Mind you I was persistent and rude at some point (mainly because they were sending me a lot of automated responses with questions I'd already answered) but the bottom line is this: Steelseries replaced my out of warranty 6gv2 (that is still functional) with a brand new 90$ keyboard. They went well above what I was asking and what is reasonable to expect and they are to be commended for it.

I gave Civ V another go (and I wanted my steam cards to drop so I could sell them), but I really dislike the game. Its mechanics are simply... inelegant...gamey? Why am I buying plots of land with gold? Who from, God? It like the designers needed a sink for gold so they came up with it. The social policies make less sense than ever, a bunch of arbitrary bonuses and buttons.... The map clutter is incredible, wonders and city states everywhere you look. The first 50 turns are dull, all I had was one spearman and one or two workers to shuffle around because everything takes so long to build. The UI is annoyingly huge on my laptop screen even though I checked the "small UI option". Everyone and everything is throwing gold at me... Huge targeting circle for bombarding barbarians with a fat arrow so you can now get away with not guarding your cities? Civ V reminds me of a facebook game. Teeny sounds of a constant stream of bonuses heaped upon the player, plink plink plink but oh so insignificant and unrepresentative of what used to be an empire building game.

Yeah! Tell me about it! My AV had all its bells and whistles go off as soon as I touched the play-button. I will try the game again later today, I reckon. It's been a few hotfixes now, it seems. I will not import my old save from TIAOVH1. This looks to be best treated as a new game altogether. And Katarina is adorable! I always admire people like you guys, you'll play a game as soon as its been released but accept the fact you may not be able to play it. I would be too annoyed by a game that you can basically purchase but keeps crashing. I would question the Q&A testing of the developers. That's why I always follow the 1 month rule before purchasing any game I generally follow the 1+ year rule, so I must qualify for Dalai Lama status by this forum's standards

Still TF2. If anyone has TF2 items they don't need (many of them come with Steam pre-orders and just sit in your inventory... if you don't play TF2) I'd be happy to take them off your hands.

I don't understand what's up with these new games, installation size is skyrocketing but without a perceivable technological leap. I read that Wolfenstein has a 44 gig installation, Van Helsing 2 is 20 gigs, what are they thinking,,,

Pity, I was waiting for an opinion on the game

Got kicked off a TF2 server for..using an aimbot...that I wasn't using. Don't even know how to set one up. My inner troll is frolicking in delight at the immensity of their rage. s'all good.

My sole experience with streaming games was over that game something service and it sucked. The control lag was noticeable and made the FPS I was playing barely playable.

Their cut scenes are cutting edge though, so it's not like they disregard graphics. That may be so, but they're not in the least representative of the actual game. Its pure advertising

Game graphics don't have to push technological boundaries to draw people in. Blizzard is the living proof of that. All their games are graphically mediocre, but they succeed design and gameplay wise so no one cares. I

AC graphics were bad even at the time, but they grew on me. I'm never going to say they're good, but they do stoke the imagination enough and paired with the spartan sound effects are definitely atmospheric. They must have something since I could never play space 4X games on account of how bland and generic their graphics and world design are. The only one I was ever interested with was Emperor of the Fading Suns, and that's because its backed by a strong setting. As for Beyond Earth.. the direction of the game doesn't give much cause for optimism, for us who wanted an AC game. The designers seem to have no idea just why AC was so well regarded (criticizing AC for being "pessimistic", what?) and neither do they possess the depth of though Reynolds brought to the game (the setting material we know so far is very sci-fi... but not very philosophical/thought provoking)...but at least they made it clear from the start that its "Civ in space". Which would be fine if that didn't mean "Civ V in space"... I'm going to get it, but its likely not going to be what I'd like it to be, so I'll get it when the price drops.

It looks nice but I'm surprised they couldn't do some futuristic weapons and had to go the standard gun/shotgun/assault rifle route. Quite disappointing for an old school shooter.

I tried CS:GO for a bit and apart from the sluggish aiming I simply didn't feel like it brought anything new to the table that makes it worth playing. I've been playing CS on and off ever since release, it was hands down the most popular multiplayer game in Serbia - but its a little long in the tooth now and no amount of graphical pimping is going to change that. I'm enjoying TF2 much more now.

Yeah, many of the animations are obviously of the scripted variety.

Just stop being abusive and insulting people, seems to be a rather good place to start. For instance don't accuse people you don't know or have just started interacting with of having stunted emotional development or being abusive backwards cavemen. Indeed.

And the tagline of the project: Yo dawg we heard you like Oblivion so we put some Oblivion in your Skyrim so you can Oblivion while you Skyrim? Hmm, sounds appropriately pointless.

A lot of Slavic people have Asian features. While the Slavic peoples originated in Eastern Europe, they spread pretty deep into Asia and there's obviously been a lot of interbreeding. At what percentage does one stop being Slavic and starts being Asian, I'm not certain. I'm Slavic. So am I. But the percentage of slavs exibiting eastern asian features is probably far lower than those with partially nordic, turkish, central asian etc features. Dunno, the guy's eyes definitely look eastern asian to me. Can't place the rest.

A lot of Slavic people have Asian features. While the Slavic peoples originated in Eastern Europe, they spread pretty deep into Asia and there's obviously been a lot of interbreeding. At what percentage does one stop being Slavic and starts being Asian, I'm not certain. I'm Slavic. Can tell a slav across a street in a blizzard. That said, there probably has been more than a little mixing in the Russian east, so its certainly possible.

They'll probably add an aero theme next. After that, the sky is the limit

Defining RPG's is a fools errand these days when everything has some form of character progression. That said I was under the impression that there was a particular tactical squad game subgenre of general strategy games, like Silent Storm, Fallout Tactics, Gorky 17 etc that are not considered RPG's.