melkathi

So now you'll play Shadows? Coteries had some interesting character exploration of your coterie members. But the 0 agency of the player and singular ending was rather disappointing. Sadly Shadows, while giving the possibility of different endings, was a lot less interesting, with the feeling that you did fewer meaningful things on the way. Heart of the Forest (different devs and werewoofs instead of vampires) was so much better than either.

It's a prequel, so it doesn't require you to know anything. It is a nice bonus for people who do, to realize the "significance" lore wise.

It's good to play it now with a consistent UI across the game and expansions. Before it was really confusing to finish Spellforce 3 and have to relearn to play Soul Harvest. Good game though. Really enjoyed it. Did you play the previous games and care about the story?

As long as it isn't another survival, crafting, rogue like

The way he pronounces Swansong is odd...

You know what doesn't have magic bows, annoying hands or Starscourge Radahn? Troubleshooter! Also MW5 you could be playing with Chill and I

Settling in a gloomy forest: Boosting villager confidence: Putting out fires:

Even more Against the Storm. Got unlucky with the modifiers in one of my maps. Storm kept killing my villagers. That got the queen irritated so she pulled the plug just as I was getting the village on track. My first failed run. So today I decided to show her I don't care how irritated she gets. Ignored all her orders and got lucky enough to get the rebellious passive that raises villager resolve based on the queen's irritation. The more annoyed she got, the better the village started doing.

I thought the sun never shines in Soulslike games...

Hmm this thread has gone past the 20 pages mark. Soon it will get locked! Post while you still can!!!

In other news:

I already own Iron Harvest, so fine by me

Multiplayer support for XCOM 2 is being disabled. I am certain somewhere someone cares.

My communist upbringing is intrigued by this. True rpg level-scaling and thus equality can only be achieved by the complete abolition of levels. NPCs, monsters and critters of the gaming world unite and cease the means of your oppression: the over-leveledness of the player character.

It would be strange if they changed that now. "Due to the way COVID restrictions affected development, Elex 2 has level scaling" would be a funny announcement though.

More thoughts on Against the Storm: The bad: One thing I find gives joy to the city builder experience is order or planning or control or whatever you may call it. Structuring your city for maximum efficiency, then enjoy being able to just sit back and watch it function on it's own indefinitely. Against the Storm isn't that kind of game. Missions are on a timer - the Queen's irritation meter - and once time runs out the mission fails. Maps are random. Real estate is tight. Resources are scarce. Your buildings are huddled around your warehouses and fire pits, but you aren't able to plan a layout. The good: The game has everything else you need from a city builder. Harvesting resources to produce goods to combine into more complex goods. Fulfilling various needs of your villagers, from food and shelter to leisure and bloodlust. You have humans, beavers, lizards, and harpies who all are slightly different but with some overlap. Both humans and beavers like their leisure time, so going for drinks at the tavern. Humans and lizards have a penchant for religion. Lizards and harpies have bloodlust so enjoy some friendly sparring. Everyone is good at something and everyone enjoys something. Humans are good farmers but enjoy alcohol. So they are more productive than others working at a farm, but working in the brewery will make them happy. Beavers are fascinated by technology, harpies are good at alchemy. In a raindistillery beavers will be amazed working with ancient raintech, but harpies will actually be good at it. Glades add exploration to the game. As your woodcutters clear the forest, you explore glades. Small glades may have a couple of resource nodes or some loot. Larger Dangerous Glades will have a glade event you need to solve fairly quickly or suffer adverse effects. The largest, Forbidden Glades have some really nasty events. Events basically boil down to you sending a number of scouts with a choice of resources to the event. The resources represent the way you solve the situation; closing a termite mount with resin, dousing a fire with water, dismantling a malfunctioning raintech with tools. There seem to be enough events that you can't be certain what you will find. The pressure and randomness work. There is a feeling of accomplishment closer to other game types than the methodical city builder feel. You managed to get your hands on incense, send your lizards to pray, which boosted their resolve enough to tackle that forbidden glade, which then gives you the reputation you needed to appease the queen. Unlocks. Loads of unlocks to unlock between villages. New buildings, new upgrades, new traders. As you progress the game becomes more complex but also a bit less random, as more buildings get tagged as essential, giving you more ways to plan for making your villagers happy.

Pfft. Neither compare to Troubleshooter. Or Majesty.

Back to the important games. I'm building my 3rd village in the 3rd cycle of Against The Storm. Food supply is nail biting. I have a number of farms, but as they grow crops with the seasons, during Clearance (the least rainy season) my village goes down to 0 food and I scramble to keep them fed. Then, in Storm season the harvest comes in and suddenly all is great. But because of the storm morale goes down, so I have to make a spectacle of burning extra coal in the central pyres. So everyone is either happy but hungry, or unhappy though unhungry. (I know that's not a word)

DA:O took 24 hours to finish with all sidequests if you know what you are doing... The biggest problem the game had (other than stupid npcs (though real life the past few years has made them seem more realistic after all) and a plot that made little sense at times) was that the Origins were the best bit about it. I had fun with it. Even finished it multiple times. But each playthrough made any problem in the writing more jarring. It may have something to do with IE games being longer, so there out of setting situations are kept in balance to the overall atmosphere. As DA:O is a rather compact experience, your companions talking about shopping therapy or licking lamp posts in winter rips you out of the dark setting. The game is schizophrenic: darkness all around but a soap opera in camp.

Cutting a path into new areas of the forest: Discovering shrines of the Fishmen And rampaging humongous moles Then gathering around the fire to chill in raincoats

The human noble had the added problem that they weren't just anyone, a random unlucky stranger like the rest. They were pretty much the top of nobility and people treat them as if they were random adventurer #5382.

Against the Storm has this "one more turn" compulsion. Though it isn't turn based. But you just wait for your woodcutters to reach that little glade. Then for your scouts to grab that loot. Then get firewood and food ready for the heavy rain season. And then Drizzle season starts so lets see what bonuses the Queen has to offer and what settler caravans are passing through. And lets make sure those settlers have housing... Played six hours today it seems.

I braved my first big storm in Against The Storm. Which is a fancy way of saying I reset the map. It is a rogue-like city builder? A magic storm covers the world so it is raining constantly. Every few years a cataclysmic storm drowns everything. Some weird, mysterious queen has the magic power to hold the storm at bay and so people survive in her citadel. When it is safe to go out, you, a viceroy or something like that, organize expeditions to (re)establish settlements in the surrounding areas. The nifty thing, until the reset those villages are persistent, so when you work on a new settlement, you can trade with the previous villages you built. Working on the first village of the new era. It is going through that tricky early period where I am lacking in some resources. This time it is food. And there isn't anyone to trade with yet. Luckily this is a mutant forest, so while my human settlers have a couple of plantations running and lizard folk trappers steal insect larvae, the beaver woodcutters get meat as a byproduct of cutting trees.

10 days, no screenshots. If you want something to get done right (or at all) you have to do it yourself... Beavers, humans, and lizardfolk building villages in the rain:

I am not sure if you are talking about Elden Ring or Total War 3. And only because there isn't a third AAA title just out I am aware of or aware of people here playing.