Luridis

Then you never had the pleasure of downing a fleet of 200+ with 10 battleships. Before anyone asks... No, I wasn't using the Time Warp Facilitator with the Phasing Cloak to achieve this. I'll give away my big secret here, but you can't really play it online anymore. This ship build makes use of considerable miniaturization of certain weapons. Weapons: X amount of Heavy, Autofire, Shield-Piercing Phasors + X*2 of same minus the heavy mounting. (The latter doubles as point-defense.) With good miniaturization, this allowed for 20 heavy + 40 standard range phasors of this type on a battleship. The "AutoFire" causes the weapon to fire 3x per turn, with each shot losing 20% of its hit rating. With an elite crew and a moleculartronic computer all three shots are guaranteed to hit anything under an elite crew on enemy unless they have internal nullifies. This mount effectively triples weapon damage. Equipment: Moleculartronic Computer (+175 Beam To-Hit) Automated Repair Unit (Repairs 20% of Armor and/or Structure per combat turn.) Achilles Targeting Unit (Any damage that penetrates shields bypasses armor completely, including heavy, and has 3x chance of hitting systems.) Battle Pods (Increases Ship equipment space by 50%) High Energy Focus (Increases Beam Damage by 50%) Structural Analyzer (Doubles any damage that penetrates enemy shields.) Damper Field and Xentronium Armor (Available via capturing Orion or Antarian ships, can't be used with shields. Reduces all incoming damage by 75%.) Heavy Armor or Reinforced Hull (Choose based on whether or not your enemies have the Achilles unit.) I think that's it, it has been a while. The result is that the Damper Field, Xentronium + Heavy Armor or RHull and the Automated Repair Unit make your ships weather huge amounts of damage, that gets mostly repaired each turn. I'm talking multiple attacks from a half dozen Doomstars with just about anything short of a Stellar Converter. Now look at the weapons... Heavy Phasor (7-30) + Autofire 3x (21-90) + HE Focus +50% (32-135) + Structural A. and Shield Piercing = 2x (64 - 270) x 20 Units = 1280 to 5400 Long Range Dmg per turn. Phasor (5-20) + AF 3x (15-60) + HE Focus +50% (23 - 90) + Str. A. and Sheild P. 2x (46 - 180) x 40 Units = 1840 to 7200 Short Range Damage per turn. The upper end of that damage is 12,600 per turn, roughly equivalent to 8 Stellar Converters. Additionally, this is damage that bypasses shields and armor and has 3x chance of hitting the ship drive, making it explode and damage all the ships around it. Using disruptors instead of Phasors is even more devastating, if you manage to research the physics tree 5x past the end of new tech. Edit: You need the standard phasors doubling as point defense because Damper Field equipped ships have one major weakness: emissions guided warheads. With no shield, there's a small chance they'll hit your ship drive and blow up the ship, even if it's 99% functional.

I don't think a lot of people realize... RPG mechanics are a spider web and that making a change anywhere on that web causes all of the other parts of the web to change position slightly. Changing a class's armor value can cause healers to become OP, or UP. Change a group buff and suddenly and entire class of monsters are too weak to be considered threatening. I'm not a game dev, but I suspect creating balance is one of the hardest parts of your job and involves lots of spreadsheets.

Emphasis mine... And that says it all right there. Crowd funding is still funding, and thus has a bottom. I'll also note that some of the problems we experience are likely due to the Unity engine. In my personal experience playing games made on the engine, I would say that increased complexity makes the engine progressively more flaky. Sure, its fine for something like angry birds, but end up with anything like a massive script library of functions and/or objects and it shows weakness. I suspect this might be due to its massively cross platform design, trying to create essentially the same experience everywhere. The bottom line OP is that you still haven't figured out how the world works. When you do, you'll see that the system around you is driven by greed and it sucks. And, in the end, you'll end up doing the best you can within that system like everyone else, unless you get lucky.

I've got a really good question for them... How exactly does that trailer congeal with this statement by one of the developers? Also, ships do not move the way it shows. Additionally, the blue ship would be dead before it could be surrounded by 4 other battleships. I can tell you from my own personal experience with the game and other players of it, and back to the time of the original's release... That is a made up percentage by an absolutely clueless individual. The people in charge of this "reboot" are clearly not up to this task, have little understanding of the pedigree on which they tread, and will most likely produce a flop worse than the game's first sequel, MOO3. No tactical combat in MOO is like no pipes in Super Mario Bros. There is also mention of "real time". With no tactical combat, exactly what is happening real time? Video battles like... LMAO Endless Space? Thinly veiled "tactics" choices that are little more than that silly card game amplitude put in ES? I want them to show just 5 minutes of gameplay footage... I predict MOO fans the world over responding with, "this is pretty fail." Yes, I am doing a lot of complaining about it. There's good reason too, from everything I've seen here, and read elsewhere, there is absolutely nothing to praise... at all. Master of Orion 2 sold on great gameplay, these guys appear to be trying to do the same on badly voiced, poor quality cinematics that will have nothing to do with the resulting game. Hell, I am still waiting for gearbox to fix their reboot of Homeworld. There have been no updates in months, and apparently someone didn't bother to consider the idea that the tactical formations and behaviors of the original games C code did not get imported into HW2's C++ engine. And, as a result we get this nightmare... https://youtu.be/Cx0uxR2kZy8 No, no, frigates taking 900% longer to destroy stationary targets is not a big deal at all... Let's not fix that in a timely manner, cause it's hardly important.

I think y'all are forgetting what a modern GPU actually is: A stream processor or, massively parallel single instruction multiple data floating point ALU. Programmers are finally breaking out of the legacy mold and starting to see the GPU as something used only for CAD and gaming. If they're offloading something to your GPU then it is because either the compiler, or the runtime VM seems to think that it will run more efficiently there. Additionally, with the growth of languages like Haskell, F#, Golang and now Swift, it will become more commonplace. Don't discourage the attempts CS engineers at making better use of your hardware. https://helgeklein.com/blog/2014/12/impact-gpu-acceleration-browser-cpu-usage/ If something is firing up your CUDA cores, its probably calling one of the API's that use it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebCL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL

Co-founders of bands leave all the time, usually due to creative differences that form over time. I think the majority of them are probably fairly sincere in their best wishes to one another when that happens. Yes, it's uprooting a larger tree, but still just moving a tree. Buncha hens.

So... this means you think of me as something bright and cheerful, filled with candy and toys for children? Thank you. That makes me feel much better about our relationship.

It's possible that the games is good, but I read as far as "You will design custom spaceships and deploy them into real-time battles" and stopped reading.I dislike "RTS" games passionately. DOnt get it fool you, it really have decent space battles very similiar to old Moo unlike that junk that Galactic civilizations got instead of combat The one thing that killed GC series for me is that crappy space combat... even Endless space has better combat, although i don't like the phase and resolution system. Best 4X developed after MoO2 era for me so far was the Sword of the Stars first game, but it had pretty meh planet management and the only redeeming factor was the space conquest and RT battles. If only Sid would expand on the Starships game and change it into a fullblown 4X that would be probably best game since MoO2 but in the current shape it's a fun space.combat TB 1 session game. I really hope that this remake will rock my socks off... Endless Space? LOL I couldn't get past it's nearly schizophrenic game design and rank amateur coding. The AI makes moves that aren't being rule checked, it's also "petty" in its behavior and does things like repeated attacks only to retreat to be as annoying as possible. The race governments and abilities are far from balanced. The galaxy generation is not just random, it is nonsensical. (Probably do to the aforementioned programmers. I poked around and their algorithms are... intellectually challenged.) To be frank, I think they were a bunch of random people who got together to make a game and didn't bother looking into how that is actually done before starting on this one. EDIT: In case anyone is unclear on what I mean by nonsensical stuff in Endless Space, see my attachment. As for the MOO reboot... I'll pass. The voiceover was nails on a chalkboard terrible. It is better to have no voiceover than have bad voiceover. Nothing in the video seems to hint at how the actual gameplay will look. It's a short view of classic that sashays into something that is nearly guaranteed to be nothing more than a low quality CGI with the assets they've made to date and will not resemble gameplay in the slightest. I don't see any new features. I don't see any evolutionary features. There's nothing to say, "Here's all the 4X ideas we've had 20 years to contemplate." I already have MOO2 on my system now and I'd rather just play that than buy a new one with mediocre 3D graphics coupled with terrible voiceover.

Possibility #1: He went to work for JibJab, with the upcoming presidential election and whatnot. Possibility #2: A guy bumped into him in some LA dive bar who turned out to be Quentin Tarantino in disguise. Vodka & tequila flowed, so did ideas. Possibility #3: We all got very lucky and he's left to tutor Peter Clines how to wrap up fiction properly. Possibility #4: Notch... needed a butler. Possibility #5: Half-Life 3 Confirmed! LOL Seriously, y'all are a bunch of busy bodies. Job changes are typical in a career.

As I am working on little projects of my own, I am beginning to see the same terminology barriers exist in game development as CIS or EE also exist in the games industry. When you don't know the industry vernacular for a particular thing or idea, you're at a loss to find help and/or examples. I was watching a video the other day where a guy was talking about "figuring out when two game objects touch or overlap". I realized that without knowing the words "collision detection", finding code examples would be difficult. Now, I've run into the same problem with the artwork in modern games. 3D: I know this covers everything in the area: textures, meshes, sculpting, uv & bump maps, shaders, etc. Pixel Art: I know this covers most of the legacy and retro stuff, mostly with tiles or sprites under 512x512 px. What I am trying to figure out is the term used for game art that is both modern and 2D. I'm thinking of things like modern platform or isometric games where the pixel density is high, with 24 bit+ color. There must be a specific term for assets of this type, but I've been unable to figure out what it is as of yet. Thanks...

I installed it because it has free fraps functionality.

Here, Picasa is doing some deliberate downsizing that I can't prevent. But you can at least see that the shadows aren't off, etc. My 660 SLI is running this at an average of 55 FPS.

The right thing to do would have been to optimize genuinely, but suggest that the game would look much better with a newer card. In my opinion, their "optimal settings" are a malicious hamstring of quality to motivate a newer purchase. They don't care what it can do, only about what they can incite me to do by presenting me with the worst possible scenario.

Do you think that is too harsh?

Here's a formula to calculate the average damage mod based on your accuracy: =IF(Acc+WAcc>=100;1+DmgMod+CD+WCD; IF(Acc+WAcc>49;1+DmgMod+(CD+WCD)*(Acc+WAcc)/100; IF(Acc+WAcc>14;0.75+DmgMod+(0.5+CD+WCD)*(Acc+WAcc)/100 IF(Acc+WAcc>0;0.675+0.85*DmgMod+(1+DmgMod+CD+WCD)*(Acc+WAcc)/100; IF(Acc+WAcc>-50;0.675+0.85*DmgMod+(1+DmgMod)*(Acc+WAcc)/100; IF(Acc+WAcc>-85;(0,5+DmgMod)*(.85+(Acc+WAcc)/100);0)))))) where Acc = player accuracy - monster deflection WAcc = base accuracy of the weapon (-5, -10 etc. for firearms) DmgMod = damage bonus you have CD = critical damage mod (0.5+any bonuses you have) WCD = base weapon critical damage mod (-.3 for firearms) Maybe you could use it on your sheet to calculate the average damage based on a distribution around a targeted accuracy value, like for the damage reduction. PS. In your sheet I think you can't go over 20DR, maybe your tables should go until 28DR (for people to be able to see what are the best weapons against the adra dragon). This... is why I like the game less every time I play it. The mechanics are convoluted, over imagined and they've thrown in everything they can think of, along with the kitchen sink. There's no room for subtlety or simple mastery, and you spend too much time looking at numbers. That isn't difficulty, it's technicality and I don't much care for it. A simple, home-grown version of d20, ala 2nd Edition would have made the experience far more enjoyable to me. (Yes, they could do it. Game mechanics aren't subject to copyright, only the names and descriptions.) At this point I am convinced that Torment is going to be the better game since it runs on a system of which the formulas do not look like electrical engineering. It's really... not that complicated. You attack, you take your Accuracy minus their Defense, then you roll a d100 and add that to it. If it's between 1-15, miss and no damage, 16-50, graze and -50% base damage, 51-100, hit, 100+, crit and +50% base damage. That's it. Boiling that down to formulas can make the formulas look daunting, sure... but it's really not that complicated, and nothing like the convoluted mess that was THAC0. You're attempting to oversimplify my statement to reduce my argument to a single point which you can argue. I did not write "mechanic", I wrote "mechanics". I merely highlighted a single one, it's the combination that is tiring. THAC0 was nothing more than a floating hit difficulty at 5% gradients.

Here's a formula to calculate the average damage mod based on your accuracy: =IF(Acc+WAcc>=100;1+DmgMod+CD+WCD; IF(Acc+WAcc>49;1+DmgMod+(CD+WCD)*(Acc+WAcc)/100; IF(Acc+WAcc>14;0.75+DmgMod+(0.5+CD+WCD)*(Acc+WAcc)/100 IF(Acc+WAcc>0;0.675+0.85*DmgMod+(1+DmgMod+CD+WCD)*(Acc+WAcc)/100; IF(Acc+WAcc>-50;0.675+0.85*DmgMod+(1+DmgMod)*(Acc+WAcc)/100; IF(Acc+WAcc>-85;(0,5+DmgMod)*(.85+(Acc+WAcc)/100);0)))))) where Acc = player accuracy - monster deflection WAcc = base accuracy of the weapon (-5, -10 etc. for firearms) DmgMod = damage bonus you have CD = critical damage mod (0.5+any bonuses you have) WCD = base weapon critical damage mod (-.3 for firearms) Maybe you could use it on your sheet to calculate the average damage based on a distribution around a targeted accuracy value, like for the damage reduction. PS. In your sheet I think you can't go over 20DR, maybe your tables should go until 28DR (for people to be able to see what are the best weapons against the adra dragon). This... is why I like the game less every time I play it. The mechanics are convoluted, over imagined and they've thrown in everything they can think of, along with the kitchen sink. There's no room for subtlety or simple mastery, and you spend too much time looking at numbers. That isn't difficulty, it's technicality and I don't much care for it. A simple, home-grown version of d20, ala 2nd Edition would have made the experience far more enjoyable to me. (Yes, they could do it. Game mechanics aren't subject to copyright, only the names and descriptions.) At this point I am convinced that Torment is going to be the better game since it runs on a system of which the formulas do not look like electrical engineering.

You cannot do much without the full licensed version of Unity. The engine isn't open source and that will drive most contributors away. When you mention NWN, you're talking about modding. That is already being done for PoE.

It seems to me that it damages an industry of creators in the same way something called "Cheese Spread" with an almost unnoticeable under note saying "contains no actual cheese" affects dairy farmers. If you don't understand why... There's not much I can say to make you understand.

What do you all really think of stuff like this? I know companies need to make money. But, when I think of that, such thoughts are fairly unkind. What I don't even see mentioned in the comments is that what's being sold cannot even be considered "content". It just seems to me that more money could be made from producing something actually desirable in the face of something many players have often striven to master. I played years ago and my first thought was, "Hell, that takes all the fun out of perfecting it. Why would I ever buy that?"

I got it... I wasn't understanding their attack. It's a melee that does elemental damage. Their defense is high physical DR, but not magical. Thus, these are useful: Enchanted Weapon (Fire) Paladin Flames Most Spells Arcane Assault Best Defense: Bulwark Against Elements (Pretty much negates their attack.) Arcane Defense Anything lowering attack. My best play is to move the mage aside after casting Elemental Bulwark and use Arcane Assault to get them all to teleport to the mage and then cast Fan of Flames, that pretty much leaves them all in an extra crispy pile. A cheaper version is to use Arcane Defense instead, it's less health pool saving, but it prevents the two-shotting that normally happens.

1> Teleport negates attempts to do so. 2> #1 does not appear to be distance limited. If by "protect" you mean don't bring them... That, actually works. 3> Many undead, all teleport. I think I just need to be a little more careful pulling these. 4 & 5> I've not had problems dealing with ranged. I think the reason these are so annoying is that not only do they teleport, their damage appears to be elemental and bypasses DR. But, I am so annoyed with them that I am determined now to find the best tactic to bring them down with minimal annoyance.

Here's the deal... I'm trying to play with the included NPCs so I can get their story. The wizard Aloth pulls threat from anything that can teleport with his mere existence. I'm currently fighting the shadows of various places and two facts seem apparent to me: Wizards are targeted primary by teleporters. 75% of my resting is to restore wizard health, not tanks or anything else. I've tried letting Aloth set idle for half the fight and he still gets targeted and beat down while doing absolutely nothing at all. Yes, I said he is sitting IDLE and pulling threat and thus I am STILL resting to regain his health instead of my tanks. Whoever is working on threat mods please fix because I am just done playing till this is fixed. I cannot stand this kind of screwball threat in RPGs, it's immersion breaking for me. I can't imagine what's going though the mind of whoever is responsible.

The "raw damage" doohickey that you're supposed to use every fight is so annoying (range) that I end up wanding everything. I'm not getting that close to the front line just to use that mini aoe PoS. There are too many spells in the game IMO that amount of unfocused action bar clutter. I'd like to see everything more useful and more focused.

The keep in NWN2 was much more memorable. Hopefully, they'll sort this one out in patches. If it takes more money to run than is collected, what are you supposed to do once all the mobs in the game are dead?

I'm still holding on to wolf pelts and bear pelts. Are they vendor trash? Is there a clue to crafting use that I am missing?