kanisatha

This is what I've been expecting to see happen after the sale got finalized, and was hoping Xbox would grab Bioware and bring it back to its old glory. But that's very unlikely now, and the more likely outcome is that EA holds on to the Mass Effect IP and just dumps the rest of Bioware into oblivion. 😢

I'm almost at the end of my run through Black Geyser, but I needed a break so I fired up Humankind again. For any of you who have played that game through to the end, how do you keep city management interesting in the mid-game? It just feels like you have to keep building more and more districts in a never ending tedious cycle.

I was in college during the last few years before the wall came down. And I was a fanatical Cold War wargamer. I had the entire orders-of-battle for both Warsaw Pact and NATO forces across the IGB perfectly memorized. The grand total of combat troops, tanks, AFVs, and especially artillery tubes the Soviets had amassed among 1 Guards Tank Army in the north, 2 Guards Tank Army in the south, and 3 Shock Army in the middle was staggering. I always felt really bad for the troopers of our Blackhorse cavalry regiment at the Fulda Gap, because their lifespan was estimated as mere seconds if WWIII ever broke out. Their entire job was to die sending word back to SACEUR that the Soviets had crossed the border. And I also agree with you that winning the battle/war is fundamentally separate from a subsequent occupation. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and dare I say even Vietnam, the US decisively won every set-piece battle it fought. It was only occupation that sucked hard and cost us so very dearly. I still recall being on a panel at my university a few weeks before Bush sent us into Iraq in 2003. I was the sole person in the room who rejected both sides in the debate about going to war. I disagreed with the Administration's military plan, but I equally rejected those opposed to invasion, both here in the US and especially certain European governments, who were ridiculously arguing to stick with an obviously failed status quo. So, when asked what my plan would be, I suggested the classic Machiavellian realist alternative, which was to secretly cut a deal with Hussein for him to be our patsy and do exactly as we say in exchange for us walking away from all UN sanctions and our blockade. But then I also added that if that was too distasteful for our squeamish liberal internationalist elites (liberal in the poli sci theory sense and not the US politics sense), then another alternative would be to go in hard and fast, remove Hussein from power, hand over the country to an Iraqi version of Egypt's Mubarak (which we had there), and then get the hell out of that counrty ASAP. The domestic politics of liberal democracies are just not capable of handling what one must do to effect a successful occupation of a hostile enemy. Hint: it's what the Allies did to the civilian populations of both Germany and Japan in 1945.

Well, they were pretty scary at the height of the Cold War, weren't they? All those tank armies at the IGB poised to swamp and crush the hapless West Germans. 😉

Hehe, yeah, people are talking about that bug a lot in the game's Steam forum, and SNEG commented they will definitely make sure that bug doesn't return. 😄

Agreed. I still believe Ukraine faces a potential collapse on their front lines because of how widespread draft evasion has become among young Ukrainians. But I certainly didn't expect the Russian side to fair so badly in this year's battles. I guess Russian battlefield incompetence is endemic, and the only way they ever "win" is by throwing masses of their people at the enemy.

Agree 100%. For me as well, it's my single-player game, and even when the game itself doesn't acknowledge my RP choices and decisions, they matter greatly to me just to be able to make them within my game (including with character creation and development/leveling). So that's why, even when there are no consequences whatsoever, I won't rob from ordinary people and only from the elites, won't harm innocents, am happy to accept a fair price from merchants and won't steal from them, etc. It's why playing BG3 I refused to ever use the tadpoles or their powers even though there were no meaningful negative consequences and only powerful beneficial consequences. The whole point of playing an RPG, and why that genre of games is my thing, is to be able to play my game my way. And that's why I get really pissed off when developers won't give me certain freedoms or options within their game for me to be able to play the game my way. I suppose ToEE will now end up just sitting in my Steam library as a never-played game. I did do my due diligence looking at various youtube videos before I bought it. But I should've waited until someone here in this forum provided an honest and trustworthy appraisal. And now, that's exactly what I'll be doing with the PoR remake.

Thanks very much for the honest appraisal, Bruce! And prolly a good thing for you to post it here than in a PM so it benefits not just me but others as well.

This is the concern for me with these old games, and very likely the reason why I passed on playing them back in the day when they first came out, because for me this is expectation #1 even while combat is not even on my list.

Ha, then maybe I'll wait to buy it until after your review of it?

Well, I interpreted this as turn-based combat but with a timer on your turn. That would be the worst of all worlds for me.

The GOG page says "Timed-action combat system." That itself will very likely make this a 'no' for me.

What are people's thoughts on the old game Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor? A remake of it has been announced, and so I'm now curious about the game, having never cared about it previously. Is it just a dungeon-crawl? Heavy in combat with little/no story? https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/a-forgotten-dungeon-crawler-from-the-baldurs-gate-era-is-coming-to-steam-and-gog-for-the-first-time-ever/ Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor on SteamPool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is a turn-based party RPG set in the Forgotten Realms. Build a band of heroes, descend into the haunted elven ruins of Myth Drannor, and use tactical positionin

Yes. I've had my eye on the game for decades, but kept putting it off until it got to the point where I found it too dated for my tastes. So when the remake came out, I finally bought it. But I was intending to send you a PM just before whenever I get around to playing it, especially about how best to go about adding in the mods, so no need to post anything here for now. Thanks! ☺️

But this is going to be exactly my dilemma when I play this game. I want all the bug fixes and gameplay improvements from mods such Co8 and Temple+, including especially such things as the level cap increase. But I'm really, really, really not interested in the additional challenging battles as someone who doesn't care for the combat parts of my RPG-playing experiences. The challenging battles in the base ToEE game sound bad enough, especially because that game does not come with an "easy" or "story" difficulty setting. 😟

That's good to know, because Timberborn keeps coming up in my online searches. I just can't get into playing beavers as people.

So, a question for all you city-builder fans: I'm looking for recommendations on city/colony-builder games that are low in micromanagement and have no combat (or combat can be turned off). I have Foundations, Farthest Frontier, and Manor Lords in my wishlist, and already own Dawn of Man, Patron, and Surviving Mars. Any others I should look at? Thanks!

Except that they didn't sink the Cole. These modern drone boats, however, have enough explosive yield to sink major warships. On the flip side, though, these Iranian targets didn't have any meaningful ship-based defences, whereas our naval vessels do have pretty decent close-in defensive systems.

The problem, of course, is that eventually everyone else will have these same things too, including the Iranians who will use them against our big, fancy, and very expensive warships at sea.

Obsidian was trying something new. Sawyer personally was working on a new game that was supposedly very similar to F:NV but not in the Fallout franchise. That tells me they were loooking to create a third new IP, this time in the post-apocalypse genre to go along with their fantasy and sci-fi IPs. But Xbox came along and ordered that project terminated and switched Sawyer to working on a new Fallout game. My guess would be Obsidian will try to use as much as they can from what they developed for the cancelled project in the new Fallout project, especially given the massive staff cuts. And in the end, this new game won't cut it sales-wise either, because both Fallout franchise fans and post-apocalypse genre fans who want something new/not Fallout will end up feeling disappointed by yet another 'let's try to please everyone' game, which is clearly what Xbox is now demanding from Obsidian. I think the writing is already on the wall. Even if Obsidian is successful in making and pushing out the door this new Fallout game, what comes after that? Yet another Fallout game? If the Pillers and TOW and Pentiment IPs are dead, and no new IPs are allowed to be created, and with Grounded largely spun-off to outside development, what's left for Obsidian to work on? I predict that a few years from now, Obsidian will either return to being a struggling indie studio (that may not even get to keep their Pillers and TOW IPs), or be dead, killed off by Xbox. Either way, it will SUCK for us.

In theory, absolutely yes. But the problem with that is there is probably financial success space only for a handful of such studios per game genre.

It must be so horrible for Sawyer and the other creative people at Obs right now. The two new IPs that they created with a lot of their passion and vision and talent and effort they have been ordered to kill/scrap/shelve (along with all other passion projects they may have been working on), and then they're ordered to all work on just one project that is an IP that belongs to someone else and over which thy won't have full creative control. I have to wonder if some of these people, including Sawyer himself, are contemplating just walking away from it all in disgust.

I was actually looking forward to Avowed, or any other new game in the Pillers IP. But I'm not that interested in the Fallout franchise, so for me this is a huge blow. Obsidian is pretty much dead to me now as a studio whose games I look forward to. 😞

That's a huge blow to me, as I have never cared for the genre of RPG that the Fallout games fall into. So, without another game in the fantasy genre/Pillers IP, Obsidian becomes yet another irrelevant studio to me. 😞

Wasn't the whole point of Obsidian agreeing to join MS about security for the company and its people? They may as well have stayed indie.