kanisatha

It's a Bioware game, so aren't romance options mandatory? I would expect they'd be just like in the previous games, and especially so since this game has been rebuilt as a more tightly narrative-driven game.

https://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-solovyov-nato-warsaw-helsinki-will-ours-russia-ukraine-war-1901936 LOL What say you Poles and Finns?

https://apnews.com/article/estonia-russia-buoys-border-10b99970ed538ce1684bf88c6384a1ec Hope you guys in the Baltics are getting ready. You're up next!!

https://wccftech.com/dragon-age-dreadwolf-has-everyone-at-bioware-really-happy-with-how-it-turned-out/ It's the #1 game in my Steam wishlist, so I want it to be good <fingers crossed>. Don't have much else in the way of what I want: a party-based fantasy RPG that is NOT turn-based combat.

Maybe they're trying to poach talent from CD Projekt. And if that is the case I would be rather angry about it, because I'd much, MUCH rather have CD Projekt's games than Larian's games.

People who paid for physical items during the KS campaign are still waiting for their orders to be fulfilled. For months and months Owlcat kept issuing monthly promises that the items are "on the way" and that their "small size" was a big part of why they were having trouble getting those shipments done. Then, the monthly promises became perfunctory, literally the same message cut and pasted into a new monthly announcement. And now they have just simply stopped sending out messages altogether after many backers, including some superbackers, called them out and harshly criticized them. Instead of working on four new games, which itself is silly for a mid-level studio, they should drop one of those projects so they can provide basic, decent customer support for their KS backers.

Having started out with fewer than 20 people, growth to 500 is crazy. And my guess is that most of those people are contractors and/or low quality people. Given how shoddily they have treated the backers of WotR who paid for physical items in the KS campaign, I am now rather disillusioned with Owlcat. It's why I have removed Rogue Trader from my Steam wishlist, effectively boycotting that game. They will need to win me back for the future.

Yes I do, unfortunately, because the Russian army is now actaully bigger in available combat units than it was in 2022, and those units are now experienced and battle-hardened. But most importantly, they have massive amounts of artillery available (which they have already used very effectively to clear out Ukrainian defenses in several border villages around Khar'kiv) whereas Ukraine's artillery capability, heavily outnumbered to begin with, is relatively nonconsequential because they've run out of munitions.

Well, they don't necessarily have to "take" the city. They just need to encircle it and then lay seige to it. They themselves are going to realize that if the point is to trade it away, then it makes no sense to expend the kind of resources it would take from them to capture the city. But it also keeps open the possibility that the Ukrainian defenses in the city simply collapse. Forcing the Ukrainian side to accept defeat/surrender on Russia's terms is ultimately the end-game for Russia. Their first strategy to accomplish this end-game was to try and take a huge swath of Ukraine, essentially all of Ukraine east of and including Kiev, and force surrender in this way. That did not work. Their second strategy was to try and coerce the Ukrainian side by threatening to escalate to the use of tactical nukes. That also didn't work, mainly because of the external pressure on the Russians, including even from their friends. Now this is their third plan for coercing Ukraine's surrender, born from their battlefield succeses in eastern Ukraine recently. And this plan is the one that has a really good chance of succeeding, especially because Ukraine's Western allies are "going wobbly" (to use a line from Thatcher back in the day), and because within Ukraine itself we now have political differences over war strategy and Zelenskiy is no longer seen as Superman.

I feel that Putin's strategy now is to try and take Khar'kiv and then use it as leverage and a bargaining chip to force the Ukrainians to accept an end to the war on Russia's terms.

I also used to have many of the old tabletop boardgame wargames and strategy games back in the '80s and '90s, but now have just four left: Gulf Strike; NATO: The Next War in Europe; Civilization (the old AH boardgame); and, Axis & Allies. Apparently, "Gulf Strike" is the game SGS is going to be making as a video game next, after they're done with updates for "NATO's Nightmare", which is their most recent release. Used to play these games with a hardcore group of wargamers I was friends with in college. We also did a lot of TT miniatures wargaming. I used to have the rulebooks and a TON of miniatures for the Challenger 2000 system for modern land warfare. I had entire armored/mechanized/motor rifle battalions for Cold War US and Soviet armies. Nowadays I don't get to play TT anything anymore as I don't have anyone nearby with those interests. For video games I only have "The Operational Art of War IV," but unfortunately its developer, Matrix Games, has not been good at all in providing any updates or new scenarios since its initial release, leaving it up to modders to do that work. The problem for me with most existing "TOAW 4" scenarios, as with many other video game wargames, is that some 90% are WW2, and especially Eastern Front games. And the scope of those games, where you're running literally thousands of units, just feel way too overwhelming for me. I like my wargames at the operational level (so, regiments/brigades and higher), but with only a small number of units per side. But apparently, that's exactly the opposite of what most other gamers like to play, it would seem.

@Gorth, the game "Flat Top" was specifically mentioned by the SGS guy in a Steam froum post as a game he'd love to work on in the future. But he also mentions that the game "Carrier Battles", which is currently available on Steam, is a very close replication of Flat Top. I'll post on the board games I still have later today when I get back home. Am posting this from work.

Great read @Gorth! Very interesting that you are also a wargammer. Have you looked at any of the video game wargames currently being made based on those old AH/VG/GDW boardgames? There is a studio called Strategy Game Studio (SGS) that has been making several of these games, and their publisher is Avalon Digital. If you check out the Steam forum for their games, the main guy who works for SGS seems very passionate about bringing those old TT wargames to video gaming. He might even be interested in adding another programmer to SGS. I have the following wargames in my Steam wishlist, and as always, looking for feedback from anyone who's played them: SGS NATO's Nightmare SGS Afrika Korps: Tunisia Strategic Command: World War I Napoleon's Eagles: Game of the Napoleonic Wars

Bumping this as the campaign has only five more days to go. It is funded, and now working towards stretvh goals. I backed it at 50 euro purely because they were considerate enough to include an integral RTwP option.

Haha. And I'm one of those wishlisters entirely because of what you shared about the game. But because of my "no purchase of an early access game" rule, I'll wait to see how things develop with this game.

"Friends" who'll see us as soft, pink, and delicious!

There was an interesting article in Foreign Affairs today proposing that European countries could potentially send troops to Ukraine but do so outside of NATO and without invoking anything NATO-related, the argument being that this would not trigger as massive a response from Russia. Have any of you Europeans seen/heard anything along these lines being discussed there?

Because I'm still waiting for a deal on a new computer, and the GPU on my current old machine constantly crashes, the only games in my library that seemed like I could play and not tax the GPU are the old BG games. So I've started a run of BG1, SoD, and BG2, and for the first time ever am using a few select mods. I'm also playing the classic fighter-mage-thief multiclass for my PC, which I've never done before in my many, many times playing these games. It's rather rough here in the beginning, as my Charname is so very weak from having everything including XPs divided across three classes. But it amazes me how enjoyable it still is to play these now-ancient games.

The French ready to fight? Truly, the end-times are nigh!

So I'm still confused. Is it the case that the game is grimdark throughout and with no good-happy ending? 'Cause that's a dealbreaker for me as well.

Thanks for sharing. Being able to turn off all combat is a huge draw for me. But I'm still unsure about managing individual people's survival. I'll wait to see I suppose, since I won't buy/play until it comes out of EA anyway.

This is exactly my take on this game as well. I'll let it sit in my wishlist for six months or longer and then reevaluate how I feel about it.

A question about the Hogwarts game: given that the Harry Potter universe is based on children's books and movies, is the video game at a level where it can be realistically enjoyed by adults? Serious question, as I know nothing about this or any other Harry Potter video game.

* yes I meant Farthest Frontier I largely agree with you. I think it is the adding of the "survival" piece into the builder games that make them a turn-off for me. But even with strict builders, or where you can use a sandbox mode (which Patron also now has) option, caring for the needs of the people and making sure everything is optimally available for them starts getting tiresome for me once the population gets big. Even when I play Surviving Mars, I always use the robots mod so that eventually I can replace most of my workers with bots and limit my human population to under 100. Btw, I've kept Kingdoms Reborn on my wishlist. Because of its card game component, I'm curious to see how it eventually turns out (once it leaves EA).

Interesting. I got bored with the game after I crossed 100 population, and quit soon after. I then went into my Steam wishlist and deleted a couple of builders I had there (Foundations, Last Frontier), because from the looks of Youtube demos I am very likely to get bored with them also for the same reasons I got bored with Patron. I think what I need, and am looking for, are games where I get to build cities (and even an empire), but without having to micromanage individual citizens and their needs. That's the part that gets tiresome and tedious for me after a while, and especially as the population gets beyond a certain threshold.