What are you playing now?

[Mamoulian War]

I have EU2 as well

 

I will play it later this year, because I have still pretty big backlog of games. And I really wanted to start with the oldest game

 

The biggest thing I like already about EU2 is that you can choose from big number of countries compared to 8 in EU1. I will have to do lot of thinking before starting this one

Edited August 30, 2015 by Mamoulian War

[Bartimaeus]

Europa Universalis has come a long way in that regard, then, judging by the hundreds that you can play as in EU4...

[ShadySands]

Yeah, I always create my own nation now in EU4. Not sure which DLC added that option.

[Bartimaeus]

El Dorado...which I felt was the weakest expansion released so far. Nation Designer and Americas development were the main selling points of it...and the Americas still pretty much sucks, so...and I'll never use the Nation Designer because of just how weird/ahistoric of a feature it is.

[Keyrock]

Crookz - The Big Heist is so good.  The one fear I had with the game after playing the demo was that it would be too simple.  I can happily say now that my fear was unfounded, this game is most certainly not too easy.  I'm 6 heists in, 7 if you count the tutorial, and the last heist I did was relatively complicated, and that was a 2 star (out of 5) difficulty rating.  There were a ton of moving parts and a good bit of teamwork and precision timing was involved.  About 2/3 of the way through the heist, which took me almost an hour and a half to complete, I came real close to being caught out and ruining the whole heist.  Lucky for me, Cleopatra is really fast and I was able to pull off some slick moves to get away and lose the heat off my trail.  There were so many guards and security systems to keep track of that it was easy to lose sight of one of the guards and get caught unaware, which is exactly what happened to me.  I can't wait to see what 4 and 5 star difficulty heists look like. 

 

If you remember Commandos or Desperados, this game plays a little bit like those games, though the AI of guards isn't at the level of those older games.

Edited August 30, 2015 by Keyrock

[GhostofAnakin]

So I decided to pre-order Metal Gear Solid V through Amazon.  They were selling it for less to start with than any other place I saw, plus they were giving a 10% discount on various pre-order games (MGS was obviously one of them).  So I figured why not.

 

The downside is I'm going to have to wait until probably Thursday or Friday for it to arrive.  Amazon doesn't typically ship games until the actual release date, meaning by the time it makes it through transit it'll be 2 or 3 days later (hopefully not more -- Amazon's usually pretty fast with deliveries).

[Oerwinde]

El Dorado...which I felt was the weakest expansion released so far. Nation Designer and Americas development were the main selling points of it...and the Americas still pretty much sucks, so...and I'll never use the Nation Designer because of just how weird/ahistoric of a feature it is.

 

I don't remember which one added like 1000 extra provinces, I had been playing an Aztec game at that point. Controlled the southern US to northern S. America and had colonized Australia and the Philipines. Patch came out, added like 50 new provinces in my area and it looked like this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=509581615

 

I cheat if you're wondering how I got the Aztecs that big by 1736. Anyway, Loading the game and it added the neighbouring new provinces to my empire, but none of them had been developed at all.

 

I want to give it another go with El Dorado, or maybe a custom Central American country. Mostly been playing Ireland with the Beyond the Pale mod (Adds like 6 new cultures to the British Isles, a unique government type for Irish culture, a bunch of events and such. Basically makes playing Ireland super fun) and Elysium with the Third Odyssey mod(Byzantines flee the Turks and establish a new nation in Virginia, completely implausible, but fun).

[Bartimaeus]

Yeah, it was probably El Dorado. And yeah, updating (with a major patch) in the middle of a campaign means your map is going to get all warped. I would've just rolled back to the previous patch via Steam to finish the campaign. You can "update" to a "beta" that's actually a previous patch version by going into EU4's properties and the beta tab.

Edited August 31, 2015 by Bartimaeus

[Katphood]

It's almost September 1st.  Mad Max or Metal Gear Solid V?  Decisions, decisions.

MGSV. Everything about it is just freaking awesome. The game runs at a fluid 60 fps on the PS4 and the story, the characters, the gameplay, the graphics...everything is top notch.

[GhostofAnakin]

 

It's almost September 1st.  Mad Max or Metal Gear Solid V?  Decisions, decisions.

MGSV. Everything about it is just freaking awesome. The game runs at a fluid 60 fps on the PS4 and the story, the characters, the gameplay, the graphics...everything is top notch.

 

 

Yeah, I'm going to be getting both anyways.  I guess my indecision is more geared toward which one I'm going to play first.  It might end up being Mad Max simply because I ordered MGS from Amazon (thanks to the discount) and won't receive it in the mail until probably Thursday or Friday.  Whereas I'm just going to the store to pick up Mad Max on Tuesday.

[ManifestedISO]

Me too, Mad Max on Tuesday, just the movie, haven't seen it yet. 

 

Also Original Gray 20th Anniversary Dualshock 4. Kindapumped. 

[Mamoulian War]

I ended up home with stomach problems during last few days, so I have decided to redo the few things I have written here about my playthrough of Europa Universalis and add few of the pictures as well.  I made a google sites web page, where, I have corrected few mistakes in chronological order of events and possible made few new, but yeah, **** happens It should be now much corresponding to the reality

 

Anyway, if you'd like, feel free to check it out

 

https://sites.google.com/site/mamoulianfh/letsplay/europa-universalis

 

Only the first part is rewritten yet. Feel free to leave here some insights if you wish. Unfortunately, I do not know how to enable commenting on the site for other people, without allowing them to edit whole page. If any of you have experience with it, please let me know, how to allow it.

 

Thanks

[SadExchange]

Well, I put down DA:I because after 22 hours, it was just feeling like a chore to play, so maybe I'll go back to it with renewed interest some time.  Picked up my save from The Witcher 3 and just got to Skellege and just find the quests and explorations top notch.  Honestly, these guys did in 5 years what some developers still can't do after multiple game releases. 

 

Also started a new game in Pillars of Eternity since the new patch and was wondering for those that have started again, how does party management go?  I thought I read somewhere that your party members would need less management for some reason, however I haven't seen any change from pre-2.0 or am I thinking of a different game?

[Rosbjerg]

They have a part AI now, which thry didnt before.. Now they dont need as much micromanagement.

[SadExchange]

They have a part AI now, which thry didnt before.. Now they dont need as much micromanagement.

What would this include?  Because from what I've seen, if they've killed an enemy, they don't necessarily move on to the next one and I haven't seen one use a skill on their own.

[Malcador]

Diablo 3 season 4. Now with a Horadric cube of sorts, haven't played with it yet though

[Rosbjerg]

 

 

They have a part AI now, which thry didnt before.. Now they dont need as much micromanagement.

 

What would this include?  Because from what I've seen, if they've killed an enemy, they don't necessarily move on to the next one and I haven't seen one use a skill on their own.

Patch notes http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-186-update-notes-200/

[Gfted1]

Diablo 3 season 4. Now with a Horadric cube of sorts, haven't played with it yet though

 

The new cube is pretty sweet. After teaching the cube a new buff (which destroys the object to be learned), you can then add that buff to your repertoire. One each for Weapon, Armor and Ring.

[SadExchange]

 

 

They have a part AI now, which thry didnt before.. Now they dont need as much micromanagement.

What would this include?  Because from what I've seen, if they've killed an enemy, they don't necessarily move on to the next one and I haven't seen one use a skill on their own.

Patch notes http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-186-update-notes-200/

 

Thank you.  I knew I wasn't having memory problems, but from the patch notes, it appears that you can toggle the companion AI on and off, but it doesn't say how.  Does anyone know how you would do this?  I can't seem to find it in the options.

[mute688]

I don't have 2.0 yet, still waiting for the dvd patch, but from what I have read there should be a new icon on each character's ability bar that lets you toggle each NPC on/off individually.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0GvsA6exuY

Edited August 31, 2015 by mute688

[Gfted1]

Thank you.  I knew I wasn't having memory problems, but from the patch notes, it appears that you can toggle the companion AI on and off, but it doesn't say how.  Does anyone know how you would do this?  I can't seem to find it in the options.

I think you single click each party member after which a silhouette of a head with gears in it should appear. This selection can be used to turn party member AI on/off. I think.

[Bendu]

Well, that was pure luck. Me fighting Nazgûls.

 

[SadExchange]

Thanks everyone for the help.  I see the icon now.  Will be interesting to see how well it works!

[Keyrock]

I went ahead and built my first solar power plant in X3: Albion Prelude and I downloaded and installed the crystal-less power plants script.  I wasn't really looking to mess with the script editor.  It's a powerful tool and it can be used to great effect to give yourself an advantage (as well as all manner of wacky stuff), which isn't necessarily the wrong thing to do, if you want to skip the 100+ hours to build an economy and relations with races so that you can afford to build a massive fleet you can just give yourself 1 billion credits and rank 10 with a bunch of races at the start of the game and go straight to fleet battles.  However, I wanted to go through the entire process of building up from basically nothing to a commercial empire that generates millions upon millions of credits for me to owning a massive fleet and dealing death and destruction everywhere without shortcuts.  I will make an exception for this one script since I don't feel it gives me n advantage, rather it erases an unfair disadvantage.  Every other kind of production station in the game is essentially identical whether it is player owned or AI controlled.  The only difference is that player owned stations don't stock secondary resources, but secondary resources don't affect production of that station in any way shape or form, their only real function is to try to help alleviate some blockages on other stations by (slowly) consuming resources that might be otherwise difficult to sell.  Whether a station has zero secondary resources or full secondary resources, production on that station remains the same.  AI controlled solar power plants have no primary resource (i.e. they require nothing to produce energy cells), they have a secondary resource, crystals, but, as stated before, the crystals are in no way required for production.  Player owned solar power plants, curiously have crystals as a primary resource, meaning you have to have crystals for the plant to produce energy cells.  I always thought this was bogus, why should my power plant need a resource to produce wares when all the AI controlled power plants don't?  Luckily, there is a script that removes the need for crystals on player owned power plants and makes them like AI controlled power plants.  The service, however, is not free, it costs roughly double the price of the power plant to convert it to not needing crystals.  So essentially you pay triple the price for a power plant that performs exactly like AI controlled power plants, and power plants are pretty expensive to begin with (As a point of reference, I spent about 15 million on the medium power plant I just built: roughly 5 million for the plant itself and 10 million to convert it to crystal-less).  It's still worth it in the long run, though, as that power plant will now produce energy cells for "free" forever and ever.  it will take quite a while for it to pay for itself, but in the long run it will make me a tidy profit, especially since I don't need to buy a transport and hire a pilot to service the station, since it has no need of resources.  Selling wares won't be a problem either, everybody needs energy cells; so long as I offer a good price I will always have AI controlled transports coming to my plant to buy energy cells, there is almost no chance my output will exceed demand.

 

Anyway, with the main plot completed and my economic machine churning away and bringing in decent profit constantly, I'm off to start the headquarters plot.  Hopefully starting the headquarters plot will shut up the Argon commander who keeps calling me ever since I started the main plot.  Yeah guy, I know the war is still going and some stuff is going on in Asteroid Belt or Heretic's End, I don't care.  I did my part, I put in my service to the commonwealth, I prevented a big catastrophe from happening.  My service is finished, as far as I'm concerned, someone else can fight Terrans on the front lines.  After the headquarters plot I'll do the hub plot, then finally the shady business plot so that I can get that Acinonyx Prototype (the whole reason I'm doing all this).  By that time I should also hopefully have some frigates.

Edited August 31, 2015 by Keyrock

[GhostofAnakin]

Well, I put down DA:I because after 22 hours, it was just feeling like a chore to play, so maybe I'll go back to it with renewed interest some time.

 

Only way I can push through replaying that game is by sticking to the main questline as much as possible.  The side content, by and large, is incredibly boring.  I still don't know how they came to the decision to make it "open world" and thought those quests would be good.