Gaming Rut

Callonia said:

Try age of wonders 3.

About that skyrim comment..

Only obtain loot when you observe it's weight and resale value.

Generally in this order..

1st Weapon
2nd Chest armor
3rd Potions and jewels etc.
4th anything else.

My main Skyrim character already have over 500k septims, goal was like 1m but I got frustated due to lack of good homes in skyrim. They're all basically tiny hovels except for one near the blue palace but even then, that home felt so freaking cramped.

My bedroom is downright luxurious and spacious compared to skyrim houses.

Failing that, grab a follower that doesn't suffer a permanent death cuz followers is kinda then have her carry everything.

And then if you really have to, resort to TGM command to turn on godmode and then you can move heaven and earth with your back.

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Just shoot for items with a value-weight ratio of at least 10-to-1. Making money becomes stupidly easy once you max your alchemy and enchanting skills though. Then the tediousness becomes trying to find merchants with enough gold to buy what you have to sell.

Hearthstone helps with the house thing. Personally I didn't find Windhelm's house to be that bad. Quite spacious and with tons of trophy cases.

If you have a PS3, play Battle Princess Arcadias Owen would endorse this

Owen Glyndwr said:

Just shoot for items with a value-weight ratio of at least 10-to-1. Making money becomes stupidly easy once you max your alchemy and enchanting skills though. Then the tediousness becomes trying to find merchants with enough gold to buy what you have to sell.

Hearthstone helps with the house thing. Personally I didn't find Windhelm's house to be that bad. Quite spacious and with tons of trophy cases.

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(Does have alchemy/enchanting maxed.) >.>
And then mercantile skill too as well.. It adds more money to vendors. And to get rid of my excess items, i just went from town to villages, etc.

Alchemy was pretty easy to max, i basically did it at same time when I was just starting out as newbie cuz I wanted those potions to make my adventuring less lethal. To put it simply, I followed the road and picked all those flowers growing on the roadside as I was traveling to a village for the first time everytime.

Can't count how many times I've been poisoned and would've died if i didnt' drank an antidote.

Since you mention FTL, I'm just gonna throw out Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup as something worth a try. It's free, so you have nothing to lose. It's the best rogue-like game I've played. It's easy enough to get into, but it definitely has a steady and somewhat infinite learning curve, so beware of that.

sherbz said:

Personally I found that Long War for Xcom was like a whole new game and as a result I have sunk another hundred or so hours into that.

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This mod was excellent! I really love how they've managed to change the spawn locations on the maps. It's like playing new maps on every mission

ImperialGuard said:

This mod was excellent! I really love how they've managed to change the spawn locations on the maps. It's like playing new maps on every mission

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Yes. The huge amounts of new items and drastically longer tech path also add a significant amount of new challenge too. Its one of the few mods i have played where i now think that the vanilla version will have to adopt large parts of it or it could in itself be boring if a new game i s released in the future. i also much prefer the new class system. Soliders are more useful earlier in their promotion tree (medics, snipers etc); and the new classes added offer some interesting strategic alternatives, especially when coupled with the different weapons (do you want an in the zone killer scout with a marksmans rifle and squadsight; or do you want a super speedy scout that can sprint 17 tiles without run & gun and mow people down with a shotgun. Or do you want a rapid fire gunner with an autolaser who can move and shoot with heat ammo; or do you want a long range squad sight gunner, who cant move and shoot, but has shredder ammo and holotargeting. perfect for those swarming chryssalid moments). Those are way more interesting IMO. only drawback is that a high level squad wipe on long war is more than a little devastating.

Heretic_Cata said:

Lords of Xulima !
Sorta like King's Bounty except more odd battles and err... things.
Also wierd name.

I just bought a new graphics card, and what i use it for is a game that looks like it was made in flash. Took me about a month to finish.

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I know what you mean with the GPU. I got a 6870 in 2011, and didn't run anything that put anywhere near a full load on it until Chivalry in late 2012. Even now, there isn't a whole lot I've run that's taxed in. Rome 2 on free weekends, but I seem to have reached a point where my desire for improved graphics in games is increasing slower than cards are getting faster. Heck, the most recent strategy game I tried, Conquest of Elysium III, has graphics that are roughly at Civ2's level, but that didn't matter while playing.

Lately I've been playing a fair amount of Table Tennis. It's a surprisingly fun game, and does a pretty good job of keeping the heart rate up. It can be difficult, but it's definitely a skill-based game that you improve at over time. Pretty low graphics requirements, too, only downside is it takes a lot of space to install.

Quintillus said:

Lately I've been playing a fair amount of Table Tennis. It's a surprisingly fun game, and does a pretty good job of keeping the heart rate up. It can be difficult, but it's definitely a skill-based game that you improve at over time. Pretty low graphics requirements, too, only downside is it takes a lot of space to install.

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I love Table Tennis ! But lately, my server is having trouble finding other players to match me with. There are very few players around here.
In the last few years i've been playing the Coin Collecting game. It's a very hard easter-egg-hunt type of game, but i'm hooked ! Gotta catch 'em all !

Heretic_Cata said:

I love Table Tennis ! But lately, my server is having trouble finding other players to match me with. There are very few players around here.
In the last few years i've been playing the Coin Collecting game. It's a very hard easter-egg-hunt type of game, but i'm hooked ! Gotta catch 'em all !

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Yeah, I've been lucky in that I have a few IRL friends who are also into Table Tennis, so we just do a LAN setup. There is a local matchmaking server around somewhere, but I think it relocated last year and I don't know its new IP address.

I haven't done much Coin Collecting myself. I've got a few unusual ones, and some that the Danes developed that have odd features like circles in the middle (maybe they were inspired by CDs?), but like Gamersgate Blue Coins, it's mostly currency to me.

*bump*
Can't find anything interesting. Might give World of warships a go. Released today, I think. Is it just really slow on game releases now?

I've been playing defense grid 2, no time for my regular dota obsession. It's fun but short, beat all missions already, did a couple super grinders, gets kind of dull. It's too similar to DG1.

Loppan Torkel said:

*bump*
Can't find anything interesting. Might give World of warships a go. Released today, I think. Is it just really slow on game releases now?

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Just make sure to horde free exp for higher levels, as with all WG games the stock / unupgraded ships being placed in high tier matches is just frustrating as hell. Its to make you spend money on a free game.
Great fun, I play my doubles which is good for an hour.

FriendlyFire said:

Just make sure to horde free exp for higher levels, as with all WG games the stock / unupgraded ships being placed in high tier matches is just frustrating as hell. Its to make you spend money on a free game.
Great fun, I play my doubles which is good for an hour.

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What do you mean 'horde free xp'?

He means hoard.

I'd say a game I found really great on all level but yet is pretty much unknown, is Kingdom of Amalur : Reckoning. It's huge, with tons of side quests and large regions, but with a definite main quest having a definite ending, a very engaging gameplay and a good writing.
Only big flaw : becomes too quickly too easy. Start in "hard" and avoid crafting, it really destroy the challenge.

Idk if it's unknown, more like it just flopped pretty badly commercially. I had a thread about it a while back like over a year ago maybe. I picked it up, was intrigued but it plays too much like a single player mmorpg imo. I'll have to give it a second look though when I get time. In the middle of moving and haven't gamed at all in two weeks.

civvver said:

Idk if it's unknown, more like it just flopped pretty badly commercially. I had a thread about it a while back like over a year ago maybe. I picked it up, was intrigued but it plays too much like a single player mmorpg imo. I'll have to give it a second look though when I get time. In the middle of moving and haven't gamed at all in two weeks.

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Actually, it didn't even "flop" (it sold 3 millions units), it's just that the investment was so huge it didn't break even (it needed something like SEVEN millions sales for that). It just... well, wasn't talked much about.

It's true it feels like a SP MMO, but in a good way (that is : huge open world) but without the drawback that would hamper a solo game (you don't require a group, the story is good, the writing is good, the gameplay feels more like a pure action game and not a static lag-reliant one, etc.).

I accidentally found about it when killing time at a friend's, and I was pretty impressed. One VERY good game IMO, and one of the best surprise I had.

Well I guess it was only a matter of time before Akka broke or was replaced by a defective clone.

Kingdoms of Amalur... I actually finished that game. I... I mean it's not as bad as some would have you believe, but it is the one game that made me say, in the end "This is the last time I finish a game just for the sake of finishing it". About halfway through, I wasn't having that much fun anymore.

Like you say, it is huge, and it is indeed in many ways a single-player MMO, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I loved just going around and exploring World of Warcraft, so it was fun doing something similar in KoA. I'd say the WoW world is a lot denser with interesting stuff though.

I personally thought the story was not engaging at all. Some of the "main side quests" which gave you special card abilities when you finished them had deeper meanings and lore and were okay. The main quest itself was a bit tedious. At the halfway mark I started avoiding pretty much all minor sidequests.

The dungeons were pretty bad. Extremely long and padded corridors of easily defeated enemies. Often seemingly copy-pasted. I would have removed 90% of them and the game's length would have been pretty decent still. Especially since I had the DLC, which was just overkill. I should probably not have played the DLC, but it was pretty good in itself. Just added too much time.

My main feeling towards the game was tediousness. The combat was fun, building the character was very fun and original, the sights were nice, some of the lore was okay-ish and mildly interesting. But still, at the end I was quite glad it was over and, as I said, I swore to stop playing games when they felt like a chore. So it felt like a chore, and there must have been a reason for it.

That's what happened to me with darksiders. ~15 hours in, all the fights exactly the same, all the jump from platform A to platform B exactly the same, never finished.