What are you guys playing now?

My #1 pet peeve with Civ5 is all the empty space on the map.

Antilogic said:

My #1 pet peeve with Civ5 is all the empty space on the map.

Click to expand...

Not only that, but the AI will throw cities all over the map because #420yoloswagblazeitnomaintenancemodifiersfordistance.

I prefer CivIV's system of actual empire management.

Max Payne 3

Despite the change to Sao Paulo it definitely keeps at least a decent amount of the gritty noire feel from the first two games, it is just a lot more colourful. Still pretty dirty though. It probably has more time in cutscenes than actually playing but I am quite enjoying it, although I wish it wouldn't constantly switch to Max wielding a pistol for and after every cutscene when I was using a shotgun or rifle beforehand.

bhavv said:

When did you ever run serfdom instead of slavery or caste system in Civ IV? Oh right, never.

Just how OP was pyramids & representation over HR? <---------------------------------> Much x infinity.

How great were aggressive and protective traits? Oh right, they were the most underpowered.

How much did trying to get an early religion instead of worker techs cripple your economy at the start? Too much.

I built 5 cities on deity. And now I'm at 0% science slider and still on negative GPT, oh noes! Meanwhile the AI has 15-20 cities each with no problems. Awesome balance!

Civ IV was very good, but it probably had the worst balance flaws out of the entire series.

Click to expand...

Everything you are saying is not a design flaw, it's just the design. Civ4 maintenance was a great system. Civ2 and 3 were literally city spam. Spam the most cities or you lose. I'm glad civ4 changed that and civ5 uses it too but with happiness instead of gold sliders. Saying civ4 city balancing system was bad and civ5's is great is just ignorant since both use very similar limiting factors approached in different ways. You build more cities, your maintenance/unhappiness goes up and you have to combat that somehow.

I did actually run serfdom quite often. Get to state property and bang out a million watermills and then try to say it's not powerful.

Bastion is great so far. I love love love the art style, it's a beautiful game.

IMO Civ5 penalizes the player the most for having too many cities. I say this as someone who not-irregularly goes broke in Civ4 due to building too many cities. When I've really miscalculated, I've been broke for nearly a thousand years at a time. But it's still less of a penalty (and less unfun of a penalty) than the happiness penalties in Civ5, IMO.

I've been playing Halo 2 for XBox 1.0. The best in the series, IMO, and the XBox 1.0 is much more reliable than the 360.

Quintillus said:

I've been playing Halo 2 for XBox 1.0. The best in the series, IMO, and the XBox 1.0 is much more reliable than the 360.

Click to expand...

3 was my favorite. I've never really understood why so many people praise 2 as the best, I thought the online play in 3 was significantly better.

Space Run on steam, check out my thread for it, its an amazingly original and addictive tower building strategic game in space.

On hard difficulty it can take days to figure out how to perfectly 5 star some of the levels.

Zack said:

Have you played BNW? Having only 3-4 cities max is generally the best strategy unless you're going for domination.

Click to expand...

This is my main issue with Civ5, so much about it seems to discourage building a massive empire (which is something I love to do). Civ5 and Civ4 both have good limitations on early game expansion, creating tension between rapid expansion and developing a few powerful cities. However, later on in Civ4 you can start either conquering a massive empire or doing a settler backfill to grab the less desirable spots once your economy can support the drain. In Civ5 that isn't really possible. Sure, you can puppet cities you conquer but that doesn't give me the same level of satisfaction as getting a new city to rule and manage.


Oh, and I'm starting a character in Fallout: New Vegas as an unarmed/limited melee fighter. I didn't realize how cathartic it was to literally punch a gecko's head off.

Zack said:

Bastion is great so far. I love love love the art style, it's a beautiful game.

Click to expand...

Do you have a controller? I wasn't that into the game when I first got it but once I swapped in an xbox controller instead of mouse it got a lot better. Kind of weird but the game just seemed to flow more nicely. Good game.

civvver said:

Do you have a controller? I wasn't that into the game when I first got it but once I swapped in an xbox controller instead of mouse it got a lot better. Kind of weird but the game just seemed to flow more nicely. Good game.

Click to expand...

I tried it at first with the mouse. I like it a lot more with the controller.

Ajidica said:

This is my main issue with Civ5, so much about it seems to discourage building a massive empire (which is something I love to do). Civ5 and Civ4 both have good limitations on early game expansion, creating tension between rapid expansion and developing a few powerful cities. However, later on in Civ4 you can start either conquering a massive empire or doing a settler backfill to grab the less desirable spots once your economy can support the drain. In Civ5 that isn't really possible. Sure, you can puppet cities you conquer but that doesn't give me the same level of satisfaction as getting a new city to rule and manage.

Click to expand...

I don't mind it. My favorite thing to do is OCC anyways.

Train Fever. It really is like a non-grid and modern version of Transport Tycoon which is awesome by the way! Although I'm sad there aren't airplanes or monorails... yet.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam. A couple of hours during weekends. I did play civ5 (complete) for a while during the summer. I like it better than civ4, but it's a timesucker. I guess Witcher 3 is my next game, outside some minor ones. I'll try out Sunless Sea sometime this autumn too.

Leonel said:

Train Fever. It really is like a non-grid and modern version of Transport Tycoon which is awesome by the way! Although I'm sad there aren't airplanes or monorails... yet.

Click to expand...

Is this anything like railroad tycoon?

Maniacal said:

Max Payne 3

Despite the change to Sao Paulo it definitely keeps at least a decent amount of the gritty noire feel from the first two games, it is just a lot more colourful. Still pretty dirty though. It probably has more time in cutscenes than actually playing but I am quite enjoying it, although I wish it wouldn't constantly switch to Max wielding a pistol for and after every cutscene when I was using a shotgun or rifle beforehand.

Click to expand...

I beat this game a couple months ago, enjoyed my experience. At first I thought the game was "ok", mainly because I thought it abandoned its roots.. but they made up for it. a bit bare to me at the beginning.. and I didn't like the story.

I wish there was a bit more of that noir stuff in there, not to mention the dream sequences, or whatever they were. There wasn't enough of that in there. Instead all they had was max payne saying something noir-like for 2 seconds, and then it was back to a regular shoot em up game. Bit disappointing in that regard, but it didn't really detract from the game overall. It's just that they turned it a bit into a mainstream style console style game and turned their backs a bit on the noir style weird pc game that it used to be. A great game if i pretend that it isn't a max payne game. If you don't, I think it's a good max payne game.

spent over a day downloading a ridiculous 7.6gb of tf2 updates. Worth it though

Zack said:

3 was my favorite. I've never really understood why so many people praise 2 as the best, I thought the online play in 3 was significantly better.

Click to expand...

For online multiplayer, 3 might be better. I've mainly played Halo as a LAN game. And for that, the multiplayer support is great. One small, but very nice area where Halo 2 is better for LANs is that it's possible for one player to change their control scheme without the overlay covering the entire screen for that XBox.

But moreso, it's just that the maps are really good, and the weapons are really fun and well-balanced. IMO the additions like health-drains and circular shield-things and radar jammers in Halo 3 actually detract from the experience for non-serious players (although the use-anywhere lifts can be quite fun). Going back to the maps, they're really well designed for both tense atmospheres and team games. There's something that's just right about maps like Lockout and Ivory Tower.

I'd put either Halo 1 or Halo 3 as second-best. Halo 3 for 360 is still a strong game, but Halo 1 for PC is also a strong contender. Some 1920x1200 Boarding Action or Hang 'em High may not quite equal Lockout, but it's close.

cardgame said:

spent over a day downloading a ridiculous 7.6gb of tf2 updates. Worth it though

Click to expand...

Combined with not actually playing it, that's why I uninstalled TF2. Seemed like nearly every time I logged on to Steam there were a couple hundred megabytes of updates. I know the hats have to look nice and all, but that's a lot of frequent updates.

I was referring more to how 3 had more game modes and a smoother overall experience, not necessarily the gameplay itself, if that makes sense. That said, it's been years since I played either, and I never actually owned a Halo game.

Path of Exile. Starts out slow, but I'm now on merciless (the hardest difficulty) in a softcore league and I'm really enjoying it.

The desync is really the only flaw that I can find with the game. Everything else about it is very compelling / interesting / fun.

goddamnit

another 30mb update today, and when that finishes and I press play, it tells me there's been another update. You're killin' me, Valve.

Besides TF2 I'm finally developing a real interest in ciV