In What Electronic Entertainment Have You Been Partaking #18: Reticulating Splines

[amadeus]

Guess who found where the alliance variable is stored?

A multipolar world that includes all of the true great powers.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

So in Skyrim (special edition), the archer completely missed the horse thief and he began running back and forth and then after I got out of the character creation screen he just stood there staring at me

At least the cart didn't flip on me this time.

 

[Broken_Erika]

You need this mod

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

 

[Takhisis]

Peter Griffin to the rescue!

 

[AmazonQueen]

Its not on fire yet, disappointed.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I haven't played any MMOs in a long time. I don't really know what the state of the genre is. I might be interested, depending somewhat on the game.

1. I'm playing Path of Exile anyway, as mentioned above. I've only ever played it solo, though, so I don't know what playing as a group entails. It isn't quite an MMO, fwiw, it's an "action RPG" like Diablo. On the plus side, there are no factions in that game, so a group can accommodate any mixture of characters and anybody can play whatever they want.

I've no idea what other games are even out there nowadays.

In PoE when you play in a party or private league, three main things happen: all monsters get buffed, experience points earned get a big boost and loot improves. The more people playing together, the bigger the buffs. Otherwise, its the same. Leveling can go much faster with an additional person or two.

I'm playing Heist too. I decided that I would wait a week for the kinks to get ironed out so I farmed Oni goroshi with 4 scions and got two swords and pretty good loot. I then headed into the game with 2 six links. One with molten strike and the other with cleave. MS clears so so well. I'm liking the Heist aspect and have been figuring it out, but I don't like playing through the Acts; by the time I get to 6 I'm ready to move on to mapping, but can't. My standard guys are so much fun to play that I keep going back there and doing content I never get to in the leagues.

I'm always up for some two party play.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

 

[Ajidica]

Nah, you need Really Useful Dragons:

EDIT: How could I forget two other essential mods?

 

[Phrossack]

It's a shame I utterly broke my Skyrim installation with an excess of mods and mod managers I didn't know how to use. Clearly there should be a mod manager manager

 

[AdamCrock]

It's a shame I utterly broke my Skyrim installation with an excess of mods and mod managers I didn't know how to use. Clearly there should be a mod manager manager

Modding Bethesda games is a form of art It feels like You're a developer yourself. I think that's what makes people love their games because if You invest some time in making something You'll love it more . The only exception is Fallout 76 but let's not get into that ....

 

[Lexicus]

It's a shame I utterly broke my Skyrim installation with an excess of mods and mod managers I didn't know how to use. Clearly there should be a mod manager manager

You were trying to cross the border, right? Got caught in that imperial ambush, just like us, and that thief over there

 

[amadeus]

Spoiler :

Ahistorically, Ethiopia and Somalia begin the game at war with Somalia attempting to take over the country. The real Ogaden War happened in the late 1970's with sporadic fighting continuing in the 1980's.

Soviet-backed Ethiopia wins over Somalia 100% of the time. A weakened Somalia, hostile to the United States, is a good target for espionage actions as they'll be less effective in countering them. Again, this is ahistorical as Somalia, despite being ruled by the socialist Siad Barre, had close relations with the U.S. during this time. For context, Barre overthrew the Somali government in 1969 and was briefly allied to the Soviet Union. Following the Ethiopian revolution that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian Derg aligned the country to the Soviets. Barre's regime broke with the USSR as Moscow couldn't both support Ethiopia and Somalia's irredentist claims to Ethiopia's Ogaden region.

Somalia in turn sought new allies, and the U.S. was happy to supply Barre with aid to counterbalance the Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa. Barre also courted then-apartheid South Africa, giving them landing rights at Mogadishu airport for South African Airways flights, so for some time in the 1980's SAA international flights would make stopovers in Mogadishu as South Africa was for obvious reasons officially shunned by the majority of black African states (minus Malawi, ruled by the octogenarian Hastings Banda.)

Given the limitations of the game programming, it makes sense that Somalia would be hostile to the U.S. with the government values they're assigned versus that of the U.S. and other capitalist powers. So I used this advantage to further weaken Somalia and increase my own political power; this will my foreign policy actions more likely to succeed if I should decide to strengthen my relations with friendly countries. I can build closer economic relationships with my allies, and this results in mutual GNP growth that makes the USSR and other hostile countries relatively weaker as the absolute strength of the Western allies grow.

Since covert actions incur an "ethics" penalty, my human rights rating also declined to the lowest point in the game. If I build up my allies economies and diplomatic relations with them, this will also increase my ethic rating and I'll probably go back to having a more open society. The openness/closedness of a country appears to me to be simply a cosmetic effect and has no noticeable impact on gameplay as far as I'm aware through my extensive testing.

 

[local_hero]

It's hard to remember and realise just how much you can hate Mario Kart while playing it.

I was leading at the finish line on the final track of the grand prix cup when I was overtaken. I was so close to achieve a three star rank (win all races) on the cup on 200 cc.

Gah. Despicable.

 

[cardgame]

Squad 1.0 released last week and it's absolutely incredible the progress that's been made since early days. Been dumping absolutely loads of time into it. And I've managed to become a fair pilot! Not an easy feat, believe me.

 

[H4run]

Squad 1.0 released last week and it's absolutely incredible the progress that's been made since early days. Been dumping absolutely loads of time into it. And I've managed to become a fair pilot! Not an easy feat, believe me.

Are you still playing Bannerlord dude? I thought there was a huge update just few days ago.

 

[Zardnaar]

Tested out the Forgotten Queen mid for Stellaris vs a X10 crisis.

Built a 5 million or so fleet power fleet. The games lagging really badly though as I also have 7000 pops.

Managed to wreck an AI fleet around 3.8 million fleet power. Unbidden has 20 odd fleets like that though.

Can't produce enough dark matter so had to make some weaker ships due to resources.

Using a mega shipyard to mass produce 20 disposable class battleships at a time. They're fast, hit hard and are squishy.

My slower shipyards produce Star Guardian battleships equipped with dark matter shields, propulsion and energy source.

Game can't handle fleets of 1000 odd battleships though.

 

[Farm Boy]

Any particular desire to dweeb out about simple but effective army compositions in Total Warhammer, Syn? I don't have the DLC past mortal empires, and I certainly haven't played all the factions that come with the base game, but I figure that's normal. Game is huge. I've mucked about with Empire, Dwarves, Brettonia, High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen, and some with the Vampires. Seven campaigns-ish, not bad for a game like that before first massive burnout I don't think. Trying to figure out which army has the most fire and forget heroes if you don't like mucking with them. Probably dwarves since you can kinda treat them as a unit of anvil infantry unless it's an engineer. Still have to level them up tho. High elves, maybe. The dorks sort of get everything.

 

[Synobun]

Any particular desire to dweeb out about simple but effective army compositions in Total Warhammer, Syn? I don't have the DLC past mortal empires, and I certainly haven't played all the factions that come with the base game, but I figure that's normal. Game is huge. I've mucked about with Empire, Dwarves, Brettonia, High Elves, Dark Elves, and some with the Vampires. Six campaigns-ish, not bad for a game like that before first massive burnout I don't think. Trying to figure out which army has the most fire and forget heroes if you don't like mucking with them. Probably dwarves since you can kinda treat them as a unit of anvil infantry unless it's an engineer. Still have to level them up tho. High elves, maybe. The dorks sort of get everything.

I cheat in single player, so compositions end up not mattering once you get past a certain number.

Except with the Chaos invasion in the first game. Even having all my settlements churning out mega armies as fast as they can, that event somehow still crushed me.

I only ever played as the Vampires in the first game. It was on my old laptop, and it was very much not up to the task. I have the second game now and the new laptop but haven't gotten around to trying it out. Don't think I have any of the DLCs...

If there's, like, a go-to composition that's all-around great, I would be keen in knowing. Like, are flying units ever worth having?

 

[Farm Boy]

If you can support them economically, not easy, an entire stack of the griffawn things as Bretonnia is really stupid strong against everything. Even better if Leoncour is on the field. If you're lizardmen, an entire stack of the (non-ancient) stegodons is hard to top. In both instances, pick up a caster life mage(use the army commander if you want) and just use them to heal units with large health pools

Some flying units are great, just spensive. The early ones are not. Bats and harpies might be about the weakest units in the game. I find as a general rule I usually wind up with 3 or 4 heroes, 2 artillery on a non-good-artillery faction, 4 artillery on a artillery faction, 4 - 6 ranged units, and the rest just all anvil to hold them in place while the artillery and ranged do the work. Works with elves, throw in a dragon or two for flavor. Works with dwarves, throw in gyrocopters or fancy cannons for flavor, works with Bretonnia even, but their anvil infantry is awful, so you have to save the fight with flanking charges. I still only even run a couple units of cav. I can't mange the micro on keeping more units than than cycle charging . The charge bonus only lasts about 10 seconds, and after it's gone cavalry is usually a poor cost proposition.