What Videogames Have You Been Playing XXI: Going for the Platinum!

[FredLC]

All right, 1000 posts reached, so time for the next chapter:

Here are the previous ones:

• What Video Games have you been playing I: My Muffintop Expands!
• What Video Games have you been playing II: Have you finished that backlog?
• What Video Games have you been playing III: You're gonna need a bigger boat.
• What video games have you been playing? 4
• What video games have you been playing V: the return of the subtitle
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing VI: Because There Are No Elections In Video Games
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing VII: The Real Ending is Locked Behind a Paywall
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing? Eight times I've died...
• What video games have you been playing IX: Now with 4K VR!
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing, Part 10: Or; A Shameful Display!
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing #11: I should go
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing #12: Rage Quit - ain't my thing
• What Video games have you been playing #13 Now with CGA graphics!
• What Videogames are you playing? ΙΔ - Meet your doom
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing #15: Computer not on fire yet? Better add more mods!
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing #16: Retirement Party For The Active Mind
• What Video Games Have You Been Playing XVII: REMAIN INDOORS!!
• In What Electronic Entertainment Have You Been Partaking #18: Reticulating Splines
• In What Electronic Entertainment Have You Been Partaking #19: Cyberpunked
• What Videogames have You Been Playing XX: Virtual Imperialism
  

Enjoy!

Regards .

 

[Takhisis]

Let's start with an indie game.

SuperTuxKart.

 

[Hygro]

Ahaha Fred makes a rare appearance and snags a serial thread

 

[Synobun]

Still no gaming.

I have Borderlands Pre-Sequel, Stellaris, ME: Legendary Edition, and SWTOR installed, and have had them installed for weeks now. I just haven't managed to convince myself to start any of them.

 

[Strong Reaction]

I am playing Atom: Rpg, before that I was playing 7.62mm High Calibre. I have S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky cued up.

 

[Zkribbler]

Sims 3: Isla Paradiso. Best of the Sims games, but so damned expensive. Takes some adroit option selection to avoid some previously purchased abysmal extensions.

I'm playing as a horrendous fat guy striving for Master of the Arts, i.e. 10 ranking of both painting and guitar playing. I'm moving up in my my chef's career. I shouldn't have decided to have a parrot.

 

[Takhisis]

Still no gaming.

Rants thread is that way →

 

[Sofista]

Sims 3: Isla Paradiso. Best of the Sims games, but so damned expensive. Takes some adroit option selection to avoid some previously purchased abysmal extensions.

I'm playing as a horrendous fat guy striving for Master of the Arts, i.e. 10 ranking of both painting and guitar playing. I'm moving up in my my chef's career. I shouldn't have decided to have a parrot.

Consider using this, before committing to a long game.

 

[Synobun]

Sims 3 is my favourite of the series (ignoring the childhood nostalgia of the first). It's too bad the game is held together with sidewalk gum.

 

[MaryKB]

I like #4 because of the building options and the create-a-sim.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

usual suspects of dominions 5 mp (recently rushed someone else as ma xibalba, rather than being rushed lol) and pdox games, but lately i have gotten back into ftl, with the multiverse mod

they keep adding content, and it's in great shape now. trying to get a win with each ship on highest difficulty settings (maybe excepting the limit ships), though there are well over a hundred now.

 

[warpus]

I've been playing Kerbal Space Program. Trying a new approach to the game, to mix things up a bit. Instead of one mission at a time I am trying to simulate being a real space program, where a bunch of stuff is happening at once. The alarm clock mod is helping me do this without going crazy

First I spent days and days getting a fleet of about 30 interplanetary ships in orbit of Kerbin. Each of these ships took at least 2 launches to assemble and is custom designed for a specific mission to a specific planet.

To help facilitate construction of the fleet I put 4 refueling space stations in orbit first. As each of the 30 ships was being constructed, it first immediately docked with one of the refueling stations, where it either refueled or met up with its other significant half. This approach made it easier to get my 30 ships in orbit w/ 100% fuel without having to schedule a dedicated refueling mission for each of the ships, which would have resulted in 33% more launches required overall.

I built a dedicated crew delivery system and am using it to send crews up to the ships before they depart for each mission. I am sending 2 pilots, 3 scientists, and 3 engineers to each of the 6 planets, although a couple planets are getting extra crew complements, since they ended up getting more funding. For instance, the moon of Duna is getting its own dedicated space station, Duna is getting a rover, and Laythe and the Jool system is getting some extra stuff too.

I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of all the missions to each planet, so that I can make sure that each ship has all the stuff it needs before it departs, and that all the right parts and crews end up in all the right places.

So far I have made it through 2 launch windows and have launched 8 of the 30 ships to 2 planets (Dres and Moho). It looks like 1 of those 8 ships might have a problem of a low fuel nature.. It might not be able to make it in orbit around Moho. I have contingency plans in place, there is a lot of time and RCS fuel on board to maybe make it work.. Alternatively, there will already be assets in place around Moho when this ship arrives, so it might be possible to dock up and refuel it a bit.. although that would be an incredibly sketchy procedure.. 7 out of 8 is great in terms of success rate, but I don't really want to lose that 1 ship. It has 2 engineers on board! If anything goes wrong, I am going to be designing rescue missions.

We'll see if my 7/8 prognosis is correct.. but for now I have to deal with the upcoming Jool/Laythe window. Everything is almost ready to go, except for 2 crew delivery runs I am hoping to squeeze into one mission profile.. Then the Duna window is right after that. Alltogether that will be 11 ships blasting off to those two planets.

Other than this my space program has a space station around Kerbin with a small crew.. and I already raided the crew from the Munar Space Station to send on some of these missions. This is the first time I'm setting out to other planets in this save, so it's an exciting time for my space program. I've also actually never been to Moho or Eeloo.. and I can't remember if I've been to Dres.. so I can't wait to see them. I also have some visual mods installed for the first time, so that motivates me more to see some of these places. Some of them have also probably changed a bit since I've seen them last.. since I haven't visited Laythe in a while.. and some of these other places

 

[EgonSpengler]

The Long Dark

My new Interloper run is going well. Day 35, I think. I've spent almost a month in Mystery Lake, honing my survival skills (including my own marksmanship with the bow) and sewing up some clothing. I've finally got the four wolf pelts I need for the coat, but I'm cutting it close. Morning temperatures are around -20F/-29C now, I'm getting blizzards every 2 or 3 days, and it's going to keep getting worse for another couple of weeks.

Hunting wolves is of course fraught. I shot one wolf and he ran off and I never found him. I shot at another, missed, and got into a tussle that took me three days to recover from. I never found either of those wolves after I wounded them. I did have one great moment. One advantage to hunting wolves, rather than deer, is that they'll follow you. Quite a long distance, sometimes. I lured a wolf from the forest glade near the little collapsed cabin, all the way back to the camp office, then steered it into a deer near the train tracks. The deer ran for the lake and the wolf caught up to it, literally on the doorstep of the camp office, where I've made my temporary home. Then of course I was able to get close enough to drop the wolf with a single arrow. I ended up having to fight/kill 6 wolves for only 4 pelts, and I lost 3 arrows in the process, but it was worth it just for that one. I love it when a plan comes together.

Spoiler :

 

[red_elk]

I never found either of those wolves after I wounded them.

Crows usually point at fresh corpses. Can be seen from far away in clear weather.

 

[Akka]

I have been replaying a good amount of The Settlers. Yeah, the first one from 1993.
It actually can run on SVGA without a single problem with Dosbox, and is among these classics that hold surprisingly well the test of time. Even the graphics actually fits really well and in some way look better than the newer version - they are really cute to this day, and it's really relaxing to watch them doing their jobs while you plan logistics.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Crows usually point at fresh corpses. Can be seen from far away in clear weather.

Indeed. Their altitude seems like it's at a fixed height, or at least within a range, so terrain can make them harder to spot. There's often a corpse or a carcass in some of the deep valleys, and sometimes the circling birds are basically at ground-level.

 

[J-man]

Sims 3 is my favourite of the series (ignoring the childhood nostalgia of the first). It's too bad the game is held together with sidewalk gum.

Sims 3 is such a great game. Open world, so many things that you can do without feeling it's a bunch of mini-games stitched together and lots of stylizing options. I never bothered to buy the sims 4.

 

[Takhisis]

Went on a four-hour Doom 2 bender. DOS games remain some of the best games ever.

 

[Quintillus]

My EU4 campaign has reached 1750. Been a long time since one lasted this long.

1650 - 1710, roughly, were the Sixty Years' War with the Commonwealth. Three actual wars took place in that span, lasting 7, 11, and 10 years. The Poles won the first one, we won the last two. After the last one, the Ottomans invaded the Commonwealth, and after that they decided to focus on going west into Bohemia and Brunswick instead of fighting the Horde again.

So, after recovering from that, the Chagatai Horde decided to focus elsewhere too, and now rules most of China, having recently taken most of southern China from Siam. It's a bit tougher for out steppe hordes to win in the jungle than on the plains, but thanks to spending 32,000 ducats on boosting our manpower (nearly doubling it in the process), we're also more resilient and less depending on those huge plains victories.

Will I play through until 1820? Maybe. We need to have at least one more showdown with the Commonwealth, and we have a lot of claims on Qara Qoyunlu and our erstwhile allies the Ottomans, whose army dwarfs everyone else's, including ours. We can also proclaim ourselves the successors of the Yuan Dynasty if we take the rest of Manchu's lands (they never quite formed Qing, despite becoming Emperors), and have good reason to build a navy to invade Ashikaga after they betrayed us several times. But nearly three centuries in (start date 1466), it no longer feels like we're seriously threatened by more powerful neighbors. Although the Ottomans going unfriendly could change that.

China did completely change our economy. From 1/4 of what Poland had, to pretty much the same size. Strong enough that those 32,000 ducats to almost-double manpower was borrowed money - maybe the most I've ever borrowed in EU4 - and it still didn't sink our economy. Though I am still making payments 15 years later. It's like a mortgage, ought to be paid off in 30 years, and at 3.5% APR it's not that bad.

 

[Kyriakos]

Not sure if @r16 ever plays Victoria II (it would be rather boring, given the ottoman empire there starts with a decent position, in 1836), but there aren't that many different ways to exploit the starting position for Greece.
There are, essentially, three ways to go about it, and all have issues due to the game time being only 100 years:

1 You can just not colonize anyone, and ally with Russia, to declare war on the ottomans during the first oriental crisis (war with Egypt). But Russia won't bother to bring the baltic fleet there, so you will be blockaded and usually this means you end up with at most two new provinces in a peace deal.
1.b You can do the same as above, but ally with France instead. This may lead to more provinces, since France has a decent med navy and will sooner or later defeat the ottoman one. But now there is a larger risk of ottoman mobilization sending enough regiments towards you to control the capital, which will ruin everything. It is doable, of course, with some strategy, but France will first take control of Libya before landing anything in Europe.

2 You could go for a colonial concession (eg from Kongo), which will still allow you to have some income and little enough bb points to (with some luck) manage to ally with Russia or France during the oriental crisis. But usually you will only manage to do so afterwards, which means the ottomans will have partly rebuilt their army. Again, Russia will defeat them for you, but if the oriental crisis is over (and assuming it ends with syria going to the ottomans) it will take more time to finish the war, and the clock is ticking.

3 You could just forget about the oriental crisis and go for a protectorate cb. This makes some sense because you start the game with two modern (steamer) ships, with which you can reach Indonesia and annex an OPM in Borneo, which has previous stones. Then, you can create a new protectorate cb against another OPM just above Singapore, which also produces previous stones. It is in Britain's sphere, but even if they declare war on you there is enough time to annex the OPM - at which point the war automatically ends. This approach will ensure you tons of money, but also that more than a decade will go by without any chance to ally with Russia or France. Ultimately this means defeat, even if you take 1-2 provinces through causing an international crisis.

So yeah, the only realistic* chance you have to become a great power as Victoria II Greece, is scenario 1. If you take over 4 ottoman provinces, you will have enough to then annex the aforementioned OPMs in the the orient, for more money. But it is touch and go, and all depends on that first war, at (usually) 1938-39-40.

*there are other exploits, but even less historical. I don't feel like controlling parts of China - let alone that the ratio of greek to non-greek population in such a case will mean you won't be able to research anything at all... This issue exists (though to a much smaller extent) for method 2 as well (concession from Kongo).

tldr: Victoria II just isn't fun when you need to spend half the game to become a major power.