What games have you been playing lately?

Slippin Jimmy wrote: »

Started playing sid meier's civilization v today. Pretty decent game and very addictive. Played it for about 6 hours straight.

Can't believe it has been out so long. Do many boardsies play it?

On release it was nothing to write home about but I still put about 350 hours into it.
Gods and Kings was an improvement but even so I probably only put another 150 odd hours into it.

But after BNW came out I think it changed everything.

I've put in 1500 hours in total now.

That's about 5% of my waking life since it was released.

There's just so much to do in it. It never mattered that I'd usually get bored 3/4 of the way through a game because I was so dominant and only finish about 1% of the games I started (I'd say I've only got about two dozen victories in all the time I've played it).
I'd usually just want to start again and try something new.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I'm done with the game now and it'll probably be at least 5 years before a new CIV game is in the same state as CIV5 currently is.
When 5 was released you had a situation where they had to release a game with half the features of the previous one because CIV4 had had 2 expansions to go along with it.

So instead they have to fix underlying problems with the previous game to try and make up for it - they tinkered with the culture system, quite successfully, although it further improved in each expansion, they introduced hex tiles, which you couldn't imagine doing without now and, in a bid to fix combat, they added 1 unit per tile which has introduced as many problems as it solved.

For the next installment it's hard to imagine what they're going to do - when the problems are of the scale of fixing the AI (especially naval AI - if you want an easy win go England on an archipelago map) and the combat system or trying to "fix" systems that aren't really all that broken like social policies, religion and the tech tree, you're just as likely to make things worse as make them better.

Honestly, you could have a 4-year degree course examining the CIV franchise, if not just CIV5. From the tactics and gameplay, to more "meta" stuff, like why it's so bloody addictive, it's a quite singular game.

sirboby wrote: »

i think it would be cool if they added a religion victory.

And maybe refine the diplomatic victory, right now you can build an ecomony buy out all the city states and win, even if you piss off all the other civ's

The oldest special victory - science, which has been there since at least CIV2, is still pretty much the same and works fine.

Domination is quite straightforward - taking capitals is better than having to completely destroy everyone else, as was the case in some earlier games.

Religion would be easy enough to do - spread it to all enemy capitals or something like that - right now that would be too easy, but I think if you sped up how fast religion travels in the game and made it more of a minute-to-minute balancing act it would be more dynamic and interesting.
I think that would benefit religion in general.

Culture is ok. It feels very distinct from the other victories and I quite enjoy it. It's just a bit of a slog.
You can currently slingshot by stockpiling great artists, musicians and all that, and focusing on certain building types, just the same as science victory with great scientist and research agreement slingshots*, but even so, it always takes an awful lot longer for me than science or domination and you generally have a small empire while doing it and you try to be peaceful, so you end up spending your time doing **** all, waiting for the culture-gauges to fill up on the enemy players.

Diplomatic is the trickiest. It's the most open to cheesing as things stand.
Unless you buy all the city states, it's reliant on other players, which doesn't make sense in a competitive game - why would they vote for you to lose the game?

Either it should be scrapped or work along the same lines as culture, where your interactions have an effect on other nations that work towards a victory condition, and enemies don't have a direct influence over that progress - you can be diplomatically influential even if everyone else hates you.

At it's core I think that victory condition most exposes the dissonance between the roleplaying part of the game, where it's you pretending to run a real country, versus a game, where other players are trying to win.
If enemies can be made to vote for you, it feels un-game-like, whereas if they vote against you for no particular reason, other than stopping you from winning, it breaks the fantasy and is too game-like.

It's interesting in Endless Legend - diplomacy requires spending a resource - influence. You could have the opposite, where it generates a resource, and that contributes to win conditions. So you're further rewarded for being active in diplomacy, of any sort, whether it's declaring war, or handling trade agreements, beyond the material rewards of those interactions.

*FYI, great scientists give the amount of research you've generated in the previous x number of turns, where x varies by game speed - I think it's 8 turns on standard speed.
So, build academies up until around halfway through the game, and then keep the rest until you've entered the atomic era, bee-line to spaceship tech, pop all your scientists and voila - you've technologically gone from the year 1900 to 2050 in one turn.

Links234 wrote: »

Finished Witcher 2 now

Very, very pleased because it had been sitting unplayed for over 2 years.

Now, whether to dive straight into Witcher 3 or give it a little?

Go straight in, what did you do at the end? Read up on where your save file needs to be.

Kill or spare?

Links234 wrote: »

Spare

I was very tempted to fight, but loved that the game gave me the option to spare him, so I had to go for that. Maybe it's too much Undertale, but not killing feels pretty rewarding to me right now.

I did the same and well.......

Very minor spoiler for 3, has no bearing on main story.

Links234 wrote: »

Getting hyped, I'm about to wake the white wolf!

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

That game pushes Zelda OOT as my favourite game ever. It is absolutley brilliant in every way.

I was annoyed at my ending so its in the fridge until the 2nd DLC comes out and I play them both together.

Links234 wrote: »

Damn, I think my machine is actually struggling a bit with this...

The Evil Within is the only other game that's been making my machine show it's age, so far I've been keeping up with most things without issue. Wolfenstein: The New Order, Metal Gear Solid V, Vermintide, most recent games I've got still seem to run really well, Witcher 3 kinda hit me pretty hard though. I'm not a framerate purist or anything, but it was seriously, seriously noticible and it does not feel good at all. Going to try play around with some settings tomorrow, but it's gonna kill me if I have to play this in 720p, because it does look seriously gorgeous.

The foliage draw distance helped me a lot

Hardcore in Diablo 3 season 5 - decently geared crusader with a thorns build, completely immortal on torment X - managed to get on the leaderboards for a level 65 greater rift too rank 400andsomething but yeah, it's a rank and it's up there

Darkest Dungeon full release - loads of little changes and the final dungeon is unlocked too, great craic, also hairpullingly frustrating at times, but fun for what it is