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Madoushi
May 9, 2003

Some days, you just get up on the wrong side of the bed...
How are you supposed to play AdvertCity?

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Kalenden
Oct 30, 2012

anilEhilated posted:

The info on wiki still stands; off the top of my head the only important thing it doesn't tell you is that there's four companions of which you can pick two to round up your party, and they're all in the first town. The thief is a bit hard to find, you need to dig a tunnel in the graveyard to meet him - all the others you'll most likely meet just by questing.

GhostBoy posted:

- Summons are great meatshields, occasionally useful damage dealers and a handy way of getting to things you cannot reach directly.
- The spell "Rain" is very useful. Wide area and allows you to put out burning things. DOS likes burning things.

Thanks! Will keep in mind.

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


Now that I've dumped a fair few hours into Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I have a few things to share that I found useful:

- the new remote hacking ability is insanely useful, especially with the upgrade. Basically lets you bypass lasers/cameras/turrets with ease, and you can disable bots for 30 seconds without using EMP ammo.

- armor piercing ammo is important in this one. Lots of enemies seem to have helmets so if you want to quietly kill anyone with a gun, you'll need AP ammo to do it if they have a helmet. I feel like even unarmored enemies seem to survive pistol headshots in this game, so investing in the combat rifle is a good choice for any situation. Money is pretty plentiful so don't be shy about buying ammo if you're trigger happy.

- exo suit enemies can be killed/taken down with your melee attack, but only if you stun them with EMP first

- bots can be killed fairly quickly with armor piercing ammo. Stun them with a remote hack or emp ammo first to take them down (relatively) quietly.

- bonus health doesn't appear to degrade over time, so the best practice seems to be popping painkillers to boost up to 200% health as soon as you drop below it. They're plentiful, so no need to hoard them. Hypostims are better for restoring health in combat anyway. Booze will also give you bonus health, if you can stomach the screen blur (I cannot!)

Ainsley McTree fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Nov 8, 2016

duckfarts
Jul 2, 2010

~ shameful ~





Soiled Meat

Madoushi posted:

How are you supposed to play AdvertCity?

not sure if it helps, but this is someone's review from the steam thread a while back

Too Shy Guy posted:

Welp, I think I hosed up. I bought AdvertCity when it was on sale last week for $12 because I've been wanting to try it and thought it would be a good fit for my next review series. Now it looks like Groupees is about to have it in a bundle for $1.25. But you know what? I ain't even mad, and I'll tell you why right now.



I picked up AdvertCity on a lark, being on both a cyberpunk and management kick at the time. I knew going in that the learning curve would be steep, and after a few false starts I got the hang of making money and expanding my operation. As I moved my offices into a towering highrise and set my sights on rival corporations under the harsh glow of my neon billboards and blimps, I started to feel like I had divined all the secrets of the game and would soon grow bored. But this was soon followed by a realization the likes of which I have rarely had from a game, one that elevates this title to true brilliance.

AdvertCity sets you up as the CEO and sole employee of Adsplay, a startup advertising company in a procedurally generated metropolis. Every building and resident belongs to one of a dozen or so megacorporations that run the city, and you get to make your bones by advertising for them. Starting out with stacks of fliers and a limited range of influence, you can earn new technologies like posters and billboards from friendly corps, buy new offices to expand your reach, hire employees to improve your ads, and so on. There's also an internet view where you can post all manner of cat pictures and spam ads as well.

Each kind of ad has strengths and weaknesses depending on where in the city it is placed, in what kind of building, and for what corporation. This then becomes your chief concern, puzzling out which ads go where to earn you the most money and rep. And it's quite a puzzle, because there's no guide or tutorial to making a million bucks. The scant tutorial teaches you how the interface works and gets you set up with a loan and running the most basic ads for pocket change. You have to delve into the procedural descriptions of buildings, corporations, and even ad technology to understand how to ply your trade.

Making your fortune as a shameless advertising mogul is only half the game, however. Once your company becomes a major player in the city, you can set your sights on seizing control of the other corporations. This is how the game is won, by eventually absorbing all of your rivals and taking over the entire city. At first glance, this may seem like an impossible task, since you'll be looking for something to do with your first million dollars and the smallest megacorp might cost thirty million to claim. You'll also run into a confounding ceiling on how much money you can make from your ads, as the resources to produce them (employees) start to catch up to the profits you make.



That's where I was when I started to cool on the game, with my sprawling company humming along and a few easy conquests down, but the remaining megacorps far out of my reach. By that point the game had started to feel like a more interactive clicker game, with me just spamming my most expensive ads over and over for the biggest returns, still not enough to topple my foes. I was beginning to think there was no real strategy to the game, just a long grind up to enormous cash totals again and again. And it turns out I was very, very wrong.

In my quest for the fattest bank account, I started running nothing but colossal blimp ads as quickly as I could for one particular megacorp. I was earning plenty of rep with them and money, but not nearly enough to buy them out. I started to notice that the campaigns themselves were going poorly and the megacorp disliked them, even though they were paying me for them. I stopped the campaigns once my income peaked, and on a lark I took a look at the megacorp's info. What had once been a company valued in the tens of millions was now worth a measly half a mil and falling.

That's when it hit me: I was running an ad agency. I could help grow companies with good ads, or I could run them into the ground with bad ones. All that effort I made in the early game to learn what worked and what didn't could now be turned around to destroy the very companies that had helped me grow. The economy in AdvertCity was far, far more detailed and complex than I gave it credit for, and provided a wealth of strategies for hostile takeovers. I could tank a company's profits with poor ads, boost their competitors with good ones, buy out their buildings to starve them of employees, or drain their bank accounts by running an endless stream of extravagant ads for them.

It's a brilliant strategy game hidden beneath a rough, if stylish, exterior. The graphics are simple polygons and wireframe menus but fit the cyberpunk feel to a T, and the heavy, oppressive soundtrack is the icing on the dystopian cake. The interface can sadly be a pain to deal with, sometimes letting you double-click through to the wrong options or stack up notifications to obscure important info. Performance can also suffer once your operation gets enormous, and I had one audio mishap that forced a restart the first time I went bankrupt. These are all minor issues around a far more major one, the learning curve. If you want to reach the genius buried in this game, you have to work for it. You have to take the time to read, experiment, fail, and try again until it clicks, and you have to do that at every stage of the game. It won't be for everyone, but those who do delve deep into AdvertCity will discover one of the most clever and rewarding strategy games I've ever played.

Vidaeus
Jan 27, 2007

Cats are gonna cat.
I'm after specific, non-spoiler advice for The Witcher 3.

I'm at a very clear point of no return: Isle of the mists. Is there anything I should make sure I do before proceeding? I hate missing quests/content to this kind of thing.

Turtlicious
Sep 17, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Vidaeus posted:

I'm after specific, non-spoiler advice for The Witcher 3.

I'm at a very clear point of no return: Isle of the mists. Is there anything I should make sure I do before proceeding? I hate missing quests/content to this kind of thing.

A.) No, you're not lol. Won't say more then that.

B.) Do any character specific quests before you go forward though, it's your last chance to do those.

Pyromancer
Apr 29, 2011

This man must look upon the fire, smell of it, warm his hands by it, stare into its heart

Vidaeus posted:

I'm after specific, non-spoiler advice for The Witcher 3.

I'm at a very clear point of no return: Isle of the mists. Is there anything I should make sure I do before proceeding? I hate missing quests/content to this kind of thing.

It's more like a chapter end, it will end few quests though, and you not doing them is also a valid outcome that'll have some effect on game:
One is Triss questline to get mages out of Novigrad
The other is new Skellige king/queen questline
There are also some differences in Heart of Stone expansion quests if you do it now, instead of later.

Pyromancer fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Nov 9, 2016

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


I finished Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and have one more tip: the end credits are unskippable and long but there is a cutscene in the middle(!!) of them so stick it out instead of getting up for a drink or something.

Or just look it up on YouTube I guess.


(edited to fix grammar, as the original post was phone-posted while waiting for the credits to end)

Ainsley McTree fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Nov 10, 2016

im cute
Sep 21, 2009

edit: nvm

Zushio
May 8, 2008
Hot tip for any Ubisoft game (Assassin's Creed franchise in particular): the end credits are long as hell.

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Zushio posted:

Hot tip for any Ubisoft game (Assassin's Creed franchise in particular): the end credits are long as hell.

Only some of them are skippable too.

FauxLeather
Nov 7, 2016

Um Bongo
Don't some of them have post-credit cutscenes too? I seem to remember an AA game being rude enough to also skip it if I skipped the credits.

Nebrilos
Oct 9, 2012
Tip for Tales of Symphonia: There is a rare accessory called Sephira which increases money drops from battle by 50%. It can be upgraded with a rune bottle to increase money drops by 100%. You can actually get Sephira as soon as Palmacosta by saving the game at the inn, buying a Grab Bag from the Katz, and resetting if you don't get Sephira.

Xander77
Apr 6, 2009

Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.



A lot of people apparently try playing Dishonored without killing anyone to get the good ending, which is a very boring thing to do on your first playthrough (well, depends on how you go about it, but the tip addresses that). I feel like this should be the very first wiki entry:

- You have a LOT of leeway in terms of killing people before you go into "High Chaos". Don't be afraid of going loud once in a while and don't reach for the reload button every time you're caught while sneaking around.

Lunchmeat Larry
Nov 3, 2012

plus if you end up in High Chaos it tells you at the end of the mission so just be extra careful on the next one, it's really easy to avoid :shrug:

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

Xander77 posted:

Dishonored

My advice for Dishonored is just chill out and roll with it.

  • Don't worry about high or low chaos, do what feels right.
  • Don't reload a savegame if you get spotted. Teleport away and hide, or go nuts and kill everyone in sight.
  • Don't savescum to get the bone charm you want, they're all pretty weak.
  • Go ahead and chug a health/mana potion if you're low, you'll find plenty more.
  • Don't worry about money, there's nothing gamebreaking to buy.

Zomborgon
Feb 19, 2014

I don't even want to see what happens if you gain CHIM outside of a pre-coded system.

Gynovore posted:

My advice for Dishonored is just chill out and roll with it.

[list][*]Don't worry about high or low chaos, do what feels right.
[*]Don't savescum to get the bone charm you want, they're all pretty weak.

That said, if you're leaning low-chaos hug times, then scumming the Strong Arms charm makes this vastly faster and more versatile.

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
Thing about the bad ending in Dishonored: it comes with a considerably more fun final level setup.

Lunchmeat Larry
Nov 3, 2012

anilEhilated posted:

Thing about the bad ending in Dishonored: it comes with a considerably more fun final level setup.
This is very true. The low chaos final level is boring and unsatisfying, even thematically. The high chaos one has so many cathartic opportunities for screwing around and disposing of your foes.

Head Hit Keyboard
Oct 9, 2012

It must be fate that has brought us together after all these years.

Lunchmeat Larry posted:

This is very true. The low chaos final level is boring and unsatisfying, even thematically. The high chaos one has so many cathartic opportunities for screwing around and disposing of your foes.

YMMV but while the final level was marginally better, I did think the entire rest of the game on High Chaos was worse.

Can't even put my finger on why exactly, but my High Chaos run felt very shallow and uninteresting.

Lunchmeat Larry
Nov 3, 2012

Head Hit Keyboard posted:

YMMV but while the final level was marginally better, I did think the entire rest of the game on High Chaos was worse.

Can't even put my finger on why exactly, but my High Chaos run felt very shallow and uninteresting.
agreed, guess we shouldn't get any more specific in this thread though

GOTTA STAY FAI
Mar 24, 2005

~no glitter in the gutter~
~no twilight galaxy~
College Slice
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided:

Save often. The game has an excellent level of polish but there are some irritating bugs that can be problematic. They'll eventually patch this, I'm sure, but if you give a certain shopkeeper what he wants, and he says "go check out my basement and take what you want," be aware that while the basement is no longer a restricted area, the hallway leading to it is. Don't bound up the stairs and get immediately gunned down for being seen "somewhere you're not supposed to be."

Just because you plan on going non-lethal for your first playthrough doesn't mean a lethal weapon won't be really, really handy in certain situations.

You can do takedowns on civilians if you want, but you earn no EXP for them.

The aug that lets you see enemies' cone of vision is very handy if you plan on sneaking around.

As usual, look for stuff that's lying around. In the worst case, you can just sell all that wine and beer. Discovering stuff like ebooks, side paths, and alternate entrances earns you a handful of EXP, too.

There are quite a few instances where you'll love having activated the CASIE aug. It's cheap, and sometimes it's easier to, say, talk a dude into helping you out than to take him and his friends on or sneak around a restricted area to get what you want.

Capturing the red node in the hacking minigame immediately results in a success and gives you any software that was on the board. Unfortunately, many red nodes have one-way connections, but keep an eye out for those that don't.

Speaking of hacking, you always have the option of not spending the Praxis on hacking augs and just using a multitool instead.

The cloaked takedown aug is ridiculously useful. Just make sure to drag the body somewhere outside the enemies' patrol route before someone finds it.

Side missions are generally not too tough or lengthy but give decent rewards. They're worth doing.

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided:

Save often. The game has an excellent level of polish but there are some irritating bugs that can be problematic. They'll eventually patch this, I'm sure, but if you give a certain shopkeeper what he wants, and he says "go check out my basement and take what you want," be aware that while the basement is no longer a restricted area, the hallway leading to it is. Don't bound up the stairs and get immediately gunned down for being seen "somewhere you're not supposed to be."

Just because you plan on going non-lethal for your first playthrough doesn't mean a lethal weapon won't be really, really handy in certain situations.

You can do takedowns on civilians if you want, but you earn no EXP for them.

The aug that lets you see enemies' cone of vision is very handy if you plan on sneaking around.

As usual, look for stuff that's lying around. In the worst case, you can just sell all that wine and beer. Discovering stuff like ebooks, side paths, and alternate entrances earns you a handful of EXP, too.

There are quite a few instances where you'll love having activated the CASIE aug. It's cheap, and sometimes it's easier to, say, talk a dude into helping you out than to take him and his friends on or sneak around a restricted area to get what you want.

Capturing the red node in the hacking minigame immediately results in a success and gives you any software that was on the board. Unfortunately, many red nodes have one-way connections, but keep an eye out for those that don't.

Speaking of hacking, you always have the option of not spending the Praxis on hacking augs and just using a multitool instead.

The cloaked takedown aug is ridiculously useful. Just make sure to drag the body somewhere outside the enemies' patrol route before someone finds it.

Side missions are generally not too tough or lengthy but give decent rewards. They're worth doing.

Yeah don't be afraid to use multi tools. I hoarded them and had like 15 at the end, and I can only think of two instances where I was like "I'm glad I had a tool because I really needed it then." One because I had to get through a level 5 door while a guard was approaching, the other early on to get a silencer hidden behind a level 5 lock I couldn't have hacked.

If you're curious where this silencer is: its in tf29 hq, in the safe in Vincent black's office. Makes early game stealth a little easier.

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

Ainsley McTree posted:

Yeah don't be afraid to use multi tools.

Also, guards will become angry if they see you hack, but for some reason they don't give a poo poo if they see you multitoolin'.

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


Speaking of hoarding items: I ended the game with 14 neuropozynes so either there's a ton of NPCs looking for it that I never found, or it's totally safe to sell the stuff and only keep 3 or so on hand in case you bump into someone looking for it.

Lobok
Jul 13, 2006

Say Watt?

Anything to know about Tropico 5? I just ended the tutorial last night and the menus and micromanaging seems more daunting than I expected. Guess I haven't played this style of game in a long time.

Fur20
Nov 14, 2007

すご▞い!
君は働か░い
フ▙▓ズなんだね!

Lobok posted:

Anything to know about Tropico 5?

The most important thing to know about Tropico 5 is that the islands you play on in story mode will actually come back later--as in, your city setup, population, economy, etc. will all be carried over--so make sure your town has a safely solid economy and reliable infrastructure before completing the mission objectives. The game isn't, like, hard-hard, but you'll have some problems later on if you have to scramble to fix your previous import/export problems at the beginning of a stage when the objectives start actively interfering with your goals--spawning rebels, reducing the export income from farms, all that good poo poo.

Also, your dynasty actually does matter a little bit and the bonuses are really nice, so when events like this one come up, make sure you don't just screw them and send send your kid off to some lovely free community college instead of dropping a couple ten grand on sending them to an Ivy League in America, okay?

Fur20 fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Nov 11, 2016

Lobok
Jul 13, 2006

Say Watt?

Cool, thanks!

juliuspringle
Jul 7, 2007

It's your fault, you're the reason I bought a used copy of Empire by Orson Scott Card today.

im cute
Sep 21, 2009

juliuspringle posted:

It's your fault, you're the reason I bought a used copy of Empire by Orson Scott Card today.

Shadow Complex is good, but it's not that good.

Lobok
Jul 13, 2006

Say Watt?

juliuspringle posted:

It's your fault, you're the reason I bought a used copy of Empire by Orson Scott Card today.

Because of Tropico...?

Anyway, I got tired of the campaign mode and am having more fun in sandbox. Campaigns make it feel like more of an old RTS when what I wanted was more of a SimCity / Civ vibe.

juliuspringle
Jul 7, 2007

Regulation Size posted:

Shadow Complex is good, but it's not that good.

The summary someone gave of the source material sounded so horrible I HAD to check it out.

Zushio
May 8, 2008
Might have been me, I remember talking about it awhile back along with another poster.

Can we have tips for books cause Empire has the following:

It's a lot like any other OSC book. Just ignore the ideology behind it and the author and appreciate it for what it appears to be on the surface level. He is in all honesty a drat fine author at times.

Panic! at Nabisco
Jun 6, 2007

it seemed like a good idea at the time
Fleshing out my Wii U library now that stuff is discounted. Any tips on Hyrule Warriors or Xenoblade Chronicles X that aren't on the wiki? I have only played one musou game before and it was like three hours of Sengoku Basara so assume I'm new to musou.

revdrkevind
Dec 15, 2013
ASK:lol: ME:lol: ABOUT:lol: MY :lol:TINY :lol:DICK

also my opinion on :females:
:haw::flaccid: :haw: :flaccid: :haw: :flaccid::haw:

juliuspringle posted:

It's your fault, you're the reason I bought a used copy of Empire by Orson Scott Card today.

Oh God no, why did you do that?

Zushio posted:

Can we have tips for books cause Empire has the following:

Card is a decent author, but the problem is that his writing goes downhill in exact proportion to his self-insertion. Anyone read the latter Ender books, where Ender basically winds up as a kind of Christian missionary in a Portuguese-speaking space colony? Or how perplexingly all the characters in the other series of side books seem to think that Brazil is the one and only possible place to establish the New World Government? Take a wild guess what Orson Scott Card did for his missionary year for the Mormon Church. We're talking Steven King after he got run over levels of going off the rails. I could break it down but he gets to the point where he's switching from first- to third-person mid sentence at times, really basic poo poo no author should be messing up. Compare to the first Ender book, which contains nothing at all about his own life aside from the subtle homoeroticism, was his best work.

So in the end, a tip for reading Orson Scott Card:

Orson Scott Card only ever wrote one book, Ender's Game. Ghost writers helped him craft sequels which feature Bean as the main character, and they are decent sci-fi romps.

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

A dude posted:

It's your fault, you're the reason I bought a used copy of Empire by Orson Scott Card today.

revdrkevind posted:

Oh God no, why did you do that?

Card is a great writer but a loathsome human being; racist, sexist, homophobic, you name it.

I wholly approve of buying his stuff from a secondhand bookstore, that way he doesn't get any money to spend on Miller Lite and Slim Jims.

egg tats
Apr 3, 2010

Gynovore posted:

Card is a great writer

This is really debatable. I've read a bunch of his non-ender's game books, and he's horrible at characterization - everyone talks with the exact same weird voice, which was ok in ender's game because they were child soldiers being raised in space, but gets weird when you're talking about a homeless woman who's addicted to heroin - and most of his plots are inexorably tied to his political beliefs.

One of the actual heroes of empire is literally actual Bill O'rielly, who is the most influential and unbiased newsman in america dontcha know?

Senerio
Oct 19, 2009

Ooh! Are we messing with Adora?



Panic! at Nabisco posted:

Xenoblade Chronicles X

I don't think it can be emphasized enough that you need to read the loving manual.

Also, don't take any party member quests in Sylvalum or Oblivia until you get a Skell, because they are rather difficult to get to on foot. You can still do them, it'll just take about 10 minutes of boring swimming.

When you complete a class line all the way to the end, you can then use their weapons on a different class. Since skills are tied to weapons, I recommend finishing up a skill line and then move to another one, so you can ease into it.

Fat Samurai
Feb 16, 2011

To go quickly is foolish. To go slowly is prudent. Not to go; that is wisdom.

Gynovore posted:

Card sci-fi author is a great writer but a loathsome human being; racist, sexist, homophobic, you name it

ftfy

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PJOmega
May 5, 2009
That's not very fair, there's tens of sci-fi authors that aren't homophobic AND racist AND sexist.

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