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Motorsport Manager is under $10 on the Humble Store, and I have become hopelessly addicted to it. Definitely a good buy even if you're not a racing fan. Take the advice of some of the top Steam reviews and check out a let's play series of a guy named Quill18, if only to prepare yourself for an otherwise fine game's baffling design errors, like the fact that your entire pit crew can disappear without any notification at all if you don't regularly renew their contracts, which it also doesn't warn you to do.
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May 18, 2020 09:21
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zedprime posted:Most people playing it end up falling into the rehab camp because its just easier to manage. For a game that set out to make you think about the hard decisions in for profit prison systems it sure settled on modeling and encouraging the Scandinavian model. The developers are English and are incredibly left on the political scale, so its not surprising that they leaned into the rehabilitation camp. It almost feels like all the hard punishment you have in the game, you're still encouraged to be nice about it. Death row, but you still want to give them books and a way to work out, etc. So for anyone who's on the fence about it being a game primarily about punishment, it doesn't seem to be. That said, their reoffend mechanic is basically useless. You either set it to 100% of not reoffending or accept you're gonna get a random game over at some point. dogstile fucked around with this message at 11:06 on May 18, 2020 |
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May 18, 2020 11:02
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tinstaach posted:Motorsport Manager is under $10 on the Humble Store, and I have become hopelessly addicted to it. Definitely a good buy even if you're not a racing fan. Take the advice of some of the top Steam reviews and check out a let's play series of a guy named Quill18, if only to prepare yourself for an otherwise fine game's baffling design errors, like the fact that your entire pit crew can disappear without any notification at all if you don't regularly renew their contracts, which it also doesn't warn you to do. I know zero about cars or racing but I had a blast playing this. To me, the core of the game was the Predator Challenge, so once I beat that I lost all interest in playing more. But yeah, more than once did I find myself winning a race I had no business winning, getting me points I desperately needed to not be relegated or something, only to find that 80% of my Pit Crew disappeared after the race causing me to restart the race and renew everyone's contracts before the start. But as a management sim it was plenty of fun until I felt I did everything I wanted to do with it.
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May 18, 2020 11:45
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Yeah I made some long posts earlier in the thread about the game and it’s slowly crawling up the list of my top games played on steam. I assumed I’d lose steam at some point but I’ll still open it up and do a race once a week or so. It’s a shame the sequels are simpler and mobile games. I’d have loved to see a fully fleshed out sequel.
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May 18, 2020 15:22
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Wow. I always wondered "Why would anybody write anything as ugly and lower-case fascist as managing a prison?" Knowing that the win strategy is being humane whips my head around.
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May 18, 2020 16:14
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straight to the gulag with you
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May 18, 2020 16:35
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Wow. I always wondered "Why would anybody write anything as ugly and lower-case fascist as managing a prison?" Knowing that the win strategy is being humane whips my head around. it's one of those things like tropico where superficially the game is a dictator simulator but you have to go out of your way to be a bastard, and the better way to play the game without going for some gimmick run is to lean real hard into rehabilitation when i played the games years ago i preferred to just put showers in everyone's cells instead of a common shower, so that prisoners could shower whenever they wanted without having to be granted access to a specific room. no common showers makes it easier to protect prisoners from violence also, even if it is more expensive in the long run
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May 18, 2020 16:51
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luxury handset posted:it's one of those things like tropico where superficially the game is a dictator simulator but you have to go out of your way to be a bastard, and the better way to play the game without going for some gimmick run is to lean real hard into rehabilitation I thought the problem with that approach was that you need to clean each shower area daily, and each cell requires a guard to walk up and open / close the door for maintenance, unless you do something like set all the doors to a schedule? And yeah, I'm really surprised at how Tropico didn't let you lean into the awful aspects when one of the success metrics is "how much money can you siphon off into your bank account"
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May 18, 2020 17:51
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Volmarias posted:I thought the problem with that approach was that you need to clean each shower area daily, and each cell requires a guard to walk up and open / close the door for maintenance, unless you do something like set all the doors to a schedule? it's been years since i played prison architect so i dont know if my approach had any downsides. maybe everyone's cell was always soggy and i didn't notice  with tropico it was always, always better to run a benevolent social democracy than any kind of police state. like you could easily flush tons of cash into the swiss bank account if you were just making and spending giant piles. one of the best ways would be to enact the "special building permits" edict as soon as possible, which inflates all building costs by 20%, sending 10% of that into your SBA. then just coat the entire island in buildings and you get your corruption slice. way better than trying to knock pennies out of the pockets of your poor oppressed farmers or whatever. stealing five percent of a million bucks is way better than stealing half of fifty grand
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May 18, 2020 18:07
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Volmarias posted:And yeah, I'm really surprised at how Tropico didn't let you lean into the awful aspects when one of the success metrics is "how much money can you siphon off into your bank account" I mean, Tropico lets you lean into the awful aspects. There's just never any reason to, except as a gimmick, because you pretty much have to intentionally screw up to have any serious dissent at all.
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May 18, 2020 18:08
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Guildencrantz posted:I mean, Tropico lets you lean into the awful aspects. There's just never any reason to, except as a gimmick, because you pretty much have to intentionally screw up to have any serious dissent at all. That's what I meant. There was no real incentive for playing the game the way it was advertised, it was always better to just have fully automated luxury gay tropical communism.
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May 18, 2020 18:23
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Volmarias posted:That's what I meant. There was no real incentive for playing the game the way it was advertised, it was always better to just have fully automated luxury gay tropical communism. Fully Indiscriminate Slave-Powered Pirate Army Builder was actually not bad in retrospect, it was just hard not what you were expecting coming from the first game. I maintain that Tropico 4 is thus far peak Tropico in that it took all the extremely cool systems improvements and awesome personalities from 3 and layered attention, polish, and character everywhere.
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May 18, 2020 18:40
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Volmarias posted:I thought the problem with that approach was that you need to clean each shower area daily, and each cell requires a guard to walk up and open / close the door for maintenance, unless you do something like set all the doors to a schedule? You can set the doors the schedules in prison architect. Later on you can control them all from a central room, too. Cell blocks all open at the same time, etc.
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May 18, 2020 19:10
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Hey, whoever used my 5% off coupon, want the mystery Steam key? DM me.
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May 19, 2020 18:33
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Anyone played Endzone: A World Apart? Worth paying full price?
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May 19, 2020 20:18
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Planet Zoo's tutorial is really, really frustrating me. Okay. Where the hell in this UI do I confirm that I want to replace this wall with the window? I don't see a confirm, or apply, or anything else button.
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May 20, 2020 02:13
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I find the process of actually building stuff in planet zoo excruciating. I just want to raise red pandas but its nearly impossible to make a decent looking enclosure without some sort of fuckery
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May 20, 2020 02:22
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Click the +?
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May 20, 2020 03:56
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So I want to get back into Sim City 4. I was an OK player before, small but self sustained cities, but I want to really branch out into regional maps. Are there any guides on how to do that? I am installing NAM since I have a general idea of how to manage a city.
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May 20, 2020 14:55
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I'm not sure what the + does, but it doesn't seem to mean commit. (I'm in the tutorial, and clicking plus doesn't move me to the next step.)
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May 20, 2020 15:42
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I remember that tutorial step requiring something entirely arcane and unknowable but can't remember what exactly. The workflow normally is highlight some wall, click the new material IIRC.
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May 20, 2020 16:37
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Oh, okay. If the tutorial is messed up, I'll try something on my own.
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May 20, 2020 16:56
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For Anno 1800 Agricultural DLC incoming Apparently dropping June 2? quote:The new gameplay in “Bright Harvest” comes from three new elements: tractor modules, silos, and fuel. Let us start with what you have already seen in our Season 2 trailer, the tractors. How do you get them? Tractors are activated via a tractor module, of which you can build one per agricultural farm, connecting it to the main building. Doing so will result in several things: allowing you to construct 50% more fields per farm, which you will need to boost the efficiency of the farm to 300%. In addition, the amount of required farming workforce will be lowered. In other words: tractors allow you to work larger fields more effectively, while requiring less manual labor to do so.
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May 20, 2020 18:53
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Two Point Hospital Trip report. The game has a good sense of humor. Music is, unfortunately, just as annoying as real hospital music. PA announcements are hilarious though. The game doesn't give much feedback on what causes problems or which items to use. There are a bunch of seemingly identical plants for example, but each plant provides different amounts of attractiveness and the UI doesn't give any indication as to which is which or what the downsides are. More important things are equally opaque. I got all 3 stars on the first 3 hospitals, and I still have no idea how I'm supposed to tell when I need to build a new room of the same type, or how many people I need to hire per room. It's a fine game, but it mostly makes me want to play Evil Genius again.
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May 20, 2020 19:49
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I cannot wait for Evil Genius 2 and I hope it retains all the charm of the original.
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May 20, 2020 19:53
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Im not a veteran 1800 player by any means but none of that sounds very interesting Reduced farmer workforce need: having enough farmers have never really been a problem Having to route railroad to every farm area sounds like a giant pain. If you run out of oil your farm reverts back to the pre-tractor performance? That just sounds like it will cascade you into a full society breakdown. Reverting to pre-tractor -> increased workforce need -> other industries will start performing worse -> more shortages. You already have a shortage of oil in this scenario so there already is a problem somewhere
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May 20, 2020 19:58
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LLSix posted:The game doesn't give much feedback on what causes problems or which items to use. There are a bunch of seemingly identical plants for example, but each plant provides different amounts of attractiveness and the UI doesn't give any indication as to which is which or what the downsides are. More important things are equally opaque. I got all 3 stars on the first 3 hospitals, and I still have no idea how I'm supposed to tell when I need to build a new room of the same type, or how many people I need to hire per room. there's no downsides to placing items except your hospital gets more cluttered / more spaces for worms to hide. generally over time you unlock more expensive but more efficient items, or items that have special effects the main thing to watch for feedback is queuing. if you have long waits for certain rooms, build more of those rooms. each room generally needs one staff member to operate it, with a few exceptions like wards and surgeries. there's no optimal number of staff to have room coverage, because your needs will vary depending on how long staff spend on break and what kind of patients you're getting. a good rule of thumb is slightly more than one staff member per room but this gets expensive and you can cut down on it a bit with micro, and training your staff to handle specific tasks while preventing them from using certain rooms clustering rooms together by type is usually a good idea. put all the nurse diagnostic rooms in one area, the radiology rooms together, the nurse treatment rooms, the doctor treatment rooms, the staff only rooms (research, training, marketing) in their own distant corner. you want to spread break rooms, bathrooms, and general practice around. it may seem like a good idea to put all your GP rooms in one spot, but remember that the patient cycle is: GP -> diagnostic -> GP -> diagnostic again, but a different kind -> again and again until GP makes a diagnosis -> treatment so if you cluster all your GP offices together, then you'll have one central hub area that is constantly full of patients bumping into each other place entertainment, food/water, bathrooms, and other things near where patients cluster. a patient who is in line for a room will hold up the entire line as they wander off to the rear end end of the hospital to pee and get a snack. you want to make sure nobody has to walk too far to take care of whatever need they have treatment rooms are always the final stop before a patient is cured or dies, so they can be on the periphery of your hospital. you'll want to pay more attention to the needs of patients who are in the GP -> diagnostic cycle since that is where most time is spent in your hospital also don't forget to constantly train and specialize your staff! you absolutely need as many 5xGeneral Practicioners as you can get, and have them do nothing but GP. the GP office is the pillar of your hospital and is probably your biggest bottleneck in patient turnover
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May 20, 2020 20:47
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Ineptitude posted:Im not a veteran 1800 player by any means but none of that sounds very interesting
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May 20, 2020 21:38
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KKKLIP ART posted:So I want to get back into Sim City 4. I was an OK player before, small but self sustained cities, but I want to really branch out into regional maps. Are there any guides on how to do that? I am installing NAM since I have a general idea of how to manage a city. To clarify, in what sense are you asking for help here? Gameplay? Avoiding bugs (specifically the infinite commute problem with multi-region cities)? Something that looks nice/realistic? From saying you have a general understanding I'll assume the latter, so; Quickest advice is to start by bouncing around multiple region tiles and build villages/small towns in a number of them, usually around some kind of feature or other (Real or imagined). The kinds of places real settlements sprang up for whatever reason; by a river, somewhere defensible, near natural resources, whatever. Then start connecting them with basic roads, and then just go from there as the demand rises and you find new things they might want/need. For example in multi-region cities I tend to build a major power plant at some remove from any settlements and use it to provide power to numerous other tiles. That can be a bit fiddly because sometimes the game doesn't like to play nice with importing utilities at one end and exporting them at the other, but it usually goes well enough. Another idea is to consider - i.e. imagine - things like government and state laws and building guidelines and so forth. A small town I fondly remember was on an island where I just said "okay most of this place is a nature reserve" so I only used about 15% of the island for building, and the rest was pretty much wilderness with some forest trails through it. Bobcat Island was always going to stay small, I think it hovered around 4,000 people, but it had more charm than most cities 20x its size because I'd placed pretty much every single road and object and tile specifically and carefully. I can't remember any specific ones that are good but I imagine you can dig up some old 'Natural Growth' style City Journals (i.e. Let's Plays) on SimTropolis and stuff, those had some good ideas and advice back in the day. Basically don't just plunk down a massive grid for your future metropolis right away; build only what you need, or even less than what you need, pretend laws like Eminent Domain or height restrictions in a certain neighbourhood exist (can't use more than low density), tie things together with highways (Enjoy falling into the hell of NAM because you'll spend IRL days tinkering with things it has so many options) and rail routes and whatever, just chill with what is still the greatest city builder. I just wish to Christ that modding it had been made convenient at some point rather than having to do everything 2003- style or rely on big modpacks that might suck and usually vanish from the Internet anyway 
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May 20, 2020 21:43
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I finally gave up and googled. The window must be placed directly behind the animal's shelter (?!?!?!) or it isn't recognized.
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May 20, 2020 21:43
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Splicer posted:Anyone played Endzone: A World Apart? Worth paying full price? Not yet. It is very literally Banished, to the point I’m surprised they haven’t been sued, with a post-apocalypse coat of paint. You place houses, houses hold families and you need a new house per family, you assign adults directly to jobs, you have to find seeds for orchards and for farms, at the core it’s literally Banished. What they have added is still in flux and doesn’t work well yet- radiation grows and shrinks and you should be able to scrub it but it doesn’t work that well; you can plant trees for new materials but apparently they get harvested too fast to be actually sustainable; there are expeditions you can send people on to find stuff but they aren’t explained well and the interface is bad. Basically, it might be good in a year, but it’s not good now.
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May 20, 2020 22:09
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Just spotted an interesting one on YouTube. Evil Bank Manager, you play an old merchant bank, buying assets all over the world, funding wars, etc. Nookrium had a video of it, and it looks pretty interesting. It’s a tenner on Steam just now. Maybe not that much replyability, but certainly looks fun. https://youtu.be/JQggMO7dOro
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May 21, 2020 12:30
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Oodles posted:Just spotted an interesting one on YouTube. Evil Bank Manager, you play an old merchant bank, buying assets all over the world, funding wars, etc. So a Bank Manager?
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May 21, 2020 12:40
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skeleton warrior posted:Not yet. It is very literally Banished, to the point I’m surprised they haven’t been sued, with a post-apocalypse coat of paint. You place houses, houses hold families and you need a new house per family, you assign adults directly to jobs, you have to find seeds for orchards and for farms, at the core it’s literally Banished. Follow up: Is surviving the aftermath the same deal or does it bring something new to the table?
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May 21, 2020 13:11
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Just Offscreen posted:So a Bank Manager? This isn't the Simulation games thread
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May 21, 2020 13:24
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Latest Autonauts patch just dropped.quote:@everyone Maybe I’ll reach Transcendence by the time the new DLC for Anno hits😀
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May 21, 2020 14:19
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luxury handset posted:there's no downsides to placing items except your hospital gets more cluttered / more spaces for worms to hide. generally over time you unlock more expensive but more efficient items, or items that have special effects Another thing of note is that there's an option to make your patients skip immediately to treatment at a certain diagnosis %, skipping the final GP visit; which in all likelihood is only going to buy you a couple more % diagnosis score anyway. I check that and the "auto promote staff" option every hospital.
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May 21, 2020 15:54
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Space Haven early access starts in a couple hours. https://store.steampowered.com/app/979110/Space_Haven/ https://youtu.be/kFFfYTCfj_g
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May 21, 2020 16:08
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a slime posted:Space Haven early access starts in a couple hours.
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May 21, 2020 16:14
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I have never hated a tutorial as much as I hate the one for Planet Zoo. I have to listen to these two people blithering along and making bad jokes that are irrelevant to the game mechanics, and there is no fast forward. Couple that with the terrible programming that has rules that are never made clear, and the wretched controls (who decided that in a WASD game, E and R should be used for "up" and "down" and I have to take rage breaks from the tutorial.
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May 21, 2020 16:22
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