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Something else that people were super excited for then complete silence a few days after launch was evil genius 2. I imagine it wasn't very good otherwise people would be bringing it up.
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May 16, 2021 16:35
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Even the streamers stopped pretty quickly. The mission management is tedious
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May 16, 2021 16:48
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Bhodi posted:Something else that people were super excited for then complete silence a few days after launch was evil genius 2. I imagine it wasn't very good otherwise people would be bringing it up. It's bad. Even Quill18, who makes everything seem fun, spent as much time complaining during his stream as anything else. The lead designer previously only worked in mobile "games" and the commitment to time-wasting is really obvious. Only now there's no premium currency to explain why your time is being wasted. It just is. At first glance Evil Genius 2 manages to look okay, but after the first 10 hours it turns painfully soulless. All the Evil Geniuses have the exact same voiced dialogue. The hilarious/cringy thefts and radio voice-overs from the first game are completely gone, so even when you do get to do something that should be cool, it doesn't feel satisfying. It's just ticking another pointless checkmark. There are some sequencing issues and bugs too. It's possible to lock yourself out of several things and the game does nothing to warn you about it ahead of time.
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May 16, 2021 16:57
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It’s been patched a couple times and the grind is a lot better. There’s a solid game there, just get it on sale later this year or whenever and it’ll probably be even better then
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May 16, 2021 17:12
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SkyeAuroline posted:OpenTTD (swear they changed pathing) This is several pages ago, but the only major changes that affect pathfinding I remember were in 1.10 (last year's release), where a pathfinder cache was introduced to help CPU usage a lot on large games. This means that the vehicles don't respond the same to conditions changing along the route (like occupied platforms on truck stations.)
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May 16, 2021 17:26
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Im not usually this negative but pretty much the consensus is all remakes suck in this genre. They never update the gameplay loop in an engaging way, they just do their best to carbon copy the old game. EG2, startopia 2, and Nebuchadnezzar were all high profile swings and misses. Two point hospital is doing it's thing, but I've put 1/100th the time into that than I did theme hospital.
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May 16, 2021 17:40
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Grevlek posted:Im not usually this negative but pretty much the consensus is all remakes suck in this genre. They never update the gameplay loop in an engaging way, they just do their best to carbon copy the old game. I will say that there are a lot more choices now then there were then, especially with theme hospital. Very easy now to get distracted by the latest new thing.
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May 16, 2021 17:56
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T. Bombastus posted:Crypt of the Necromancer is one of my all-time favorite games, and cyberpunk dystopias are one of my all-time favorite settings, so I was really looking forward to Industries of Titan; then the initial reaction was so lukewarm that it fell off my radar completely. Really glad to hear that they managed to turn it around. I think most people who bought it when it went in to early access (myself included) just went 'wow this has like zero impactful decisions to make and you can only do 1/10th of the poo poo you see in the trailer, guess I'll check it out again when it's out of early access in a year and a half or whatever'
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May 16, 2021 19:37
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It doesn’t help Industries of Titan that the tutorial is unfinished and the game doesn’t provide clear direction. I picked it up again a month ago and could generally figure out what to do, but still have no earthly clue why I’d want to do it.
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May 16, 2021 19:52
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The Industries of Titan thing was "Well, there's the framework of a game here, but nothing fleshing it out." Anyways I've fallen into Transport Fever 2 hard. After a few false starts (begin with passenger stuff, makes way more money for less of an initial investment) I'm getting the hang of it. Except when the game does...weird poo poo like this. I can't get this train station to accept any bricks for me to ship to another city:  Tracks 1 and 3 are bringing in stone, and the truck depot is taking away bricks to the city just off screen. All of those are doing utter gangbusters right now. Some of my biggest profits, and those being profitable make the city profitable which makes me need more passenger rail in the nearby city so it's having a nice knock-on effect. However platform/line 2 won't accept bricks no matter what I try.  Here's the other end which I've made absolutely sure has everything it needs for cargo, is connected to the streets, etc. etc.
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May 16, 2021 19:56
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Alkydere posted:The Industries of Titan thing was "Well, there's the framework of a game here, but nothing fleshing it out."
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May 16, 2021 20:03
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zedprime posted:You've added a train to the route, right? And let it pull into a station at least once? It bases its supply rate on the line frequency which only gets calculated when there's a train running and is updated as they arrive and leave stations. Yeah it has run a few times. Nothing's happening which is driving me wild. I'm making enough money I'm just...gonna run it a while longer I guess. Edit: Or...or...I could have not set the station properly! 
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May 16, 2021 20:04
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Alkydere posted:Yeah it has run a few times. Nothing's happening which is driving me wild. I'm making enough money I'm just...gonna run it a while longer I guess.
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May 16, 2021 20:10
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Grevlek posted:Im not usually this negative but pretty much the consensus is all remakes suck in this genre. They never update the gameplay loop in an engaging way, they just do their best to carbon copy the old game. The real gut punch is that as an audience for the antfarm game community was all "I hope they change nothing about *core thing* and just update it to look slick with like 8 QoL improvements" then the devs did and it turns out there was some special sauce in the OG formula that cannot be recaptured or that thing was always ok. I later saw the Augustus 3.0 mods as that QOL update for Ceasar 3 to be the pinnacle ideal for this philosophy of "just update the thing". I still lol that there is a Julius fork that is save game compatible with the original save files from the CD game. Turns out the real Evil Genius was the friends we made along the way.
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May 16, 2021 20:12
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Turns out that games that were fun as young teenagers (or younger) aren't as fun when you're in your 30s.
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May 16, 2021 20:16
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Alkydere posted:Yeah it has run a few times. Nothing's happening which is driving me wild. I'm making enough money I'm just...gonna run it a while longer I guess. I'm also on my second week of binging Transport Fever 2 and my most common gently caress up has been assigning a vehicle with the wrong cargo type. That said, I nearly posted in here 2 days ago because I think I hit a real bug. I created truck route that only existed to ferry crude to a train station that also loaded crude. Despite being assured by multiple postings online that cargo could move intermodally, I couldn't get it to work. The next day I fired up the game and it started working right off the bat. Sometimes I think there are bugs, so it might be worth restarting if you've triple-checked everything.
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May 16, 2021 20:30
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EG2 feels like the intersection of a couple different genres with no particular one standing out as the primary focus, and it makes it feel like a game that was made by 8 different teams who all brought their parts of the game together in a couple weeks or something. It's a real drat shame too because the game looks and sounds like a classic but man is it just not much fun to play more than a few hours. Having to start a new game to use the DLC is just hilarious, though.
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May 16, 2021 20:31
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totalnewbie posted:Turns out that games that were fun as young teenagers (or younger) aren't as fun when you're in your 30s. As a kid you probably didn't have hundreds of games sitting in your steam backlog either. So you'd get frustrated with a game but you'd keep coming back to it anyway. I was lucky to get one or two new games a year so I put hundreds of hours into whatever I had. Add the good old days nostalgia glasses and you may be remember the experience as better than it was.
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May 16, 2021 20:39
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KirbyKhan posted:The real gut punch is that as an audience for the antfarm game community was all "I hope they change nothing about *core thing* and just update it to look slick with like 8 QoL improvements" then the devs did and it turns out there was some special sauce in the OG formula that cannot be recaptured or that thing was always ok. Basically all the core systems got a refresh in EG2. They fixed a few annoyances (adding incinerators to quickly get rid of body bags, yay!) but broke so many other things at the same time that it is a net negative. Most of the problems are super obvious to anyone playing the game. How did they ship with that over world map? The problem isn’t that it is a sequel. It is just a bad game. DSP and SV are proof it is possible to create a sequel to games in this genre that are still good. Even great.
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May 16, 2021 21:02
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explosivo posted:EG2 feels like the intersection of a couple different genres with no particular one standing out as the primary focus, and it makes it feel like a game that was made by 8 different teams who all brought their parts of the game together in a couple weeks or something.
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May 16, 2021 21:23
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Facebook Aunt posted:As a kid you probably didn't have hundreds of games sitting in your steam backlog either. So you'd get frustrated with a game but you'd keep coming back to it anyway. I was lucky to get one or two new games a year so I put hundreds of hours into whatever I had. Add the good old days nostalgia glasses and you may be remember the experience as better than it was. Yeah, I reflected on this after coming back to some older games was that they just aren't good, but we would only get a game every month or so after begging someone for a ride to wherever the computer store was attached. Theme Hospital is actually not a good game at all once you get past it being silly, but we all have good memories because it was decades ago, we were unsophisticated idiots, and we had to make due because it was the best we had at the time.
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May 16, 2021 22:35
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There's also novelty. Theme Hospital was incredibly novel when it was new. Today it's not. So while our standards have in general gone up, it's also true that we enjoy flawed games today when there's not a better alternative.
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May 16, 2021 22:46
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I think it also comes down to the fact that games in general at that time were fresh and new. The way we even thought about games back then is totally different from how we do now. Games like competitive FPS (notably counterstrike) or RTS (starcraft) are GREAT examples of how we evolved in how we think about games at even a very fundamental and basic level as our societal knowledge grows. So you might go to an old game now and find "Ugh, A, B, and C are so annoying. Why does D even exist? E makes sense in the real world but it makes for lovely gameplay" but that's just because you have 20 years of game design, etc. showing you what's possible. 20-30 years ago, you literally didn't even know those were things that could change - they just were. To use a word one of my intro to engineering professors liked to use, there have been many paradigm shifts since those times so it shouldn't be surprising that games that fail to follow those paradigm shifts don't seem as much fun anymore. totalnewbie fucked around with this message at 00:40 on May 17, 2021 |
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May 17, 2021 00:36
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KirbyKhan posted:Turns out the real Evil Genius was the friends we made along the way. Put this on my tombstone please <3
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May 17, 2021 00:56
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evil genius 2 is fine now, its just a bit slow, which is tough for a game to be when there's a kajillion other games to play and i dont have endless saturday afternoons to waste
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May 17, 2021 02:20
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Wandering around my game collection for something to click with, started up Tropico 6 and it's ok. A bit poor at showing what's going on in a way you can easily access, but also very possible I just missed something with that. Guess I'll see how long this holds me. e: There has to be some way to see your total of each resource, right? SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 16:45 on May 17, 2021 |
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May 17, 2021 05:30
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I continue to play W&R on self imposed Cosmonaut difficulty, and only "cheat" by buying roads etc when something I don't intend to happen occurs, like trying to delete a dirt road but it gets the whole intersection because ??? I'll never make things as pretty as ASA but I can certainly still do some things, and Cosmonaut makes for a slower and more rewarding game.
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May 17, 2021 07:12
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:evil genius 2 is fine now, its just a bit slow, which is tough for a game to be when there's a kajillion other games to play and i dont have endless saturday afternoons to waste Yeah it's this. The game is actually not bad except for a few gripes (some of them petty, like the fact that the factions on the world map are colour-coded by continent now rather than matching actual cold war spheres of influence like in EG1) but the makers are clearly afraid of letting you blaze through the tech tree and story so everything takes like 3 to 4 x as long as it should. Doesn't help that a lot of the fun toys are locked fairly far down the tech tree. They seem aware of the issue though (but I'm not sure if they'll be bold enough to reduce the gameplay loop to more acceptable standards).
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May 17, 2021 07:20
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LLSix posted:DSP and SV are proof it is possible to create a sequel to games in this genre that are still good. Even great. I'm probably just cynical but every time I see a dead brand being resurrected I expect it to be not good. I wish more companies went the route of Stardew Valley (honest love letter to Harvest Moon). Arkane as a company is also a good example of taking older genres and making great games despite not using existing brands. Arx Fatalis was a superb dungeon crawler in the vein of Ultima Underworld, Dishonored updated the Thief formula for the modern age, Prey was one of the best in the lineage of System Shock/Bioshock (this example is a paradox because it did try to pull off a brand resurrect, it was just a completely non-sensical one!).
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May 17, 2021 13:14
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I'm back in another "build for an hour, hate everything, quit without saving" phase in C:S and Railway Empire so I've gone back to ye olde NIMBY save. Portland to Provincetown is now a reality  and gently caress it, spur line to Martha's Vineyard because who gives a poo poo who gives a gently caress This railroad is good for about 10mil profit a day, though I'm still trying to figure out scheduling and pricing as I see people making way more money, but I increase a base fare price by $0.10 and suddenly start getting a bunch of refunds for "waited too long" despite having trains running every 5 minutes
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May 17, 2021 15:17
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How is Industries of Titan these days? It looks really cool but I feel like I've heard nothing about it since it dropped in early access.
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May 17, 2021 17:48
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Solarflare posted:How is Industries of Titan these days? It looks really cool but I feel like I've heard nothing about it since it dropped in early access. The one guy who's playing it posted that he loves it last page. It was extremely barebones when it entered early access so there wasn't much to talk about when it became available.
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May 17, 2021 22:42
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:evil genius 2 is fine now, its just a bit slow, which is tough for a game to be when there's a kajillion other games to play and i dont have endless saturday afternoons to waste My main issue with EG2 is the fact you lose all your minions each mission. So later game where you need 10 Martial Artists to complete each of the 5 seperate sub parts of the mission means your locked waiting for training. plus the later game constant base raids always seem to kill the one minion type your trying to build up. I think this is why they put the breaks on research so much, the game itself is fun, but it becomes a grind. I'm thinking about restarting now I know the dangerous raids always come in from the back of your base - a better maze should help base defence. but as others have said, there are so many other games to play.
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May 18, 2021 15:02
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SkyeAuroline posted:Wandering around my game collection for something to click with, started up Tropico 6 and it's ok. A bit poor at showing what's going on in a way you can easily access, but also very possible I just missed something with that. Guess I'll see how long this holds me. Followup: no, there is not a way. There's not a way to see almost anything this game needs you to be able to see. Rapidly getting less impressed as play time goes on.
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May 18, 2021 15:07
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SkyeAuroline posted:Followup: no, there is not a way. There's not a way to see almost anything this game needs you to be able to see. Rapidly getting less impressed as play time goes on. Yeah I really struggled with this too. If you wanted to find out what items you're storing to take on a larger trade route you have to just click on all the buildings to see what's being produced but even then it's pretty abstracted. I ended up taking on so many contracts that I couldn't finish because I thought I was making way more of a particular resource, or I was but I was already trading all of it away. I really want to like Tropico 6 but this stuff sticks in my craw.
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May 18, 2021 15:14
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explosivo posted:Yeah I really struggled with this too. If you wanted to find out what items you're storing to take on a larger trade route you have to just click on all the buildings to see what's being produced but even then it's pretty abstracted. I ended up taking on so many contracts that I couldn't finish because I thought I was making way more of a particular resource, or I was but I was already trading all of it away. I really want to like Tropico 6 but this stuff sticks in my craw. Trade contracts are what spurred me trying to figure it out - I have a sugar contract with 0/5,000 fulfilled while I have something like 7700 between plantations and the buffer for the rum distillery. Everything else is fulfilled readily. Teamsters are nowhere near at capacity (I keep getting faction requests for building their offices anyway). But nothing ever makes it to the docks. I do not like this game very much. But I am stubborn.
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May 18, 2021 15:23
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SkyeAuroline posted:Trade contracts are what spurred me trying to figure it out - I have a sugar contract with 0/5,000 fulfilled while I have something like 7700 between plantations and the buffer for the rum distillery. Everything else is fulfilled readily. Teamsters are nowhere near at capacity (I keep getting faction requests for building their offices anyway). But nothing ever makes it to the docks. Yeah exactly the same thing I couldn't figure out. I ended up using the trade exports page to see what I was exporting the most of which helped reasonably ascertain what I was producing more of, but it's kind of mind boggling that there's no better way.
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May 18, 2021 15:26
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Tropico 6 feels like they made a fairly elaborate agent system that feeds the production system but then for fear of making it unapproachable to the Everyman just decided to automate the entire thing top to bottom so you just have to place a teamster and a dock. They really should give you more information and more tools instead of trying bizarre trial and error things to see if you notice anything different in the behavior of the system. For example, one thing I played with: Where should teamsters offices go? Should they go close to homes, so teamsters arrive quickly? Should they be near production, so it’s less travel time? Near the docks so they don’t have long after they finish their loop? Do they prioritize close production, so should I spread them out? Is this farm full because there aren’t enough teamsters, or are they too far away, or is it some downstream production throttle? I’m sure someone has some either observed or read answers to that - but that’s not really my point - it’s that I can’t readily answer any of those questions ingame without trying one extreme case and comparing it very informally to another case. The production/teamsters thing isn’t the only suspect here, tons of systems and things are very vague about what’s *actually* happening under the hood and how it works. The game seems to want to hide all that for more casual players to not be overwhelmed but I don’t know how that could be working since I can make a hugely well oiled network across an entire map in Workers and Resources, a game with tons more complexity, but I can’t sustain a profit in tropico until I get lucky to manage a surplus long enough to get Banks churning out interest. Not to mention that looking at W&R’s moneyless society vs tropico insisting you do everything in cash (and tying productivity directly to wage) makes tropico 6 pretty much impossible to run free housing and play as a full on communist nation. Everyone gets paid and you have no way to siphon that money back from them, since rent is about your only regular tax on most citizens. Hell, the way factions work now it seems like you almost have to please all of them all the time, which really detracts from the experience of building your “own” nation. I like the game’s aesthetics and presentation, I just wish we could somehow get a Tropico++ mod that made it meatier so I could explicitly tell some systems how to work so they don’t end up as broken black boxes sucking away my money.
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May 18, 2021 15:42
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Before signing export contracts see if those items are being regularly exported from your docks, or look at your revenues tab and check the export list. If you're not exporting that, don't sign a contract. And as for the teamsters problem? gently caress if I know, I just slap those fuckers down everywhere.
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May 18, 2021 17:49
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I'm enjoying Anno 1800, I like how the game does progression, but whenever I get to level 3 stuff I feel completely overwhelmed. I'm gonna keep at it but I keep getting dissatisfied with my setup and considering all the poo poo I'm gonna have to do to maintain Artisans and starting over. Does the DLC add anything to the early game or is it all endgame stuff? Are there, I don't want to say easier but maybe less overwhelming city builders out there?
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May 18, 2021 19:33
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