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For people on the fence, a thing I really appreciate about Against The Storm is that there are natural break points. Every time you finish a settlement, there's a chance to think "Wow, I'm really tired" or "I'm not having fun right now", because you get bounced back to the main menu. As differentiated from, say, Rimworld or Stardew Valley, where it's easy to play nonstop until you're exhausted but searching for that one last goal.
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Dec 18, 2022 04:34
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Anyone here still playing Foundation? Thinking about grabbing it on sale because "chill gridless city builder" is extremely my jam, but I'm reading a lot of poo poo about how the 1.9 update made the game a lot less chill. I could always install some cheat mods I suppose, but anyone have any insight on that?
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Dec 18, 2022 06:12
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zoux posted:64 separate Dyson spheres aren’t enough? Better yet you are the sole member of the "ancient alien race" whos culture and buildings spanned the entire galaxy but at some point disappeared completely. In the end your robot is basically just a prop designer for the AI being who narrates the game, but is in fact the true creator of the universe. So you go around building all these things so that some intelligent race not yet born can stumble on these great creations and play out a story created by the AI for his amusement. Or just let me build ringworlds, space stations, mass relay systems, or a death star.
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Dec 18, 2022 22:14
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I started a new factorio world using the Rail World preset and it's funny how breaking into oil processing is the first big "ugh, do I really want to continue with this?" roadblock in every new factory I spin up. I'm trying to make an effort to actually use trains this time around and I really do not like the track laying/signal placing in this game either.
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Dec 19, 2022 00:01
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I get that feeling too because building pipelines in factorio is garbage. They should all be underground. It's also a pretty chaotic mechanic because of all the ratios involved. It's usually the point where I break out blueprints because I just don't want to think about it. Late game, sure, I'll obsess over getting it all optimized. But in the early game it's the last thing on my mind.
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Dec 19, 2022 00:10
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Eric the Mauve posted:Anyone here still playing Foundation? Thinking about grabbing it on sale because "chill gridless city builder" is extremely my jam, but I'm reading a lot of poo poo about how the 1.9 update made the game a lot less chill. I could always install some cheat mods I suppose, but anyone have any insight on that? I have not kept up with the game so this opinion could be extremely outdated and wrong, now, but I ended up hating this game for the 'gridless' aspect because you paint residential areas and houses populate dynamically, but this ends up being so horribly hosed that the main "unique" feature of the game is something you spend all the time working against. The generation was so willy nilly, but houses still want like 'service' coverage and that, so you end up sort of trying to use hedges and poo poo to coax houses where you want and don't want them - carefully learning this amorphous size and sussing out the algorithm that they use so that you can get enough houses somewhere to upgrade. You end up spending way longer trying to force that poo poo into boring shapes rather than the promised "it generates a pleasing neighborhood." Like I said - this opinion could be way outdated. I haven't played the game in years now, but it left a sour enough taste in my mouth because of how badly I think it missed that I still want to warn people off of it. Maybe, just maybe, they've fixed this weird behavior in the meantime... But the mechanic was their unique thing at the time. Sorry, devs, one of the biggest misses in the genre for me. :/
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Dec 19, 2022 09:24
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Started out Ixion, and folks really were not kidding about the potential for a doom spiral. Hit game over in Ch2 after running perpetually short on metal. Once I hit 25% hull rating the stability penalty kicked in, couldn't afford stability buildings, then sector 1 went on strike, including the EVA bay and medbay, resulting in a ton of dead workers and death despite the free 0 structure save they give you. Tried restarting the chapter a few times before realizing it was doomed from the beginning, and ended up loading back up to the end of Ch1 instead. Spent probably twice as much time as originally just hoovering up ore and building a spare iron foundry and EVA bay.
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Dec 19, 2022 17:36
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Eschatos posted:Started out Ixion, and folks really were not kidding about the potential for a doom spiral. Hit game over in Ch2 after running perpetually short on metal. Once I hit 25% hull rating the stability penalty kicked in, couldn't afford stability buildings, then sector 1 went on strike, including the EVA bay and medbay, resulting in a ton of dead workers and death despite the free 0 structure save they give you. Tried restarting the chapter a few times before realizing it was doomed from the beginning, and ended up loading back up to the end of Ch1 instead. Spent probably twice as much time as originally just hoovering up ore and building a spare iron foundry and EVA bay. I'm doing that in sector two and still pretty stuck, but enjoying it.
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Dec 19, 2022 17:54
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Yep once I figured out there was almost no real pressure to actually advance into chapter 2 until I'm good and ready I stocked up on everything the solar system had to offer. Made chapter 2 much easier.
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Dec 19, 2022 18:03
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Ixion patch out, a bunch of fixes and tweaks and one really nice change:quote:The stability debuff from stored cryonic pods has been updated - you will now get -1 in a Sector that is storing more cryonic pods than the total active population of the Sector, rather than the previous station-wide debuff of -1 per group of 250 stored cryonic pods.
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Dec 19, 2022 20:03
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It broke my game. I jumped systems and now my food producing sector has 2 large warehouses with 1400 food and it's not exporting to my other sectors. So they're starving to death despite food being available.
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Dec 19, 2022 20:16
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If you haven’t yet, try setting the minimum number to store in that sector to something other than max. Max does some weird stuff sometimes.
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Dec 19, 2022 20:29
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:If you haven’t yet, try setting the minimum number to store in that sector to something other than max. Max does some weird stuff sometimes. That might be what happened! thanks How many of each industrial building do you guys build? I have 3 steel mills and 2x electronics factories and polymer factories in one sector.
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Dec 19, 2022 20:30
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I want to like IXION, but I just find there is a disconnect between the narrative and gameplay that just irritates me. People have raised most of the issues I have, such as workers getting upset at recycling, getting upset at having too many cryopods, rioting and then starving because of it, etc. It just feels that the gameplay takes precedence over narrative, which would be fine if it resulted in meaningful challenges, rather than roadbumps or death spirals. Currently, the game feels so close to really good, but marred by enough small annoyances that I think I'll put it down until/if these little nitpicks get resolved.
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Dec 19, 2022 20:42
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Found my first serious complaint with Ixion. There's no way to cancel a ship dismantle operation. Even if it refunds the materials, it's a huge waste of time if you misclick once.
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Dec 19, 2022 20:46
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Another thing: cargo ships picking up 3 units from a nearly depleted stockpile and then flying all the way back to the Tiqqun rather than traveling to the next stockpile very close by to pick up more is quite irritating.
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Dec 19, 2022 22:43
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Even better is sending two cargo ships to pickup the remaining 3 units of a resource. I should have the option to manually assign a cargo ship to pickup from a location.
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Dec 20, 2022 00:51
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You know there’s toggle switches for celestial objects that you can instruct ships to avoid or prioritize right? For example if there’s an asteroid full of iron you don’t want a pickup for you can click on it and tag the avoid button.
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Dec 20, 2022 01:19
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Trivia posted:Even better is sending two cargo ships to pickup the remaining 3 units of a resource. I should have the option to manually assign a cargo ship to pickup from a location. I make an effort to have different prioritization for different ships so they don't do that.
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Dec 20, 2022 01:21
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Kraftwerk posted:You know there’s toggle switches for celestial objects that you can instruct ships to avoid or prioritize right?
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Dec 20, 2022 01:44
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:Yeah but I’m guessing they want the three iron, but they only want one ship to go get it. And/or to have it pick up other things too on the way there / back, instead of just going out for what I'm guessing is a small amount of resources, without having to babysit it.
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Dec 20, 2022 02:03
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My favourite dumb thing with ships was how they don't seem to maintenance top-ups when they're idle in the hangar. So they'd start flying to an asteroid with like 1% of their max flight time remaining, get just outside the station, then immediately turn around and go back for maintenance
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Dec 20, 2022 02:10
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Radiation Cow posted:I want to like IXION, but I just find there is a disconnect between the narrative and gameplay that just irritates me. People have raised most of the issues I have, such as workers getting upset at recycling, getting upset at having too many cryopods, rioting and then starving because of it, etc. It just feels that the gameplay takes precedence over narrative, which would be fine if it resulted in meaningful challenges, rather than roadbumps or death spirals. I guess that also shows why so many management games back in the day tried to have a silly tone. The way you make these systems volatile and entertaining gets in the way of depicting them as reasonable, or trying to tell a serious story. It also makes things go down easier when you might be playing a villain.
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Dec 20, 2022 02:14
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Been playing PoE for the last week so I missed out on the Ixion release. With all the comparisons to Frostpunk I think I'm kind of glad I missed it. I have bounced off that one very hard on several occasions. By all accounts I should be in to it but something about it doesn't click and I quit within an hour. Someone mentioned something along the lines of not liking such a strong narrative in their management games and I think that's part of what's going on for me. I bought Dwarf Fortress but doubt I'll ever actually play it. I played it originally shortly after its release around 2007 while in a deep, deep depression in college. It actually managed to generate some dopamine for me in a time where it was in short supply so this purchase was more of a long overdue thank you than any real desire to go back and play. Now I'm looking forward to the full Farlanders release. The demo was really good. I felt like it offered quite a bit of content and definitely got me excited for the full thing.
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Dec 20, 2022 03:05
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Has anybody tried Viking city builder?
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Dec 20, 2022 05:31
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VelociBacon posted:I make an effort to have different prioritization for different ships so they don't do that. The prioritization system might actually work if ships were capable of alternating between even priorities. As it is unless I want overloaded storage for one resource and a dearth of another I'm manually changing them every few minutes. Doesn't help that they don't repair sensibly, they'll double up on almost empty stashes, etc. Yeah I mark almost empty locations when I notice, but I shouldn't have to.
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Dec 20, 2022 06:36
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Just beat Ixion and I'm extremely disappointed. Not even fully sure wtf happened or who all the various factions were. Nothing was explained. It feels like a 1990s game where all you get is a "You've won!" and thats it.
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Dec 20, 2022 06:42
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all according to keikaku
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Dec 20, 2022 06:56
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there is a load in the tooltips in the tech tree if you want to start putting context someplace. you start seeing ethical violations a bunch if you connect anything
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Dec 20, 2022 07:42
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company that fucks up spectacularly right at the start of the game has serious ethics violations? hmmm
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Dec 20, 2022 07:46
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Wafflecopper posted:Ixion patch out, a bunch of fixes and tweaks and one really nice change: I think this swung a bit too hard in the other direct. It's pretty trivial to stay under this limit, especially if you know what you're doing. I'm about to leave Chapter 1 with two food-neutral sectors, one of which is almost a dedicated industrial sector. I'm debating sticking around to open a third sector, or heading to Chapter 2 out of impatience rather than need. Radiation Cow posted:I want to like IXION, but I just find there is a disconnect between the narrative and gameplay that just irritates me. People have raised most of the issues I have, such as workers getting upset at recycling, getting upset at having too many cryopods, rioting and then starving because of it, etc. It just feels that the gameplay takes precedence over narrative, which would be fine if it resulted in meaningful challenges, rather than roadbumps or death spirals. I honestly think it falls apart in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 because making the climax of the game being overcoming a hostile ship with weapons cuts against the grain for what kind of game IXION is emulating. What I think made Frostpunk's narrative and mechanical structure so compelling was a combination of short timeframe and the fact that the antagonist was literally nature itself. Between a "combat" that feels a bit shoehorned and enough gameplay/story segregation--mostly around the time it takes to do things--to make you think twice about what the narrative is telling you, you lose the verisimilitude that the New Home base Frostpunk game did so well. I don't think the things like workers complaining about needing to recapture waste and such are all that terrible. It's pretty normal for the genre. Grumpy dwarves etc. Especially for a Frostpunk-like survival management game. But IXION does a bad job of engendering a sense of urgency outside the Chapter 4/5 spoiler above. The penalty for staying in one place for too long is a -1 penalty to happiness. Which is utterly trivial considering how many things boost that. Even in Chapter 3, the global floating bodies malus didn't put a dent in me. So instead of making me feel like I need to move on, I'm content to simply mine and explore until I've had my fill or I run out of resources to mine. I'm not even sure that's a hard limit, since I swear the game spawned new sources of Iron when I thought I'd soft-locked myself in Chapter 2 in my first playthrough. I'm debating setting up a tent in either Chapter 3 or 4 in my second run and seeing how long I can stay in one place before things fall apart. Kraftwerk posted:Just beat Ixion and I'm extremely disappointed. Not even fully sure wtf happened or who all the various factions were. Nothing was explained. It feels like a 1990s game where all you get is a "You've won!" and thats it. The... interesting choice they made is that event outcomes are static. So in addition to Grognan mentioning the story hidden in the tooltips, you also need to choose the "correct" event resolutions to get certain plot details. I'm honestly not a fan of the decision.
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Dec 20, 2022 08:55
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I’m hearing more in the discord about how “well, in the original French…” so maybe Ixion is just getting back at the rest of the world for lovely localizations. More seriously… Ixion feels like an early access game in many ways. I just hope it’s “finished” like frost punk was with different scenarios.
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Dec 20, 2022 11:04
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I really like the odd localization in IXION, it really feels to me like I'm in the future and dealing with some linguistic drift. Maybe it's not intentional, but I don't care. Anyone have any insight on a specific event in Chapter 2? Rockatansky D79 Your crew, if they survive this insanely deadly comet, will get replaced by a different crew, or do they? I'm not sure what's actually happening here or what any long term consequences might be of taking the naomi protocol option. Maybe it doesn't have any? Strange event.
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Dec 20, 2022 11:35
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Warmachine posted:The penalty for staying in one place for too long is a -1 penalty to happiness.
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Dec 20, 2022 11:39
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Splicer posted:Why isn't it a cumulative ticking clock? Take -1 after a while, then 2, then 3 etc. Same for the cryonics, set it so the higher the proportion of frozen to workers the higher the penalty. That's the thing: Cryonics DID function that way. It was -1 at 250, -2 at 500, etc. But the "loitering" penalty, as far as I can tell, was only -1. Or at the very least it didn't increase fast enough to notice in normal gameplay. I'm going to try idling for an ABSURDLY long time in Chapter 4 after clearing the objective this time, just to see if anything is different. edit: I know one of the things they included with the patch announcement was their desire to have difficulty modes in the future. I think the Cryonics change was motivated by the new player experience, which can be overwhelming. But in retrospect, I think the old penalty is fine once you've had the chance to stretch your legs and know what the game expects of you. I think reinstituting it the way it was is a good idea for higher difficulties. Warmachine fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Dec 20, 2022 |
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Dec 20, 2022 14:31
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Warmachine posted:
Wish I'd been taking better notes on event outcomes for a replay later. Sure was nice to fully upgrade my science ships for max safety, tell my dudes to check out this cool lookin orb they found on a comet, and then the whole thing blows up, everyone dies, I lose the ship, and can't even collect the science accumulated from the successful choices up until then.
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Dec 20, 2022 14:41
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Eschatos posted:Wish I'd been taking better notes on event outcomes for a replay later. Sure was nice to fully upgrade my science ships for max safety, tell my dudes to check out this cool lookin orb they found on a comet, and then the whole thing blows up, everyone dies, I lose the ship, and can't even collect the science accumulated from the successful choices up until then. And that's where it gets really funky. There's a guide on Steam that did what you mentioned, and it turns out the "failure" states are necessary to complete the story with the orbs, and a certain order of the orb-related outcomes is required in Chapter 5 to learn exactly what the orbs are implying. So yeah. I don't like the encounter design choice at all. It feels like they tried to split the difference between random outcomes with choice and an on-rails story delivery, and got the worst of both worlds.
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Dec 20, 2022 14:45
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Radiation Cow posted:I want to like IXION, but I just find there is a disconnect between the narrative and gameplay that just irritates me. People have raised most of the issues I have, such as workers getting upset at recycling, getting upset at having too many cryopods, rioting and then starving because of it, etc. It just feels that the gameplay takes precedence over narrative, which would be fine if it resulted in meaningful challenges, rather than roadbumps or death spirals. same. the game artificially pushes me to advance through the plot to boost the apparent difficulty of the game, or i can just hang out and not trigger the critical event so i can build up resources to trivialize advancement. its like they realize they built a sandbox space game with no resource scarcity and a minimal sandbox, so in an attempt to tune the game they just made it so certain events try to push you along when you're not ready. it ends up feeling like the game just doesn't want me to play it, but to stagger from cutscene to cutscene to experience what is shaping up to be kind of a silly plot i've remained spoiler free so far and i just got to chapter 2 before running low on interest: i'm guessing the whole thing is a dream or a simulation or an artificial reality or something like that, given how often the game keeps talking about genetic conatus and self-similar space and other High Sci Fi concepts i'm clearly supposed to care about. plus the intro warning in the parade of weird characters who speak cryptically warning you about dementia from the FTL engine. almost dreading finding out the final twist is some poo poo like that in the last chapter Warmachine posted:The... interesting choice they made is that event outcomes are static. So in addition to Grognan mentioning the story hidden in the tooltips, you also need to choose the "correct" event resolutions to get certain plot details. I'm honestly not a fan of the decision. its really not a great idea to bolt a plot to a sandboxy game. just make the game less sandboxy or the plot less of the point of the game in order to make the plot work, you have to guide the player between plot chunks. this is a bit antithetical to a game where the point is loving around unguidedly. something more like FTL would be appropriate, where the plot is just "go from here to there and don't get killed!" and let the player work out the details of the narrative between scrounging, building, and fighting/enduring hazards per aspera had this same problem, except the sandbox was kind of bad too Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Dec 20, 2022 |
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Dec 20, 2022 16:39
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It sounds like IXION didn't understand that the key part of Frostpunk having a plot was that storm happened no matter what. The story was born of how you built the city to deal with the storm, but the storm was the storm. If you just hosed around and let the researchers run forever while everyone was still in tents then everyone would die within a week. If you can just build up resources forever and the problems are triggered by you then either you build up and trivialize the game or the game goes "oh no someone left the space door open and all the food got sucked into space" and it pisses you off for being a blatant waste of your time because they couldn't balance the game.
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Dec 20, 2022 16:51
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also thinking about Fallout 4 recently, which was mostly a plot based game but it did have enough open world and management content to barely qualify as sandboxy, and i put more hours into building towers of pallets and twine to squat in than i did chasing down my lost son or engaging with the bullshit factions if you're going to make me engage with a plot at least make the plot compelling on its own. "you've had enough fun, get back to the plot now you loafer" is not an approachable game design strategy
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Dec 20, 2022 17:14
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