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Not that anyone asked, but there are some things you should know before playing Star Control Two, or its easy to find free-ware clone, the Ur-Quan masters. I spent some pretty serious time on it a couple of weeks ago, and despite the controls, (no mouse support, etc) unreasonably large game universe, and strange/twitchy/fun/had spacewar combat, it's definitely worth playing, provided you know a few things. 1) The game's ending has a time limit, and unless you use FAQs heavily, you are not going to make it the first dozen complete games you play. No exaggeration. 2) If you're not planning to play it over and over again, you might as well make use of a bit of strategy strategy-guide. There's not a lot of "aha" stuff so much as there is "90s bullshit puzzle-game" stuff, but if you actually pay attention to various aliens and listen carefully when they speak, they give lots of clues. The game fluff matters more often that it doesn't, so you can't just skip to the coordinates. 3) The game is meant to be played with pencil and paper on hand because no friendly modern labels and in-game notes are present. The game universe is entirely too big--while it's exciting that there are thousands and thousands of planets, it's also annoying that no more than two dozen of them have anything plot-related. Still, hardcore gamers who don't do anything the easy way can sink a solid 200 hours into it. 4) Expect to spend a lot of time on the mining mini-game or dogfighting aliens for cash. 5) Make sure you have the sound and graphics pack--the voice acting in the game is mostly good, genuinely funny/interesting and gives a real sense of atmosphere. 6)Be sure to investigate Pluto before you leave the solar system for the first time! One way of thinking of Star Control 2 is that it's a bit like morrowind, or really, dagerfall, in space, with all of the upsides and downsides of such a gameplay experience.You may now resume your regularly scheduled discussion of games that were made in the last 15 years and have such evil sorcery as mouse response, auto-save, etc.
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Mar 31, 2010 04:13
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Mrens posted:Sid Meier's Pirates, it was on sale on Steam a while ago and I feel like I missed some sort of intro level. I've tried booting it up a few times but can never get into it despite the fact it sounds right up my alley. Usually I end up just mindlessly sailing around the ocean or trying to recruit a crew without a clue to the purpose, usually with little indication about what I should be doing before I call it a day. I had some similar problems with the game, then I figured out a few things: 1: the trade system is broken and worthless, there's absolutely no point in keeping cargo other than food and cannons. You can make way more money boarding ships and selling them. 2: Visit the governor every time you visit a city, and get good at the dancing minigame or else get a patch/trainer to make it automatic. It's a pretty annoying QTE thing but it's completely essential for the main quest, and also for getting items. 3: You have to keep getting gold to keep your crew happy and be able to recruit new members, and if you can get enough gold you can keep sailing indefinitely. You get older each time you split the loot, and that makes the dueling harder, and if you get too old it will be physically impossible to beat the game's "final boss." 4: Ground combat and ground exploration are time consuming and kinda random, and finding buried treasure is usually a pain in the rear end. 5: You're going to want a small, fully upgraded sloop between 80-120 tons as your main ship. Larger ships are slow on the world map and speed beats endurance. 6: The game is actually pretty shallow--I never ended up rescuing my entire family, or finding the lost city of whatever, and the ship combat becomes pretty mechanical after awhile. You can sink a good 20 hours into it, but more than that is pushing it. One of the great mysteries of the universe is that all pirate games are either very limited or just suck, even though the setting should produce solid games left and right. Someday...
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Apr 30, 2010 12:43
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Just got Jagged Edge 2 Gold Edition and I'm a little bit overwhelmed--the controls seem kind of clunky, the guns I've got access to all suck, and I feel like I'm missing something. I've restarted three times and read some FAQs but something's still not clicking.
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May 12, 2010 02:19
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What should I know about playing The Guild: Europa 1400? The tutorials seem to only brush the surface and I've restarted about five times but I'm not really getting/getting-into the game. Is it my fault or is it not worth playing? Any tips for Space Colony would be appreciated too--it feels like a cross between startopia and the sims and I'm not really seeing how I can manage 20+ very different sims at once while simultaneously running a base and again, the tutorials only cover the basics. Thanks!
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May 9, 2011 21:08
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Nova88 posted:Any advice for Europa Universalis III Chronicles? (all DLC except for sprite packs). Any mods worth using also? I checked the wiki but there were only about 4 tips there and I heard it's a pretty complex game. For the first few playthroughs try playing as a powerful european nation, like Austria or Spain, which are pretty forgiving. The Paradox wiki covers all the basic information, and yes, it's going to take some reading to figure out how all the stuff works. The thing that took me the longest thing to understand is that war exhaustion is based almost entirely on attrition, rather than casualties or battles. So even if you have the manpower, make sure you don't leave your armies in high attrition provinces ever, not even during peace-time. Centralization is the most useful slider: watch out for events that reduce it since it has mostly positive effects and you'll need it for some pretty powerful national decisions. With all the DLCs almost any nation becomes viable if you can just survive long enough to get your sliders and ruler right so that you can make the "westernize" national decision, it will change your tech group to a more western one. From there, you get "neighbor bonuses" that let you catch up technologically fairly quickly. So don't be afraid to play non-western countries, just have a westernization game plan from the get-go or you'll get stomped after about 1500.
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Sep 1, 2012 03:08
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theshim posted:Going to start Deus Ex: Human Revolution soon. Anything to add on top of the wiki's page? It's not an open world, the skills don't allow you to create your own path but rather let you take advantage of one of the two or three pre-designed mission paths, so all lifting/jumping skills are almost useless. If you manage to get somewhere they didn't want you to go by using your jump, it'll just automatically kill you, so that's fun. Shops are nearly bare but with some work you can horde more than you need of most stuff. There are vents in every single mission. The boss fights are extremely dumb but make sure you have some explosives/heavy weapons skills no matter what you think your build is. There's lots of voice acting and some interesting missions, but no significant choices--play it as a cover stealth-shooter and ignore anything that doesn't have clear combat applications when leveling up. I thought it was a stylish bad game, but many people really enjoyed it.
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Dec 4, 2012 01:32
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Colon V posted:This advice is basically a TL;DR for "how to turn DX:HR into another boring linear shooter". Because, for good or ill, when you remove the stealth, that's what it is. Totally agree. But I'm not the one who made melee takedowns use up a very finite resource, nor did I put in a boss fight where you have to use a rocket launcher and grenades. I was so shocked I actually went to the FAQ to see if there was a diplomatic or stealth option I'd missed. Nope! It was like they went back and said "Hey, remember in Deus Ex how you could avoid that fight with Gunther by learning his override and how cool that was? Well, that was a bug, and shouldn't have been in the game."
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Dec 4, 2012 18:08
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It was a few pages back, but I've played the game alot now and some of the advice on Fallen Enchantress seems to have missed what I've found to be the most fun way to play the game. I want to give some unsolicited tips that are not that obvious. It's actually a great game, but it's hard to tell at first because the starting difficulty and settings make the game too easy and most features of it pointless. Before you start: *Play on at least challenging, preferably expert after a game or two, otherwise your sovereign is too powerful in relation to the enemies you fight and you'll be bored halfway though the game because building troops won't matter. *Set wildlands and monsters to above average, random events to above average and resources to scarce: this means that you'll have real shortages, genuine objectives, and a need to defend cities with not just garrisons but champions. *Play with at least 4 AI opponents. *I prefer setting technology speed to Marathon because it lets you focus on developing cities, champions, and armies instead of being trapped in a tech race. You still have to put points into tech, but all of a sudden small research differences don't make or break the game. In game: *City growth is not that important, and with all the monsters roaming around, most cities should be set up as forts. The advantages from cities are mostly money and growth, which in turn give you more money and growth bonuses. *Play as close to iron-man as possible: champions and the sovereign unit can't die anyway and you'll appreciate the greater tactical choices that come after defeats, not to mention the backstory of a champion who is blind in one eye with a gangrenous hand fighting the dragon that did those things to him. Any game is easy if you savescum, but this one is especially ruined by always insisting on the optimal result. The end result of playing like this is that there are only a few places for cities and the world is dangerous, with lots of battles, lots of xp, and the possibility for some diplomacy since the AI who would normally be sending endless waves of spearmen at you is probably having his city besieged by giant spiders. A lot of the reviews kept the settings to defaults and these definitely unbalance the game and make cities far less relevant and valuable, and also allows you to just create the "hero stack of death" that destroys everything in its path. Fallen Enchantress is a really promising game, but it's definitely not a polished one (like, at all) and it takes a lot of work and even a learning curve to get the features reasonably balanced. Also, the AI cheats, but there isn't any 4x game where the AI doesn't, so live with it.
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Dec 8, 2012 03:23
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Colon V posted:I'd suggest not bothering with tanks. They're expensive, take way too long to be worthwhile, can't learn skills, and are also buggy as hell. There are a few bugs with them, but if you're playing ironman on the harder modes, tanks fill a nice niche as expendable point man. Alternatively, you can just rush to the ghost armor that makes you invisible, which is gamebreakingly powerful for reasons you'll discover later.
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Mar 9, 2013 07:05
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Taerkar posted:Going to try and actually playing through Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura for once. I'd like to gun a gunslinger and the website has a bit on it. My main question is what modifications should I run as I remember tech being far weaker than magic. If you're serious about going tech over magic, there are some hard truths. Magic is more powerful and convenient, and as a gunslinger there are large sections of the game you're not gonna be able to get by with purely by shooting stuff. A lot of the tech route is just about good/tedious inventory management and spamming certain useful items--you're gonna need lots and lots of healing items, and in certain places you're gonna want to have about a million grenades/explosives/traps. Seriously, in the later parts of the game you will need to have 20 stacks of all your techy damage items until you get certain guns late in the game that are comparable to late game magic weapons. As your tech aptitude goes up, the ability for magical party members to help you goes way down, but the AI doesn't seem to get this, so keep that in mind when doing party composition. Honestly, I've tried to play the tech route about three times and each time I end up either going pure melee with light magic or I just give in to magic utterly. You may want to put the game on easier setting for some parts of it if you don't want to have to cheese your way through it.
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Mar 15, 2013 20:39
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GrandpaPants posted:Does anyone have any tips for Eador? I'm on the first shard and I can pretty much beat any combat, but I don't see a way to actually defend my territories, so when I take over a territory and the enemy inevitably takes it back, they somehow poo poo out like 9 units to defend it which means I have to slog my way back. The only thing I can do is make an outpost, but those are prohibitively expensive for me right now. This is an easy one: when you click on the province, one of the little circles is the option to hire a province defense force of some kind: local militia, adventurers, brute squad, elves etc. You should put them in most provinces and they're pretty cheap, between 30-80 gold for about 9 units that can't leave the province. They seem to get more powerful the longer it's been since you've hired them, so my province defense that I've had for 20 turns can easily put down local revolts, but they still get wrecked by armies led by the enemy hero.
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Sep 1, 2013 05:23
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McCoy Pauley posted:Any tips for Dragon Age Origins (on steam, the complete edition with all the DLC), beyond what's on the wiki? In particular, with all that DLC, when and how do I access it (like when can I get the golem companion, for example)? The DLC doesn't add a lot of play-time in terms of new quests and areas, but they do give you quite a few really powerful items that compare favorably with end-game gear. The DLC locations will be marked in gold on your map, so if you want more of a challenge get to them in the mid-game or later, except soldier's peak, which is worth doing early if you want the storage chest. Play on hard, don't play on normal. It may be tricky at first, but with all the DLC on, normal will be a tedious cake-walk after you get all the fat loots and extra levels, while hard will still have a lot of strategic depth. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Sep 28, 2013 |
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Sep 28, 2013 01:06
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Wolfsheim posted:Now that I have a functioning PC again I'm considering really making a go of Arcanum. I played around with a half-Orc with the ugly stick background, and while it was kinda funny at first, convincing literally everyone I talked to to even give me the time of day started to grate while I was still tooling around Shrouded Hills, so I'm thinking of starting over. A couple of questions: When you play melee you're definitely going to get into magic because melee makes tech mostly obsolete/tedious. The gear restrictions for weird sized people can be severe, but half-orc is such a beast in melee it's not really going to matter. I recall correctly, persuade is still pretty useful, I wore an oversized smoking jacket for most of the game for exactly this reason. For magic, get the buffs and heals first, and if you're having problems in the mid-game the summons can be useful distractions--your ogre will do disgusting amounts of damage. Arcanum is a pretty fun game but magic is far easier to use than the tech stuff because it has a better power-curve, it's more powerful in the long run, and it doesn't require micro-management. And Deus Ex Human Revolution is an awful game, regardless of edition. Horrible boss fights, embarrassing level design, clunky shooting, and an upgrade tree that removes all interesting choices. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 21:18 on May 13, 2014 |
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May 13, 2014 21:16
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Shibawanko posted:Tried Bioshock about 4 times from the beginning, gave up every time because of its sheer badness and terrible nerd story. I also had this problem. Does the game actually get better or does it continue to phone things in with boring set-pieces and combat that's all inventory management?
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Sep 14, 2014 23:40
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