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So here's a... civ builder roguelite? Dwarf Fortress roguelite? It's called As Far As The Eye. It's very light on metaprogression, mostly just unlocking new traits for the trait pool, but if you want some nice 1-2 hour runs of a civ-style builder, it's pretty solid. The goal is to shepherd your tribe of mask-wearing balloon enthusiasts as far as "The Eye", the one point of shelter in a world that's slowly flooding, and you're limited in the time you have to spend in each place, because flooding. The "roguelike" feel is that not only do you have randomized maps, but they're arranged in a progression tree. So you can start out with a choice between, like, a path to a big lake area full of protective auras that needs you to build up wood and stone, or a path to a small canyon that needs you to master growing, gathering, and stone mining. Your units get experience as they do tasks, like Dwarf Fortress, and there's a little skill tree as they get to the advanced levels. Disasters will periodically happen as you go, and they'll get faster as you're wasteful, overbuilding resources to put a building in an optimal place or harvesting too much from a map and having to leave some behind. Every map also ends with a major disaster, penalizing you for your last few turns in place, so it can be good to leave early. You can build two types of buildings - "permanent" ones you leave behind, that only need wood and maybe something else, and "mobile" buildings that can be packed up and relocated both on the map and between maps, but are more expensive. You only have limited space on the caravan and it's got to hold both the mobile buildings and all of the resources you want to take with you, but you can increase that storage space both by having your units pick up stray pack animals on the maps and by researching expansions with knowledge, a resource that you get by fully exploring maps or having experienced people do a job. There are four different modes available, for short and long journeys. Come from the West and that's your basic start, blank slates with a positive trait each and plenty of food. Come from the South and you begin with one extra guy (and a free camp extension to stick him in) and all your guys start with a positive and negative trait, in addition to having mastered the basics of a random profession. Good for exploring the higher regions of the skill tree. Come from the East and turn up the disasters, start with one less guy and they'll always have the trait that makes them count for two, so your basic camp only holds two people. In addition, everyone you start with or recruit has a trait that slows down your experience gain but turns it into knowledge, so it's much more a game about climbing the tech tree. Come from the North and disasters are much less frequent, but mostly that's just replacing random disasters with a constant bitter cold, so addition to keeping fed you also need to worry about keeping everyone warm. Some tips for starting out: - Grab pack animals when you can, they're useful not only for space but for dedicated extensions to the camp - extra housing for more units, trading in desperate circumstances, improving all efficiency and doubling up on buildings, and improving your research capabilities. Extensions can only be built directly adjacent to the big central caravan beast, so be careful where you park him 'cause he ain't moving until it's time to go. - Explore. Clearing every blank space on a map is a big kick in the knowledge and finding empty space to put down all your craft buildings can sometimes be challenging. - You're going to need some kind of cooking building to make the various food items into edible rations, but try not to go too far over on them - especially if you build a mobile cook station and can drop it down in the next map, carting along the raw ingredients is actually more space-efficient than what they cook into. - Don't sleep on building upgrades, especially for the mobile buildings. You can learn to preload the entire recipe tree at a cook station or herd those fuzzy llamas into a pasture to shear them all in place. - Always go say hi to friendly caravans that show up, they're how you get more units, though you can also make a trade in your advantage or beg for a smaller favor for cheap or free. - Whatever you start with, you're going to want to dedicate one unit to getting builder experience so they can build all your mobile buildings and get the advanced bonuses, and give at least one unit experience in gathering herbs and brewing potions so they can get good at dealing with goody huts and/or protective auras later on. Glazius fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Oct 10, 2020 |
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Oct 10, 2020 22:07
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SKULL.GIF posted:This looks really interesting, I might give this a try. Yeah, that's another reason I brought it up - it's a game with very little metaprogression mechanics, other than having to unlock the tribes W -> S -> E -> N, and needing to do a tribe's short journey to unlock its long journey. You get better through learning the maps and mechanics.
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Oct 11, 2020 00:50
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Cleared the last short journey for As Far As The Eye. Wow, the northern tribe is a challenge, especially if you have paths that need wool. I had a maximum expert with a 50% bonus efficiency trait and I still only barely made it to the end.
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Oct 11, 2020 15:54
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SKULL.GIF posted:I tried As Far As The Eye for a hour or so this morning, finished the campaign/tutorial and messed around a bit in a regular game before heading to work. The game is definitely challenging and it's not uncommon to see your survival engine stall out or not come online in time. Usually I just quit out before that happens, I don't like to hear them starving to death. One thing to keep in mind is that the resource cycle is a complete loop - units take on a class at a resource building (or optionally at the caravan for pepkins, wood, pack beasts, and anything else you've researched) walk to the hex with the resource, gather for three turns (including the turn where they arrive), and return to the building, slowed 1 MP by the resource they're carrying. If this cycle is interrupted at any point, it's entirely broken and has to start over from the beginning, so unless it's a matter of life and death the time to interrupt a unit is when they're listed as "going to work" or have 2 turns left.
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Oct 11, 2020 22:18
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Motherfucker posted:misread this as Clown Trick and was excited for a moment. I believe you might be interested in largely unheralded May release Dandy Ace? Haven't played it myself, though.
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Nov 4, 2020 19:00
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ZypherIM posted:As long as you keep up with your +skeleton level (1 above the loop level seems sort of the minimum that felt acceptable in the second level to me) it isn't too bad. Swamp tiles actually worked decently, as the misquito suicide attack tended to clear out all the various extra spawns. Though I was running desert tiles as well, and got solid level up choices, but the boss wasn't too bad with 3 skeles and +1.5-2 levels on the loop counter and a dash of quality. Necro has really good ancestral tomb synergy though, since they don't have armor and it doesn't affect mage armor. On a related note, I had a really nice time on a rogue run where the arsenal gave me the necro pendant. Glass cannon + per-battle temp HP =  .The heck is up with the Maze of Memories, though? I might try a garbage lich run with it just to see what's up.
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Mar 6, 2021 04:51
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Turin Turambar posted:Apart from the combat feel, it's also more difficult than it seems at first, once you reach the 4th level, because it lack dash invulnerability, brief hit invulnerability, you can't interrupt enemies attacking, you don't have the rally effect from DC, nor the 1 hit protection. All the series of little tricks good games use to make it feel more fair. There's a warp dash that's effectively invuln since you don't cover the distance, but yeah, you have no iframes, unless you specifically add stun to an attack there is no stun, and if you blunder into a damage vortex you can 0-to-death real quick. (also you probably want two dashes for mobility around the bosses, which is some real fun on face buttons) It's actually made me appreciate parts of Hades more by seeing what a game plays like without them, though Ace usually gets a very strong range game with the option to kite through previous rooms, which is something Hades chose to lack.
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Mar 28, 2021 06:19
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Toshimo posted:Every character has the same easy peasy negotiation strat: Remove all your red cards, play all your green ones, build up defense and card draw and grind your opponent to death. Buying an early Brain Gills makes this even faster to achieve. I dunno. They tend to ramp pretty quick even before Impatience shows up. The key for Sal is to be diplomatic if you're making friends and be hostile if you're hurting people. Friendship can get ally arguments showing up to help at the start of fights and a lot of later Diplomacy cards can protect them. Violence and death get you brutal reputation status cards that weaken diplomacy and boost hostility, and if a whisper campaign starts against you, great - that's one more time a Dominance-boosted Overbear can go off, another builder for Oppress, another action from Bulldoze. And don't be shy about using your Flourish to buy you a free turn if you're drawing dead.
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Jun 13, 2021 23:59
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Hooplah posted:my main gripe is if i take a boon to upgrade a given slot, say dash for instance, i then want to lean on that slot as my damage-dealer. now if i get another boon from a different god, i need to actively avoid that same mechanic i've been focusing on and grab a second upgrade that's now just as resource-intensive as the first would be. it's forced anti-synergy. Yes, it usually doesn't fall into place as well as the seeking doom vortex run. The game encourages you to go wide because there's some opposition, like the giant poison-spraying rats, that would be completely terrible to fight if you were relying on your dash to do damage in melee range, and some opposition, like the giant laser-spraying snakestones, that want you in their face stunning them out of their bullshit as fast as possible. It can be easy to rely on a single good boon, but your weapon has two attack modes for a reason, and later developments in the game give you two more important buttons to press, though more rarely. Hades really wants you to press all your available buttons, and maybe to associate a given god with one of your buttons for a run. Seeing that god again gives you a chance to upgrade what that button does - your chain lightning now makes more hops and makes enemy attacks backfire on them, your water splash DOTs when they move and causes a secondary splash when you hit them into something. And the combination upgrades are only available when you've put their respective gods on one of your main buttons. cock hero flux posted:This exact thing is why I don't like metaprogress that increases player power at all. It's fine when it unlocks alternate playstyles, like classes or races or ships or whatever. But when it directly improves the power of the player then it's always either: Griftlands seems like it's doing a good job of this. I beat a Sal run fresh despite not 100% knowing how the final boss would get set up by the plot (though it was a real nailbiter), and a Rook run with some perk points from Sal but no other help. I'm confident I'll have a fairly similar experience with Smith. I've seen the sentiment that you're going to skunk out until you grind out some metaprogression, but from how I've played it seems more like the metaprogression is there to help rise to the challenge as you climb up in prestige level.
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Jun 22, 2021 19:32
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So since it's eaten most of my weekend, I figured I'd share a link to The Last Stand: Aftermath, a sequel to apparently some old Armor Games flash games about setting up a fortified position against zombies? But this one's a run-based isometric zombie shooter. The conceit is that your survivor's compound is beset by a new strain of the zombie virus, and you play as someone who's been exposed, running a suicide mission to cover as much ground as possible before the infection claims them, in order to find... well, I'm not sure, I just made it to the third biome. Some kind of hope, at least. The infection eats at your health bar unless you can find some rare pharmaceuticals, and anything it chews up is permanently gone, though you do get some compensation - up to six weird mutations before the infection takes all of you. Batteries are basically your skeleton keys, allowing you to power up abandoned supply caches and outposts, and as far as between-run progression goes, you're collecting primarily supply to improve the armory back at the compound and knowledge to advance your own tech tree. Every once in a while you'll come to an old fortified hardpoint with a generator, and if you kick it on you can loot a cache or get access to antivirals or really good battery chests... but you'll also hit the floodlights and make a terrible racket, so here comes the horde. Biomes are gated by some of these challenges, and if you accomplish them once they stay cleared, though any particularly tough customers that spawned the first time around are still going to be back for the repeat performance. It's got an experimentation-based crafting system that was pretty satisfying to play with, and while it's no Dead Rising you can get some pretty ludicrous and satisfying melee going. You'll need melee, too - some zombies are still wearing their old armor and you'll need to snap it off with melee attacks before a gunshot will connect. It's very reliant on between-run progression though; you'll absolutely need multiple runs just to get enough knowledge points together to research the protective measures that give you a bigger timer. At least the progression comes in big, relatively inexpensive chunks so it feels like all your spends make a difference.
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Nov 21, 2021 09:40
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BrianRx posted:I liked what little I played of the demo despite being sceptical because of its origins. Steam reviews are mixed, which usually means bad unless something very specific clicks and you can overlook glaring faults. I'd like to buy and give it a shot but am leery. Everything you mentioned was the stuff I liked in the demo. What's rough about it? I do remember zombies being both dumb and also able to see you through walls and while sneaking. I haven't had problems while sneaking, but zombies definitely hear you and will move toward noise, which you make when walking or running. As for downsides I've noticed? Sure, I can mention a bunch of things that bothered me a little, but nothing ever really hit tossed controller, ragequit, or even "this is bullshit" vocalization levels of rage. They're little rough patches I'd expect from a $25 game. Yes, I'm aware that Hades is also a $25 game, Supergiant is criminally underpricing that thing. So, first off, there is effectively no story. Occasionally there's a little bit of radio chatter when you get to a place that needs some plot stuff done at it, but there is little to no pre-apoc lore to find and "your character" is a cipher born to die. Difference between characters is just a matter of the three items they get as a starting loadout, which becomes less and less of a difference as you unlock more starting items with supply drops. Sometimes in a building with really really tight spaces and physics objects you can find your path barred for a bit. Many physics objects can be destroyed with melee attacks, but there are some that can't, like office chairs. Spamming dodge roll a few times would eventually get me by them, but if ever had to pop free under pressure I'd be a lot more salty about it. When you enter most buildings there's a count for searchable containers, and sometimes that'll include little boxes of junk that are physicsable but leashed, that get rattled into a place where it's hard to interact with them. I almost never find anything in them, but it can definitely rankle to see "5/6 containers searched" and then leave. There's a soft limit to carry weight that uses up stamina faster when you go over it, but in practice you're almost always over it because strong melee weapons and powerful guns are very heavy. It'd be nice to be able to, say, tag your actual loadout and stash the rest of the items in your car. However, the downside is pretty minor - I've never really run short of stamina recovery items. There's also a rebuyable perk that picks three random inventory slots from your last character to get saved for the next one, but if you're packratting then it's almost never going to give you anything good, especially since "a gun" and "its ammo" are two different slots. Batteries are pretty rare, so while you unlock the ability to skip past nodes in a biome by beating its final challenge, you'll almost never want to unless they're real stinkers, because you want to get as many chances as possible to get a battery and therefore some good guns or antivirals. In theory at a tinker bench you can make batteries out of electronic parts, but electronic parts are also very hard to find. You can tech up to improve your scavenging of ammo, healing supplies, food, and fuel, but not scrap. You can only carry one spare dose of antivirals on you at a time. This limitation doesn't make a whole lot of sense; antivirals will need either a battery or a horde battle to access. If you get lucky enough to find three of them close together, let it ride! The game supports controllers, and I've got an old xbox one that does pretty well. However, if your controller drifts at all you can find yourself interrupted by movement when you try to use healing items. Items in general are a little odd, you use the d-pad to quick select them into an active slot and then it differs. With a gun you aim with the right stick and hit the use button to fire - right-stick aim doesn't seem to account for height differences very well, but your VATS-style aim in focus mode will still hit reliably for all the couple of shots you get in it. With a throwable you also aim with the right stick and hit the use button to fire, but the right stick is giving you a predictor arc rather than just a firing direction. With a medical item you just hit the use button to use it and there's an interruptible animation. Your ground finisher setup on controller is use button + melee button, so if you have a medical item equipped the use button takes priority and you have no ground finisher, though the number of times that actually became a factor in my playthroughs is quite small.
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Nov 21, 2021 23:21
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The Last Stand: Aftermath dropped a patch that fixed the outstanding issues I saw with physics objects occasionally blocking your path, containers clipping and becoming unsearchable, and problematic aim up and down the Z-axis. Got through the third biome and unlocked the fourth, which is on fire. Didn't actually reach it, though - had a truly impressive horde pop out at the final hurdle of the third biome, though I did last long enough to see the gate open. Skipping nodes is actually proving to be more useful than I thought, once I get a decent collection of batteries -- less time on the virus counter, more chance to go to places with some guaranteed good things.
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Nov 24, 2021 01:03
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One final update on The Last Stand: Aftermath - I've beaten the game and am now in a postgame that's a neat variant on the main run. I have to admit that I wasn't expecting the game's "earlier survivors clear the way for later ones" philosophy where you only have to clear in-biome "detour" maps and end-of-biome challenges once to persist all the way to the end boss, but it makes sense. The postgame is more of an epilogue with a Pact of Punishment-style challenge setup and five heat levels to clear that unlock some pretty crazy military equipment to punch through the last biome with. And, y'know, fill out the supply and knowledge tree if you didn't repeatedly eat poo poo in the early game like me, though here's a tip - once you unlock the improvised flamethrower and a starting armory loadout that gives you the parts to build one (scrap, gears, and an oil filter) you've pretty much got an anti-armor tool you can use all game long, as long as you pour alcohol into plastic bottles over a campfire to keep its ammo up. I appreciate that this game decided it wanted to have an ending and picked a scenario that made sense to lean heavily into metaprogression towards it, because it makes the progression feel useful and powerful rather than a fifteen-run tax before you can get a clear.
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Dec 9, 2021 09:37
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Fat Samurai posted:Someone mentioned a Zombie roguelike where the runs are timed because the characters have a disease or something, and clearing an area actually clears it for future runs. Anyone remembers the name? It seemed interesting You've got your link to The Last Stand: Aftermath, I hope - just wanted to bring it up again because I've put in some time to clear the postgame these past couple of days, with the holiday break and all. The postgame introduces a new basic wrinkle: a third metaprogression resource, reputation. After every completed run you earn reputation based on your... well, if you're familiar with Hades it's your heat level, there's a multivariable difficulty system to make the run more difficult and you set up what maluses you want at the run start. Heat level works as a multiplier, and you can rack up more base reputation by collecting bounty tokens, which drop from anything that previously dropped blood samples, getting a successful clear, and scouring the maps for new randomly-appearing antibody canisters (though you do get a map icon for them, thankfully) and taking them to a successful clear. All the original in-biome challenges are cleared, since you've gotten a clear already, but even without heat this does make the basic structure of runs a little more difficult, since the bounty tokens take the place of some number of blood samples, and one of the only ways to get the run-extending antivirals is to find a former military checkpoint and feed some blood samples into it. Reputation is spent on getting military-grade gear and unlocks, including the prizes for clearing 5 heat levels - universal muzzle attachments that make a ton of noise but randomly proc explosion, stun, or fire when the bullets connect, and then extremely powerful new melee and ranged weapons. (Protip for the postgame - you'll still be racking up supply points, definitely invest them in dumping some craft supplies into the armory, since you can generally get enough batteries and electronics to hit enough caches to be supply neutral and have some leftover for the military gear in battery chests.) I say "clear the postgame" because I did enough to unlock the epilogue, which is just a little more plot stuff that doesn't really change the structure of runs, and after a little over 50 hours of gametime I'm satisfied with what I got for my money.
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Jan 1, 2022 18:11
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moot the hopple posted:This is good to know. Didn't realize the point to the destroy card upgrade until now. I think my goal next run is to phase out my starter cards this way and try to hopefully make room for better cards. You're not intended to curate the available cards as a means to pursue standard game progression. However, it can be useful when chasing the game's achievements, like incepting 99 doubt or winning a fight without attacking.
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Jan 2, 2022 23:41
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Angry Diplomat posted:Yeah I really like how Griftlands gives you various metaprogression stuff to help you progress and experiment, but then comes full circle to a no-handholding, zero-upgrade run as a final test of skill. It feels like a good compromise between giving you lots of leeway to play around and requiring you to Git Gud in order to win. If the latter style of play doesn't appeal to you, that's fine; you don't even need to beat the highest level to unlock anything! It's just there as a challenge for, well, the kinds of people who post in this thread So maybe you know: what's the actual use case for Smith's Curve Ball flourish? Literally just that one argument that retaliates when attacked? Interactions with Drum Roller/The Red because it counts as red/green damage?
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Jan 3, 2022 23:07
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goferchan posted:Have A Nice Death is a sidescroller roguelite that just launched in EA. All the reviews so far are a little shallow and it's hard to get a grasp from them on what the game is like mechanically, but boy, that art design really is pretty It's going to invite comparisons to Dead Cells. You get a core weapon, and a variety of subweapons that run off cooldown timers or a common stamina pool. There's an in-run tripartite attribute tree you climb up. I don't think there's a troidular traversal upgrade system, though - you get your movement tricks from the start. Platforming levels are smaller and there's a little exploration but there are multiple of them per biome - it's a little like Skul the Hero Slayer in that regard. Unlike Skul, metacurrency spends primarily on putting new things in the pool. Rather than trying to loot upgraded versions of weapons, you get an in-run currency you use to upgrade them, but getting a good-rarity subweapon can swing a run.
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Mar 11, 2022 19:46
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Pastrami posted:Just want to say cobalt core is incredible. First StS-like that has made me laugh that I can remember. Example: (random ? Event that happened >5 runs in) Dracula randomly showing up, and everyone’s reactions like it was normal, since it’s a common “?” event in these sorts of games. Would you believe they're arguably canonical? The studio's previous game, a starship CAD simulator called Sunshine Heavy Industries (yes, that one), featured them as a repeat customer in a free Halloween update. Glazius fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 01:51
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Cobalt Core is getting mods, though they're limited to a side channel in the developer's discord for now. New ships, new characters (including a fully carded version of Evil Riggs, who builds up rage to spawn the kerbroken missile swarm she fired off in the escape), and Cobalt Petrichor, a Risk of Rain-inspired mode with a ton of new minor artifacts that edges up the difficulty every 10 combat turns. No fun dialog text yet, but they seem to have just cracked how to do that too.
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Dec 8, 2023 09:04
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:Got to what I presume is the last boss in Cobalt Core on my first run, but the damage was just too loving savage. Game's extremely good! Cool, glad you're having fun with it! Cobalt Core is not a game that's trying to be super hard to win one run, but getting a reliable source of stun can help tremendously and one of your starting characters has the potential to do that pretty regularly if you don't find an artifact for it.
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Dec 13, 2023 06:28
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Ramie posted:I just bought the Switch version of Going Under while it's on sale, and I'm surprised I haven't heard more praise for it. It launched the week after Hades hit 1.0. Kinda sucked all the oxygen out of the "fun conversations with quirky characters in an evolving hub world" room. It is its own action roguelike animal. The pace is more deliberate, fights a little more perilous, and it's important to learn the timing of various weapon and object animations. It's all pretty solidly put together. The only quibble I had with it was that I pushed myself to advance the plot and was locked into harder dungeons without a lot of mentor metaprogression, but they fixed that with a patch that let you go back to the easier ones.
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Dec 20, 2023 09:38
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