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That's a fantastic bit of fluff at the end.
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Sep 7, 2019 00:50
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Get loving owned transhumanist saviors.
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Sep 7, 2019 00:51
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...And scattered about it, one in his overturned war-machine, the same one also somehow in the now rigid handling-machine, and the very same dude yet again somehow also stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Al Falah– dead! – slain by the big and slow cannonball against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all god's devices had failed, by the humblest things that man, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
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Sep 7, 2019 01:52
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No matter how subtle the entirely non-supernatural techno-wizard, 10kg of iron to the face will seriously cramp their style.
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Sep 7, 2019 04:51
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He's probably not dead dead though. Just temporarily corporeally-challenged. He'll get better.
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Sep 7, 2019 05:05
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DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LONG IT IS GONNA TAKE TO GROW THAT BACK?
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Sep 7, 2019 05:22
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The Lone Badger posted:He's probably not dead dead though. Just temporarily corporeally-challenged. He'll get better. I seem to recall Cythereal built a Resurrection Machine as a wonder a little while ago, so probably.
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Sep 7, 2019 05:41
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Imagine going around Iceland on vacation and introducing yourself as the guy who died for Iceland's favorable terms.
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Sep 7, 2019 10:50
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Omnicrom posted:I seem to recall Cythereal built a Resurrection Machine as a wonder a little while ago, so probably. It's something of a misnomer if you read the civlopedia entry I posted - it's a rejuvenation machine, not resurrection. I mean, at this point if Al Falah had a sample of the guy's DNA anywhere on record they could undoubtedly clone him back to life, but story-wise I don't think they'd go for that. Al Falah may have practical immortality regarding aging, but violence and freak accidents can still be fatal.
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Sep 7, 2019 12:52
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But in Al-Falah the border between the real and unreal is... diffuse. Depending on how well and how frequently he was interfaced with the ship he may well still exist in the unreal, ready to step back into the real.
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Sep 7, 2019 13:12
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Possibly, but you are overthinking something I tossed in as a "Icelanders are going to be annoying about this forever" kind of joke.  Second to last update will be pretty short, I realized that going into any detail on post-Fall China and the US, and what happened there, would be indulging in misery and violence for no reason but their own sake.
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Sep 7, 2019 13:33
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Cythereal posted:Possibly, but you are overthinking something I tossed in as a "Icelanders are going to be annoying about this forever" kind of joke. Just imply it is the world of Fallout.
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Sep 7, 2019 15:17
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One of the major resistance areas that the Al Falah troops met was around Las Vegas where an army of Pre-Fall robots and madmen using ancient artillery led by The So-Called Messenger put up a surprising fight before finally being pacified by expert negotiators
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Sep 7, 2019 15:30
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The most effective resistance to Al Falah would ironically come from the most low-tech militaries because they cannot do enough damage to qualify as a threat worth retaliation and so Al Falah could only interpret their fired arrows and such as very firm "no thank you"s. If the world was in even worse shape, they might not be able to save much of it because most remaining humans would be too scared and hostile to accept them but not dangerous enough to qualify as ethical to fight.
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Sep 7, 2019 15:34
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Fallout jokes would require me to have anything more than mild antipathy towards that series of games I've never played and have no interest in, sorry.
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Sep 7, 2019 15:37
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Winding Down Oh hey, a PAC destroyer. Destroyers are the t3 Purity cruiser.   Why is 'The Quantum Computer' a wonder again?  The first manned landing on the moon - not quite as impressive when the moon in question is orbiting a colony world six light years from Earth. When the colony that launched the mission was currently occupied with invading another planet in another star system. Neoplanetariums increase a city's orbital radius. Skycranes are a Purity production structure. The science boost now makes arrays give as much science as an academy that hasn't received any upgrades.  Running out of vaguely interesting things to research without jacking up Harmony or Purity.  I guess this could be useful?  Speaking of quantum computers, Ard's latest project promised to be the most powerful artificial intelligence ever devised, code-named Cynosure. Fluff reasons and nothing else to make in Ard, really.  The deep space telescope is a satellite that grants a whopping 25% science boost to any city in its (rather large) range. Really neat, but a bit too late in the tech tree to likely do much good. More importantly, if you're gunning for Contact, a deep space telescope has a guaranteed proc to decipher a part of the Signal during the satellite's lifetime - the second of the three ways to get a Signal piece. The third is simply a very small chance for explorer expeditions to progenitor sites to discover one. The planet carver is a more powerful orbital laser.  Mister sea dragon, where are you going?  To Earth!  I guess. State of Earth    Eight years had passed since Al Falah had returned to Earth. Eight years of relentless military advance, automated infrastructure development, and careful diplomacy. The end of the Emancipation campaign was in sight as Al Falah forces swept down North America, across east Asia, and out into the islands of Oceania. New Zealand and Colombia, the remnants of the Commonwealth of the Pacific and Organization of South American States, bowed their head in recognition of the inevitable. In China, Al Falah encountered what history would come to call the darkest part of the Fall. Such a massive population, such catastrophic pollution, and then the nuclear war and winter. Famine begat atrocity and horror the likes of which the world had never seen, and hopefully never would again. Even observers from the Pan-Asian Cooperative could only look on in stunned horror as the whispers of the Fall in China, Korea, and Vietnam reached the Emancipation forces. By contrast, the North American campaign was simplicity itself. No fewer than twelve cities of note had proclaimed themselves the capital of the United States of America, the one true successor to the American federal government and opposed to those who had seceded. More than any other region of the world, the former United States resisted Al Falah's return... and were swept aside as easily as every other opponent before them. Divided, crippled by catastrophic climate change, and still sparsely populating an immense geographical region, the last gasp of American exceptionalism did not last long. For too many Americans, the simple promise of food and medicine was an offer they could no longer afford to ignore. The California Commonwealth, Free State of Colorado, and Great Lakes Confederation were among the American successor states to simply join the Solar Protectorate outright. Peacekeeping in Texas and the American South would go on for some years to come. The end was near, at least for this era of mankind.
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Sep 7, 2019 17:07
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The Sentinalese, meanwhile, are still on their island doing their thing.
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Sep 7, 2019 17:53
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The Sandman posted:The Sentinalese, meanwhile, are still on their island doing their thing. The David S. Pumpkins of the universe.
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Sep 7, 2019 18:35
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Siegkrow posted:Just imply it is the world of Fallout. The U.S. gets off easy in Fallout. Europe and the Middle East looked like the West Coast in Fallout before the bombs even dropped.
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Sep 7, 2019 19:14
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Defiance Industries posted:The U.S. gets off easy in Fallout. Europe and the Middle East looked like the West Coast in Fallout before the bombs even dropped. We don't actually know that: we know that Europe got mired in an ugly war fighting over Middle Eastern oil and eventually split apart, but that information also largely comes from an essentially fascist, paranoid country that eventually got nuked. It's entirely possible that most of Europe has since recovered, since their governments (probably) didn't put a bunch of fission batteries everywhere and lie about them actually being fusion, or pump out FEV monsters For Science, or create a government in exile that sought to basically murder all the other survivors via genetic testing and guns.
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Sep 7, 2019 20:46
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thetruegentleman posted:that information also largely comes from an essentially fascist, paranoid country that eventually got nuked. Just because Chris Avellone is American doesn't make him automatically wrong ya know
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Sep 7, 2019 21:16
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Full Circle Al Falah came to Al-Jalidia known as a society of artists. So they were at the end.  They were named The Salvation, sent into the stars in a desperate roll of the dice. Not one that would have been sent had there been other options. Yet... Thrones are a Purity/Harmony unit of no consequence to this LP. The New Terran Myth is a culture wonder.  Through fire, thunder, and bitter cold... The Mass Driver is a city defense wonder with a pointless extra gimmick.         Al Falah had done more than endure. They had prospered, and embarked on a new era for mankind. Cynosure posted:The exponential growth of quantum computers quickly opened up new opportunities to create ever-more-powerful artificial intelligences. In particular, the work of AI-human team 9-Bigden and Ishmael Beyh in the theoretical development of the Bayesian Chained-State Array led to the creation of the most powerful types of AI ever created. Starting with Lodestone (sadly terminated due to a catastrophic dephasing of its primary state array into neutrinos), the series found its culmination in Cynosure, the most powerful synthetic sentient being ever created.  Once, the discovery of another Progenitor device would have baffled Al Falah scientists. Now, they were quite confident they could operate the device as intended... and that it only offered a small performance increase over existing Al Falah technology for molecular fabrication. Reverse-engineering the device would not be a challenge. Our explorers are still hard at work even now.  Al-Jalidia's mysteries were falling away. The Xenonova is a health wonder.  The mysteries of the greater universe beckoned. Cynosure, djinn, and some transhuman minds spent their entire existence plumbing the depths of possibility.   "Temporal" calculus was really something of a misnomer, but the name grabbed headlines. Studying an effect to predict a cause was really nothing new to science, but the new practical applications found for the new branch of mathematics were useful all the same.   The embrace of the cybernetic had been the key to Al Falah's success, reliant upon neither flesh nor steel alone. Life was a quality and an attribute independent of the vessel it inhabited, and the same was true of humanity. Had Al Falah abandoned their humanity, as many detractors claimed? If you asked them, the Al Falah would say they celebrated their humanity. State of Al Falah, Turn 301  Ard  Farah  Aswat Adida  Midfa'a  Miah Mortafi'a  Hajar  Wogohna State of Earth  And then... there was silence. Almost ten years had passed since the Emancipation Gate had first opened and frightened men and women in Kuwait City had fallen to their knees at the sight of their saviors. Al Falah indeed. The Salvation. A name, a cause we had amply lived up to. Twice we had crossed the sea of stars. Once in a starship cruising close to the speed of light, once through a fold in space and time. Even Sleepers like my husband, refugees from the too many Seedings that had ended in fire and then bitter cold on Al-Jalidia, returned to a world alien to them. Everyone they had known and cherished had long since passed. Critics who decried the Emancipation, the Hajj, as an alien invasion only realized half the point. Humanity was invading an alien world. Some still refuse to call us human, and refuse to participate in the Solar Protectorate. They'll accept our help, of course, but they claim they'll never accept us. We might have saved humanity, they say, but we sacrificed the soul of our species to do it. I don't agree, and even most Solars don't, but if it is true? Wasn't our sacrifice worth the reward? Earth will not be healed for a long time. Not for centuries in the best of all possible worlds, maybe not even in mere thousands of years. Tens of thousands, most models predict. Restoring an entire planet is a lot of work. When, though, have we ever shied away from a duty simply because what is asked of us is hard? We're a stubborn lot, the Al Falah. The very next thing to immortal, and we're increasingly taking a long view of things to match. The voyage from Earth taught us to be patient, resourceful, self-sufficient, self-reliant, and generous to our family. Al-Jalidia taught us to be industrious, clever, and imaginative. Our courage and boldness, we brought with us from Earth. What the future holds from here is hard to say. My mother announced her retirement a few months ago, and elections chose Representative Siobhan Takauji as the new Secretary-General of Al Falah. She has some big shoes to fill, but my mother is confident that we're in good hands. I don't know much about Takauji personally, but if Arshia Kishk believes in her then that's more than enough for me. On Earth, the Protectorate is meeting in a new complex in Beirut to discuss the future of Earth and Al-Jalidia. Beirut, which seems to be becoming Earth's new planetary capital. No one really signed away their sovereignty during the Emancipation, and Jalidian nations are meeting, too - the Kavithan Protectorate, the Pan-Asian Cooperative, the North Sea Alliance, the Peoples' African Union, and INTEGR have joined Al Falah and the Solars. Everyone agrees that it's time to form some new governing body for mankind, and the Civil Administration is expecting to have some sort of quantum entanglement ansible operational for instantaneous interstellar communications within the next five or six years. Right now, though, we can't even agree on what to call it. A federation? A confederation? A commonwealth? An alliance? A coalition? All anyone can agree on is plans for the future: continuing the restoration of Earth and eventually returning to the stars, from both Earth and Al-Jalidia. We want to at least reclaim what we've lost. After that, probably go back into the stars to look for the other Seedings. Ninety-three Seeding ships left Earth, and only twelve went to Al-Jalidia. The smallest was the Tlaloc Initiative's Quetzalcoatl, with five thousand colonists. The biggest were the PAC's titanic Black Tortoise class, carrying almost a hundred thousand. There's millions of people who left Earth, and we owe it to them and ourselves to find them. Will the war on Earth repeat? Or will we have more groups like Chungsu and the Slavic Federation on Al-Jalidia who recognize that hostilities with this new power are a lost cause but cling stubbornly to their independence. My mother thinks that some worlds, perhaps we'd be wiser to simply leave in peace. It's a big galaxy out there, and there's no telling what the other Seedings found, or what they might have become. My mother spoke of all this and more at the ceremony that officially ended the Emancipation campaign, standing on a platform before the newly operational gateway in Baghdad. Al-Jalidia had been a brutal crucible for humanity, and remade Al Falah into something very different than the men and women who had left Earth. Problems for another time, maybe, but we're functionally immortal now so it's time we start thinking in less limited ways. That day, that scene, was hard to describe for anyone who wasn't there. Oh sure there were the giant robots, and the ranks of soldiers preparing to go back through the gate. Al Falah had promised to not be an occupying army, and the bulk of our troops were going to go home and demobilize. That's what Al-Jalidia had become, in its way. Home. I was in the crowd, standing in on the world of humanity's birth, under the star that had illuminated billions upon billions of human beings. It wasn't my world, or my star. And in the middle of it all stood my mother. My mother had never been a large woman, less than five feet tall full grown, and she had never enhanced her height through implantation or genetic modification. My mother's presence was in her eyes, the way she could look at a crowd and make every single person think she was looking and speaking directly and only to them. Those eyes never betrayed the uncertainty and doubts I know she must have felt. When my mother spoke, she spoke as if she had absolute confidence in herself - and in you. When my mother said she believed in you, you couldn't help but believe in yourself, too. The truth is, almost no one remembers what my mother said that day. We remember what she *felt*. My mother, the first to activate a Mnemosyne Device, recording her memory and transmitting her awareness across the network. I was there, standing in the crowd, and I was THERE, on the center platform. I, and millions of people across two planets, WERE Arshia Kishk at that ceremony, and the memory remains on public record for anyone to experience today. We couldn't transmit anything back, of course, but everything in my mother's mind flowed out to all of us. Being in two places at once, seeing through two sets of eyes and minds... it's commonplace now, but back then the multiplicity of existence staggered us all. Some handled it better than others, those were the earliest days of the cognitive-emotional memory/mentality link, but one thing above all else dominated my mother's transmission of her innermost thoughts and feelings, and it wasn't joy or triumph. It was relief. My mother, who had seen Al Falah through the three worlds of the Golden Shah, Al-Jalidia, and Earth, was making her final speech as Secretary-General. Her burden, so heavy and borne for so long, was at an end. She had done it. Al Falah was in good hands, and so was humanity's future. Now she could finally try to be a good wife, a good mother, a good grandmother. To try to make up to those she loved for all the holidays and life moments she had missed, all the countless days when she wrought the fate of mankind. To know - not simply understand or think, to *know* - that the greatest woman I had ever known regretted not being a better mother to me or my sisters, not being a better wife to my other mother, lead directly to me being the first victim of Sympathetic Cognitive-Emotional Overload Syndrome. - Nur Athrawes, "In My Mother's Garden" Victory to Al Falah! Probably tomorrow I'll do a post-script and retrospective on the game and the LP, what I think I did right and what I could have done better, and what my plans for the future might be. I wasn't expecting so many readers, much less responses, and I'm glad I was able to show off this deeply flawed game that's nevertheless dear to my heart. This project's been great fun to relax with after work, especially if it was a stressful day on the job. If anyone has their own thoughts or criticisms, of the game or my LP, I'm happy to hear them.
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Sep 7, 2019 22:05
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I have always thought Beyond Earth would have gotten a much warmer reaction if the Rising Tide mechanics had come in the base game. Vanilla is very VERY much like Civ 5 with a tech web instead of a tree, but I thought the ocean-centric Rising Tide stuff was both a fun way to differentiate the game from its predecessor, but also very thematically appropriate (nomadic cities just MAKE SENSE in this context, you know?) They just needed to do more to differentiate themselves and by the time they came out with something that did, it was too late.
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Sep 7, 2019 22:11
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It didn't help that in many ways, Firaxis just didn't care about this Civ 5 mod. I mean, yeah, some nice experimental ideas, but when you realize that this came was competing for resources with XCOM, you can tell where the money went. A quiet LP reaching a quiet and melancholic end for a chill backburner game.
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Sep 7, 2019 22:13
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berryjon posted:I mean, yeah, some nice experimental ideas, but when you realize that this came was competing for resources with XCOM, you can tell where the money went. I can't say I blame them. There's a lot of projects I'd starve to feed XCOM. If XCOM was a person I'd want it to be my dad.
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Sep 7, 2019 22:15
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Can you show off some things you can do with spies in the next campaign?
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Sep 7, 2019 23:10
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SSNeoman posted:Can you show off some things you can do with spies in the next campaign? Probably not. It's just not something I like doing and I know little about how it really works. Defiance Industries posted:I have always thought Beyond Earth would have gotten a much warmer reaction if the Rising Tide mechanics had come in the base game. Vanilla is very VERY much like Civ 5 with a tech web instead of a tree, but I thought the ocean-centric Rising Tide stuff was both a fun way to differentiate the game from its predecessor, but also very thematically appropriate (nomadic cities just MAKE SENSE in this context, you know?) They just needed to do more to differentiate themselves and by the time they came out with something that did, it was too late. The really sad thing is there have been a lot of hints that early builds of Beyond Earth were actually a lot more experimental and exotic than the product we got. Play-testers apparently had a lot of trouble with the game being unintuitive and hard to figure out - one thing I know for certain is that fungal biome worlds used to look a lot weirder but play testers hated them because they had a really hard time identifying at a glance what was a grassland, what was a forest, etc. Also at one point in development, apparently all wonders in the game occupied a tile on the strategic map ala Civ6. berryjon posted:It didn't help that in many ways, Firaxis just didn't care about this Civ 5 mod. I mean, yeah, some nice experimental ideas, but when you realize that this came was competing for resources with XCOM, you can tell where the money went. I don't know whether to be glad or disappointed none of the reasonably common yet really blatant bugs that just never got fixed happened during the LP.
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Sep 8, 2019 00:05
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Defiance Industries posted:I can't say I blame them. There's a lot of projects I'd starve to feed XCOM. If XCOM was a person I'd want it to be my dad. I wouldn't want to play catch with that dad.
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Sep 8, 2019 01:44
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thetruegentleman posted:We don't actually know that: we know that Europe got mired in an ugly war fighting over Middle Eastern oil and eventually split apart, but that information also largely comes from an essentially fascist, paranoid country that eventually got nuked. It's entirely possible that most of Europe has since recovered, since their governments (probably) didn't put a bunch of fission batteries everywhere and lie about them actually being fusion, or pump out FEV monsters For Science, or create a government in exile that sought to basically murder all the other survivors via genetic testing and guns. i have a feeling europe isn't doing any better than the u.s is in the fallout universe. places like mexico city were hit by nukes for some reason, and i doubt they had a ball in the race with ww3. even if the tactical nuclear war that the european commonwealth was having with the middle east at the time was overblown, they definitely didn't make out like bandits after the nuclear holocaust happened. Roobanguy fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Sep 8, 2019 |
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Sep 8, 2019 07:24
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Spuzzz posted:I wouldn't want to play catch with that dad. His dad managed to hit himself in the throat with a fastball he threw overhand.
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Sep 8, 2019 10:04
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Roobanguy posted:i have a feeling europe isn't doing any better than the u.s is in the fallout universe. This thread isn't a place to talk about Fallout. I've never played any game in the series, have no interest in them, and was never making any intentional reference to them.
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Sep 8, 2019 13:10
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Is there any reason you defaulted to antipathy rather than simple apathy?
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Sep 8, 2019 14:03
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Siegkrow posted:Is there any reason you defaulted to antipathy rather than simple apathy? 
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Sep 8, 2019 14:05
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No, it is a legitimate question, you said you hadn't played any game in the series, you'd think you'd default to simply not caring rather than outright disliking. (Implied is that you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I like fallout and I'll likely keep mentioning it, sorry)
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Sep 8, 2019 14:27
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Thanks, this was a fun LP. Looking forward to anything you've got in the future.
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Sep 8, 2019 14:37
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I think Cyth is going to take at least one more run with a different ideology, although not sure if more difficulty or different playstyle.
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Sep 8, 2019 14:42
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Siegkrow posted:No, it is a legitimate question, you said you hadn't played any game in the series, you'd think you'd default to simply not caring rather than outright disliking. This isn't the place for that. If you really want to know, send me a PM. Siegkrow posted:I think Cyth is going to take at least one more run with a different ideology, although not sure if more difficulty or different playstyle. I'll address it in a proper post-script, but yes I am planning to do at least one more run as Purity, but I may not start it for a bit to give myself and the thread time to cool down. It will definitely be on a different planet if nothing else, I'm still considering what else to change. As for other games, I'm definitely considering it but my constraints for what I'm likely to LP are fairly strict. There's one game I'm currently struggling to get working nicely on a modern computer, but then it was notoriously unstable, buggy, and generally half-finished even when it was newly released. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Sep 8, 2019 |
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Sep 8, 2019 14:52
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Cythereal posted:This isn't the place for that. If you really want to know, send me a PM. I don't have Plat, sorry. Tho I think we briefly were friends on battlenet during WoD? I don't delete anyone so I should still have you there. Diego#1991
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Sep 8, 2019 15:03
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Post-Script All in all, despite a few mistakes I think this game and this LP went as well as I could have hoped. It was a quiet, relaxing game, and that's exactly what I play Beyond Earth for. Moreover, the LP itself was nicely relaxing, I love to write as a hobby and this was a wonderful way to share that impulse with other people. Starting in the arctic was bad, but it's less bad in Beyond Earth than any other Civ game because as I showed you can in time make the arctic thrive, and being in Rising Tide I could immediately start farming the sea. Much as I made fun of it, I got really lucky with my explorers: Ard grew much, much faster than it should have from all the refugees, and I got culture kicks at excellent times. I think I also showed off why I like the standard starting options that I do: a free worker out of the box to start improving terrain immediately, culture gain right off the bat to start working towards the free colonist for fast, free early expansion, and the tectonic scanner that let me see some valuable resources straight away for city planning purposes even if I didn't get to exploit titanium right away. I also got lucky with my relics, snagging both drone commands and slumber-slaughter extract was huge. There's another bonus that would have been truly ridiculous stacked on top of that and Master Control: Projected Chassis Construction, which gives workers +2 movement. 5 movement workers with 60% faster tile improvement speed, my good sir? There's other hilarious ones, too - Sky Chitin for +50% strength and +3 range for air units, and Tidal Navigation for +100% defense against ranged attacks for naval units come to mind. As for the other colonies, the ones I set in the advanced settings to encounter were the other Rising Tide factions, plus Kavitha because her tweets amuse me (she was actually pretty lucid by her standards in this game!). Daoming, Kozlov, and Barre were all products of the random leader setting. As for things I didn't show happening in the game? One, I actually lost a couple workers to aliens! The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed when I started escorting colonists and workers with military units even though I never said anything. Aliens attacking your units is unlikely if you haven't done anything to annoy the aliens, but it does have a small chance of happening, and it did. Two, Kavitha and Barre did not in fact survive until the end of the game, they were completely wiped out by other factions. Three, I had a couple of Supremacy quests pop up later in the game that I didn't show because their fluff didn't match the story I was telling. One was a quest about the large-scale employment of drones causing massive unemployment issues and riots in Ard, but that came along after I had self-aware AIs from Synthetic Thought and so I decided it just didn't fit the story I was telling. Another that fired after I started the Emancipation Gate talked about how primitive and bulky cybernetics were, powered by batteries and only available to the elite - this after I had augmenteries and nanotechnology everywhere. Four, I was actually deliberately not completing the frigid biome planetary wonder. The wonder's story contradicts what I established about Al-Jalidia and its climate, that this was a completely normal temperate world once until the Progenitors hosed everything up with a big industrial project. I wasn't sure I'd be in a position to complete that quest, so I simply established that Al-Jalidia orbits a dim star near the edge of the Goldilocks Zone. Goons, I have to say, were also very predictable with their voting choices. I was fully expecting goons to pick Supremacy, then Supremacy-Harmony, then Emancipation, and was not disappointed. I wouldn't have built up my military nearly as much as I did if I wasn't anticipating going for an Emancipation win. What do I think didn't work so well? The Earth stuff with Emancipation, I think, was a clever idea that ultimately didn't work. For one or two updates, yeah, but to be honest I was ready to end the game and narratively I think I exhausted the meat of the Emancipation story on Earth within a couple of updates unless I wanted to indulge in sci-fi gun porn or misery porn. I think maybe I should have been more aggressive with the neighbors. It's not how I like to play, but I know it was a quiet, low-intensity LP and picking a fight could have made things more interesting. On the technical side of things, everything I did for this LP came from just a handful of resources: Steam's screenshot function, the semi-official Civilization wiki (for some of the concept art and copy/pasting Civlopedia entries), Google Maps and the windows snip tool for grabbing the Earth maps for Emancipation, and all shot editing was done individually for each screenshot via Paint. Yes, it's a time consuming process, but I don't have any fancy screen capture or media editing software, much less video capture stuff although I think some things like a function of my video card could record video if I really wanted to.  So, what lies ahead? I do plan to do a second playthrough as Purity-dominant, but I'll leave many of the choices like what faction we play as (with one exception, ARC is off the table), what secondary affinity if anything, what planetary biome, and maybe what kind of map I'll play on up to a thread vote. However, I don't intend to start this second playthrough right away. I want to give both myself and the thread time to cool down first. And, frankly, I think a Purity game is going to be much harder to write. Supremacy and Harmony are pretty easy to characterize, and most of their techs support their ideology and technological path. Purity, however, is more defined by what it is not than by what it is, and most of the Purity techs feel very arbitrarily assigned in my eyes. Will I LP some other game, before the Purity game or after? Possibly, as I explained my tools for recording and editing are limited, and that puts limits on what I can LP despite how much I love writing. Of the three other games I've seriously considered LPing in the past, two have excellent ongoing LPs as I type this and one is concluding in the near future (and I contributed a lot to anyway). Right now I'm seeing if I can get an old, obscure RPG called Wizards and Warriors by D. W. Bradley running on my computer, but I'm not having much luck and the game was notoriously buggy, unstable, and crash-prone even on the computers it was designed for. There's also an obscure Warhammer 40,000 4X game called Gladius: Relics of War that I own on Steam, and it's a competent but shallow example of the genre, and has the slight issue that I've become deeply disillusioned with the entire Warhammer 40k setting and I don't want internet Nazis, "ironic" or otherwise, following me. Or if I can get screenshots working on Ubisoft's Uplay, I might consider taking a crack at Anno 2205, another black sheep in a beloved strategy game series. But, all of that is for the future and I'm making no promises about what I may or may not do soon. I hope folks enjoyed my tour through this odd little stepchild of the Civilization franchise that I love despite the warts and problems, and I'm always open to feedback about what I could do to improve my writing or the LP process in general.
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Sep 8, 2019 18:21
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Gladius is a game I actually like, mostly because it knows when not to take itself too seriously while being a fun if shallow civ clone, kind of like warlock, really. Mechanicus is in the same boat in that it treats the setting like a place where people live, toning down the grimdark idiocy while letting something as crazy as the mechanicus be as crazy as it should be, while also being an actual organization of people, albeit people with some very strange beliefs. Also, half the main cast is female, but if it wasn't for the pronouns it would be basically impossible to tell, as they're all incredibly, incredibly ultra-augmented with ungainly cybernetics, giving them a uniformly androgynous look (while making each still quite distinct).
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Sep 8, 2019 18:44
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