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Just quit another Hearts of Iron game as the Byzantine Empire. Conquered Turkey and Romania, and managed to take out Romania quickly enough that I was also able to knock out Hungary before it joined the Axis. The Soviets started justifying on me the moment I took control of Romania. But when I released them as a puppet roughly a month before the justification ended, the Soviets stopped justifying. I had earlier released Hungary, which turned out to be a mistake. I released it as a full country, so it took the Transylvania region, which hadn't been under Hungarian control when I conquered them. I should have released them on a state by state basis instead. Amusingly, after releasing both Hungary and Romania, I still had a tiny chunk of territory up at the far north of the Balkans under my direct control. It was a small bit of Czechoslovakia that had been given to Hungary earlier, and it stayed with the Byzantine Empire even after I released Hungary.

As before, Italy never invaded Yugoslavia. This time Bulgaria started justifying on my Romanian puppet. I started justifying on them in response. Bulgaria was part of the Axis, so if Bulgaria invaded Romania, the rest of the Axis would declare on Romania, and I'd have a wide-open border to defend. I finished my justification long before Bulgaria finished theirs. But I had some divisions that were about to deploy, so I held off. And the war goal expired literally just before I got my troops into place. But I was able to complete a new set of war goals before Bulgaria finished their initial declaration.

Meanwhile, Italy started justifying on Greece (and still had never declared war on Yugoslavia). They declared on me, I declared on Bulgaria, and overran Albania (which was the only direct point of contact that Italy had with Greece).

And then I got an invasion notice that the Germans were invading Greece. Pretty much simultaneously, German divisions landed in the Pelloponisian Islands. A quick check on the adjacent sea zone showed roughly 100 Axis ships in the zone versus a much smaller Allied fleet contingent. My best guess is that the Italians had some sort of AI logic that caused them to consolidate their fleet just for the invasion, as the ship numbers had been much lower before the invasion, and dropped back down to normal levels not long afterwards. Fortunately, unlike in my previous game, I was able to pull my army out of Albania and keep the Germans from expanding beyond a few spaces. Then once Bulgaria was defeated, I pulled that army down and crushed the German pocket (which had a lot of divisions, but had trouble getting supplies through the sole port that they owned). Then I declared war on Vichy France, and took most of Syria. The British took some of the southern regions, since the French promptly joined the Axis and declared on the Allies, causing the British to invade from Palestine.

This left me wondering what to do next. There was no common border with any of the nations that I was at war with. I had an idea about briefly surging the coast of Italy with a fleet of ships, and hopefully getting enough strength to land an invasion on mainland Italy. However, the Axis probably had far too many troops, and would crush me instantly. So I got the bright idea of declaring on Yugoslavia, hopefully racing a good ways up the country, and then pulling the bulk of the Axis forces into a stalemate (since Yugoslavia is good terrain to fight a defensive war in). Bad idea. I stalled almost immediately, Yugoslavia joined the Axis, and German troops started blowing holes in my lines. It was at that point that I called it.

I actually started four games in quick succession. I can't remember why I restarted the second game. But in both the first and third games, the popular Greek leader died pretty much the moment I unpaused the game. It was a bit freaky, and made me wonder if something's bugged. This is the third time I've seen this happen in less than a dozen games.
Again, Italy didn't attack Yugoslavia even though they (as usual) took their national focus that gives them war goals against Yugoslavia. I'm wondering if there's something in the logic that causes them to call it off based on Greek behavior.
The German invasion was also odd. I was able to identify the fleet movement that made it possible this time. But as before there was no warning at all. I got the notification at the same time the troops arrived on the beach. Usually you have a pretty good lead time between the warning, and when the troops actually arrive. Ironically, no troops ever attempted to land in or around Albania, even though there were no opposing ships there to stop them.

Been having an annoying time doing all the solid state drive shenanigans. Only thing we can’t do is clone drives. Maybe the other thing I installed that does the same is preventing both from working. Anyway hopefully this will be figured out tomorrow while I’m playing 40k.

After all that I will play tww2 but till then xenonauts of all things. It’s basically x-com but slightly more updated. Not sure wtf their sequel was gonna come out but it still hasn’t. I think I’m doing sorta ok so far on the strategic map but it hasn’t even finished the first in-game month yet so who knows.

My friend shouted me the Ideology DLC for RimWorld and it's made the game 10x more complicated, struggling to wrap my head around it, in all honesty. Quit just now because I saw some of my peons are upset because they ate 'a sacred animal.' Grr lol

My brother got me E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy for coop play. Gave it a whirl on my own to get used to the basics and it's quite the experience..

Back on Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Just managed to find the symbol of Mantorok which heals both sanity and health for the 1st time and I'm hoping it won't make the game too simple now. It's a shame you can heal your sanity so easily so it's easy to miss out on the interesting hallucinations. Just had the "blue screen of death' one and the 'walk into a room and find a whole lot of ammo on the floor' one. It can get frustrating, though, especially because hit detection can be pretty dodgy especially against the three huge three-headed creatures things. Great game, though.

Eumerin wrote:
If someone seriously wanted to start playing, it's available as part of a Humble Bundle for a few more hours. Grand strategy games like this one do tend to have a bit of a steep learning curve, though.

I figured I should mention that the info above is outdated. The Hearts of Iron 4 bundle has been extended, and will last for at least another couple of days.

Still having to deal with the solid state drive and its issues. I ended up winning a 40k game today at least and I'm playing xenonauts for now until my SSD gets everything copied and fixed.

Xenonauts is going ok so far. It's basically the old x-com from what I heard rather than revamped xcom.

I have lasers and the somewhat better armor. I may use c4 more in the future when fighting sebillian lizardmen dudes since cutting around corners could be particularly deadly with their short ranged accuracy. They suck at long range but smoke doesn't effect them due to their thermal vision. I know suppression works but in areas where that's tough c4 might need to be used. That or maybe I'll use stun gas grenades since you can throw grenades and c4 over all kinds of cover unlike rockets.

We will see but I'm not sure right now.

"The Ice Crown has been destroyed, Victory to the Free."

The fighty win however can go sit on a cat...

Mostly doing well right now in xenonauts. Gonna gather more resources but I want that tier 2 dropship built soon. Luckily I shot down a few ufos in the daylight area so I should be able to recover everything from them without huge issues.

Income in most regions is going up which is good because I've shot down many enemy ufos. Only sighted corvettes so far but that may change. I have 2 bases right now and should probably get rid of some of my low tier fighter jets due to how slow they are and how much upkeep they cost in high numbers.

Gave up on Hades. Really like it, but like most Roguelikes I just get tired of having to spend an hour to try the last boss again.

Finally picked up Bowser's Fury. I had already played through the main game on the Wii U but I needed a sure thing right now and the endless creativity of shine hunting certainly fits the bill. Not sure how long it is, but having a blast so far.

Finally got my solid state drive installed so I guess I can play total war warhammer 2 whenever I want now. Even when the ssd was hooked up to a weaker cable it still was flying beyond what the normal hard drive was doing. Startups are super fast and its just great. Internet loading was like a second.

I only got to play one mission of xenonauts today but nailed it like it was nothing without even 1 injured soldier and no deaths.

Sadly a landing ship just docked at my base after some of my planes were healing up from a previous fight they won against a bomber defended by 2 fighters or heavy fighters. I haven't faced any landing craft but I did fight off an alien terror mission.

So yeah this could potentially be a tough battle at my base but all but one of the rookies have a slight armor upgrade so that's something even if it's not a big deal. The 8 man team of vets I have with good armor and decent weapons will have to do most of the heavy lifting in the fights whereas the rookies will be support grenade users mostly.

Anyway most things are going well in this game. Funds are pretty good and funding nations are all still kicking and mostly giving me lots of funding. Once my 3rd base is up it'll just be south America (whose funding is a little low) and Australasia (Oceania and Australia basically and still about average funding) not being protected and they'll probably be ok.

I also have a tier 2 transport almost done being built which holds 2 more guys and moves faster so it should be very helpful.

 LunarSol wrote:
Gave up on Hades. Really like it, but like most Roguelikes I just get tired of having to spend an hour to try the last boss again.

Huh! Funny, speaking of Hades I began playing it for the first time today and damn is it addictive, and damn is it good and frig in hell is it addictive. Zagreus is a surprisingly likeable character who I want to help attain his goal to escape the underworld. It seems a sin to the Greek gods that when you summon Aphrodite it doesn't play her theme song from the old Hercules cartoon based on the Disney movie. Obviously, Disney wouldn't allow it but damn it, they should lol.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Mostly doing well right now in xenonauts. Gonna gather more resources but I want that tier 2 dropship built soon. Luckily I shot down a few ufos in the daylight area so I should be able to recover everything from them without huge issues.

Income in most regions is going up which is good because I've shot down many enemy ufos. Only sighted corvettes so far but that may change. I have 2 bases right now and should probably get rid of some of my low tier fighter jets due to how slow they are and how much upkeep they cost in high numbers.

I enjoyed Xenonauts, it's a good game. Definitely a lot more like the original, although I think with a much kinder difficulty level. I didn't ever spawn to have a grenade thrown directly into the landing vehicle and the entire squad wiped out on turn 1, for instance..

That being said I wanted the game to be a bit more 'realistic' and upped the money allowance significantly, allowing me to go nuts with bases and new equipment. Not only did this ruin the game for me (a lot of the challenge of the game is balancing spending and then almost being in tears when expensive equipment.. sorry, a soldier, is destroyed) but after events of the last year I'm not sure it was actually more realistic. I'm now convinced that if we actually had an alien invasion, there would be a significant portion of society that a) Wouldn't believe the aliens are real. They don't know anyone personally that's been shot with a death ray so... ? b) Probably side with the Aliens and hamper government efforts to combat them. Confusingly, there would be a significant overlap of groups A and B.

To be entirely fair all ufo sightings were and generally are considered conspiracy theory and in the case of xenonauts with reptillian aliens it’d actually make really weird conspiracy theorists seem right. It’d also make the government look like they lied or covered up things because they often do about various things.

Either way I don’t think turning every game into politics is the best thing. I’m pretty sure Deus Ex and xcom games are built upon conspiracies being all real.

Re-installed and messed around with Endless Legend, as I'm still trying to decide if I want to pick up Humankind (despite is weird ahistorical premise and the terrible pacing from the preview builds).

I'd forgotten how much the Endless games bother me. They just don't sit quite right, like they're missing something and make up for it with weirdness that doesn't really appeal (like some of the factions and designs).

AOE 3 Def again

Got the african dlc

Attempting to learn how to Hausa....

Quite difficult little faction to master...
Aethiopians otoh seem really good.

@voss: Weird because I liked the endless series but I’m unsure about Humankind. I haven’t played any build of it but I’m definitely skeptical.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
@voss: Weird because I liked the endless series but I’m unsure about Humankind. I haven’t played any build of it but I’m definitely skeptical.

Yeah. I get they want to shake up the genre a bit, but the win state being 'have the most fame when the clock runs out' is... a weird choice? Especially since they're conscious of the idea that fame is fleeting and some sources of fame just tick down as the years pass. That strikes me as a fundamental conflict.

The culture swapping really bugs my history background. A culture that wanders through Zhou-Persian-Aztec-Ming-Italian-Turks (as an example as you progress through the eras) is just incoherent. Nothing in how societies develop justifies that, and that they're just reduced to a permanent trait, a unit and district makes it feel unimportant to label them as real world cultures and make this mess in the first place.
And that someone might get to the next era faster and steal the one you want just feels bad from a gameplay perspective. In several cases you want to set up for how a culture will 'win' the next era ahead of time. [Which also means a chunk of the game is about finessing/exploiting mechanics rather than organic growth of a civilization] And the focus on few cities doubles down on the lack of parallels to how these cultures really developed.

In terms of general mechanics, the playthroughs I've seen of the various builds aren't reassuring either. The eras and the tech research aren't matched up (but were theoretically rebalanced after the last open beta). I saw one where the play had hit the early modern era, but hadn't yet unlocked the boat tech for his Viking ships that he had left behind two eras previous. And that wasn't even rare- leaving an era before building the signature unit or district was very common from what I saw.


For the endless stuff.... I'm not sure how to explain it. In some ways the games feel safe and familiar, but there's also the weird element in the background that just feels odd or out of place. It seems to be a cultural thing, some that seems to come out of French game design. Felt the same way about Rackham- neat ideas, but odd and subtly 'off' of what I was looking for. Though I feel that way about Gloomhaven, too. So it may just be the departures from traditional fantasy.

@voss: Lol you should watch the fifth element (if I recall correctly it’s French). That movie felt odd to me but some love it.

I played more xenonauts. I may or may not play more later. Shockingly only 1 soldier I had died in the base defense. That was highly unexpected but welcome. Sadly the one that died was like a major or captain with a shotgun I think. Everybody else lived though without wounds.

After that nobody has really died. I’ve just got my new drop ship (which is faster and holds up to 2 more soldiers) and seen a couple landing ships. I’ve also built some defenses at the 3rd base. I imagine I won’t be able to use the base for aircraft any time soon sadly but it’s there for when I need it. My funds and resources are a bit on the low side as well due to all the buildings I made but income should come back when more ufos show up.

Anyway we’ll see how it goes. I’ve mostly got corvettes handled so well that I’m not really taking deaths from the enemy crew anymore or at least once they’ve crashed. Still have yet to see alien outposts for some reason but raiding them would totally give me that sweet building that tells me what each enemy ship is planning to do and its crew members and what type. It also gives a crap ton of resources and money if you capture it.

After watching a Retrospective of Command and Conquer: Renegade; which I remember playing a long time ago and enjoying a lot. I had a go of RenegadeX a fanmade multiplayer online version, it's pretty hard, seems games are either extreme stalemates or one side slaughters the other with very little inbetween lol

I got to early January in the campaign and only 1 more soldier has died. I may swap soldiers out once in a while so I don’t end up with an indispensable team that when lost leads to a weak army of dudes.

Corvette clearing is going fairly well and seems to be pretty easy now most of the time. I’m about to do my first landing ship raid. I was hoping to get a little more plasma weapons before doing it but there you go.

My resources are mostly good and I’ve built the 1 Corsair next gen fighter jet I needed and sent it to.

I even got to fight one air mission vs a bomber team I think with 2 ship killing missile ships and 1 Corsair won without any friendly deaths which is funny because it calculated a 55% success for auto resolve.

Anyway money from funding regions is mostly really good. I might want to destroy enemy research craft if that slows down how quickly I’ll see some of the bigger nasty ships.

Other than that my 2nd base is really solid like my 1st but the 3rd is still not fully in order.

Anyway it’s going good and I gotta sleep for work tomorrow. See you al

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
@voss: Lol you should watch the fifth element (if I recall correctly it’s French). That movie felt odd to me but some love it.
.

The director was french… it stars Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman and Ian Holm and is entirely in English, except for the alien bits. Wouldn’t quite describe it as a french film

 Flinty wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
@voss: Lol you should watch the fifth element (if I recall correctly it’s French). That movie felt odd to me but some love it.
.

The director was french… it stars Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman and Ian Holm and is entirely in English, except for the alien bits. Wouldn’t quite describe it as a french film

Only French film i think i've seen was Chocolate (pronounced french-like). Maybe i was just young when i saw it but it wasn't my thing.

The other French movie i know about was Cuties and there's a decent chance watching that movie would put you on an FBI watch list even though its supposed intent was quite the opposite. I suppose that's failing at portraying a story but most movies seem to suck now anyway so it's a low bar they couldn't rise above.

-----------

Xenonauts game is going ok. I just gotta fight a landing ship right now. I think they set up alien bases and similar or supply other ships but not sure. They also might be one of the ships that forces a base defense.

Anyway i just got some plasma weapons so hopefully that works out for me. Hoping i don't lose many soldiers in this fight but it's entirely possible given the higher number of enemies and more elite enemies that tend to come out in bigger missions.

If i can get more funds i might buy a vehicle to help me on night time missions. Of course with my tier 2 transport it's so much faster that i could probably deal with a mission before night time hits anyway.

I forgot if i said i haven't lost any funding regions yet but that is currently the case. It's going ridiculously well right now or at least for the time being.

——-

Updates:

Shockingly nobody has died on today’s run despite all the landing ships I’ve fought among other things. I got pretty close a couple times however but wolf armor while heavy proves to be quite durable. I also have plasma warheads now on top of a full plasma weaponry squad and ships. The lowest rank dude on my squad is a sergeant, followed by 3 lieutenants and everybody else is a higher rank. My 3rd base is also getting plenty of planes to fight with now. Australasia and South America are still iffy but everywhere else should be fairly safe soon.

more updates: lost a soldier or so taking on one of the alien cruisers but I think I took out the first without much issue. Having to deal with all the various ufo is a headache and im gonna need to get faster planes to keep up with that soon. I do have one marauder but it may not be enough. I have a ton of alloys and even an alright amount of alenium right now. The scary part is the terror mission where I fought with an extremely helpful tank it did die and I managed to lose 3 more soldiers or so with only 1 being revived. Basically I need 3 red shirts I gotta turn into alpha chads in a few missions provided they live. I may need to build another vehicle or two for fire support and to help with limited skilled soldiers.

More rimworld. Getting a better grip on the ideology system. I quite like the improvements to animal husbandry. I really want to start digging into making various religious communities.

Been having an interesting time with xenonauts (2nd hardest difficulty on ironman). I managed to take out one alien base and capture it but I think it cost me at least 4 soldiers. Doesn't help when the alien leader flat out mind controls one of my units from a huge distance and the very second mind control breaks they just shoot him to death. I didn't even get a chance to save em. Maybe if I threw smoke at him but he might get to attack me. That's still kinda bs. Many of my good soldiers have died so it's more a team with few hard as nails vets and lots of rookies or slightly experienced soldiers.

Aside from that I am about to have 3 final tier marauder fighter and missile hybrids planes. Finally I'll be able to take out the faster ufos which I'm starting to find in annoying regularity now. It's still just carriers so thankfully no battleships yet. Still if I remember correctly they're annoying to fight at the crash site and much worse when they land and you have to fight the full alien crew.

Surprised I'm into April 1st (yeah yeah April fools day) of the next year and still managing to hold every region. Australasia and South America are pretty dangerously close to falling however. I might have to just let them fall despite the nice funding considering I probably won't get an insanely huge amount protecting them too much. Indochina is also sort of at risk of falling but not massively.

 Nerak wrote:
More rimworld. Getting a better grip on the ideology system. I quite like the improvements to animal husbandry. I really want to start digging into making various religious communities.

Oof, the Ideology Expansion hit me for a six for how much it changed the game. Guess that's the mark of a good expansion, though!

 Adrassil wrote:
Oof, the Ideology Expansion hit me for a six for how much it changed the game. Guess that's the mark of a good expansion, though!

Yeah. The royalty expansion added stuff but could easily be ignored. The Ideology expansion you can’t ignore and forces you to understand and work with it. It’s really quite good though, both for gameplay, added stuff, roleplay and esthetics. Just takes some time to wrap your head around in an already quite complex game.

Finished up Ending A of Nier Automata, I didn't expect to say this, I think I might have preferred Replicant so far. The combat doesn't feel that much better in Automata, and the story in replicant was much better directed. Automata feels like it is about ideas and concepts without really having much of a plot, whereas Replicant had a very well-paced mystery/reveal system as its plot moved forward.

Played a very small bit of xenonauts today. No wounded and no deaths despite the fairly low level guys for most of the team. I had really good armor so maybe that’s helped and still only facing the 3rd strongest ufo in crash site missions.

I built a bunch of marauder fighter-bombers (I’ll have my 4th soon) and sold some of my crappy MiG foxtrot ships that are extremely obsolete esp. since lots of crappy planes take up a lot of upkeep.

Most of my research is done aside from mag weapons which should be fun. I still need to get the tier 3 drop ship.

I’m also possibly going to lose the Australasia region since funding in the region is now in the negatives but I still have like 20 days to fix that problem which might be fixed with more super powerful aircraft. It might also be fixed if I have to fight off a terror mission in that region.

Anyway next time I’m going to be fighting a downed carrier. I’m hoping an alien leader doesn’t consistently try to force my dudes to hallucinate and shoot their buddies. At least when assaulting a ship it should be easier than when assaulting an alien base or possibly even a terror mission.

Prepping for my True Detective vs the Mythos session tonight. Way behind what I wanted to do, but oh well!

Whoops, wrong thread!