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Dark Souls 3, because it's just so much fun. Currenty trying to avoid the Watchers of the Abyss, because they wreck me.

Well, my latest Dwarf Fortress fell to Were-armadillos. I had an Exceedingly Cunning Plan, wherein entrance to the fortress itself required passing through the tavern (and thus various visiting warriors) to cut down on attackers and thieves.

And it worked. Except after the were-armadillo attack, I learned that several of the now-bitten visitors a) were nobles and couldn't be exiled and b) were guests so I couldn't exercise the fine control required to wall them off safely without trapping a bunch of others with them.

And then the potentially infected split off and some went back to the tavern and others to the temple, and I got morbidly curious as to what would happen. Short version: the gore in the new tile-set is quite prolific, and many deaths ensued in the public places of the fort. (And the hallway outside, as someone had left a stone in the door of the temple, so the splatter continued out into the hallway.

More planning is required, but after 40 hours into the game already, a palate cleanser sounded good.

---

Cue Octopath Traveler coming up on 60% off sale on steam (due to the release of whatever Final fantasy remake part). Some old-style monster bashing sounded good.

Its pretty fun, though the experience and ability grind is rougher (in terms of numbers required) than it needs to be and class-combos have less customization than they really should.

Been dividing my time between Planet Zoo and Ixion. Planet Zoo is relaxing. Ixion is not.

Thus the need to divide my time.

Just started Mechanicus, as it was on sale. Nice fluff rich turn based tactical thingy. It plays a lot like Blackstone Fortress with the mixture of combat missions and random encounters. The Necrons are nicely deadly to my chaff, and can tank a few hits.

I just watched a video on Vampire: the Masquerade; Bloodlines, so it inspired me to check moddb if there's been an update, and it just so happened Wesp5 had uploaded a new 11.3 patch only a couple of hours ago, so I downloaded that and had a go of a new mod where you play as a member of the Society of Leopold after the main game, which is pretty cool.

More Hunt: showdown. I quite like the new event, though it seems to be crazy long. The blend of challenges and regular points grinding is welcome though.

Very interested in Ixion and think I will buy it tonight. A thank you to all who have written about it in this thread with prose and cons about the game.

Played more Dark Souls 3, experienced more enjoyment.

Getting my TBS fix with Mario+Rabbids.

Picked up Pentiment after watching Josh Sawyer talk about it from time to time on twitter. Only a bit in but loving the art style and presentation so far.

Played the new Kirby game. It's good.

Finally got the C&C1+2 Remastered at a whim - interesting.

Ixion. I quite like it. The game falls short as a political simulator. It’s also a bit tedious to manage your space station, space and power have so far been the most limiting factors for me. The interface is a little clunky and I find it really difficult to maximize space. Managing resources is a drag because of how stockpiles work. You can’t send X resource to sector Y. What you need to do is go into resource management, put a high priority on the sector you want to send the resource to, lower the amount of desired resource in the active sector, wait for it to transfer then put the desired amount high again. There’s so many steps and it is clunky. All that said though it really is a very good game. It does feel like a cramped space station. Music is great, the space environments are amazing and Having all your ships out coordinated feels very good. The space theme carries this game and it does so quite well. I like specializing sectors. Like setting up an agri sector, a industrial sector and so on. My next step is going to be an energy sector full of power plants. First I need more food though.

The flaws of this game are mostly apparent if you’ve played other games in the same genre. Overall I’d say it’s very good if a bit tedious and hectic. Think of it as a challenging city sim in space.

Edit: I just found out that the composer for Ixion was the same guy who made the music for Mechanicus. The music is just as good as can be expected.

I have begun the ancient, perplexing art of building Dwarf Fortresses. I poisoned my entire fort when miasma went off in the kitchen, for reasons I still do not understand, and flooded an entirely different fort attempting to secure a water source after the dwarfs fetching water kept being assaulted by badgers.

10/10, highly recommend.

It is indeed an art, one with no mastery or end.

Miasma from food (and in general) is... odd. Mostly because time in dwarf fortress is odd, and the timer_until_rotting (not actually the name of the variable) for various things is hidden (though a sufficiently deep dive into game files and maybe the wiki can find it).

But the short answer for miasma from kitchens is, the only real way to prevent rot is to have food in bins (or barrels) in a stockpile.

But hauling things is super-low priority for dwarves (though children do it now as a chore, albeit slowly), so unless you have dedicated haulers that ONLY haul things, too many tasks (including automatic background tasks) means they won't get around to it quickly. And as you have more and more stuff (which happens naturally as time goes on and you expand), there's more to haul, and ironically, less gets hauled as you give them more other things to do.

The good news is its easier to set prioritized work now, but it can take some learning of the labor menu.

Sorting out stockpiles properly (don't do 'accept all' stockpiles, except maybe when unloading the wagon) helps as well. Both what they hold and being nearby the relevant workshops for input and output.
So, for example, put a non-prepared food stockpile (no seeds) near the kitchen then a 'prepared meal' stockpile between the kitchen and dining room (which shouldn't be far). Minimizing hauling time helps a little. More work time before the hauler gets distracted by sleep/drinking/eating/praying/random bout of insanity/re-prioritizing/badgers.

--
Dealing with DF water physics is definitely its own topic. In general carve a reservoir and overflow tunnel, install flood gates (and link them to levers), seal the dig tunnels off and only then crack the walls and let the water in.

Then hope you can deal with whatever goes wrong, including rocks getting shoved under the floodgates so they won't close.

Let us know when it’s caught fire, fallen over them sunk into the swamp

 Flinty wrote:
Let us know when it’s caught fire, fallen over them sunk into the swamp

Swamp forts are surprisingly good. Lots of wood, plants to forage and water sources.

I did have a nascent tower fall over when the river thawed (and I built it wrong). But the second time it stayed up!

It got abandoned because I didn't put limits on who was allowed to gather plants, and the farmers guild got larger and larger with demands for a grander and grander guild hall, and effectively turned into an anarcho-syndicalist commune, just staying out in the forest at all times, ignoring the fact that I cancelled all gathering orders, eradicated all fruit gathering zones, set gathering to 'no one do this' and restricted everyone to the defensive burrow.

There were just ~20 odd dwarves gathered around a stepladder under a particular tree. Talking. And plotting.

And then the goblins came. And the dwarves scattered in every direction but the fortress, running and dying in their panicked flight.


I also had a lizardman mob boss come visit my tavern, but he wandered into the river outside the fortress walls, not far from the corpse of the poor dwarf who fell into river while expanding the fishing area inside the walls. (He dug out the wrong square first- ironically I was trying to get him to channel a ramp so people who fell in could get out). The lizard stayed there for years, under the water. Waiting. Possibly for his lieutenant, who quite happily installed himself in the tavern and never left.

There was also the were-iguana that showed up with an artifact armor stand that he left behind after shifting back into a dwarf.

That particular fort became increasingly confusing and inscrutable. I now heavily restrict farming and gathering as a matter of course (gathering is quite dangerous as it takes people outside the fortress, and ties them up on tasks for long periods of time)

You should write a novel about your dwarf fortressing. Funniest thing on Dakka

 Flinty wrote:
You should write a novel about your dwarf fortressing. Funniest thing on Dakka

My current one is sadly quite boring, other than the absolute weirdest aquifer I've ever seen. It spanned about 15 z-levels, but wasn't consistent- just spots here and there. Had to change plans on the fly as I kept running into it as I dug stairs and rooms, and had to keep digging and digging to get past. Eventually did a shallow, sprawling fort across a couple upper levels just to get industries up and running. Its cramped and laid out wrong and I hate it.

I've got everything up and running (except soap, which is a pain), well on my way to steel equipment, and had to dig down 100 levels to finally hit a cavern level. Nothing was there. I closed it up after a bit, but with other fortresses, I've opened up caverns to find evidence of sprawling monster brawls- just blood and bits everywhere. Or endless waves of troglodytes (to the point that the monster hunters that came with express purpose of hunting monsters in the caverns eventually gave up and stayed in the open-to-visitors chapel in the fort). This was silent.

I picked a coastal desert on an island between the major civilizations, and I guess its too far from anything. No visitors, no caravans other than my own.

I'm at about the five year mark and the total incidents so far is 2

A child fell into the river while hauling wood (mid-spring, the ice thawed while he was halfway across). Started building a bridge in response. Dunno if they're using it now.

A were-elk arrived around year... 4? Killed some sheep, and caught a peasant out at the fortress entrance. Killed her, but hesitated to go after the dogs I keep at the bottom of the entrance passage to detect thieves. Eventually it turned back into a goblin and left.
Only mystery was that in both goblin and were-elk form, it had the title 'Overlord.' May have to dig around in legends mode and figure out who that is.

Or start over and find a nice swamp in the midst of the all-out war between humans and goblins (their respective settlements are intermingling on the map in an absurdly aggressive way), and see what happens.

Dwarf Fortress is one of those games I love reading stories about and would never, ever play.

Progress! I have turned my fort into a profitable gem mine and jewelcrafting concern, and migrants are arriving each season now. A stoneworker was driven mad by his work, and sadly dehydrated to death within the halls.

My attempts to entomb my fallen dwarf were complicated by the horror other dwarfs felt at the task, and must have been unsuccessful, for a poor, innocent child, barely old enough to be buzzed, was soon possessed and crafted a masterworked leather bracelet.

I got it to the weird and inscrutable point of the game, and it is every bit as perplexing as I had hoped it would be.

trexmeyer, I felt the same way until the new Steam version came out with graphics. It is much, much more approachable.

The graphics are nice, but the big improvement is the UI.

I have no idea what was in the programmer's head when he came up with the keybinds (the old version was basically keyboard only, though you could fight with making a mouse not-really-work). There are still some issues (military squads are still messy, but there were things that if you didn't know, you'd never find).

Tombs are also currently weird. It does work, but learning how it works is like peering into the mind of some sort of Dark Souls entity. The easy way is to treat them like 1x1 bedrooms or cells, pop doors in front of each and use the 'multi' option to create them all at once. Otherwise you're painting each individual square with an installed coffin and that's a pain. And unlike beds (though they prefer bedrooms), dwarves won't utilize an installed coffin until you tell them it is a tomb. They'll just leave their family members to rot on the floor.
---

Update on tombs and corpses and things: my current tavern has turned into a strange place. For a bit I had a full demon visiting (who was also 16 years old, which is weird in its own right, as DF demons are immortal and usually spawn at the beginning of time or early in world generation when a civilization breaks into the underworld. He just.. hung out, felt nothing while watching various performances and after a couple months, left. Currently I've got a troupe of naked elven poets hanging out. They have no items, just sheep blood on their feet (they walked through the remains of a cyclops attack from a year back, which left some blood on the ground). Just a troupe of naked poets. One has a book about ears. Sure. I've also got a lot of special undead creatures visiting. 'Sunless ones' and 'faint corpses.' One is a 'wolf woman faint corpse.' Not hostile, just... hanging out, listening to stories, occasionally singing and dancing. There was also a human poet necromancer, but happily he left before one of poets turned out to be a were-coyote. A necromancer animating bits and bobs of dead creatures in the tavern would have turned into a 'fun' pinata.

But a werecoyote incident got me going on corpse disposal, and some of the weirdness. Some human poets (the ones that weren't a werecoyote) were killed, and they got tossed in the refuse pile. Several visiting dwarven poets got killed as well, but were left on the floor, as were the were coyotes (visitors got injured by the first were, and just hung out in the tavern, so I locked everyone in to keep the infection from spreading next month). Turned out I had blocked dwarven corpses from my refuse pile (preferring actual burial for fortress residents), but because these dwarves weren't residents, no one would bury them. So I had to toggle settings on the refuse pile and now there they sit among the cow and dog bones and turtle shells. The werecoyotes were a different problem- the refuse area has no setting for were creatures, and two died as werecreatures, so didn't revert. So they weren't treated as refuse. So I had to create a garbage dump, and mark the corpses (well, one corpse, one skeleton at this point) for dumping. Finally all the corpses are gone.

Still a few teeth and a necklace or two, but someone did come along and mop up all the blood and vomit, so that's nice. It got out of hand, but my tavern this time is on the opposite side of my entrance hall from the fort entrance (with the trade depot in the middle), and nothing is getting past my disturbingly large pack of dogs undetected (even with butchering some of them, there's 20+ dogs in the fortress pack. I started with 3).

Ixion, just finished it. Everything I’ve seen in this thread holds up until the end. It’s a good game with a strong theme. A hectic city builder in space. I enjoyed my time with it. It’s by no means great and suffer from a number of issues. Most notably pacing and very strange research paths. Also garbage is quite simply overpowered since it can make you self sustaining. Or at least it seems to, I’m not going to actually calculate the numbers. It can provide the two resources you need at any rate, which are alloys and water. There’s actually multiple endings. I noticed two and possibly more. If you don’t take the final planet up on its offer you receive a different final goal, one I thought was more interesting. The game as a whole is a recommend but be aware that it’s not smooth and is more carried by it’s theme rather then it’s mechanics

 LunarSol wrote:

 Sigur wrote:
.) Bayonetta 3 looks pretty underwhelming. Shame. :/

People only seem disappointed in the story which is pretty par for the series. I'm saving it as a Christmas gift Idea for my family but plan to play it as soon as I can.

Follow up on this. Didn't get as much game time as I'd like over the break, but played through most of Bayonetta 3. Haven't yet seen the ending, so I'll comment on that later.

Overall its GREAT. In terms of gameplay its Platinum running on all cylinders. The combat is as fluid as ever and the ability to mix in demon summons mid combat lets you get really creative while not being as complicated as say, Dante's different styles in DMC4/5. The game does a great job mixing in other genres similar to Nier to keep things fresh and definitely shines when it keeps up the momentum. Newcomer Viola has major Nero vibes but is definitely implemented better. She has a dorky charm and rather weak playstyle that keeps her from feeling like she's here to steal the spotlight the way Nero did in DMC4. She's largely won me over, though I'd really love it if her Witch Time trigger was more forgiving.

Now, what I will say is that it's very clear this game was salvaged from a more ambitious design that just wasn't working. The level design clearly has this open world flair to it and there's a bunch of kind of pointless traversal mechanics to explore. This stuff is mostly tedious and feels like busywork. It's particularly bad early on. Big empty spaces reworked into linear levels via some awkward invisible wall placement. You can actually feel as the game goes on things shift to a more focused design and the level design gets notably better.

This kind of extends to the story as well. The inciting incident is the kind of fun you'd expect from the series, but quickly turns numbingly apocalyptic in a way that Bayonetta's character doesn't interact with very well. It's a huge step back from losing Jeanne at the start of 2 and it takes a long time for everything to fall into place, but even then is kind of repetitive. Viola actually helps break things up a lot and probably would have helped if she had been integrated in a little sooner as would an encounter with the villain who is all kinds of generic.

So... yeah. I guess it's a question of what you're looking for in the series. I'll likely have more to say on the story tomorrow once I've finished it, but neither it nor the level design are the best in the series. The gameplay, however, is super fun. I just cleared DMC5 a little bit ago and this tops it pretty easily for me. The speed, weapon design, mix of kaiju elements and regular bits of alternative game mechanics are all fantastic and only get better in the later levels as the game drops a lot of bad ideas in favor of keeping things moving.

Finished it last night. Strong finale. Dumb villain but spectacular fight. Ending was actually quite well done to the point where I'm wondering why the setup was so shaky by comparison. Anyway, quite enjoyed it. I could maybe call it the worst Bayonetta, but that still puts it in the top tier of games I've played overall.

Saw so many comparisons between Ixion and Frostpunk that I decided to pick up the latter during the Steam sale. Took it for a spin. After a few false starts, and getting the hang of some of the mechanics, I sat down for several hours and played through the main scenario. Managed to survive with just over 450 people.



I was quite surprised at how short the main scenario is. Explains why they felt the need to release a special "endless" scenario.

Over the break I've been playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla, a little bit of Hunt: Showdown and very recently a whole lot of Dorfromantik.

This is the first AC game I have played since 2 but I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought. My wife started playing it when it came out on xbox gamepass and I was pretty impressed. I have a fair few problems with AC:Valhalla but I let a lot of it slide because the bottom line is the immersion is superb and the depth and colour and life that they created in the early medieval period is impressive. It's a great way to show how connected the peoples in this time were. Of course they then ruin that by completely breaking you of your immersion with the ridiculous abstergo modern world crap. I've never understood why they put that in the games when a historical game series would be completely fine.

Dorfromantik might be my new favourite game. I've spent an absurd amount of hours on a game that I've owned for 2 days. It's very peaceful and it's mind numbing in a very good way.

Been doing a multiplayer campaign of WH3 Immortal Empires with one of my gaming buddies.

Its really expanded my love of this game.

He's playing as Karl Franz and I'm Louen Leoncoeur. It was rough going because we were playing on one of the higher difficulties, but I've got Couronne upgraded to tier 4 and have an elite knight army with a supporting peasant army, slowly retaking Bretonnia from Grom. He's got a similar mid/high tier army as well, ready to claw The Empire back from Festus and the Vampire Counts.

Its been a lot of fun, and relatively stable (only 2 crashes in about 50 turns spread over 3 days).

Would be even more amazing with more players that can meet up at similar times.

Also pretty deep into a playthrough of Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters. Almost ready to take out Mortarion. Got a solid crew of 25 grey knights mostly max level.

Thanks for getting back to it.

 LunarSol wrote:
... I could maybe call it the worst Bayonetta, but that still puts it in the top tier of games I've played overall.

Yeah, I guess that's a fair assessment of things. I'm just so worried the story may annoy me. I have very, very little patience for stories in video games, and if they try to do hollywood stuff that's a reason for me to give up on it. All I want is to make the little guy on the screen jump around and not fall down holes.

Most of what I tolerate in a video game in terms of story is what I recently saw in the latest Kirby game: Big hole appears in the sky, slurps everything up, Kirby gets in and has to get it all back. Efficient, clar, not annoying and certainly an understandable motivation for the guy in the tv to jump at things and not fal down holes.


Maybe I'll get it, if if gets a PC port and is on sale for less than EUR15,00 some day.



In other news, I played more C&C2, this time online with my brother, and it's pretty good fun.

In other other news, I reinstalled and refamiliarized myself with Elite: Dangerous. What a game. Not necessarily a rush playing it, but being a spaceship captain and being able to do all these things in this HUGE universe is just nice. Lost 2 nights to the game, uninstalled today, because it would ruin my life if I didn't. 5/5*.

 Sigur wrote:
Thanks for getting back to it.

 LunarSol wrote:
... I could maybe call it the worst Bayonetta, but that still puts it in the top tier of games I've played overall.

Yeah, I guess that's a fair assessment of things. I'm just so worried the story may annoy me. I have very, very little patience for stories in video games, and if they try to do hollywood stuff that's a reason for me to give up on it. All I want is to make the little guy on the screen jump around and not fall down holes.

Most of what I tolerate in a video game in terms of story is what I recently saw in the latest Kirby game: Big hole appears in the sky, slurps everything up, Kirby gets in and has to get it all back. Efficient, clar, not annoying and certainly an understandable motivation for the guy in the tv to jump at things and not fal down holes.


Maybe I'll get it, if if gets a PC port and is on sale for less than EUR15,00 some day.

Well, that shouldn't be a dealbreaker. There's basically no story until the credits roll. Almost every cutscene is some variation of "world ending, so Bayonetta surfs a cruise ship on the wave of destruction" or the villain shows up and says your doom is inevitable before the boss attacks. There's basically no plot. Evil dude wants to destroy the multiverse so you go to alternate realities (that are more like just other cities or time periods really) and fight monsters until you fight a big monster. When people complain about the plot on this one, its mostly because there's no real plot to speak of until the very end.

I could do with more stories in games and less mission tables and collect-a-thons.

Been watching some coverage of Marvel Midnight Suns as it unexpectedly went on sale already, but the amount of busy-work required to get to the next (quite possibly tiny and short) mission is appalling.

Yeah, I hit a pretty hard wall on busywork a few years back. The indie retro era has done a great job providing games with engaging gameplay and level design again and the big budget games I still play tend to carry my attention on raw game mechanics more than anything.