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Any enemy plane flying in or around your territory has a chance to be spotted. This chance is improved by the number of aircraft you have on air superiority missions. If eny aircraft are spotted, then they can be intercepted.

Radar improves the chance to spot those planes.

It also improves the chance to spot enemy ships, and I believe helps with intelligence against enemy ground troops.

Recently finished the Aliens campaign with Graphite. Devastator and engineer was a good mix. Swapping out a bit now to try some other combos. What a great game when you just want to drown things. Still love the smart gun. Tried the mini gun and the microburst launcher, but always back to the smart gun.

Forcing myself to use the heavy flamethrower for the time being, but low damage aside (unless you have a gunner along who has the right buffs when they overclock), but the smartgun remains a great heavy lifter. They should really give the player the gunner's badge when you four star the weapon:

Just finnished King of dragon pass. Man that was great. A bit tedious at times and with some very unfair heroquests. But still, a truly great experience. Got the best ending where you

Now on to more pathfinder: kingmaker. Quite enjoying it. I really like the kingdom building aspects. Got a pretty good run going and just finished chapter 3. Playing a barbarian/druid fellow. My idea was to rage while doing wild shapes. It's worked soso, probably not a top tier build. But it's my first time and I just threw it together on a whim haha.

Starting Shadow of The Tomb Raider.

Finally wiped out Soviet Union while mostly dominating the sky. I also just fought out armored transports and tanks can be boosted with army xp. I’m sure navy works a similar way but I wish I knew it mostly works like planes with better variants which I figured out before

I have about 10 nukes available and about some lands around Japan that I’m gonna build into top tier air fields to store enough planes to get air superiority for nuking fun.

Anyway with how Japan is by itself and decent but without any decent allies it’ll ultimately get rolled over like it was nothing. Seriously the can’t handle allies, post axis faction allies, post commie allies and the main Chinese faction as just one country. It is absurd to even try to make all those enemies or attempt that.

On the biggest plus note I’m being more aware of army groups with only mounted infantry or otherwise fast units to help with breakthroughs and encircling. In 2 or more big encirclement I wiped out over 20 soviets if not 25 or 30. It was beautiful

The rockets I sent to Russia were also fun and I wonder how much they helped destroy their buildings and infrastructure since they were really full silos when I sent them. I think I just ran out of em when the war ended between allies and soviets too which is really good timing.

I wonder how bad destroying enemy infrastructure can get or is it just a way to handle forts easier. If nothing else I’ll have to make strategic bomber for my inevitable 75% air power needed for a nuke. Ofc I have at least 10 nukes now so may as well level Japan with them.

I've played an obscene amount of heavily modded Skyrim recently and decided that the base game (and Bethesda's Fallout series) lean towards mediocre because they're overly committed to a garbage engine and excessively detailed meaningless NPCs. I'm not excited for Starfield or anything else that they have planned because their design philosophy, as a whole, is heavily flawed.

The most exciting thing about Starfield is going to be finding out how many Skyrim and Fallout bugs and exploits are still in there, completely unfixed.

I'm still a little boggled that the Fortify Restoration loop is still part of the Even More Legendary Special Extreme edition of Skyrim. It ain't hard to put a maximum cap on bonus values.
Or that with the right equipment, all once per day abilities become infinite use by taking a hat off and then putting it on again.

Voss wrote:
The most exciting thing about Starfield is going to be finding out how many Skyrim and Fallout bugs and exploits are still in there, completely unfixed.

I'm still a little boggled that the Fortify Restoration loop is still part of the Even More Legendary Special Extreme edition of Skyrim. It ain't hard to put a maximum cap on bonus values.
Or that with the right equipment, all once per day abilities become infinite use by taking a hat off and then putting it on again.

They either don't care about exploits or it's too severe to fix. Either instance isn't good. The engine is bad. I've tried to play a mage and even with mods it's dramatically worse than any other fantasy or Star Wars title I've tried. Setting magic/scrolls as equipped items is a terrible decision and limiting the player to 8 unseen hotkeys makes it worse.

What makes it worse is that there are moments of brilliance like the Lost to the Ages quest that are drowned out by all the other issues. The lack of player options when it comes to quests is a big issue.

Ah. The hotkey thing is a problem, one they could easily solve, but console versions are the priority. They just don't bother with a better UI for PC. Inventory is the same story- its set up because consoles are crap at it, and they didn't put in the work at making it not crap.

Player options for quests (and NPCs) just doesn't seem to be part of their mentality. Or they've simply discarded branching decisions as too much work, which, it obviously is more, but they don't have to go full insanity on it.

Fallout 4 had somewhat reasonable branching decisions with various factions in that you could at least aid or destroy specific ones.

trexmeyer wrote:
Fallout 4 had somewhat reasonable branching decisions with various factions in that you could at least aid or destroy specific ones.

Eh. The problem was that you had to destroy those factions once you allied with the other main one. Even if it didn't make much sense.
And then there was no real payoff beyond a potential crater. The world state didn't really change and there nothing to do with the factions after that point but random-gen quests.
No 'maybe we shouldn't mass produce slaves/ murder people/ destroy personalities for no reason.' There's nothing but going back to the exploration and fething about against a variety of red mobs.

The sad thing is FO4 probably had the best writing Bethsoft ever produced. Its just the main quest is so short and disjointed from the world (and tied very specifically to a background you can't alter). Its still a decent exploration shooter, but they could do so much more with their games, but for whatever reason actively choose not to.

Completed the Pokedex in Legends Arceus. First time in ages I've been compelled to do so. The secret boss you unlock is one of the best fights I've had in a long long time. Absolutely love the game. I'd love to see it expanded into a more traditional gym leader challenge focused adventure going forward.

Voss wrote:

trexmeyer wrote:
Fallout 4 had somewhat reasonable branching decisions with various factions in that you could at least aid or destroy specific ones.

Eh. The problem was that you had to destroy those factions once you allied with the other main one. Even if it didn't make much sense.
And then there was no real payoff beyond a potential crater. The world state didn't really change and there nothing to do with the factions after that point but random-gen quests.

While that is true, I was at least grateful for the opportunity to do so and in Skyrim to destroy the Dark Brotherhood. I think going forward they should have the option to destroy unlawful factions.

They also need to separate faction mainquests and the path to becoming the faction leader.

I'm playing Final Fantasy XI again. I was running around Crawler's Nest last night, and realized that new MMORPGs don't really let you just goof around in a dungeon anymore. It's all instances. Don't get me wrong. They're generally fun instances. But the focus is on getting through the single set path. There's no exploration, or simply enjoying the environment.

It's a trade off.

Anyway, a few years ago, the dev team released the final storyline for the game -Rhapsodies of Vanadiel. I finally finished it yesterday.

Except...

It turns out that there's no a new storyline -The Voracious Resurgence - that's in the process of being released.

Been playing a canny bit of deeprock galactic with some of the lads. It's been ages since I last played it and I'm enjoying the newer updates. So much added since then.

Ah yes, good old Ultimate Squat Simulator, I envy people who get to play it with friends, though BOSCO is me mate.

New guns incoming as well, I love the effort the team keeps on putting into the game. They're working on new "sidearms" now, two previewed, two more to go.

Doom Eternal's Horde mode.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines with my 2nd play through with my OP Toreador. Taking a break from Bannerlord as it's become quite frustrating. I made the mistake of making my own kingdom. I keep getting War declared on me and my new town Seonon being besieged again and again. Aserai are now on me and yeah, I think they're quite OP. They've been expanding a lot. Almost as much as when I was fighting for the Vlandians. And in the last siege I swear every 3rd/4th soldier is top tier. That's 1,000 men.

More progress in Cataclysm: I managed to clear out a small trailer park through judicious use of kiting and fires.

Now to build a base?

 BrookM wrote:
Ah yes, good old Ultimate Squat Simulator, I envy people who get to play it with friends, though BOSCO is me mate.

New guns incoming as well, I love the effort the team keeps on putting into the game. They're working on new "sidearms" now, two previewed, two more to go.

Ah I know how you feel, until very recently I was in the same boat, my friends had swapped from xbox to PC last year and I was lagging behind until last month. I'm looking forward to the new guns!

It's definitely a squat simulator I like the numerous GW references in the game.

Cyberpunk just got a *huge* (over 40GB) update, adding new stuff (including new apartments, and apartment customization), changes to the way that fixers hand out missions, QoL, NPC AI (both in and out of combat, rebalancing, and more. The list is quite long (and ends with a note that there's more changes that aren't listed), and so I'm not posting it here. You can find the list on Steam, and similar locations.

One item of note, though - some of the changes don't apply to previous generation consoles (i.e. PS4 and XBox One). If you own the game on either of those platforms, be aware of this.

They're finally getting beyond the "fixing the bugs" stage, and moving onto "putting in stuff that probably should have been in the game at launch" stage. They mention "free DLCs" in the patch, which is probably a reference to the apartment additions. But the changes to the fixers are an example of something that in no way can be presented as a DLC. It's a system that should have been present when the game went gold.

In any case, there are two bits of good news here. First, I think it's safe to say that CDPR isn't walking away from the game any time soon. Second, I think the partial shift in patch priorities suggests that they think they've largely got the bugs dealt with, and are moving to start making the game more *fun*. And that's an important thing for a video game, or so I've been led to believe.

Got a Crokinole set for Christmas and my whole family are deeply into playing.
We even take it when camping.

Other than that just a heap of painting the last few months for MCP, AOS, Necromuna and Warhammer Underworlds. Just cannot bring myself to play.
Have been in funks like this before so will return to playing soon.

One big thing on the Cyberpunk list:

they've stripped the crappy red lighting out of character creation (so you can actually reasonably approximate what your character will actually look like) AND you can change your appearance in your apartment(s) mirror at any point in game.


-----
It was apparently a big patch day for several games for some reason:

BG3 (early access) also got an update (with the barbarian class and UI rework). The barbarian kind of sucks for the way BG3 is structured- D&D expects a small number of significant combats per day, not the dozens of minor battles that CRPGs typically indulge in. So raging a few times per day (two or three times at early levels) means you basically don't get major class features most of the time. But in a sudden departure from their previous design decisions, they just tossed out the rules for the Players Handbook Totem Warrior subclass and replaced them with...other things. Some of which are worse, for no apparent reason. But in the past like with Rogue and Warlock, they just left subclass abilities they couldn't implement out and didn't replacement. Early Access is Early Access, but hopefully the UI replacement is better than the crap one they were using and they go back and fix up existing classes.

Wrath of the Righteous was supposed to get a DLC and update today, but they pushed back the DLC by about 3 weeks at the very last minute (seriously, last night) and the big patch (which still doesn't come close to fixing all the bugs, 5 months post-release) is still vaguely coming later this week, probably.


So, yeah. None of that matters in the face of Total Warhammer 3 this week, so... hope they all keep chugging along for when I have time to check on their individual screwups.

Got bored and started playing xcom 2 again since I added a new online friend in the game’s character pool. 2nd campaign attempt and seems to be going pretty well now. Strangely I should’ve lost a couple missions and didn’t.

The mission where you get ambushed by advent in the tunnels was really hard and I should’ve probably lost esp. since I didn’t have 5 squad size at that point.

My latest tough mission I had to fight off 2 turrets, 2 advent mecs and various other baddies like stun lancers and I lost 2 soldiers and almost a 3rd. Enemy hit chance is weird sometimes and one of my character pool soldiers was one hit killed by an advent mec while in full cover. It was really stupid.

I’m already up to mid-May and I have 2 days left till magnetic weapons are researched. Anyway I think this run is mostly stable now. All my gts trained soldiers auto become sergeant class and it’s so early in the game that that’s better than most of my trained soldiers esp. due to soldier deaths. Also my online friend I just added is currently the only guy left alive from my character pool but I suppose i only had 4 soldiers in that soldier pool. He’s a sniper at sergeant class I’m pretty sure.

Will have to reinstall Cyberpunk at some point now, especially with them also fixing broken or useless skills, free respec in end game is welcome.

Unless I missed it, they still haven't made an attempt to have the mini map zoom out while driving, which is still something they need to do.

The cyberpunk 2077 update looks great on ps5, it's honestly one of the best looking games i've booted up on this console to date. It's still the same game, but it just feels a lot better...like it should've been this way from the beginning. Plus a lot of little quality of life changes, i've been wanting to alter my characters hair/details for like a year plus at this point. So there might be a redemption story for this game yet, if they stick to it.

Cyberpunk seems to have (finally) put in the game stuff that 25 year old games had and it was amusing to see the Developers having to oh and Ah over them.

Alot of stuff still seems broken - like police AI.

Finally gotten around to picking up Mass Effect Legendary. Pretty fun replaying the franchise so far.

I have just downloaded Dwarf Rock Galactic as a friend to play with pals. It looks quite good fun, has anyone played it?

Alfus Piedro wrote:
Finally gotten around to picking up Mass Effect Legendary. Pretty fun replaying the franchise so far.

I've been playing this too recently, about twenty hours into the first game. It's great! Still holds up really well, I am sure the second game will be even better.