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Eumerin wrote:
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.

Spoiler:

The news of the oncoming storm caught me off-guard and in a bit of a precarious situation. I started scrambling to get everything taken care of, but didn't do very well. When the storm started, I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to survive it. Fortunately, I had enough time to get the waves of refugees all housed and healthy (though I only retrieved one of the three late-game refugee groups stuck in the Frostlands) though it took me a while to get houses for all of them. Coal production was stabilized just as the storm started, though I had to play with the overcharge early on to get my reserves up. Unfortunately, I ran out of food just before the storm broke. But that turned out to be the very last day, and a single missed day of food won't starve your citizens.

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

Each scenario is about 20 hours which is the length of a normal game. There's 5 story based scenarios. I'm on the last one now. I really like FrostPunk and glad to hear a 2nd one is coming out.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:


Each scenario is about 20 hours which is the length of a normal game. There's 5 story based scenarios. I'm on the last one now. I really like FrostPunk and glad to hear a 2nd one is coming out.

That's definitely not the case with the New Home scenario (i.e. the original one). The scenario lasts for I can't see it taking anyone twenty hours unless you pause it a lot, and never use the time acceleration.

I’d be curious to know which game you found to be the more enjoyable experience Eumerin. Between Ixion and frost punk that is. Since you played through both so close to one another.

Black book is my comfort game and what I’ve been playing lately. It’s an rpg card game. A little bit similar to slay the spire and baten kaitos. It’s very cozy and filled to the brim with Slavic folklore. Very simple graphics but it’s got a lot of heart and feels like a fairy tale.

Also been playing a bit of necromunda hired gun and don’t starve.

Eumerin wrote:

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:


Each scenario is about 20 hours which is the length of a normal game. There's 5 story based scenarios. I'm on the last one now. I really like FrostPunk and glad to hear a 2nd one is coming out.

That's definitely not the case with the New Home scenario (i.e. the original one). The scenario lasts for

Spoiler:

48 days. And the last week or so of that is basically spent responding to the occasional pop-up while you wait for the storm to blow over.

I can't see it taking anyone twenty hours unless you pause it a lot, and never use the time acceleration.

Actually I guess I never use the time acceleration. Too busy stressing about all the problems and see what people are up to.

 Nerak wrote:
I’d be curious to know which game you found to be the more enjoyable experience Eumerin. Between Ixion and frost punk that is. Since you played through both so close to one another.

Mind you, I still haven't finished Ixion yet. I need to get back on that. And as KamikazeCanuck noted, there are five different scenarios in Frostpunk, and I've only played one (though I suspect that all five have similar atmospheres).

The most apt comparison that I can think of for Frostpunk is that you're standing in front of a dam. Not Hoover Dam, but big enough. Made out of concrete, of course. And if it breaks, bad things happen when the water behind it gets released. You've got a trowel and wet concrete, and are busy patching holes in the dam. But every time you patch a hole, a new one appears. And if you let up on patching the existing holes, new ones will still appear and finally the whole thing will collapse and sweep you away in a torrent of water.

It's a gross simplification, but the overall urgency of the situation is probably about the same.

Ixion has elements of that, but not to the same degree. Early on, things will be tight. But while you're expected to take on refugees (and later awaken the contents of cryopods), *you* get to decide when to do that. You don't have a group of people suddenly show up in your hanger asking whether they can come in *right now*. Instead, you'll be told to pick up a group of people (or cryopods), and then the game will let you arrange the cargo ship(s) to get that done. You could wait an (real life) hour before dispatching those cargo ships, if you wanted, while you gather the resources to build the homes and food production that they'll need. Frostpunk might let you know that the refugees are headed your way. But you can't stall them for an hour. They show up when they show up, and you need to deal with them at that exact moment. While playing New Home, at one point I had dozens of homeless people. They just showed up on my doorstep, and I had to get the homes built as quickly as I could after they arrived. The cryopods in Ixion are even more of an "How do you want to handle this" affair. You bring the pods onto the Tiqqun at your own pace, and then wake them at your pace (there's a morale penalty associated with having too many unopened cryopods, though it was made much less punishing in a patch a couple of weeks ago). Hull repairs are somewhat similar to the generator in Frostpunk, but never to the same degree. Late in the game, the generator in Frostpunk is devouring coal by the wagonloads. While hull repairs get more and more expensive as the game goes on, they never consume to the same degree. That's not to say that you can ignore the refugees and cryopods forever. You do need to leave your current system at some point, and sometimes you'll be required to bring in a certain number of people or pods before moving on. But you get to choose when they board the Tiqqun.

Further, Ixion expects you to get most of your supplies from outside. In Frostpunk, you mostly create your own resources using the facilities that you've built inside your settlement (village, really; I'm not sure if it's possible to get more than 600 residents). Scouts can find supplies elsewhere, and outposts can provide a steady stream of resources each day. But ultimately, you depend on what is being produced within your settlement. Ixion instead expects you to gather your raw materials from outside your "settlement". Your miners will turn asteroids into units of a raw material (say, Iron), which will then get picked up and brought back to the Tiqqun by your cargo ships, where it will be refined into a processed resource (Alloy, in this case). Or you'll retrieve the processed goods using a cargo ship from a "node" in the system that you've explored. The important thing is that outside of your ships is where all of the materials come from. Except food. You grow that. And while you can find food elsewhere (and it's helped me paper over a shortfall a time or two), that's not the primary source. The bulk of your food comes from Tiqqun. You eventually can develop the ability to produce other resources inside the Tiqqun. And as has been mentioned previously, that appears to break the game somewhat.

Also, morale isn't as big of an issue in Ixion. Yes, it's important. And to a certain extent, it works like the temperature in Frostpunk. You'll have constant negative modifiers that you'll need to counteract with positive modifiers. But the pressure (at least so far) isn't to the same degree that the temperature is in Frostpunk.

Finally, there's the length. Both games have a Very Definite Endpoint. But as I noted just a bit ago, Frostpunk (at least for me) was quite short. Ixion is not. While the game has a mild morale penalty if you stay in a system for "too long", the penalty is removed when you jump to the next system. And it's generally worth dealing with the penalty to collect all of the resources that you can before going to the next system. On the other hand, Ixion can start to drag a bit when you're not quite ready to leave a system just yet (which is where I am with the third system right now).


To sum up, Frostpunk pretty much always left me scrambling. You always feel like you're running right along the edge of the precipice, and one wrong step could doom you. There's some settlement-building, but you're heavily constrained by the generator, and the need to stay warm (and to keep from running out of coal). It's also short. Just as I was about to reach the point at which I could take a step back and relax a bit, the game ended (which, really, kind of seems like the point; you got your settlement to the point where things weren't running along the knife's edge, so you've "won" and the game ends).

Ixion isn't quite so urgent. There's always the potential for sudden disaster lurking in the back of your mind. But as the game goes on you develop more and better ways to keep things under control. It also allows you more freedom over when you specifically have to deal with additions to your population (though unlike Frostpunk, many of the people that you bring in are completely non-productive; Frostpunk lets you find a humane use for the children, and eventually lets you put amputees back to work). Resource management and settlement building are much more involved and important than they are in Frostpunk, particularly as you shift resources around between the sectors (which works, but is clunky imo). It's also longer. I don't know exactly how much time I've spent in the third system, or how much longer I'll spend. But I wouldn't be surprised if I spend as much time in that system alone (which, in fairness, will be more time than I spent in the earlier systems) than I did on my playthrough of Frostpunk's "New Home" scenario.

Hope this sheds light. Feel free to ask questions.

Playing Witcher 3 finally with the next gen update. Wasn't actually waiting for it or anything, it just so happened that I cleared most of the other games on my pile of shame and was thinking of getting to it when the update made it an easy pick.

Anyway, combat is pretty weak. Floaty, lacks impact. Also a lot of meandering. I've dozed off once during some boring quest dialog. Also some notable technical hiccups. Novigrad is kind of a mess, with tons of load times and one easily reproduceable crash that apparently isn't new as I found a discussion on it from 2016.

Despite all that, I totally get the appeal of the game. The open world design is remarkably lived in. Quests overlap in really natural ways that you rarely see in any medium. Remarkably little in the way of mindless sidequests too. Most of them are quite involved and do a great job making the encounters feel like something that demands supernatural expertise to extinguish.

So yeah, Witcher 3 is a pretty known quantity by now, but definitely holds up. I am rather glad I played it after the Netflix show though; it provides some solid context behind Yen and Ciri that the game assumes you're fully aware of.

What does the 'next gen update' actually add?
I saw the announcement but puzzled over what the point was. No content really leapt out at me.

Voss wrote:
What does the 'next gen update' actually add?
I saw the announcement but puzzled over what the point was. No content really leapt out at me.

It's mostly just a texture/ray tracing/lighting/4K refresh kind of thing. It looks nicer, but not dramatically so. Apparently, the foliage is nicer and the ground textures have been given an overhaul. It looks nice, but the game always looked nice. It still looks "old" but it's not like modern games are looking all that much better than last gen anyway. There's also some popular mods implemented in the console versions that provide some quality of life improvements as well. I'm honestly not sure what the point was, but these kind of unnecessary upgrades have been all the rage while the industry tries to get the next gen going after the stalled launch.

Ah. That's fair I suppose, the industry is in an odd lull, so I guess this sort of thing is to be expected.

I know I'm looking askance at the upcoming '2023' releases- I'm finding little to be excited about- a lot of Dark Souls-alikes (a genre I don't care about), and a lack of commitment to release dates (probably wise of studios after the last couple years).

I feel like I'm still waiting for 2021 & 2022 games to actually be finished (like bg3, wrath of the righteous and Total Warhammer 3), and anything new is going to require more waiting for much the same reason.

Homeworld 3. That is surely enough to make the whole year exciting

Voss wrote:
What does the 'next gen update' actually add?
I saw the announcement but puzzled over what the point was. No content really leapt out at me.

They put a fast travel point at the Bloody Baron's castle

 Flinty wrote:
Homeworld 3. That is surely enough to make the whole year exciting

In theory, yes. But the various messy releases over the last couple of years have not given me much confidence in big new releases, unfortunately.

 Flinty wrote:
Homeworld 3. That is surely enough to make the whole year exciting

Eh. Not my thing. To be honest, I never heard much about the Homeworld series outside people trying to establish 'Nerd Cred' hierarchies. I knew it existed, just burned out on space RTS games long before.

Eumerin wrote:

 Nerak wrote:
I’d be curious to know which game you found to be the more enjoyable experience Eumerin. Between Ixion and frost punk that is. Since you played through both so close to one another.

Mind you, I still haven't finished Ixion yet. I need to get back on that. And as KamikazeCanuck noted, there are five different scenarios in Frostpunk, and I've only played one (though I suspect that all five have similar atmospheres).

The most apt comparison that I can think of for Frostpunk is that you're standing in front of a dam. Not Hoover Dam, but big enough. Made out of concrete, of course. And if it breaks, bad things happen when the water behind it gets released. You've got a trowel and wet concrete, and are busy patching holes in the dam. But every time you patch a hole, a new one appears. And if you let up on patching the existing holes, new ones will still appear and finally the whole thing will collapse and sweep you away in a torrent of water.

It's a gross simplification, but the overall urgency of the situation is probably about the same.

Ixion has elements of that, but not to the same degree. Early on, things will be tight. But while you're expected to take on refugees (and later awaken the contents of cryopods), *you* get to decide when to do that. You don't have a group of people suddenly show up in your hanger asking whether they can come in *right now*. Instead, you'll be told to pick up a group of people (or cryopods), and then the game will let you arrange the cargo ship(s) to get that done. You could wait an (real life) hour before dispatching those cargo ships, if you wanted, while you gather the resources to build the homes and food production that they'll need. Frostpunk might let you know that the refugees are headed your way. But you can't stall them for an hour. They show up when they show up, and you need to deal with them at that exact moment. While playing New Home, at one point I had dozens of homeless people. They just showed up on my doorstep, and I had to get the homes built as quickly as I could after they arrived. The cryopods in Ixion are even more of an "How do you want to handle this" affair. You bring the pods onto the Tiqqun at your own pace, and then wake them at your pace (there's a morale penalty associated with having too many unopened cryopods, though it was made much less punishing in a patch a couple of weeks ago). Hull repairs are somewhat similar to the generator in Frostpunk, but never to the same degree. Late in the game, the generator in Frostpunk is devouring coal by the wagonloads. While hull repairs get more and more expensive as the game goes on, they never consume to the same degree. That's not to say that you can ignore the refugees and cryopods forever. You do need to leave your current system at some point, and sometimes you'll be required to bring in a certain number of people or pods before moving on. But you get to choose when they board the Tiqqun.

Further, Ixion expects you to get most of your supplies from outside. In Frostpunk, you mostly create your own resources using the facilities that you've built inside your settlement (village, really; I'm not sure if it's possible to get more than 600 residents). Scouts can find supplies elsewhere, and outposts can provide a steady stream of resources each day. But ultimately, you depend on what is being produced within your settlement. Ixion instead expects you to gather your raw materials from outside your "settlement". Your miners will turn asteroids into units of a raw material (say, Iron), which will then get picked up and brought back to the Tiqqun by your cargo ships, where it will be refined into a processed resource (Alloy, in this case). Or you'll retrieve the processed goods using a cargo ship from a "node" in the system that you've explored. The important thing is that outside of your ships is where all of the materials come from. Except food. You grow that. And while you can find food elsewhere (and it's helped me paper over a shortfall a time or two), that's not the primary source. The bulk of your food comes from Tiqqun. You eventually can develop the ability to produce other resources inside the Tiqqun. And as has been mentioned previously, that appears to break the game somewhat.

Also, morale isn't as big of an issue in Ixion. Yes, it's important. And to a certain extent, it works like the temperature in Frostpunk. You'll have constant negative modifiers that you'll need to counteract with positive modifiers. But the pressure (at least so far) isn't to the same degree that the temperature is in Frostpunk.

Finally, there's the length. Both games have a Very Definite Endpoint. But as I noted just a bit ago, Frostpunk (at least for me) was quite short. Ixion is not. While the game has a mild morale penalty if you stay in a system for "too long", the penalty is removed when you jump to the next system. And it's generally worth dealing with the penalty to collect all of the resources that you can before going to the next system. On the other hand, Ixion can start to drag a bit when you're not quite ready to leave a system just yet (which is where I am with the third system right now).


To sum up, Frostpunk pretty much always left me scrambling. You always feel like you're running right along the edge of the precipice, and one wrong step could doom you. There's some settlement-building, but you're heavily constrained by the generator, and the need to stay warm (and to keep from running out of coal). It's also short. Just as I was about to reach the point at which I could take a step back and relax a bit, the game ended (which, really, kind of seems like the point; you got your settlement to the point where things weren't running along the knife's edge, so you've "won" and the game ends).

Ixion isn't quite so urgent. There's always the potential for sudden disaster lurking in the back of your mind. But as the game goes on you develop more and better ways to keep things under control. It also allows you more freedom over when you specifically have to deal with additions to your population (though unlike Frostpunk, many of the people that you bring in are completely non-productive; Frostpunk lets you find a humane use for the children, and eventually lets you put amputees back to work). Resource management and settlement building are much more involved and important than they are in Frostpunk, particularly as you shift resources around between the sectors (which works, but is clunky imo). It's also longer. I don't know exactly how much time I've spent in the third system, or how much longer I'll spend. But I wouldn't be surprised if I spend as much time in that system alone (which, in fairness, will be more time than I spent in the earlier systems) than I did on my playthrough of Frostpunk's "New Home" scenario.

Hope this sheds light. Feel free to ask questions.

Ya, Frostpunk is like recreational stress management. Normally, I don't like that kind of thing but it this case it works for me. It's also quite grimdark. Just finished the 5th scenario and what's cool is that all 5 scenarios take place in a "shared universe" for lack of a better term. Some take place before, concurrently and after A New Home so you feel like its one long game. They got a lot out of their mechanics for sure.

Need to look into this Ixion thing if its Frostpunk like. Did it come out after?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Voss wrote:
What does the 'next gen update' actually add?
I saw the announcement but puzzled over what the point was. No content really leapt out at me.

It kind of ruined it for me. I was like hundreds of hours in and don't get why they would release a major overhaul to a 7 year old single player game. It changed the controls which obviously - I'm very used to the controls I've been using this whole time and nerfed food which was something I relied on. Basically they made the whole game harder suddenly. That combined with the fact I picked the "wrong" ending in Blood and Wine (Blood and Wine staight up has a right way of doing the main quest and wrong way which is really unusual) made me low key rage quit the whole thing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Anyway, playing "Avengers" right now. Totally getting an Anthem vibe so far. Clearly a visually spectacular game that a lot of hard work went into but I get the feeling the suits said make sure it's some kind of MMORPG or whatever gets the most microtransactions nowadays. The profit must never end! It had this weird jarring opening where it shows you the entire main storyline in cutscenes. I guess cause it's older now and they just want you to get straight in the "Raids".
Fortunately, you can still just choose to play the main storyline that it just spoiled which I'm doing now. So far, I'm liking it.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:

Ya, Frostpunk is like recreational stress management. Normally, I don't like that kind of thing but it this case it works for me. It's also quite grimdark. Just finished the 5th scenario and what's cool is that all 5 scenarios take place in a "shared universe" for lack of a better term. Some take place before, concurrently and after A New Home so you feel like its one long game. They got a lot out of their mechanics for sure.

Need to look into this Ixion thing if its Frostpunk like. Did it come out after?

Ixion came out just a few months ago.

I think the main thing with Frostpunk is that you don't really have time to get that badly wound up about it. If you fail, you fail quickly. You don't need to worry about stressing out for thirty hours of playtime, and then realizing that everything you did was a waste of time. You get the push from being under pressure, but you don't get it long enough for it to start to feel like a grind. Mind you, as KamikazeCanuck's recent post indicated, apparently some of us are getting shorter playtimes than others of us. Ixion is long, which I think is why I've been reluctant to get back to it. And I really do need to get back and finish it. On the other hand, if you've survived in that game for as long as I have, you probably don't need to worry about failing, either.

And the developer definitely knows that Ixion players are going to take a while. Every 365 cycles (the base in-game time period that is likely just a day with a different name) the AI assistant wishes you Happy New Year, and you hear your population cheer.

Anyway, playing "Avengers" right now. Totally getting an Anthem vibe so far. Clearly a visually spectacular game that a lot of hard work went into but I get the feeling the suits said make sure it's some kind of MMORPG or whatever gets the most microtransactions nowadays. The profit must never end! It had this weird jarring opening where it shows you the entire main storyline in cutscenes. I guess cause it's older now and they just want you to get straight in the "Raids".
Fortunately, you can still just choose to play the main storyline that it just spoiled which I'm doing now. So far, I'm liking it.

I played Avengers for a bit with a group of friends back when it came out . They all dropped away pretty quickly, though I stuck around long enough to play through the two FLC releases that introduced the Hawkeyes. On the other hand, I also didn't put all that much time into leveling up. I don't think I ever reached raid level on any of the heroes.

Getting the feels to have a go at one of the 'life is strange' games again.

Most extraordinary series I've ever played.

@Enumerin Well, in Frostpunk I try to see it out until the end. In almost all of my playthoughs it seemed like I had really screwed up but then I persevered through it and pulled it off in the end. Frostpunk is always trying to make you think you've messed up or made the wrong decision no matter what you do. The only time I completely had to start over because it was a disaster was The Fall of Winterhome. When you screw up there the generator blows up in your face...hard to persevere through that...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Deadnight wrote:
Getting the feels to have a go at one of the 'life is strange' games again.

Most extraordinary series I've ever played.

Played the first one and it was quite trippy. Been meaning to get back into some of the other ones.

I started playing Sun Haven, a game that is clearly based heavily on Stardew Valley, but with more of a Japanese theme (anime-looking characters and stuff). It's fun and pretty addictive.

I turn on VaatiVidya videos when I'm driving and those inspired me to replay Sekiro and Elden Ring in piecemeal fashion.
ER's worldbuilding is actually incredible and I daresay between Sekiro and ER, Fromsoft does it better than anyone else. I haven't played Bloodborne or Dark Souls, but based on my reading Bloodborne is incredible and DS is mediocre, but three titles with that level of worldbuilding and, in the case of Bloodborne and Sekiro, narrative, is incredible. Everything ties together so well.
I really dislike the combat system in ER still...mainly because certain weapon arts such as parry provide terrible in game details. Buckler Parry has minimal windup, huge iFrames, and a moderate cooldown while other parries vary. None of this conveyed in game outside of trial and error.
Sekiro's combat on the otherhand is extremely polished and once you get it, you don't forget it.
I one shot the horse boss and Lady Butterfly in a fresh game, but strangely the first Seven-Spears is giving me trouble...this is the one critique I have of the gameplay. It's far too easy for certain bosses to either one-shot or instagib you with multiple, unavoidable attacks if you fail the first dodge/parry in the early game and stangely enough Seven-Spears actually hits harder despite being a miniboss than either Butterfly or the horse boss. The worst part is that I'm 99% sure I actually one-shot him during my first playthrough...
Other than that Sekiro is still my all-time favorite game.

I’ve played a bit of wh40k dawn of war 1 vanilla campaign as well as wh40k gladius with a friend. He chose sisters so I decided to make it fluffy and chose imperial guard. We’ve basically won already as the last 2 enemies (chaos and eldar) have just a few cities left and I’m pumping out a leman Russ per turn. I wonder if the imperial guard will get to use rogan dorns by the time the next unit pack comes out. It’d certainly be fun but not sure how likely.

Then I have my xcom 2 long war of the chosen campaign which only needs be to do the last 2 campaign missions before winning but I’m too bored to finish it. I’m still surprised xcom 3 hasn’t come out yet. Maybe when I get my financial situation figured out I’ll get Midnight Suns. I’m not too big on comic heroes but the ones I’ve seen in the game seem fun.

@kamikaze Canuck and eumerin :

You know I kind of want to get Dune: Spice Wars at some point and I think I heard the frost punk devs made it. Once my financial situation improves maybe some of you dakka dudes would be up to play it. Ofc I think Canuck doesn’t play multiplayer. It’s a shame as co-op vs ai could be fun.

Different devs, unless the Frostpunk devs all bailed on their original development house and started a new one. The Frostpunk devs did make another game I've played - This War of Mine. Though a different game, there are some shared elements between the two.

Seems Goldeneye is coming to Nintendo Online soon.

I’m gonna have to get a bunch of N64 controllers and dust off the boys for Pizza, Beer, Horror Movies and games of Get Coltrane!, a personal Goldeneye Multiplayer variant.

Basically, one player takes Robbie Coltrane’s character. They’re allowed to pick up arms and equipment, but not engage in combat beyond slapping. Taking in turns over timed games, whomever died the least wins, with longest period between deaths the tie breaker.

It’s surprisingly good fun!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Seems Goldeneye is coming to Nintendo Online soon.

I’m gonna have to get a bunch of N64 controllers and dust off the boys for Pizza, Beer, Horror Movies and games of Get Coltrane!, a personal Goldeneye Multiplayer variant.

Basically, one player takes Robbie Coltrane’s character. They’re allowed to pick up arms and equipment, but not engage in combat beyond slapping. Taking in turns over timed games, whomever died the least wins, with longest period between deaths the tie breaker.

It’s surprisingly good fun!

That sounds pretty damned cool! It's always fun to play your own little scenarios inside of already made games like that

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Seems Goldeneye is coming to Nintendo Online soon.

I’m gonna have to get a bunch of N64 controllers and dust off the boys for Pizza, Beer, Horror Movies and games of Get Coltrane!, a personal Goldeneye Multiplayer variant.

Basically, one player takes Robbie Coltrane’s character. They’re allowed to pick up arms and equipment, but not engage in combat beyond slapping. Taking in turns over timed games, whomever died the least wins, with longest period between deaths the tie breaker.

It’s surprisingly good fun!

We generally always played Licence to Kill with pistols only as our mode of choice. As an aside, if instead of playing Licence to Kill you just turn everyone's health down to zero, there's some neat differences like body armor giving a single hit to surprise someone with.

flamingkillamajig wrote:I’ve played a bit of wh40k dawn of war 1 vanilla campaign as well as wh40k gladius with a friend. He chose sisters so I decided to make it fluffy and chose imperial guard. We’ve basically won already as the last 2 enemies (chaos and eldar) have just a few cities left and I’m pumping out a leman Russ per turn. I wonder if the imperial guard will get to use rogan dorns by the time the next unit pack comes out. It’d certainly be fun but not sure how likely.

Then I have my xcom 2 long war of the chosen campaign which only needs be to do the last 2 campaign missions before winning but I’m too bored to finish it. I’m still surprised xcom 3 hasn’t come out yet. Maybe when I get my financial situation figured out I’ll get Midnight Suns. I’m not too big on comic heroes but the ones I’ve seen in the game seem fun.

@kamikaze Canuck and eumerin :

You know I kind of want to get Dune: Spice Wars at some point and I think I heard the frost punk devs made it. Once my financial situation improves maybe some of you dakka dudes would be up to play it. Ofc I think Canuck doesn’t play multiplayer. It’s a shame as co-op vs ai could be fun.

Eumerin wrote:Different devs, unless the Frostpunk devs all bailed on their original development house and started a new one. The Frostpunk devs did make another game I've played - This War of Mine. Though a different game, there are some shared elements between the two.

flamingkillamajig wrote:I’ve played a bit of wh40k dawn of war 1 vanilla campaign as well as wh40k gladius with a friend. He chose sisters so I decided to make it fluffy and chose imperial guard. We’ve basically won already as the last 2 enemies (chaos and eldar) have just a few cities left and I’m pumping out a leman Russ per turn. I wonder if the imperial guard will get to use rogan dorns by the time the next unit pack comes out. It’d certainly be fun but not sure how likely.

Then I have my xcom 2 long war of the chosen campaign which only needs be to do the last 2 campaign missions before winning but I’m too bored to finish it. I’m still surprised xcom 3 hasn’t come out yet. Maybe when I get my financial situation figured out I’ll get Midnight Suns. I’m not too big on comic heroes but the ones I’ve seen in the game seem fun.

@kamikaze Canuck and eumerin :

You know I kind of want to get Dune: Spice Wars at some point and I think I heard the frost punk devs made it. Once my financial situation improves maybe some of you dakka dudes would be up to play it. Ofc I think Canuck doesn’t play multiplayer. It’s a shame as co-op vs ai could be fun.

Oh yeah got to play that Dune game too. I'm a big Dune fan. So many games. It's RTS though right? I find I'm too old to play RTS anymore. My reflexes are slower than they used to be and my brain addled.


This War of Mine was actually the game I was going to play next. Been wanting to play it for a while and it seems more relevant than ever. Didn't even know it was by the FrostPunk guys but even more interested now.

@Kamikaze_Canuck: Actually i think it's a 4X game but not sure how it works out. Couldn't be more than a year or two old at this point.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:

This War of Mine was actually the game I was going to play next. Been wanting to play it for a while and it seems more relevant than ever. Didn't even know it was by the FrostPunk guys but even more interested now.

Good game. Still dark, though not nearly as bleak as Frostpunk is.

I don't have the expansions, though. The first one added kids which I would prefer not to deal with in this particular scenario (for starters, I don't think they can be done correctly). The story based ones just didn't attract my interest.

I have been really enjoying Returnal on the PS5. Boy is it difficult, and my reactions are obviously too slow at times, but I quite like the way the story is drip-fed to you, and it tries to give you little pick-me-ups upon death, rather than just the cruelty of a game-over screen.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Seems Goldeneye is coming to Nintendo Online soon.

I’m gonna have to get a bunch of N64 controllers and dust off the boys for Pizza, Beer, Horror Movies and games of Get Coltrane!, a personal Goldeneye Multiplayer variant.

Basically, one player takes Robbie Coltrane’s character. They’re allowed to pick up arms and equipment, but not engage in combat beyond slapping. Taking in turns over timed games, whomever died the least wins, with longest period between deaths the tie breaker.

It’s surprisingly good fun!

We generally always played Licence to Kill with pistols only as our mode of choice. As an aside, if instead of playing Licence to Kill you just turn everyone's health down to zero, there's some neat differences like body armor giving a single hit to surprise someone with.

Excellent stuff, we used to do that too! Nervous as hell when you knew the shot coming in would kill you

Odds and ends...

I pledged for Star Citizen back in the day, so I've been messing around with the Alpha recently. Ambitious game, and what looks like some good stuff incoming maybe when the game finally goes live. But it's an alpha, and you realize it quite quickly when playing.

Surviving the Abyss, the latest Paradox "Surviving" title, has gone into Early Access on Steam. And since there's a discount for people like myself who own the other two Surviving titles, I went ahead and grabbed it. The backdrop for the game is that back in the '50s, some amazing advances in cloning theory were achieved and many attempts were made to clone humans. Unfortunately, all of those attempts failed due to various mutations that hurt the subject's health and caused early death. A vast wave of protests against the inhumane experiments ensued, and cloning experiments were shut down.

Publicly.

The military likes the potential of human cloning. And so in the mid-70s, it has tasked you with establishing and running a new top secret base on the ocean floor over 7km below the surface. Your assignment is to take advantage of the genomes of the ocean life to try and develop better clones. Congratulations! You are now an amoral mad scientist! You're given a handful of employees right at the start of the game, and that's it. Any other employees that you need will need to be created from clones that you create. The game has similar pressures to Frostpunk and Ixion. The other two Surviving titles (each of the three was made by a different developer, btw) are fairly relaxed affairs (usually; I've had at least one playthrough in Surviving Mars when a very unlucky meteor strike ended up wiping out my entire first wave of colonists). This game is not (at least not initially). You never seem to have enough of anything, and once the last of your initial batch of employees are sent down from the surface, the only things you'll get are what you yourself recover or clone (and the clones only have limited lifespans). Complicating matters is that there's no sunlight at that depth. You need to set up electricity-hungry giant light posts to illuminate the darkness, which will allow you access to new resource deposits and places to expand your base buildings.

There's also a couple of other items of note. The first is if - as you were told - you're the first person ever to descend to that depth, then why is there an abandoned research lab already down here? The second is that something keeps emerging from the darkness to attack your bases - something that would cause H. P. Lovecraft to smile in appreciation. I don't know if this is the first survival horror base builder that's ever been made, but it's the first I've ever played. Though since it's a base builder and not an action game, the tone is more suspense and dread than terror.

As I noted, this game is still in Early Access. So the end result might look quite a bit different (and the devs have apparently already acknowledged at least one very prominent - but probably easily fixable - bug in the gameplay) depending on what design choices they make. I played the Surviving the Aftermath demo early on, and own it as a finished product. And while the two still bear a strong resemblance, there are a lot of differences. So it's anyone's guess how Surviving the Abyss will change over time.


Finally, this isn't directly video game related, but does sort of relate to Frostpunk. Yakutia, aka the Republic of Sakha, is a part of the Russian Federation that makes up I'd estimate between one-quarter to one-third of Siberia (any Russian nationals who have better information can feel free to correct my estimate). It's also one of the coldest places in the world. There's a young Yakut woman who posts short videos on YouTube where she talks about what it's like to live in a town where it typically hits -71C in winter (the Alaskan interior generally stays at least 20C higher, and apparently the coldest part of Canada - where it can get just a touch colder - is just across the border). So I thought this might interest some of you who have played Frostpunk. Link here - https://www.youtube.com/@KiunB/videos

Huzzah. Just finished Mechanicus on normal difficulty. A distracting little turn based tactics game.

Once you get 3 or 4 stealthed tech priests, it gets pretty easy. For the final fight I had 5 of them and just took my time wandering up to the big bad bodyguards one at a time before executing them. I was hanging back for the final boss right expecting something wacky to happen after I knocked it down, but no, I just minced the guy.