I ordered #CrusaderKings3 when it was released and played the tutorial and then put it down for some reason. Caught up today playing everyone's favorite beginner character Robert The Fox on Sardinia.
I like Rick Beato's take on #AI in the #music business. People who can generate new music, including fakes, are artists do we need a name for them like aiJs?). Everyone is puzzling revenue and rights. Many old assets will become worthless. And technology moves forward despite your attachment to old business models. [#strategy
Organizational transformations are extremely difficult on a personal level for everyone involved. A team of researchers found that in successful transformations, leaders not only made sure their teams had the processes, resources, and technology they needed — they also built the right emotional conditions.
It's risky because I might be below the military level. He declared war on me and is very hostile. If I take him out of the game, the way is almost clear, I think. Or, first the base in the lower left. With other units..
Age of Wonders III
Mission #5
Pain to defeat Isabella (Humans).
The (black) ships in the first image cannot land troops. Once this is understood. The whole strategy can change.. Reminder: always look at the details of the enemy troops!
Last image (a lot of turns after): The road to victory will be long (and hard).
I'm making progress.
However, Priatan (one of the objectives?!) at the bottom left is for the moment inaccessible. A volcanic barrier protects the access. I guess I could pass an entrance to the underground, located somewhere.
Gaming time..
I played a lot Age of Wonders serie this last week. Mainly the last: Age of Wonders 4. What a great game I think.
I also loved the scifi universe of Age of Wonders - Planet Fall.
I'm on Encased since yesterday. You can catch it at only $1 on Instant Gaming. Science fiction dystopic.. Really a great one! :0)
Does anyone here having any thoughts on / experience with using the 'RPG' Steam tag on your strategy games?
Two of my most closely related games, Crusader Kings and Old World, both use it in their top 5 tags, so I'm trying it out as well, but it feels like such a loaded term, and I suspect expectations amongst players can vary greatly as to what it means exactly.
Playing some Rimworld between meetings. It's a fun and surprisingly addictive little base-building/exploration game, and as a bonus it's small (less than 500MB) and runs flawlessly on Linux (Pop!_OS here).
However, the downside is my search history looks pretty dubious now. "How to harvest organs" "Slaughtering animals" "Making drugs" "How to burn corpses" etc. etc.
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
Apr 8, 2023 - Day 98 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 105
Game: Terra Nil
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: Mar 29, 2023
Library Date: Apr 7, 2023
Unplayed: 1d
Playtime: 3.3h
I first played the Terra Nil demo about 9 months ago during the Steam Next Fest.It had a lot of rough edges, but it was quite charming, and there was definitely something there.
It was released on the 29th of March; it then popped up as part of Fanatical's Easter sale.
Take a dash of ADHD, a touch of exhaustion, and a habit of buying new games as a coping mechanism; shake them all up, and I found myself the owner of both Dredge & Terra Nil (there went my savings towards a new motherboard).
Terra Nil is an "environmental strategy game". You find yourself in the middle of a wasteland, with the job of terraforming the land to restore the biomes and biodiversity that are long gone, and finally removing all traces of civilisation.
While Dredge is "cozy horror", Terra Nil is just cozy. There are challenges to achieve during the rewilding process, but there are no threats, no impending doom, just a delightful experience of watching a dead wasteland brought to glorious life, accompanied by a delightful soundtrack that seems to slowly fill in as you move towards the goal.
It did not feel like 3 hours had passed; Terra Nil is:
Apr 10, 2023 - Day 100 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 107
Game: Kingdom
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: Oct 22, 2015
Library Date: Mar 22, 2018
Unplayed: 1845d (5y19d)
Playtime: 68m
Kingdom is a pixel-art based, sideways-scrolling strategy/resource management game. Pretty much everything I dislike, in a single package.
As soon as I saw it load in, I was sure I'd be clock-watching, just itching for my 15 minutes to be up.
An hour later I was still playing.
Sometimes the gameplay is so good, the art disappears, and this turns out to be a great game, but you have to work for it.
It does very little to hold your hand; the first ten minutes were spent trying to intuit what was going on.
You're a king or queen, mounted on a horse. You can ride in either direction, and pick up and spend gold coins, and... that's about it. You cannot attack or fight back if attacked.
You use your initial few gold coins to hire a couple of beggars, and build a tiny village.
The tiny village allows you to provide each person you hire with a tool (hammer) or a weapon (bow & arrow).
During the day, the armed villagers kill rabbits and earn gold coins for you, while the working villagers can build defenses. At night, the armed villagers defend you. Each new day, you earn more gold coins, and the cycle continues, for just one more day.
My initial impressions of Kingdom were wrong; it's:
May 7, 2023 - Day 127 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 142
Game: Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War
Platform: Epic Games Store / Steam
Release Date: Jul 13, 2018
Library Date: May 7, 2023
Unplayed: 0d (0d)
Playtime: 6h17m
Gladius - Relics of War (GRW) is a turn-based 4X (apparently) strategy game, as opposed to Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters' (CGD) tactical strategy.
Oh no...
After getting my head around CGD on Thursday night, I remembered I had a Steam key for Gladius - Relics of War (GRW) in my spreadsheet of shame (think pile of shame, but Steam keys I haven't even redeemed).
Not only that, I'd also gotten it free on Epic Games Store at some stage. On the chance I wouldn't "get" it and/or like it, I installed it on EGS (and I despise using EGS), with a view to adding the key to my giveaway list if I hated it.
4 hours and 46 minutes later, just after finally completing the tutorial, I discovered a missed alarm, when I got a phone call from the appointment I'd missed.
Tonight I installed it on Steam, started over, & completed the tutorial in 91m.
It's not quite as pretty as CGD, but it's incredibly engrossing, and I'm not entirely sure why. Civ 5, Civ 6, Age of Wonders: Planetfall didn't grab me like this, and Stellaris did my head in.
I tried Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus at some stage last year, and I hated it; so much so, that it did what I do with any of the games that I "nope" out of: leave them running until I've got all the card drops, sell the cards on the marketplace, then uninstall it, and hide it from my library.
I reinstalled it today to see if maybe it made sense to me now, and it absolutely does.
While it's not as pretty as Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, it does make sense to me now, but it's just not quite as engaging as CGD.
Total War: SHOGUN 2 (TW:S2) did not get off to a flying start.
As this was the first run, it wanted to install Flash Player. I refused to allow that, and it seemed to run OK. Turns out that it was included to show ads on the main menu, so no loss.
In the case of TW:S2, I knew it was a strategy game, going in, and since I've had a pretty good run with strategy games over the weekend, I thought I'd give it a go.
That good run ended today.
I started with the tutorial, and it was just teeth-grindingly slow. I tried to persevere, and finally, after 15 minutes, I was about to engage the enemies on the main battlefield of the tutorial, after a couple of skirmishes.
...and it crashed.
I started it again, went into the campaign, one the first battle, but what little forward motion I had was gone, and I quit out a few minutes later.
TW:CS2 is, apparently, a "blend of real-time & tactics strategy, but it just hasn't grabbed me, and the random crash was enough to leave me wanting to spend time in other strategy games.
May 16, 2023 - Day 136 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 152
Game: Bad North: Jotunn Edition
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Nov 17, 2018
Library Date: Dec 25, 2022
Unplayed: 145d (4m24d)
Playtime: 43m
Steam went down while I was writing this, which was a little disconcerting.
Bad North: Jotunn Edition is the "definitive edition" of Bad North, which I'd never played. It's a real-time cozy tactics strategy roguelite.
I threw "cozy" in there, because of all the games this reminds me, it's actually Townscaper that it comes closest to in terms of atmosphere.
It's somewhat minimalistic in design, but that gives it a unique character. You defend a series of islands against Viking invaders, so it's like the anti-Assassins Creed Valhalla.
I wish I had more to say about it, but I've come down with some kind of not-COVID (according to two tests so far), and couldn't stay awake last night to post the update.
I then went to bed and couldn't sleep, so it's a lose/lose.
I really must look up the difference between roguelike and roguelite, because all of these subcategories are doing my head in.
On The Risks of Permissive Licensing (socialhub.activitypub.rocks)
Also, the AGPL isn’t something that commercial operations are afraid of. There are plenty of examples of industry using AGPL software....