Got several things on the burner, HOI2, Civ IV, and Warlock. What I really need to do is put together the p&p D&D I've been working on.
Hmmm...going to play something "shooty," for sure; RS2/RO2 and honing skillz on Insurgency Sandstorm (it's growing on me). Other than that, I've no idea.
Stay frosty folks!
Quote from: Dammit Carl! on January 25, 2019, 08:06:33 AM
Hmmm...going to play something "shooty," for sure; RS2/RO2 and honing skillz on Insurgency Sandstorm (it's growing on me). Other than that, I've no idea.
Stay frosty folks!
No shooty for me...Just World of Warships and PQ-17 (boardgame).
WitP:AE has once again pulled me back in. As frustrating as the UI is, I still keep going back to it. And some Aggressors: Ancient Rome for that 'just one more turn' fix.
Nothing more shooty than Wolfenstein and I will definitely be playing more of that this weekend. Also happy to report that Order of Battle is not nearly as scripted as it was when I first played it years ago. Playing the Winter War campaign now and enjoying it a lot. May also start playing Wings of Prey too.
Enjoy!
Busy weekend so my 'shooty' will probably be limited to BIG monsters and Pirates in Pillars 2. Maybe a little TOAW 4 if it's quiet. One can only hope. :peace:
Just Cause 4, Elite Dangerous Guardian grinding and Space Engineers ship building.
1.) GROGPUBLIC umping. (i.e. Republic of Rome consolidated mega-campaign played in the forum and tracked on TTS.) Watching the Republic tear itself apart over political power, while a crisis of wars is looming... this game is just the best! I heartily salute all the players! :notworthy:
2.) Part 2 (presumably the conclusion) of Marching: the Followup Game to Setup: the Game (per jokes on the livestream comments), Saturday night with Cyrano and other Grogs and ArmDrags! My company of British regulars is ready for unified volley firing!! (We're playing a scenario, ump'd by Cyrano, of Colonial Adventures, specifically something to do with Blood River which is more like a Blood Pond around which we're marching not crossing but whatever. It's like Space Hulk, except with companies of Zulus and Brits out in the wide open savanna.)
Livestream starts at 7pm CST, or thereabouts. Game thread is here: https://www.armchairdragoons.com/forum/index.php?topic=547.msg8651#new
3.) I've been chugging along steadily on a pseudo-hotseat Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic campaign, with an eye toward posting it as a series of LP videos for my nieces, whom I'm using as the two main 'human' players against the AI. Fully expect to continue this.
4.) Still sort of chugging along on two other AoW3:Eternal Lords mp games, one with Yskonyn, the other with Dave from the Crisis Grogs.
5.) Yskyonyn is revving up a revanched version of his Battletech "Goodwill's Grogheads" campaign, trimmed down to a more manageable level (maybe), one Lance per player, to be scaled up when-if-ever we get that far. I'm looking toward rolling up a new Lance tonight. (By which I mean "rolling up a Lance at all" since I tried doing that previously a couple of months ago and completely failed for no clear reason. L:-) :-\ :-[ )
6.) I badly want to get back to flying with Tuna (and perhaps some others) in my 1941 model He111, and/or playing my actual dynamic campaign in the game, which I had to scrap since I couldn't figure out how to fly the dang plane with no training. :buck2: But now I feel competent enough to hang with the AI at least.
7.) Arizona Tank (Larry) and Dave should be starting a new Lords of Waterdeep match with me soon; we're just waiting for Dave to kick off.
8.) Maybe some Saboteur and/or Brothers in Arms and/or Company of Heroes (the British campaign in that case) to taste.
I'll be going to stay with my usual gaming group this weekend so it'll be boardgames for a change. However I'm sure I will still fit some Warframe in somewhere!
It's going to be a survival horror kind of weekend for me. I am picking up my pre-order of Resident Evil 2 Remake. Been lookimg forward to this one for quite awhile.
Groggy
Oh, and 9.) I've been angling toward starting Settlements for a while. It's a nice little clever indie 4x colony-management game.
No comment on the song yet? That tune has been kicking my ass for two weeks now. It's AWESOME!!
....is the song on the front page?
>:D
Quote from: MetalDog on January 25, 2019, 01:06:57 PM
No comment on the song yet? That tune has been kicking my ass for two weeks now. It's AWESOME!!
I usually like your song choices, but this one just didn't do it for me. :-"
Quote from: MetalDog on January 25, 2019, 01:06:57 PM
No comment on the song yet? That tune has been kicking my ass for two weeks now. It's AWESOME!!
It's not bad for what it is, but Bring Me the Horizon is one of my daughter's favourite bands so I'm fed up of hearing them!
It's like watching a high-budget far more drugged-out version of MANOS: THE HAND OF FATE!
:buck2:
Quote from: JasonPratt on January 25, 2019, 01:00:49 PM
Oh, and 9.) I've been angling toward starting Settlements for a while. It's a nice little clever indie 4x colony-management game.
I'm intrigued. Tell me more.
Appreciate the candor, fellas. I just can't see how any of you don't like it :crazy2:
I.... sort of appreciate the underlying message? I guess? The main problem with high-concept art is that it can be easily misunderstood, but it seems like satire: a guy watching media mind-control all day decides hey, why not capitalize on that himself, and creates a drugged-out mind-control cult. He dies of a drug overdose inspiring his followers to commit suicide similarly, which (smirkily) allows him to continue living on in noteriety (at least).
The music isn't a style I care for, though; and I'd rather not wallow in the filth of the video. I have a family member who got sucked into a sex-slave mind-control religious cult, marrying its leader, back when I was a little boy. As bad as that was, their family ended up kind-of okay? Sort of? (The widowed aunt hangs out with her sisters, and I got to play boardgames with them all a couple of years ago when they visited my dad. Heh, I taught them how to play the Alhambra card game! Think she may have died last year...) But still. Other family members have ruined their lives, and their childrens' lives, getting heavily involved in drug orgies, so, yeah, not my idea of a fun video.
If the message was what I thought it was, however, then I can at least appreciate the intention behind it. I think. O:-)
The video unsettled me, too, even though I thought it was clever. It's not the words so much that draw me to a song as it is the music. And that's any song. I don't know the words to tons of songs that I've heard literally thousands of times. Just the way that song is put together psyches me up.
That's a tough story you told there. Until you hear it from someone who was close to it those sorts of details always seem to happen to someone else.
Quote from: Huw the Poo on January 25, 2019, 07:54:40 PM
Quote from: JasonPratt on January 25, 2019, 01:00:49 PM
Oh, and 9.) I've been angling toward starting Settlements for a while. It's a nice little clever indie 4x colony-management game.
I'm intrigued. Tell me more.
Okay! Hm. It's a very tight land/resource/people management game, played in continuous pauseable time. (Is pausable a real word? Can't seem to spell it sufficiently...! pausible... nope.)
The concept is that humanity has been reduced to utterly primitivity.... okay, I know
that's a real word!! >:( The land has been absolutely choked out by a species of black bramble, infested with mutations resembling classic fantasy creatures. Humans have been reduced to living in caves only large enough for a couple of families, and traveling between these cramped corridors through semi-random paths through the thorny brambles. Some people can remember the paths pretty well to go out scouting and bringing communication between families (presumably also arranging for useful interbreeding rather than inbreeding ^-^ ), and they bring back tales confirming oral tradition, that once humanity lived in much larger buildings with strange and unbelievable powers.
I would
love to see this developed as a 3d ground level survival rts some day! But the storybook illustrations of the game are still evocative. :smitten:
The story, and the game, starts with you (the player character) being one of the people able to remember how to navigate through the bramble paths, and going out scouting for food one day you take some paths off in a direction you hadn't tried before....
....
.........
-- AND YOU FIND A CLEARING!!
<:-)
I know, that sounds anti-climactic, but under the circumstances it's not only practically a miracle -- especially since there turns out to be
two clearings (connected by the usual bramble pathway) -- it's also
room for the most precious of all commodities:
a gathering of humans into a proper
settlement.The settlement isn't large, to start with: just enough room for a few huts to be built in both areas, and for people to work at organizing tasks like harvesting lumber from overgrown trees and digging for stone. And planting an actual garden! -- with fruits and vegetables!
But it's a
start.
And that's all humanity needs to come back from the edge of extinction.
I don't want to spoil too much -- there's a story to go along with the survival management. I'm a week into the game, and I've managed to build huts for six families (each of which contributes one worker); upgrade them to log cabins (large enough for
two families each! Like one of our larger caves, but situated close enough together that we can work together!); get a garden patch going (garden produce is used for research... somehow. It's the one real immersion-breaker in the game design. ??? ); a stone pit; and when I saved for the evening, I had just dug a tin mine iirc. Also I've got a hut dedicated to craftsmaking (and some light research), and a hermit's hut for more serious research and development.
We've been living a stone age life. But with the new tin mine, I'm hoping to upgrade one of my crew with actual metal on a wicker vest, plus a stone spear laced with tin for a sharper edge. And then that fellow can go out scouting the bramble paths, able to do something better than just run away!
We'll be out of the stone age, then.
I think the game has left early access, but there's still plenty of active support going on, patches once a month. https://store.steampowered.com/app/7046
It's a very spreadsheety sort of game, with
lots of depth. Good tutorial, too.
JP, sounds interesting.
I've been playing the Endless Legend free weekend- getting my ass handed to me. I got clobbered by the Necrophages as the Vaulters.
I have a game of Distant Worlds going too
plus some Field of Glory II
MD, gotta ask about HoI 2- I have HoI 2: Doomsday/Armageddon, and Darkest Hour. Are you using any mods or just vanilla?
JP that sounds really cool, thanks very much for the detailed impressions! It's on ye olde wishliste now but, knowing me, it won't be long before I buy it. :)
Pratt is that a true story about the white slavery, above?
QuoteCivilisation as we know it has been destroyed. We are little more than a few scattered people living in caves and under bushes, banging rocks together to keep warm and eat berries.
Your challenge is to bring humanity together. Lift us up out of the stone age and forge ahead, all the while worrying about what destroyed mankind last time and if it will return to finish the job.
Settlements is a game of managing resources and crafting output over a limited space. You control the pace of the game, relax for many days of playing as you customize each character and train their skills in the items of the era, or rush ahead researching technology as fast as you can. The choice is yours.
The goal of Settlements is to bring a deep crafting RPG game to as wide a range of PCs as possible. Just as enjoyable on a gaming desktop rig as on a low-end laptop used for browsing the web.
Features
Character Customisation - Change name, appreance & voices, obtain a large range of feats and even allocate them to a family.
10 Technological Eras - From the Stone age to the Space Age. You control the pace of advancement through research and seeking out more land to settle. Play at a speed you are most comfortable with and stay in an era as long as you wish.
100+ Buildings to place and use from housing to factories. With space being your primary issue for much of the game, deciding on what to build is key to success.
60+ Character Skills. Each character can only train in 15 skills at any one time, so you will need to develop specialists and keep them alive.
10+ World Skills. Ranging from house design and metal lore to militia combat training, these skills will effect all your settlements.
Diplomacy Points. Although you cannot fit everyone into your settlements, the people who live in the wild are still important to your success. Help them and gain diplomacy points that can be spent on benefits later.
1000+ Items, books and recipes: The game has in-depth crafting at its core. Your characters will need to gain skills in various crafting methods to unlock the ability to craft rare and more powerful items as well as advance in technological eras.
100+ Base Monsters
9 Boss fights, each with their own unique treasure. (Including some with difficulty levels, ultra rare drops and rare spawns)
Scout the world for information on the Blight and help out the struggling remains of mankind.
5 Difficulty Settings
World and Settlement Threat - leading to the Doomsday system and Main Plot Failure! Be careful not to take on challenges that are beyond your character's skills. Too many failures will increase doomsday points and lead to Victory for the Blight.
What is Next!
Update 1: The Black Swamp
As well as several game improvements, this free update adds the following to the core game:
A new merchant system
A new adventure
The boss fight: The Swamp Vampire
New 15 items
2 new pets
6 new recipies
A new character feat.
The Black Swamp has been released for a while now; it just isn't listed on the page's game description as released. It's part of any bought game automatically, free DLC/update.
(Accidentally posted to another thread earlier. :-[ )
Quote from: CJReich46 on January 26, 2019, 01:26:53 AM
JP, sounds interesting.
I've been playing the Endless Legend free weekend- getting my ass handed to me. I got clobbered by the Necrophages as the Vaulters.
I have a game of Distant Worlds going too
plus some Field of Glory II
MD, gotta ask about HoI 2- I have HoI 2: Doomsday/Armageddon, and Darkest Hour. Are you using any mods or just vanilla?
Vanilla. I'm not smart enough to use a mod. I have 100s of hours in on 2. I've played Italy, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, France, USA, even Poland. I love that game!
Quote from: Gusington on January 26, 2019, 10:21:03 AM
Pratt is that a true story about the white slavery, above?
I don't think I could call it white slavery. More like some guy using a religious cult he invented to get a harem for himself, and sucking one of my Dad's sisters into it. She ended up his only wife, but he used to travel the country with her and their children in his car, freeloading off other people, and trying to get them to join his cult. We always suspected he was abusing the kids, too, and pimping them out for cash. But I don't know of any confirmation to that. >:( If we could have proved he was doing something definitely illegal we'd have turned him in so fast it would have broken his neck. Possibly with a broken neck. :cowboy: But Dad's sister and (apparently) the kids adored him in a brainwashed way, and wouldn't testify against him or admit to him having ever done anything wrong.
Some people definitely deserve to be dropped in a swamp hole and left there for God to sort out. Which is why vigilante justice is so tempting (and should be avoided as setting a precedent for everyone to make or claim judgments along that line for themselves.)
Anyway, he wasn't selling or buying anyone as slaves, sexual or otherwise, so not 'white slavery' per se. More of a classic Mohammad attempt, except he failed almost completely at it.
Quote from: MetalDog on January 26, 2019, 10:29:23 AM
QuoteMD, gotta ask about HoI 2- I have HoI 2: Doomsday/Armageddon, and Darkest Hour. Are you using any mods or just vanilla?
Vanilla. I'm not smart enough to use a mod. I have 100s of hours in on 2. I've played Italy, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, France, USA, even Poland. I love that game!
DH per se (and Arsenal of Democracy) are official HOI games and have been for a long time: you don't have to install them as mods, just as normal games, like you'd install HOI2.
If you love HOI2, you'd probably love them just as much.
Now, admittedly, DH itself has mods, notably a "Grand Campaign" mod which used to be called "Arms, Armistices, and Revolutions" -- I should check if that dev has expanded it back into the late 1800s as he was planning to do -- which links the events for WW1 and the earliest pre-WW2 start together, along with a number of other submods he already integrated. But it's also easy to install. If I recall correctly, you just unzip the file into the 'mods' folder, and find the exe file there to start the game; create a shortcut from that for convenience, maybe adjust it for compatibility with WinXPSP2.
But DH vanilla doesn't need any of that. Just let Steam install it as a separate game and go. Pretty sure AoD works that way, too.
Went back to check my notes, and DH does need a bit of tweaking to run on Win 8.1 (probably also later). The same would be true for the Grand Campaign exe.
Copy-pasting the notes I found which I saved in a file (which I added a little to)...
Quote0. Make sure latest patch is installed (at least 1.03).
1. Go to your Darkest hour folder.
2. Right Click on the Darkest Hour exe and select properties.
3. In properties go to compatibility.
4. Press reduced color mode.
5. Then select 16 Bit color in the box under Reduced color mode.
6. After that you have to go open your settings.cfg
and write 1 instead of 0 in the display mode.
7. after that the game will be windowed and it has to be like that to work.
If you wanna play the game you have to launch it from the Darkest Hour.exe not the launcher
If you wanna change what mod you are playing change it in the Settings.cfg
It wont work if you dont run it in windowed mode!
And remember to only launch through the Darkest Hour.exe or it wont work
If your window goes over the windows bar you can do this: You can right click on you're windows bar and select it to hide it automaticly
and when you hover you're mouse over it then it will appear again.
Newest version of the Darkest Hour GC dates to April 2018, and can be found here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/newest-version-of-the-grand-campaign-1914-1991.888180/
I guess this means the 1880 start hasn't been implemented yet?
While events only go out to 1991, the end date can go out at least as far as 2010, with tech research to match. (Including a war games tech called HOIception which trains your generals by having them play Darkest Hour against each other. :D )
I'll be playing a scenario of CMNAO and trying to dislodge a piece of wood from my snowblower. Not necessarily in that order.... :-\
Quote from: MetalDog on January 25, 2019, 01:06:57 PM
No comment on the song yet? That tune has been kicking my ass for two weeks now. It's AWESOME!!
I think the song is great. Not so sure about the lyrics (does it have a meaning and if yes, what). Don't like the video though.
Going to play
Stars in Shadow and hopefully some
Caesar IV.
Quote from: Anguille on January 26, 2019, 02:10:14 PM
Quote from: MetalDog on January 25, 2019, 01:06:57 PM
No comment on the song yet? That tune has been kicking my ass for two weeks now. It's AWESOME!!
I think the song is great. Not so sure about the lyrics (does it have a meaning and if yes, what). Don't like the video though.
Going to play Stars in Shadow and hopefully some Caesar IV.
I'm not crazy about the video either. JasonPratt had a good analysis of the lyrics back a page. They are kind of sketchy, too. The music is what grips me. Just charges me up.
Unfortunately I was delayed for too long around Smolensk in my campaign in Gary Grigsbys War in the East and the Soviets were able to mass too many units for me to break through. Looks like I'll have to restart once again. I think my problem was bad coordination. By the time my forces had reached the Smolensk area, my exploitation units (panzer/motorized divisions) were too spread out and piecemeal. I was only able to make local breakthroughs, but nothing with any real operational depth. The whole time the Soviets continues to accumulate, both along the front and in depth. Going forward I'm going to try to be much smarter about where my exploitation units end up after deep penetrations, so they are better situated to execute the next deep exploitation maneuver.
Otherwise I don't have much planned for this weekend. I'm still in the middle of some Combat Mission PBEMs, and I've been messing around with the East German mod for Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm which has been fun. We'll see what else my wargaming ADD gets me into this weekend!
Holy crap, Pratt.
I'm coordinating moving my wife's nephew out of Alabama. I'm driving the moving truck to NC tomorrow. Little time for gaming. What I'm doing is finishing my review of Pillars of Eternity 2 and working on the Marshalls & Gilbert Island Raid writeup for my US Navy Campaign AAR writeup. I may finish a final reading of "Hive of the Overmind" for Mutant Crawl Classics to finish that review this next week. Then reading the rules for Aggressors Ancient Rome and starting that one up.
I'm wondering if I can do an AAR for a 4x game by writing up every 10th turn or so. That would give people a flavor of what is going on without having an AAR without end that I would get bored of writing and the reader get bored of reading.
Played some Il-2 Battle of Stalingrad multiplayer with Tuna earlier today. Couldn't even get my plane to take off the ground. However later on I tried again in an empty server and was able to launch my plane, fly to the target, bomb it and miss. Hey progress I guess. :)
I'm also setting up a game of Talon Empire Wars in Table Top Simulator. I bought the physical boardgame a few months ago from GMT and have just unboxed it the other day. Rather than setup a table I'm first going to try the game out virtually.
And last but not least, working on leveling up my guys in BFV ala the current Tides of War campaign. The new squad conquest mode is lit. (lit for those of you who don't know is what according to my kids a term used the way I used to use the word awesome, cool, or pissah back in the day 8) )
Shots were fired tonight in Part 2 of Cyrano's Saturday Night Fights play of a Colonial Adventures scenario. Panzerde (Doug) was unable to be here, but Cyrano's son was available to step in. :bd:
Dougs troops were the first to die....
:hide:
I won't spoil more than that, except that there will be a conclusion to the Trilogy next Saturday night, God willing and the Blood Puddle representing a River in the middle of the map doesn't rise.
Quote from: W8taminute on January 26, 2019, 10:05:04 PM
Played some Il-2 Battle of Stalingrad multiplayer with Tuna earlier today. Couldn't even get my plane to take off the ground. However later on I tried again in an empty server and was able to launch my plane, fly to the target, bomb it and miss. Hey progress I guess. :)
W8t, now that you can take off. if you want to try again, I can talk your through the 'bombing process'! O0
Quote from: JasonPratt on January 26, 2019, 11:35:03 PM
Shots were fired tonight in Part 2 of Cyrano's Saturday Night Fights play of a Colonial Adventures scenario. Panzerde (Doug) was unable to be here, but Cyrano's son was available to step in. :bd:
Dougs troops were the first to die....
:hide:
I won't spoil more than that, except that there will be a conclusion to the Trilogy next Saturday night, God willing and the Blood Puddle representing a River in the middle of the map doesn't rise.
My head just spins, I hope this is a 'tough' game!
I'd call it medium complexity. Not at all easy! -- but there are more head-spinny things out there...
Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2
Steel Division
Quote from: Tuna on January 27, 2019, 04:18:12 PM
Quote from: W8taminute on January 26, 2019, 10:05:04 PM
Played some Il-2 Battle of Stalingrad multiplayer with Tuna earlier today. Couldn't even get my plane to take off the ground. However later on I tried again in an empty server and was able to launch my plane, fly to the target, bomb it and miss. Hey progress I guess. :)
W8t, now that you can take off. if you want to try again, I can talk your through the 'bombing process'! O0
Yes! Will do. Navigating without map references is challenging but I think I got the hang of it. Makes me appreciate the real life crews that did this back then without the aid of modern navigation systems.
Quote from: W8taminute on January 28, 2019, 08:28:57 AM
Quote from: Tuna on January 27, 2019, 04:18:12 PM
Quote from: W8taminute on January 26, 2019, 10:05:04 PM
Played some Il-2 Battle of Stalingrad multiplayer with Tuna earlier today. Couldn't even get my plane to take off the ground. However later on I tried again in an empty server and was able to launch my plane, fly to the target, bomb it and miss. Hey progress I guess. :)
W8t, now that you can take off. if you want to try again, I can talk your through the 'bombing process'! O0
Yes! Will do. Navigating without map references is challenging but I think I got the hang of it. Makes me appreciate the real life crews that did this back then without the aid of modern navigation systems.
Kind of a bummer, that they don't have 'map tools' like CloD has. I didn't get into it to the point of figure out exact speed and distance, but it would be really helpful to be able to see what 'heading' you need to turn exactly once you reach a landmark waypoint, to move to your next waypoint.
The weird thing about that, is that the Germans did have electronic navigation. It's even modeled in the game! -- aesthetically. I know exactly where the radio-beacon navigation thingies are on my 1941 He-111 console. I know, so that I can ignore them as irrelevant since the game engine doesn't model them. ::) But they're there on the instrument panel!
(Radio-beacon navigation might be modeled in CloDBlitz, not sure. It has a lot more detail for its crafts than the BoX games.)
Quote from: mbar on January 25, 2019, 12:19:19 PM
Just Cause 4, Elite Dangerous Guardian grinding and Space Engineers ship building.
Surprisingly didn't touch JC4 this weekend. Probably because I hammered Just Cause 3 the prior weekend and finished all the missions. Got 13 of the guardian weapon blue prints and 2 of the module. Need 4 more module blue prints and a bunch more of "Guardian technology components" before I leave the site.
Slight update-ish
Had to work today. In the blizzard. Yay.
However after getting home, I decided screw it. I bought Endless Legend.
That's the spirit.