FRI-DAY

[JasonPratt]

It's like watching a high-budget far more drugged-out version of MANOS: THE HAND OF FATE!

[Huw the Poo]

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.

[MetalDog]

Appreciate the candor, fellas.  I just can't see how any of you don't like it 

[JasonPratt]

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:-)

[MetalDog]

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.

[JasonPratt]

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. 

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.

[CJReich46]

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?

[Huw the Poo]

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. :)

[Gusington]

Pratt is that a true story about the white slavery, above?

[JasonPratt]

Civilisation 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.  :-[ )

[MetalDog]

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!

[JasonPratt]

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.  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.

[JasonPratt]

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!

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.

[JasonPratt]

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)...

0. 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.

[JasonPratt]

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 )