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Blog Your Current Game

Follow up: Melee Battletech builds are not great. 😄

This play through of Battletech has just kind of reinforced my previous disillusionment with Battletech as a game in general, and it extends to the Mechwarrior 5 franchise as well.

The issue is that as a tabletop game Battletech works because it's generally two sides that are roughly equal beating the crap out of eat other and the winner generally ends up mutually assured destruction with the winner being the player with a pilot who stops twitching last.

The same holds true for BATTLETECH and Mechwarrior 5 .. except that the sides are never even. Both games make you slog through waves of usually inferior enemies which eventually gets less fun as you play. Add to that the out-of-the-box economy is slow torture and I find myself wanted to edit game files to make then fun games.

The reason that older Mechwarrior games worked is that the FPS style mech combat was exactly what you'd expect. If you had skill you could shoot and hit the enemy head pretty regularly. In Mechwarrior 5 the targeting was more of a graphical wrapper that covered up the fact that it was a probability driven system like the tabletop. If you fired a Laster at an enemy mech's head there was a randomizer that determined whether it was actually on target, meaning you get get really good at aiming while on the run and it didn't matter.

But in the combat-wave style of gameplay your only real advantage is being able to effectively hit your target where you aim because quick kills is how to stay alive.

I grew tired of the limited number of effective tactics in BATTLETECH when I played it last. The only really effective tactic was loading up on missiles with bonus knockdown and just taking out mechs after they were knocked down. Heavy mech armor is only mildly better than a medium mech, and it made pointless given that you are far easier to hit, but big mechs quickly become the only way you can put enough firepower into your 4 mechs to deal with the 8+ mechs that the enemy will field.

Anyway, just frustrated all over again.
 
What the above shows is that I am playing my current game as Trung Trac of the Mauryan empire. I have met 3 other leaders, Xerxes, Isabella and Augustus. They all like me. I have 1 city(Pataliputra), and 1 town(Sopara). I have an army down by Sopara, working on dispersing a hostile independent village and gaining some XP for my army commander. We are 27 % through the Antiquities age, with goals for the age listed at the left(except 1 that I have apparently forgot to re-select tracking for...for some reason whenever you complete a step, that path deselects). I have a settler building in my city(towns you buy buildings with gold, they have no production queue).

So far I would say Civ 7 is much better than Civ 6(which I did not like), and worlds better than Civ 5(which I hated with a passion). Not sure it will be as good as Civ 4, but pretty good so far. The changes from Civ 6 are generally pretty good. I love the way you develop your cities now. When your city grows in population, you place the pop on the city map(3 hex range from city center) and the pop works that tile with the appropriate rural building(farm, fishing boat, mine, logging camp). Later you can place new pops as specialists, increasing the yield for that hex at the cost of food and happiness for the city. Urban buildings are also built on the city map, produced like other civ games from production. They can be placed in tiles with pops working, which displaces the pop and you have to put them into another hex. You can have up to two urban buidlings in any hex. There are lots of adjacency bonuses. You can also build wonders, which also go on the map, and have major adjacency bonuses. Specialists, as mentioned, increase the yield of hexes, potentially quite a bit. During the second era(the era of exploration) one of the goals for era advancement is having city hexes with more than 40 total production. Right now I think my most prodoctive hex is 6 or 7. Building your cities is wildly complicated to get ideal results, but you cann get good enough without much trouble.

And then there are towns, which work just like cities, except you buy urban buildings with gold instead of production, and they send food to a nearby city, and everything they produce except food is converted to gold. They can be made into a city later by spending gold. The bigger the town, the less gold it costs. The more cities you have, the more gold it costs.
 
After my disappointment with my return to BATTLETECH I decied to o through my absurdly large Steam library looking for games I have either not played in a long time, or bought on sale and set aside for my "next game" and then promptly forgot about.

I realized that I own CORE KEEPER... and then remembered I was really excited for it when it was first released, but I think I was deep into Dwarf Fortress at the time and was going to play it when I burnt out. Not sure what distracted me, but it's been sitting in my library for a long time.

I'm not playing it and enjoying it quite a bit. It's essentially a cross between Diablo and Terraria.

I've only progressed through the first two bosses so far, and still haven't really focused on building a serviceable and efficient base, but right now beating up monsters, mining ore and doing copious exploration is enough to keep me interested.
 
I waited for over a year for Citizen Sleeper 2, which was released this week. I loved the first one, and the sequel has not disappointed.

It's narrative focused dice game with some wonderful stories and characters, all quite wholesome by today's standards.

I like the art, story, and I find the mechanics very satisfying once I figured them out.

(In both) you're an android on the run from their "owners," and you have to put a life together for yourself.

 
Post Mortem of my play through CORE KEEPER: Meh.

While I hate to trash an indie game, there is a core gameplay loop in CORE KEEPER that I really don't like.

I eventually grow to dislike any game that hides a lack of content behind a grind. That kind of game has a way of taking your youthful exuberance when you are a neophyte and slowly grinding you down... by mid game you can almost see the dev as a task master standing over you in the salt mines laughing at you "Ha! Doesn't seem so fun now, does it?"

If you remove the grind from CORE KEEPER there is surprising little game to progress through. As a game that progresses through acquiring new gear and leveling passive traits, there is surprisingly little useful gear in CORE KEEPER for that matter.

So essentially when you remove all of the empty filler from CORE KEEPER there is very little left.

And it is that lack of real content that makes a lot of the rest of the game seem rather pointless. There is a lot of game assets that are dedicated to automation; conveyor bels, auto-miners, mechanical arms to move raw ore to conveyors, and then from conveyors to smelters, and so on... but by the time I was getting that up and running I just had to ask "Why?" you don't need mountains of resources in the game, if progression was purely crafting based and raw material requirements ramped up hen it would make sense, but everything worth having in the game is random loot table based, connected to a boss. Even if you go full crafting path to progression you don't actually need the automation to get what you need, you get more than enough by digging your way around the world to find all of the other randomly placed things.

So the game starts out with a lot of promise but ultimate misses the mark.

As a comparison, a game like TERRARIA, which has a similar progression, has so much content that you will always find something new and interesting along the way to whatever goal you had set for yourself. Not so in CORE KEEPER.
 
jmotivator said:
After my disappointment with my return to BATTLETECH
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Have you tried the Battletech Advanced or Roguetech mods? Both do a really good job of adding interest and content to the game. Roguetech is incredibly complex and hard, Advanced is alot more complex, but more reasonable I think. Dozens and dozens of new mechs, including some with all new models(quad walker mechs!), new weapons, new systems, all taken almost straight from the tabletop game. I find swapping out cores, engines, adding Ferro and Endo, improving sensors and ECM, all to be great additionns to the game.
 
Redress said:
Have you tried the Battletech Advanced or Roguetech mods? Both do a really good job of adding interest and content to the game. Roguetech is incredibly complex and hard, Advanced is alot more complex, but more reasonable I think. Dozens and dozens of new mechs, including some with all new models(quad walker mechs!), new weapons, new systems, all taken almost straight from the tabletop game. I find swapping out cores, engines, adding Ferro and Endo, improving sensors and ECM, all to be great additionns to the game.
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I might try it when the disappointment wears off. ;)

But really, BATTLETECH table top, no matter how well you represent the rules, doesn't really play well in a wave-combat model, I'm now convinced. The same tends to hold true for WARHAMMER 40K, for that matter. Rules in those tabletop games are balanced so that almost every victory is pyrrhic, which is fun in one-off matches, but becomes unfun when you are supposed to carry troops/mechs forward into successive battles.

That said, I've had a bad streak of disappointment games that had great reviews, so I may delve back into BATTLETECH sooner rather than later. New mechs and gear sounds interesting.

Would you suggest I try Advanced or Rogue first?
 
jmotivator said:
Would you suggest I try Advanced or Rogue first?
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Advanced for sure. It has most of what Roguetech has for mechs and gear, but not as much of the other stuff, and maintains some semblance of balance. Roguetech will throw you into impossible missions far too often.
 
I hadn't played anything since mid-Dec 2023 - took a long detour back to drawing and painting, which occupied pretty much every evening/night until recently - an am replaying a number of Nevewinter Nights: Enhanced edition modules (via Steam; it's updated for 64 bit). They fixed up any number of the issues with it from several years ago.

Good stuff.

Did:

-Hordes of the Underdark
- Pirates of the Sword Coast (meh)

And am trying a new DLC (new module, after 25 years!), "The Doom of Icewind Dale".

I should probably get around to BG:3 next.



I still mean to replay Icewind Dale itself, but that's for another day.
 
Mr Person said:
I hadn't played anything since mid-Dec 2023 - took a long detour back to drawing and painting, which occupied pretty much every evening/night until recently - an am replaying a number of Nevewinter Nights: Enhanced edition modules (via Steam; it's updated for 64 bit). They fixed up any number of the issues with it from several years ago.

Good stuff.

Did:

-Hordes of the Underdark
- Pirates of the Sword Coast (meh)

And am trying a new DLC (new module, after 25 years!), "The Doom of Icewind Dale".

I should probably get around to BG:3 next.



I still mean to replay Icewind Dale itself, but that's for another day.
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I played BG3 for 14 months over 4 playthroughs.

Truly awesome game highly recommended.

Took a break and wanted to shoot things. Do I’ve started STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Graphics are dated but still lots of fun so far.

WW
 
WorldWatcher said:
I played BG3 for 14 months over 4 playthroughs.

Truly awesome game highly recommended.

Took a break and wanted to shoot things. Do I’ve started STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Graphics are dated but still lots of fun so far.

WW
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I'm a big fan of Larian Studios' Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2. (They did BG3.). So yeah, it should be good.

But I'm going through the old stuff now.
 
Mr Person said:
I hadn't played anything since mid-Dec 2023 - took a long detour back to drawing and painting, which occupied pretty much every evening/night until recently - an am replaying a number of Nevewinter Nights: Enhanced edition modules (via Steam; it's updated for 64 bit). They fixed up any number of the issues with it from several years ago.

Good stuff.

Did:

-Hordes of the Underdark
- Pirates of the Sword Coast (meh)

And am trying a new DLC (new module, after 25 years!), "The Doom of Icewind Dale".

I should probably get around to BG:3 next.



I still mean to replay Icewind Dale itself, but that's for another day.
Click to expand...

I'm heading in the opposite direction. I haven't drawn anyithing in a very long time. My dearly departed daughter used to task me with a new drawing for her birthday every year, so when she died last June I lost even the yearly muse.

I'm reaching a satiation point with gaming, and have decided to start working up the nerve to draw again.

So as you come back to gaming I am going back to art.
 
Because I have an enjoyment of "life" simulator games (Sims, Dwarf Fortress, Ringworld etc.) I decided to try out the new Sims competitor INZOI.

I have only really played for about an hour this morning and I already have opinions (that is never a good sign)

This game is rough. I am running the game on an RTX4090 and the graphics seem mostly designed to look good in screen shots, not in motion.

Oddly, it looks even worse in full resolution than it does in DLSS. The graphics glitch with tightly bunched horizontal lines that cause weird strobing lines is worse with DLSS turned off.

Also terrible is draw distance. Other "Zois" pop in and out of existence in what feels like a 20 m radius, and environment items about twice that distance. What this creates is the not-so-distant city streets are empty of everything, and within a certain distance you get a lot of blinking set items that the game engine can't figure if you are close enough to lode them.

I haven't really gotten much into the game routine yet and I'm already not really impressed.

Caveat: It's a beta

Caveat's Caveat: It's a solo game and there is no reason for such limitations except to cover for bloated code.
 
Just started Atomfall and it's a lot of fun. Pleasantly different tight open world setting in the rolling English hills gone a bit post-apocalyptic. Feels like a game from the off rather than an overscripted slog.
 
Europa Universalis V was announced officially today. I have watched a few videos from people who got to play a bit of it, and it sounds like EU4, but way, way, way more complicated.

 
Chess, im not as good as I was before but can hold my own against a 1500 level player
 
Stellar Blade. I still have not dived into any games, but I like watching what are some creative ones. Noticed young employees playing this one recently, so I bought it and put it on the computer in the company theater. It is made in Korea, and is popular in Asia. Love what one young graphics designer said while I watched the play on the big screen during their break, "Korean game designers know what men want." I just winked and nodded.
 
I've been convalescing from a serious illness and decided to pick up Path of Exile 2 again and take it for a spin.

I'd like to say I have enjoyed the whole experience, but that would be a lie.

The game still suffers from an agonizingly slow start. Since right now you play the first 3 chapters twice, it's painfully obvious that the second pass through the first 3 chapters is insanely easy compared to the first go through.

Characters (except in a few cases) are excessively weak in the early game before any real skill synergies are achievable. I almost quit in Act 2 because the final boss of Act 2 was stupidly difficult.

The first issue with the first pass is that Boss resistances are far more important than they are in the second pass through the first 3 acts. There are passive skill nodes that allow you to spec for resistance mitigation, but by Act 2 of normal mode those nodes are unacheivable, or to rush those nodes you have to bypass raw damage nodes, making it basically a wash. The only real solution is to completely respec your character for the Boss' weakness... but that leads to problem #2

the Second issue is the slow to non-existent gear grind in the Normal mode. Speccing into a Boss' weakness often requires new gear to synergize, so by the time you realized to specced into Paper and the Boss is Scissors, you hit a wall.

So you respec into a new element skill set, and you end up just plinking the boss until you get fulling specced into that element.

The boss at the end of Act2 is a deceptively fast boss who has a few skills that are hard to dodge and will one hit you. The only real solution to that is Cold attacks since 1) he's weak to cold and 2) freezing him is the only real respite to his attack spamming.

While you can argue that the Rock/Paper/Scissors nature of the game is present throughout the game, it is a its worst in normal mode which also happens to be the mode that is the least flexible. By the time I reached the same boss in cruel mode I had ample resistance penetration and my DPS had jumped from ~700 in Normal Mode to ~15,000 in Cruel mode so the boss just died in a handful of hits. Granted, it was very satisfying to club the chump in Cruel Mode, but I'm guessing there are a lot of players that find something better to do with their day(s).

Now I'm at End Game and my primary attack is a whopping 50,000 DPS and the game seems a bit easy and I claw my way into the higher level encounters. I'll hit a wall there, again, I always do. It's when I hit the grind in the end game in an ARPG that I tend to call it a win and set the game aside. Weird that the most fun I had in the game was in "Cruel" difficulty.
 
Rocking fallout 4 goty edition right now, for the past few months.

About lvl 55, got several settlements up and running, but I hate the build item limitations.
 
I've been watching people streaming the indy game "the Headliners" lately and it looks like a lot of fun.

It a team survival game with the twist that you are a photo journalist team taking photos during an alien invasion. You don't really fight back against the aliens, you are just there to observe and take the best pictures you can.

The game scores each photograph by content (aliens, victims, etc.) and accelerators like "action" (pictures of combat, etc.) and bravery (how close you were to the object of the photo). As maps get harder the opportunities get more numerous, which means they also get more deadly. You can get some really valuable shots if you come across a group of soldiers engaging enemies, but you also heavily risk your life from stray gunshots, thrown vehicles and missile explosions and backblast.

As a team you have to collect a sufficient number of valuable photos to move on to the next map.

It looks fun because it gives some interesting insight into general shot selection in photography all under the narrative of an alien invasion.

I love in innovation of indy games.
 
Monster Train 2 is out, and a lot of fun. I find that I totally and completely suck at it, but it is still fun.
 
Redress said:
Monster Train 2 is out, and a lot of fun. I find that I totally and completely suck at it, but it is still fun.
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I guess I'll need to try it. I never really got good at Monster Train 1. There were maybe two decks that I really understood and I got tired of playing them.
 
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