Let's talk about Stream and buy mountains of games

I guess it has long term allure for me because I have over 300 hrs in it.

It may seem to be video poker on the surface, but the poker element is almost incidental and it has much more in common with a strategic deckbuilder such as Slay the Spire.

same as Tim for me

Any played the new Civilization VII?

Seems to be getting really mixed reviews.

I'll buy it on discount - I'm not going to pay $70 for a AAA game that failed to knock it out of the park. That said, mixed reviews aren't necessarily a bad thing in my view because I'd bet a lot of the negative reviews are from diehard civ players who like civ as it was, whereas I find civ to be really stale. The game is way too easy up to say, King difficulty, and then when you bump it up to Emperor the game is not hard per se, but you are forced to either play a domination strategy or manipulate the map and game settings to make other win conditions viable. In short, the AI is so bad that the only way it can increase difficulty is to give the CPU opponents advantages--advantages that are not really surmountable at higher difficulties without conquest. I don't really find that fun, so some form of disruption to the old model is good in my view. But it doesn't sound like that's necessarily what they sought to do or accomplished.

i recall in civ 1 there was a single chokepoint at sinai where a single fortified phalanx could completely defend the entire continent

so if you played as egypt and historical starting locations, there'd be a ton of crowded civs very close in europe and middle east but if you blocked off the chokepoint then you'd have free and unfettered access to colonize all of africa unless the zulu were present, in which case they'd be so far away they were not really a problem in terms of denying good expansion land

if zulu weren't in the game or you defeated them early then nobody would be able to touch you until much later in the game when navies could easily land troops or when the scales finally tipped towards offense and it were possible to defeat the phalanx

however, sometimes the ai would say f it, i'm attacking anyway and then proceed to send in a stack of 20 armies on at a time into that phalanx and just get wiped

it was a forgivable bug in the early games, one which was remedied in later iterations by allowing a stack to attack as an army and having attrition for the winners - so instead of hitting one and losing a binary outcome, they could lose but do enough damage that the next one could finish the job

why am i mentioning this? because in civ 1 they had an unsolvable ai issue that was fixed not by improving the ai but by changing the game mechanics.

then i played Civ V, thinking wow, they really overhauled the game, i wonder what kind of amazing things are in store for me

what happened was that the ai would now send in armies as they were produced meaning there'd be a single file conveyor belt of pikeman sent your way and with the layered defense and bombardment of defensive troops they were just marching to their death one by one, a city and 2-3 defensive units could easily fend off against a 30 stack of pikeman that sent in a new one every turn

they also put in these mechanics that really simplified the game by orders of magnitude in order to help it reach a broader audience, but by doing so, confined you to very specific paths, you could no longer choose to build whatever as everything had a very high cost and very low or specific benefits - something like building a granary or barracks or library was no longer an automatic build but rather a carefully thought out calculation of "is it worth it"

meanwhile the only way to really grow was to utilize a hack to gain extra food from maritime city state bonuses

the game became unplayable unless you followed a very specific formula and that took away all the fun

i could have forgiven the simplified changes if the game were good, but it was awful - a game that would regularly send me through all nighters where i'd suddenly realize the sun was out and i still hadn't finished my term paper was now something that i didn't even like, almost all my hours playing civ v were not out of enjoyment but rather out of "maybe i just need to get used to the changes"

have not even bothered with civ 6 even though it was for sale for like $3 recently

so i'm waiting on vii to see if they went back to the original style or stuck with the v revolution

i don't think they'll go back to the complexity of the 1st 4, but i am hoping that they'll change some of the mechanics which made V unplayable imo

Just copy/paste civ 6 and add fun costumes for your armies in the cash shop. Are they dumb or something?

Monster Hunter Wilds

After 10 minutes I can tell this is going to be epic good. Will return to this post someday if I ever put a dent into it.

I am dying to buy Triangle Strategy and Tactics Ogre Reborn on Steam, but at the same time, I fear what will happen some day when Steam gets deleted or paid subscription or something and I miss owning physical media, so I am saving for a Nintendo Switch 2. What do you think?

I bounced off Civ 5 when it released and went back to 4. I bounced off Civ 6 when it released and went back to 5. After their first expansions came out, though, I made the full switch in each case. I had 450 hours in Civ 5 and have 750 in Civ 6. My Hall of Fame is a couple Religion-heavy leaders short of completion. I despise religion play in Civ. Tedium is cranked to the absolute max.

My sweet spot for all Civ titles is the second highest difficulty. I won't play Deity difficulty for the reasons Rickroll mentioned above. It forces you into a very tight set of playstyles, and encourages degenerate behavior like abusing trade quirks with the AI. Immortal lets you do whatever you want and still mostly win, but when you lose it doesn't feel like you simply lost an early dice roll like on Deity when you spawn next to the wrong Civ and he shows up on turn 14 with 9 warriors and a shitty attitude.

I followed Civ 7 development a little, but have no desire whatsoever to experience the release. I've learned my lesson now, and will just wait for the first expansion. Based on the early comments and reviews, it seems that choice was the correct one. Thank you to all of the post-launch testers who will ensure that first expansion is great.

Not sure. Maybe when the original Steam creator dies, they will want to charge a monthly subscrition (something he is agaisnt). 10 years later maybe Steam dies. I've seen Blockbuster die, CDs die, whole industries die, in the last 2-3 decades. Therefore I am not so sure.

Nobody knows what'll happen at Steam once Gaben is no longer in charge, but it's very unlikely it will mean people lose access to games they've already bought.

The chance of physical media/consoles bought today getting broken and unplayable within 10-20 years is higher than Steam going under.

Even if the current owners of Steam run into trouble, they'll probably sell it to someone else who'll continue to operate it.

Thanks to this thread I went out and downloaded Inscryption several months ago. I played for 10-15 hours then gave up - super impressed with the atmosphere, just didn't feel like I had time to learn the mechanics well. (I went and looked up spoilers for the rest of the game and holy cow I could not be more impressed with the developer's imagination.)

I also grabbed Slay the Spire after seeing it referenced above and of course hearing about it tangentially over the last few years. I played maybe 5ish hours, trying several runs with the first 3 characters. I beat an Act 1 boss a couple of times. Kinda shrugged my shoulders and put it aside, it was OK but seemed overly difficult with a huge amount of luck.

Shortly later I went ahead and got Balatro, again after reading it ITT and also listening to a video game podcast I listen to absolutely gush over it several times. Played a little more this time, probably 8-10 hours. Won a few times, got a couple nice combos working together and nice multipliers. But, I didn't get an urge to get better and better. I uninstalled, and figured deck builders just aren't for me.

Then, for some reason a couple weeks ago I randomly opened up StS again, which I hadn't uninstalled, and holy hell it has hooked me. 30+ hours in, low-ascension wins with all 4 characters, and I'm going to get reprimanded at work 'cause I'm constantly looking to slouch off for another coffee break where I can get a couple more floors in.

Yeah StS is like that, can take awhile to grip you but before you know it it becomes your whole life. Balatro was the same way for me. Have huge amounts of hours in both.

The thing that really frustrates me about Inscryption is that I wasn't paying attention the first time I tried playing through it and have no idea really how the mechanics work. On top of which there appears to be no way to start over that I can find. So I just gave up on it.

I'm writing this from the coffee room where I snuck down to get a few more StS floors in. I had an amazing run going that I was peeking at in a virtual meeting where I was half paying attention, and got killed after some awful card luck in the Act 2 boss. I had to be very careful not to let my emotions show over the video call. (StS is definitely a problem lol, I may need to take it off my phone and buy on somewhere more restrictive).

Re: Inscryption, it really is a "figure it out as you go" game, there isn't much explanation provided for how to play. The basics for each card are straightforward (attack and health values), and then the modifiers from there are all available to read in a book you can browse at any time if you like. You probably haven't missed as much as you think. If you're interested, you could go watch a "first X minutes of Inscryption" video, I recommend you be careful not to spoil anything though if you're going to give another go of playing through.

Spoiler tag for one element specific to your comment:

Spire do be like that. Once you get a taste of victory, and really invest in thinking about it as you play, it's amazing. It took me the same experience but it has definitely climbed into my favourite games ever list.

At low ascension levels, there isn't really any luck involved in winning or losing a run. The best players would beat those ascension levels with heart kills ~100% of the time. It is just a game that is easy to learn the basics but really hard to become good at.

Death Stranding 2 looks gorgeous. I may have to actually finish the first game at some point.

The fact that heavily used routes turn into visible paths over time blows my mind but not enough to make me play the game.

Well I was hoping to be done with AC Odyssey in time for AC Shadows.

110 hours and I still don't feel like I've made a dent.

I'm not particularly into mecha games, but Armored Core 6 is seriously fun. The combat is fast-paced and immensely satisfying. Being a From Software game, there are of course difficult boss fights. Although unlike Souls games, tweaking your build is the solution to challenges rather than just "git gud". There's a crazy amount of customisation possible, which can all be done in-between missions or even during a mission after you die. No need to grind currency.

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http://avtobosrs.com

Ah, the old forum bug. Someone posted a message and deleted it, now it perpetually says there's an unread message.

(hopefully this post fixes it)

Thank you, that was annoying me!