Quoting: MeissnerEffectI have Stellaris but none of the DLC. Suggestions for which DLC to buy?

I think Utopia is the only one really worth it. The rest are nice to have, sure, but you're not really missing anything with the cosmetic DLC. Things like Synthetic Dawn are only interesting if you plan to play as a synth. If you don't, you can also ignore it.

Quoting: buenaventuraI just bought Europa Universalis IV for 10 euros at their awesome Valentine's Sale (which wasn't even advertised here as far as I've seen?) and I am just getting into it. Feels like a typical "mega nerd dad game" that will just devour my nocturnal life, so Paradox, expect me to buy some DLC real soon!

I've been on a EUIV mini-binge recently myself. The time just flies on by :D . You might want to do a little research on what DLC you want, since the PDS model is pretty a la carte and you can pick and choose whatever interests you the most.

Quoting: libgradevI don't think their approach to DLC helps them personally... I own Stellaris but I've held fire on buying the DLC as they *just keep coming* and this seems to be a recurring theme...

For these titles I tend to wait for a 'collector's edition'.

You'll be waiting for years yet, then. The current PDS model is to keep supporting the game with free content and updates for years (much like Cherryh is a massive overhaul) but that's paid for by DLC every couple of months. Crusader Kings II came out in 2012 and it's still getting content patches thanks to continued DLC sales. I'm a pretty price-conscious gamer and don't have that big of a budget to spend on games, so the stuff that doesn't interest me that much I tend to pick up in the regular sales. It's not uncommon for the older DLC to be at least 50% off. I mean, I think there's valid criticism of this model but PDS' position pretty straightforward to understand and unlikely to change.

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Quoting: 14The way you describe it, it sounds to me like they wanted to create a Memoir '44 game but needed to create a mechanic to make it indefinitely playable. (Memoir '44 is finite.) That mechanic turned out to be a grind. Bummer.

Side note: I really enjoy Memoir '44, even though you don't care about your units on a human level and you don't get to place your units either. The fun is defeating your opponent in the given scenario.

Yeah, I guess I would have been able to look past the shortcomings/lack of interesting units, if the scenarios were interesting. Most battles are like the screenshot I included, meaning that it's just a mass of opponents that rush towards you, usually from close quarters. There are a few maps with choke points, for instance, but they're few and far in between. I would have appreciated asymmetrical scenarios that made you play and plan different to break up the tedium.

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Quoting: oldrocker99The Dominions series has always been very mod-friendly, and there are dozens of new nation mods, and rule-breaking mods, maps, and other things.

If you're hooked on TBS games, you cannot do better than Dominions 5. It makes CIV VI look a little simplistic in comparison. My most played game since 2011.

I played Dominions 4. It was alright but it didn't ever really 'click' with me. I never really felt the payoff for investing a lot of time into its high learning curve like I did with Dwarf Fortress or with some Paradox titles. And yeah, the Civ series in general are pretty simple experiences comparatively-speaking. Not that that's a bad thing, just different types of games.

Quoting: razing32Also you may want to throw the Shadowrun series in there. The Workshop is buzzing with mods and I noticed some were praised as complete campaigns in themselves

I've heard that as well! I haven't had the time to get back into the Shadowrun games though, and I wanted to focus mostly on stuff I've played "recently" and whose mods I've actually tried.

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Quoting: chepatiI'm boycotting all Paradox developed and published games until they start fixing long-standing issues with their games. Case in point, the Crusader Kings II UI can't be scaled up to 4K. Anything bigger than 1080p gets too hard on the eyes. Paradox is well aware of the issue but they couldn't care less about it. Instead they are churning out DLCs and charging pretty penny.

I know, there are mods. But this is broken UI that must be addressed by the developer. Players should not be at the mercy of modders to fix what the developer is too lazy to have not allowed in the first place.

Both Hearts of Iron 4 and Stellaris have UI scaling in their menu options (EU4 has it too, but must be done manually through settings.txt). So I wouldn't say that they're lazy or don't care. I can't tell you why it's not in CK2 but I can speculate that it may be due to the latter running older versions of their in-house engine and the development team for each of their titles being different. It definitely is something they should work on more and all their games should have.

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This is one I'm definitely looking forward to trying out.

Quoting: scaineIt looks Meatboy hard. Throw-your-controller-across-the-room hard. Die-so-many-times-you-die-inside hard.

Genuinely not sure I'd enjoy it...

There's an "assist mode" that lets you change up the difficulty as much as you want, apparently. Make yourself invulnerable, have infinite stamina, skip sections, etc. No consequences to it, either, unless your ego doesn't allow you to accept the help :P

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Quoting: robvvThis looks great and I'm picking up the DLC right now! I hope Arcen Games find themselves in a position to release new games in the future.

They're also working on AI War 2 following their kickstarter campaign. Should be out sometime in the next few months, I think, and it'll have Linux support from the beginning. It's good to see them recovering from their low point a while ago when they had to let go of most of their staff. I like the little twists they try to put in their games that set them apart from similar affairs.

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Added a small update note to the article. The scenario now properly show up after a second, smaller patch.

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Quoting: KohriasI actually run a very similar hardware setup, BTRE ;) And as you I had a nice performance boost in MadMax. I havent done much with emulators yet. Could you share some tips on how to setup a good emulator environment? To me it seems like there are a lot of programs you have to use together.

If you're looking for an all-in-one sort of solution, try retroarch. It's a frontend for libretro. You need to configure some paths for where it puts its files but other than that, you can keep it updated from the program itself and you can download the various emulator 'cores' (ported external emulators) and have a unified interface for them. You don't have to worry about configuring input devices or graphical backends for most things after that. Switching between, say, playstation and PC-98 games seamlessly is pretty cool.

I still use dolphin-git and ppsspp-git outside of retroarch, though, but that's mostly because I like to test the latest changes (like some of the vulkan improvements) and retroarch can be a little behind upstream. Maybe I'll write up a guide one day on GOL, but it's not too hard to figure out tbh. There's wikis and guides elsewhere that should help you.

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Quoting: razing32One question BTRE . Why do you put your links to the game at the bottom of your article as oppose to the top ?

I'm not sure what you mean. The store links? That's the way we do it for all the articles on GOL.

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Quoting: LakortaDon't forget that cross platform multiplayer should now be fixed :D

Yeah, you're absolutely right about that! There's just so much they fixed and reworked that I forgot :P

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