Quoting: Colombo

Quoting: PangaeaAdmittedly Civ 4's combat isn't where the game shines - though it still managed to utterly trounce the idiocy of Civ 5

Ok, I need to say it again. Civ 5 doesn't have idiotic combat AI compared to Civ 4.

I'm not positive, but I don't think he was talking about AI. I think his opinion is that the Civ 5 approach to combat is braindead, as expressed in this line:

Quoting: PangaeaI'll take stack warfare over parking lot logistics any day of the week.

That is, he's saying a combat system where the "strategic depth" is all about figuring out how to maneuver your units past each other because they can't stack or even move through each other, is braindead.
I don't really mind it, but then I don't mind the doomstacks approach either. Far as I'm concerned, the game is about building up a civilization; to me winning through clever battle tactics despite having a civilization that is fundamentally lesser than the one you're at war with is . . . not cheating, but sort of missing the point. I want to crush my enemies because I have a more powerful economy, more advanced technology, stronger social cohesion, not because I managed to deploy a ranged unit to the right spot at the right time. So all I require from a Civ combat system is that more powerful armies are likely to kill less powerful armies. "Not brain dead" would be at best gravy, at worst actually damaging to what I consider the real point.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: subNow, that the Epic Game Launcher implements more and more wanted Steam features, it's just a matter of time they reach close parity.

Are you kidding? Epic Store is at least one decade away of Steam in terms of features. And they also said they won't be implementing the social features that Steam has.

Does Epic Game Store puts competition pressure on Steam? Sure, it does. But from "features" that Epic would have? Not a chance. They reaching parity? Will never happen.

From some of the stuff I've heard about the Epic store, I thought they'd reached parody already.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The basic thing I wondered seeing this was, how can it be necessary to "keep the mechanics alive" of something that's, you know, still here? If I want to experience the gameplay of Civ 5 I'll play Civ 5. You can still buy it, can't you?
Of course given the state of FreeCiv, I suppose it can't hurt to get some lead time; clearly it takes quite a while to get these things usable.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I started with Civ 2, played the heck out of that. Didn't really play either 3 or 4, they just didn't seem that different from the outside, plus I tried one of them and remember thinking that the only big change that stood out to me was the existence of resources that crippled me if they didn't happen to be in my territory, which didn't strike me as a big improvement.

Have by now played quite a bit of Civ 5. On one hand, it introduces tons of new stuff, much of it quite interesting. I like playing with the cultural stuff and the religious stuff and whatnot. And hex grid makes more sense than squares. On the other, I like my 4X games with expansion. The efforts in games to penalize growth, a fashion Civ 5 seems to have set, tend to leave me cold and feel weirdly artificial. They have a similar thing in Civ: Beyond Earth, and some other 4X games have introduced ideas along those lines--Stellaris for instance. It doesn't bother me enough to make me not like these games, but it niggles.
The funny thing is that I do agree that in real life there are, or at least have historically been, limits to the effective growth of empires--but none of the game mechanics I've seen trying to create such limits feel to me much like the kinds of things that create those limits in real life, they feel totally different and rather arbitrary. And I like the expansion phase of these games, so if it isn't going to get me much of a realism bonus I'd rather limits to growth get out of my way.
I find the movement issues in Civ 5 around no unit stacking kind of annoying too. But it's still a great game overall.

And I've played Civ 6 just a little bit so far. Districts are interesting but I can see getting sick of them once I get used to them. Seems like they've shelved the Civ 5 growth penalties, but the world seems so small it doesn't matter much. The civic card things seem nice but somehow not quite as nice as I thought they'd be when I saw video about them. And I find it annoying having to make a builder again every three seconds because it self-destructs, but I guess at least they don't have to build roads.

My favourite Civ-type game was almost certainly Alpha Centauri. For lots of little reasons, but the biggest probably the government system.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Hori

Quoting: PangaeaWindows IS still going in the wrong direction. Long may it continue.

But why tho?
What is the reason we "hate" Windows? Is it just because, or is it because it's going in a wrong direction?

Wouldn't it be better for everyone if it just started to go in a good direction instead?
Of course this is not likely to happen, but it's a valid question.

I for one wouldn't care for Linux growth if Windows would be a decent, non-spyware OS. Tho that doesn't mean I'd switch, far from it.

There are two aspects to my dislike of Windows. One is that early Microsoft was a particularly virulent organization. Young Bill Gates was a very unethical, predatory, rapacious individual and he hired predatory, unethical people and they did a lot of really bad things.
The other is more general: Windows is a monopoly. Corporations want to make profits. Free market theory suggests that this means corporations would compete hard on an even playing field to create the best products and the most efficient processes for producing them. Some of that stuff does happen, but what free market theory ignores is that it is possible to cheat. Rather than all that competing on a level playing field jazz, corporations would prefer to have monopolies so they can simply set prices at a level where they make obscene profits. If they have one, they would prefer to keep it.
And it turns out most of the things you can do to keep a monopoly once you have it are bad for consumers, bad for technological development, and don't have much to do with mythical level playing fields. So even if Microsoft is now a more ordinary, business-as-usual sort of monopoly, having to a fair degree shed the unique rapacity of the early days, they remain a corporation busily maintaining a monopoly (a couple of monopolies, actually--there's Office too) and that is inevitably going to be a Bad Thing. Structurally, such things are incapable of "going in a good direction" for very long.

Of course if Linux took over it would not be a monopoly since Linux isn't a commercial firm any more than the C++ computer language is.

(For those who are unaware: No working definition of "monopoly" requires 100%; Windows has way more of its market than Standard Oil, the archetypal monopoly, had when they broke it up)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: MayeulC

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: PangachatNothing new here, Bungie banning linux gamers from Destiny 2 too. Because of reasons...

Wrong. Destiny 2 was banning Linux gamers using a literal hack to work around anti-cheat, anyone banned using it dug their own grave.

Oh, so it is safe to play? I refrained from it because of that. I think we really need a wiki page with sources on topics like these...

No, you still cannot play as it won't work.

So it was banning Linux gamers using a literal hack to get the game (that they had purchased) to work. Well, fair enough then.

... I know, I know, I do get the logic. I do think that in theory the way this stuff seems to work, game publishers of games that use Anti-Cheat systems ought to ban all purchasers of the games from playing them. After all, while it's marginally less obvious than with Linux gamers, all gamers could be cheating by doing something that gets around the Anti-Cheat system, without the game publishers being able to detect it. Just because most of them aren't actually cheating shouldn't matter; that isn't apparently the issue with Linux gamers, just that they potentially could be--but the same is true of everyone else. Ban everybody! Much cheaper servers that way.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NeoTheFox

Quoting: WorMzyI was excited for Alyx, until it was confirmed that it is a VR exclusive. Hopefully poor sales will prompt them to revise that decision and release a more accessible version of the game.

It's not fair to call this game an "exclusive". It was simply made for VR, you just can't get the same level of control without it. Unless you want to somehow emulate 18 degrees of freedom on some other device, making the most sophisticated QWOP ever. The game design is just not going to be compatible with a flatscreen, nor you would have a good time trying to emulate VR on it - you are free to try however, since OpenVR emulators are easily downloadable.

I have nothing against VR, but I don't actually see why the controllers used for VR couldn't be used for ordinary 3d games on a screen. You have depth of field, you could have things on your hands and "reach" with them and manipulate stuff.
It's just that if you've spent enough to have those controllers and motion sensors to tell when they move and stuff, you might as well spend a bit more and have VR. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't work; the two things have no necessary connection.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Seegras

Quoting: GuestThere are compiled builds which work on many distros thanks to very kind members of the GoL community.

Which aren't that important, because it compiles out of the box with only two warnings. And works.

I'm afraid you overestimate the average todays gamers willingness to do more than press one button to play a game.....

Well, considering how many games I can play by pressing one button . . . life is short.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

No Tux No . . . uhhh . . . nevermind.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm digging the soundtrack.

View this comment - View article - View full comments