I had some difficulty picking out the main character from the clutter of enemies, what with everyone and everything being so brown.

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The thing about Battle Thralls made me realize something slightly odd about Stellaris: General weapon, shield and armour technology have no impact on ground combat. Like, in good old MOO II, if your troops are using titanium for their armour, and mine are rocking neutronium, mine are going to be doing some floor-wiping. Or if I've got Class I shields and you've got Class VII shields, I have a problem. Things are slightly different with weapons--in theory my race could develop only ship weapons and never research any infantry weapons--but the weapons technologies are there.

In Stellaris, big beasts are immune to gamma ray lasers. There's a little bit of army improvement but it's extremely abstract and gives the impression of being about better training and organization rather than physical tech; aside from that, stone age troops appear to be exactly equivalent to armies with hyperadvanced technology. The only other ways to make tough armies are
--make them robots
--make them genetic monsters
--make them psionic
--find gigantic native life on some planet to fight for you

It doesn't matter much to me because I don't care much about ground combat. Sometimes you need to do it, and then you make a bunch of armies and whatever. But it is a bit weird and why didn't I ever notice before?

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: Penglingclaiming that there'd be an AI assistant from Perplexity that will play your games for you if you get stuck

Good grief!! What's the point of playing games at all, then! This is the sort of prosthetic I can do without ...

Apparently it will also have fun for you, so you won't have to experience that.

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Cute. I find it amusing that not only does this game exist, but that other things exist closely enough related that you can reasonably say "If you liked that, you might like this."

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Quoting: Nateman1000We are not at war with Bethesda.

Not as of now, no. But what if next year it turns out we have always been at war with Bethesda? :whistle:

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AMD graphics. Hey look, System76, it can be done!

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: ElectricPrism2019, 06.28 -- Valve Index was released
2022, 02.25 -- Steam Deck was released
2023, 11.16 -- Steam Deck OLED was released

So we are about 2.5 years since Steam Deck's initial release.

Considering the R&D & time to market, I wouldn't really be surprised to see Steam Deck 2 in the next 12-18 months which would make the upgrade cycle interval about ~4 years.

I presume the Steam Deck hardware team (which previously achieved the Index, Steam Controller, and Steam Link) got pulled over to Deckard which would delay a Steam Deck 2 until after what I would imagine is either Valve Index 2 or Deckard Standalone VR. (Obviously the wuflu pandemic years messed up the timeline for R&D.)

I expect Steam Deck 2 to have a resolution of 16:10 1920x1200 (likely under this AMD Z2 chip), OLED, and largely be the same with better Wifi, Bluetooth, Increased Storage, Perhaps a 10-15% reduction in size or if they're feeling ballsie we'll see a flip up Nintendo DS style option (maybe from another manufacturer), but I largely expect it to look nearly exactly the same and function the same with better specs -- they may steal a page from Apple's book selling colored rectangles and make the personalization as simple as having different colored shells (Orange OLED shell is pretty sick, I'm looking at it right now) Translucent FTW.

What I'd love to see is a Steam laptop (the Steam Book?) using the same internal hardware as the SD but with a 15" WS display. I'm getting older. My eyes can't handle these tiny little screens.

I'm probably still OK with Steam Deck-sized screen, but I have never understood how the kids manage to watch movies on their dinky little phones. I think for it not to look tiny I'd have to hold it so close to my face I wouldn't be able to focus . . .

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Quoting: rklI picked up a new 2-in-1 Chromebook recently for £171 ($233 inc tax) and it runs ChromeOS, Debian and Android and has twice the battery life and a higher resolution screen (that has touch too) than this does, which makes me question its value. I like the idea of a "lapdock", but I suspect you'd want a really good quality one (nice keyboard, good display and long battery life) so that you could use it for many years and attach multiple generations of phones, tablets and gaming devices for it to justify its existence. That would raise its price, which might be why this concept has struggled to take off.

Makes me wonder--can you use actual laptops as docks, just sort of have them passively show you the stuff from a device hooked up to them?

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Quoting: Viesta2015the moment a steam deck 2 comes out im jumping onto the chance to get it no matter what

The moment a Steam Deck 2 comes out . . . I might finally get a Steam Deck 1 on discount. :grin: It's not like I play highpowered games anyway.

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I respect someone with a big vision. For the record, though, I'm pretty sure the library I work in is not destroying the universe.

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