Quoting: slaapliedjeNice! Though why would you use the DualShock 4 with the Steam Deck?

While it's docked and connected to the TV.

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By the way, I received my Steam Deck yesterday, and Pathfinder: Kingmaker is working pretty well on it.
(I had to disable Steam Input for my DualShock 4 though, otherwise the game would show Xbox button guides.)

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I've now played the Origin that lets you start as a vassal up until midgame.
It was quite fun up to now, and I must say, the changes to the economy seem to have reached a quite fun state again. Starting as a vassal tends to limit your early-game expansion a bit, but you also get the benefit of starting out with a relatively strong "ally" that prevents others from bothering you. In other words, you can focus on whatever you choose when the game begins (defence, research, or resource production). In addition, if you get along well with your overlord, you can renegotiate the vassalisation terms and get a pretty decent payment for your services.
The limited expansion paired with the potentially quite large income from subventions is an excellent starting point for a "tall" empire build, imho.

So, yeah, Stellaris got me hooked again.

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Quoting: foobrewAnyone played Pathfinder: Kingmaker? Been wondering about that one. I know very little about the Pathfinder universe except that it's very similar to D&D.

Yes, I've played through it, then the successor (Wrath of the Righteous) and am now at the beginning of my second play-through of Kingmaker again.
It's one of the best CRPGs I've played up to now, even though it has some issues.

The Pathfinder rule system is indeed very similar to D&D 3.5, and the setting, Golarion, is pretty close to the "default" D&D setting too. You won't find any of the trademarked D&D monsters though, and some things are named differently and also have different lore. In addition there are some interesting features on Golarion, that you might not find in most D&D settings, like the Silver Mount (a crashed spaceship) or the Worldwound (a nation ravaged by demonic corruption due to planar rifts that lead into the Chaotic Evil plane of the Abyss).

However, Kingmaker is set in an area named the River Kingdoms, which is mostly what you would expect from an "early renaissance" fantasy setting. The River Kingdoms border Numeria though, the nation where the Silver Mount crashed, and the Sellen River, a very prominent feature on Kingmaker's map, also flows through the Worldwound further downstream, so you can expect to hear of those two areas during the game.

The story of the game is also "normal" fantasy. A local leader, swordlord Jamandi Aldori, offers you a barony if you can rid the area of bandits. And that's where your path towards a kingdom begins. The game mixes a (not too complex) d20 based kingdom management layer with regular top-down-view role playing game segments.
Basically, you build up the kingdom, until an emergency strikes, at which point you (and a significant part of the ruling council..) march off to take care of the problem personally - by punching it in the face, sticking a sword in it, or setting it on fire - your choice.

The combat mechanics, and since the game is mostly about combat also the main game mechanics, are very well implemented. They do not reach the same level as they did in Temple of Elemental Evil, but they are close. You can play combat in turn based mode, or you can battle in real time with pause (though I don't see why one would want that).
Beware that in Kingmaker placement of characters seems to be more important than in Wrath of the Righteous. You'll always want to flank enemies, you will need to use crowd control spells (think: Grease), and you will also want to quicksave often (or play on low difficulty).

Equipment in Kingmaker is very easy to come by. By mid-game you'll be swimming in magical weapons and armour, and most of your kingdom's finances will come directly from the loot you collect while doing quests. That said, you can still invest a significant amount of time equipping your party, as you'll likely want to have a weapon specialization feat on all your characters, and finding a good suitable weapon for this can take a while (especially since Kingdom artisans are creating items from a random pool).

The progression in the game is well pulled off, with you being able to reach the maximum level of 20 near the end of the game. In other words, if you plan on getting the semi-overpowered level 20 class abilities, you can do so as long as you play the side-quests and don't multiclass.

Speaking of character levels, the character sheets in Pathfinder are in general a bit less complex than in D&D 3.5 and in Kingmaker some variant rules for skills are used that make it even less intimidating. You can still spend hours pondering which Feats you are going to take, or in which of the skills you invest your points though. In addition, you can multiclass, and there are prestige classes you might aim for.

One of your companions, Octavia, is for instance perfectly suited for the Arcane Trickster prestige class. Similarly, her boyfriend Regongar can benefit a lot from taking a few levels as Dragon Disciple, and Valerie, who is likely to become your main tank, has "Stalwart Defender" written on her armour. If you don't like the pre-made companions, there's also the option to just create characters from scratch. However, not travelling with the pre-made companions means missing out on a lot of story.

The game's story is fun to play for almost all of the game, and there's a lot of dialogue to enjoy - sadly only partially voiced. The encounters tend to be challenging, and are varied enough to remain entertaining until the last chapter, which sadly is not up to par to the others.
This is the only real negative point I can say about this game, by the way. In the last chapter you'll nearly exclusively face the same types of enemies again and again, with only minor variation in the enemy group composition. It's not that those encounters would be particularly hard, but they become boring and repetitive, and since those enemies have very annoying abilities, you will have to reload a few times if you accidentally moved into their aggro range without pre-buffing.
Oh, there's a second negative point... The loading screens take relatively long, what is quite punishing if you die, because in addition to loosing, you are also punished with waiting time.

Aaand, that brings us to technical details. Kingmaker is one of those games that I'd call an outstanding example when it comes to gamepad support on Linux. Not only did this game work perfectly fine with my DualShock 4 controller, it did also display the correct icons for the controller's buttons. (I still played it mostly with mouse and keyboard though.)
The Linux version itself works pretty well too. And yes, it is a native Linux build, even though the binary file is named Kingmaker.exe. Performance is good throughout most of the game, but near endgame you will probably notice that FPS will go below 60 (CPU bound). This is not an issue of the Linux version, but happens on Windows as well.
For me the game also crashed a few times, with a nasty tendency to do so at the island on Lake Candlemere.
Still, Kingmaker is definitely on my top-list when it comes to good Linux support and (relatively) few bugs.

Whoa, that became a huge wall of text for just wanting to say that it's an awesome game and you should definitely give it a try.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: MichaelDNThere exists a word for this SHAREWARE

Those of us older folks know the shareware CDs included with PC magazines.

Yes, and nowadays they are called demo versions, isn't it?

Strictly speaking, those are different things. A demo is a separate build, that cannot be upgraded to the full version (typically because it doesn't include all assets). A shareware version is a build of the full version and includes all content, but requires a license to access content beyond the demo part. (Not that the difference would matter in the age of fast internet.)

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I'm going to give the game another chance.
One of the recent updates (the one that reduced pop count) kind of ruined it for me, with the rebalancing of the economy. It felt a bit too easy to manage resources with the unification of alloy and consumer product production...
(Insert rant about how I would have prefered a dumbed down pop system over the economy changes.)

The Situations feature sounds promising. If those can happen without being directly caused by the player, they might make the economy in this game interesting again.

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Quoting: TheRiddickAre these using 6nm or some other process which makes them easier to make over the original 7nm cards? Are these the relaunch of RDNA2 that has been rumoured?

They use the same chips [External Link], but overclocked so you get worse performance/watt in addition to the anyhow worse performace/euro.

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I wonder how the native Linux port worked on Ubuntu, but not on the Deck. The Steam Runtime should prevent almost all distribution specific differences...
I somehow suspect the graphics drivers. They might have tested nVidia drivers on Ubuntu, which seem to have hacks in place to work around issues of Unity's HLSL->GLSL transpiler.

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We can hope, but do they have a real incentive to make one, given the game is running perfectly fine with Steam Play?

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Quoting: mr-victory

Quoting: gradyvuckovicwithout at least testing it

Probably because they don't know how to install linux (ot that they can install linux to a PC running Win) and don't have access to a deck.

From my experience it's usually not a knowledge issue, but rather a time (aka money) problem. If the publisher doesn't pay for it, it's not going to be planned for, and if it's not planned, there's no time to do it.
(Edit: Of course game studios can still do such work as self-investment.)

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