As a Cinammon-on-Debian stable user, sounds like good news. :smile:

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Ok, that team multiplayer stuff might accelerate me and a friend getting it – team victory against the AI is how we tend to enjoy playing Civ.

Edit: the other improvements look good too, of course.

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I gave the demo a try, since my initial thought was similar to others expressed here and I wanted to give it a chance to change my mind. I like FTL (and Slay the Spire), and a turn-based FTL feels like it could potentially be interesting, but my conclusion is that adding deckbuilding doesn't really…improve the fun aspect. At least for me.

My main issue is that there's a sort of double-frustration, where to do anything you must have both a card that lets you do it and a crewmember in the right position, where they can only move (across ~⅓ of the ship) and do an action once per round. I had one situation where my crew couldn't fight a fire on my ship because I kept not drawing Extinguish cards (frustrating from an FTL perspective), and another time where I couldn't fight a fire despite having an Extinguish card because none of my crew members could reach it (frustrating from a StS perspective). Now in fairness the enemy is also bound by this system, but since I can't see their hand of cards it's hard to tell if they're also being forced into less-useful actions like I am, so the only frustration I can see is my own. It's clearly a passion project by a small team and I wish them all the best and hope they find their audience (I did leave some constructive feedback on their feedback form relating to a few things I noticed apart from the genre-mashup), but it just wasn't all that fun for me.

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Wait, didn't Team Fortress 2 Classic also do YLW and GRN teams? *checks link* Oh, yeah, they did. Guess it's a popular addition. :happy:

I wish I knew why Team Fortress 2 was so popular. I just don't get it.

Eh, fun is subjective; something either clicks for you or it doesn't. There are plenty of popular games out there that I just don't find interesting for whatever reason, even if I'm sure they're well-designed games. TF2 has nine pretty-well-balanced classes catering to a variety of playstyles (even more with all the weapons and sub-classes like Demoknight), with a high skill ceiling such that even after hundreds of hours of play you can still be growing and improving. There's everything from high-level competitive tournaments to mucking about on community 2Fort servers as a friendly, with a number of different gamemodes for different tastes, including PvE if you don't fancy fighting other people. And if none of that personally appeals to you, that's fine! No game attracts everyone equally. (I didn't think I'd find it interesting either, but as a college student when it went free-to-play in 2011 on the lookout for free games I fired it up expecting to play for a few hours, get wasted by a bunch of old-timers, and uninstall it. And here I am, 1,435 hours later… :grin:)

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There's a certain level of absurdism that video games can reach that makes me go, "Now that's a game." Games are arbitrary collections of rules, and while some games try for a ruleset that simulates reality to some degree of fidelity, other games are happy to leave reality behind in the dust while still maintaining internal consistency. Skin Deep is one of the latter; the premise is already ludicrous ("insurance-mandated commando sent along with cargo to foil space pirates"), and it only gets wackier. You (and the pirates) are human, but the crew of the spaceship is…sapient cats? And while humans have high-poly textures and mostly-realistic (if slightly caricatured) proportions, the cats look like they came straight out of Minecraft, made up of a series of cuboid shapes. The demo does not address this at all, and I kind of hope the full game doesn't either because playing it straight without addressing it gives the world that delightful je ne sais quoi of unfamiliarity, keeping the player on their (mental) toes. I guess what I'm saying is, playing that demo was quite the experience, and I look forward to seeing the final game.

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OK, the phrase "insurance commando" piqued my interest, and the rest of the trailer convinced me to download the demo. I'm not sure what I just watched, but I'm definitely curious.

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With all the new mobs added over the years, an overhaul of the spawn egg visuals was definitely due. Differentiating based purely on colors worked when there was, like, no more than 20 to keep track of. (Though probably not for colorblind people, come to think of it. :neutral:)

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The 4.0 update really is a huge one too, and makes you think - why don't they just do Stellaris 2 at this point? Multiple major features of the game have been completely changed (multiple times in some cases too).

Silly, we already had Stellaris 2.0 back in 2018! :tongue: But I, for one, am happy that they're not afraid to massively rework things rather than simply dropping each version after a year or two in favor of ever-incrementing sequel numbers like too many other companies in the games industry. Sequels always lose something in the making (remember how much less CK3 had compared to CK2?), whereas with Stellaris I can continue playing with all the content I've purchased for it rather than having to re-purchase it over and over for each sequel. And while the various reworks have taken some getting used to over the years, in my opinion they've pretty much always been for the best (either in terms of player cognitive load or streamlining performance in my late-game 1,000 star galaxies). From what I've heard of 4.0, it sounds like it'll continue that trend.

Also, while all of the upcoming content sounds interesting, oh boy am I looking forward to BioGenesis and living ships! :woot:

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Stellaris is $9.99.

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That's a shame. I enjoyed "Say No! More" – a short but fun game about being an overtasked intern running around and saying "no" in ridiculously over-the-top ways to the ludicrously hyperbolic demands of your co-workers/managers/bosses/assistant-sub-vice-directors/CEO and maybe, just maybe, that one friend who really needs to hear it for his own good.

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