You left out one highly significant change to the war system: the new ability to have a "Status Quo" peace, where both empires gain whatever they're occupying at the moment, meaning it'll finally be possible for the first time in a Paradox grand strategy game to have wars where both sides gain and lose some territory which, frankly, sounds amazing. If this war system works out as well as it sounds like I really hope they take a long look at their other franchises to see if any of its principles could be adopted there as well. :)

(EU IV, for instance, despite being a period of many small-scale border wars and skirmishes, always turns into a series of all-or-nothing wars because the loser never gains anything from a war, so countries fight to the last man trying to keep from losing any war. A system where two countries fight and can both get something out of it—even if one is the clear victor—sounds really cool, preventing every war being a war to the death even if you only want to take a single one of the enemy's 50 provinces and are willing to give up one or two of your own in return.)

Back to Stellaris it sounds like the Cherryh update will significantly shake up gameplay, and while I can't say I'm 100% happy with the FTL changes I have faith in Paradox that they're doing what they're doing because they sincerely believe it'll make the game better and more fun, so I'm willing to give it a go with an open mind.

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Quoting: Mountain Man"The vast majority of my time has so far been wondering around, hunting small animals and foraging."

So just like a real cat.

Shouldn't there be a lot of napping and grooming in there too? ;)

(I know, we're talking about non-domesticated cats here.)

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Quoting: robobenkleinIndeed, WASD controls motion relative to the camera direction controlled by the mouse.

Thanks!

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How do you adjust the camera with keyboard + mouse? Is it movement with WASD and camera with the mouse?

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I, on the other hand, put my PC to sleep when I'm not using it like a proper environmentally-conscious individual. :P

And, uh, to save on electricity costs as a starving student. :whistle:

(And yes, I know it's still technically drawing current while asleep, but to such a tiny extent it's hardly worth mentioning. If only hibernate wasn't so hit-and-miss on Debian…)

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Quoting: brokeassbenAlso, why is Gandhi such an ass in this game? Declared war on me for no apparent reason.

In-joke for the series I'm guessing (haven't actually played VI myself yet); in (I think) the original Civilization all civs/leaders had a signed integer representing their aggression level. Gandhi/India had the lowest possible value, i.e., least aggressive. However, taking democracy as a government (available later in game) would lower your civ's aggression level, leading to Gandhi's aggression to wrap around to becoming the absolute most aggressive civ in the game, leading to very commonly seeing the memetic picture of Gandhi threatening "Our words are backed by nuclear weapons!" As a result, India's typically either had really high aggression or a particular love of nuclear weapons in every Civ game since.

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Ooo, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is on sale for $19.99! I can absolutely recommend that—a very fun and professional-quality game. Also Human: Fall Flat is on sale for $7.49, huge fun if you've got a friend or two to play it with.

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Finally people are getting around to making the Sim Ant remakes I've been wanting for ten years. :) We've got multiple Sim Tower-alikes to choose from (though I haven't actually tried any), now we just need a good Sim Farm remake and my childhood will be complete.

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Thanks for the reminder—I got the video edited and uploaded this morning (will make a better thumbnail when I get time!). :)

View video on youtube.com

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I backed this on Kickstarter and tried it our last night, and yeah…this is a very complicated game, and no tooltips makes figuring out what buttons do rather…"exciting". ;) I figured it'd be your fairly typical "start in a dinky, one-person ship and work your way up from there while learning about new systems as they're introduced", and nope! You start with a huge ship with a crew of ~20 people, all of who can individually level up and have their own skills and traits.

On the plus side, this is (or at least appears to be) a very deep game; lots of systems to interact with each other and get to know, so I expect to get a lot of play-time and replayability out of it. On the downside, learning to play without tooltips is pretty daunting; I was constantly worried one of the buttons I was almost randomly pressing would do something catastrophic. :) I figured out enough to get around, but I may wait till the tooltip issue is fixed before coming back.

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