I see it's not mentioned in the feature notes here, but the Dev Diaries they've basically confirmed that cloaking will, in fact, let you send cloaked ships into empires with closed borders, so that sounds fun. :happy: I mean, on top of all the pre-FTL interaction stuff which is what I'm really here for.

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You can have a little Linux kernel update, as a treat.

Aw, you shouldn't have, Liam. You'll spoil our suppers! 🤣

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Quoting: minidouOf course, still no mention of anti botting and anti cheating update.

I haven't played in few years now, but wasn't there some big change or update in that direction last year or so? Or has it gotten worse again since then?

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Having just spent two weeks in January on an archaeological dig in Jordan, this sounds fun. (And a lot less dirty & sweaty…) Minecraft's a game you could actually simulate the process of removing dirt bit by bit around something fairly well.

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Interestingly, I sort of just barely missed the event. I was still using Windows a few years out of college in 2013, but I'd just started a job that year where I used Linux at work…now fast-forward to July 2014 when I built my first desktop and put Linux Mint on it, mostly as a result of that experience at work (and a good Linux guru friend there). When I started first seriously thinking about doing such a thing sometime mid-to-late 2013, I kinda just took it for granted that Steam was available on Linux (even if a lot fewer games were at the time), and didn't realize that if I'd been able to build a computer a year earlier it wouldn't have been available.

Luckily for me, I'd only really discovered Steam a few years earlier in 2011* when Portal 2 came out, so I hadn't had much time to build up a large Windows-only library and a lot of my games were already cross-platform and available natively due to my tastes (plus some conscious buying decisions for a year or so in preparation). So for me the timing really worked out well to be able to make the switch from Windows, and I only had to give up a relatively small number of games at the time (all of which I can now play again anyway :happy:).

*I was vaguely aware of it before that, but my family had dial-up internet right up until I moved away to college, so Steam was never an option that I'd seriously checked out.

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I should actually put some reviews of the stuff I played:

Capes
So, as I said in the article about it specifically, it's pretty much superheroes-themed XCOM 2 in tone, XCOM: Chimera Squad in mechanics (by which I mean, your units and the enemy units all get places in the turn order which can shift around, but you control one unit at a time rather than your entire team). I turned off the auto-advancing dialog boxes option, as it felt a bit weird to have auto-advancing text boxes, but it was workable after that. Combat seemed decent from the two missions I played, and there was an interesting system where characters could have some of their moves buffed in different ways by the nearby presence of a teammate (e.g., character A made one of character B's moves do more damage, while character C made another one of them have a short-range teleport effect, that sort of thing). Enemy goons sometimes had weapons which made them much more dangerous than their unarmed companions, and most characters had a dedicated way of disarming people, which made for an interesting additional level to combat. On a personal and subjective level, I wasn't sold on the art style, though it's hard to put my finger on why (something about the animations of the characters bugged me a bit; like everyone was sort of constantly hyper and fidgeting or something).

Plan B: Terraform
I'm something of a sucker for games about terraforming, it seems (I have Terraforming Mars, Surviving Mars [with the Green Mars terraforming expansion], Terraformers, and Per Aspera in my library), and this game seems like it'd be right up my alley. I like the fact that it randomly generates Mars-like planets rather than just being flat-out Mars again (I'd love to see terraforming games in future that focus on other types of planets, like Venus-like, but that's a digression for another time). I also like that it directly models the temperature based on the atmospheric composition and pressure, something the other games I have don't exactly do. The demo shows a peek at an expanding tech tree where you steadily extract raw resources and process them into increasingly-complicated products. It seems like a pretty solid game…and I'm just not sure I'll be able to handle it, given how I always run out of steam in games like Satisfactory as the complexity scales beyond what my brain is willing to spend computation time on in my relaxation periods. We'll see if I pick it up, but if you like terraforming and Factorio/Satisfactory/similar games, you should probably at least check it out.

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I used to love Sim Tower as a kid, I'll have to keep an eye on this.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: NanobangKinda exciting. Is it voiced (a la Divinity Original Sin (Yay)? Or is it walls of text like Shadow Run games(which just exausts me)?

I'm fine with walls of text, and a big fan of the Shadowrun games. But the thing Philadelphus describes sounds kind of weird and maybe worst of both worlds.

The default is definitely not ideal to my mind. But I fired the demo up again to try the second of the included scripted missions just now, and found an "auto-advance conversations" checkbox in the menu (as well as a reading speed slider), so it's possible to turn that off.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFundamentally though I'm fairly up for a turn-based superhero game. Plus you're superhero revolutionaries? Sure, I'm in.

It's essentially XCOM 2 with superheroes and villains in tone, XCOM: Chimera Squad in mechanics. (The demo even opens with a text box saying "Twenty years ago the supervillains won.") And that's fine by me. :grin:

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Multi-track level crossings to keep road vehicles from stopping in the middle of the crossing.

:shock: Game-changer!

More natural rivers which get wider as they flow downstream.

Oh, that sounds cools. Obviously there's only so much you can do with a grid, but more natural-looking rivers would help with the immersion.

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I tried getting Plan B: Terraformer to work but the best I could get (with Proton 7.0-6) is an unresponsive black screen with music over it. Lower Proton versions I tried had the launcher claiming it couldn't find Steam and wouldn't even start the game, Proton Experimental showed a "Failed to initialize player" error box. Any tips on getting it to run? It looks like something right up my ally. I'm on Debian stable with NVidia.

Edit: adding "PROTON_USE_WINED3D=TRUE %command%" to the launch options got it running with Proton Experimental. Now to test it out!

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