For those of us who can't easily do conversions from UTC in our heads, would it be possible in future articles to include a little widget or a link to somewhere than can do the time zone conversions? That'd be a nice quality-of-life addition. :)

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Having grown up on a small family ranch, I actually avoided Stardew Valley for almost two years after it came out for similar reasons. I've been hauled out of bed in the middle of cold, rainy, winter nights because "The animals escaped again!" enough times that I didn't find Stardew Valley's well-trained animals who return to their buildings at the end of a day (or who politely don't eat your delicious crops!) very amusing. (I've also manually dug enough fence post holes to last at least six lifetimes, so I really appreciate when your spouse gets up and fixes all the fences before dawn! :D)

When I finally picked it up, however, I realized that, for all that it's nothing like real farming, it does manage to capture the spirit of some aspects of farming like that warm feeling from giving friends your own home-grown crops and eggs. ^_^

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Interesting! Looks kinda like a 3D version of OpenTTD, which I've played a lot of with a friend. We might need to check this one out. Do you have options besides trains? It's hard to tell from the trailer. (Though I did see a blimp…)

Also that map is clearly the Big Island of Hawaiʻi (where I used to live), which is really cool, though it's a bit surreal to watch trains effortlessly cresting 4 kilometer peaks. :P

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Amusingly in hindsight, I chose Leah in my first solo game about two years ago; I say "amusingly" because, totally unsuspected by me at the time, I'd be taking up painting as a hobby IRL about 7 months later due to a chain of events that hadn't started yet. (Then, in her new 14-heart event from last month's update

Spoiler, click me

she teaches you to paint,

which I thought was both hilarious and adorable.)

I'm not entirely sure how luck works, but the fortune teller gives you an idea of how it'll be on any given day. It affects things like, e.g., the chance of finding a ladder each time you break a stone in the mines, or the average time between fishing strikes, that sort of thing. So you generally want to save your mine trips for high-luck days, for example.

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That's a pretty ridiculous sum.

And the usual response, of course, is: "Yes, if you buy it all at full price." (This isn't directed at you Liam, by the way, since I know you enjoy Paradox games, it's a response to this criticism in the abstract.) Pretty much anything later than the two most recent expansions will regularly go on sale for 75% off; apply that to the price and you get £63.74 (or about $83.5 USD for my own convenience). And of course, if you drop all the cosmetic DLC that price would drop another $20 at least. Now compared to all the $10 indie games running around out there even I'll say that's not exactly cheap, but in terms of what you get I think you'll get a lot more than 8× the playtime out of it if you like that kind of gameplay. I actually have bought most of EU IV & DLC full price—but I've also put 1,154 hours into it and expect to put many more in the future once the big game-changing Europe update comes out this year, so my actual cost-per-hour is less than $0.28/hour, making it a better deal than almost any other game in my library (and most forms of paid entertainment out there).

Um, actually on topic, I've occasionally thought that it would great to be able to just pay a subscription service to Paradox. They'd get a moderately more stable cash flow (especially if they did the usual thing of offering discounts the longer you subscribe for), and if I just got DLC I was interested in as it came out without needing to buy it (perhaps with a small discount, again, for subscribing) I'd be pretty happy. Realistically I'll probably end up buying anything they put out for the games I play anyway, eventually (I don't play all games equally at all times). Like other have said I wouldn't want that to be the only option, but I think it could potentially work as an option.

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Be honest, how many hours have you put into this charming game?

207. ^_^ A bit over half of that's on my first, solo, farm, where I'm going for all the achievements I can reasonably get (still need a few recipes and artifacts and to get the last Stardrop, and beat Journey of the Prairie King), the rest is playing with a friend.

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Looks interesting, might have to check it out.

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Quoting: PangaeaAdmittedly Civ 4's combat isn't where the game shines - though it still managed to utterly trounce the idiocy of Civ 5. But like touched upon in the above post, there are a great deal of features in the game that make it interesting, and offers the player many different ways to achieve their objectives, and different ways to win the game…

I think they got almost everything right with Civ 4, and very few things wrong. I can't say that about Civ 5 and 6. I'll take stack warfare over parking lot logistics any day of the week.

I guess it comes down to a difference of opinion—a Civ game without meaningful ranged combat options was always going to stack up poorly in my opinion, no matter how well it executed the other parts. But that's also a factor of what I was into at that age, and it's possible I'd enjoy it more now; my tastes have definitely changed over time. In fact, after Civ 5 I graduated to Europa Universalis IV, where the combat model is (ironically) much more like 4's than 5's (in that it's strategic rather than tactical): stack any number of armies on provinces, smash 'em into each other, no ranged combat, etc..

I personally feel that Civ 5 got the majority of things right (once you include both major expansions), but I can certainly sympathize with the feeling that a series you love is going in a direction you no longer enjoy. :|

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Quoting: NanobangAhhh ... gotcha. Bit of tunnel vision on my part, I'm afraid. Though I don't watch "let's Play" or live streams of gamers on something like Twitch, I'm a bit chagrined at not having thought of that myself.:whistle:

Btw, thanks for your well considered, well written answer. Your thoughtfulness is appreciated! :)

No worries! You're welcome. :) Different personal experiences, that's all. I've watched a few Let's Plays of Undertale, and while I'm not particularly interested in playing the game I've considered getting the soundtrack. (Though that's available on Bandcamp rather than Steam so it's not a perfect example, but you get the idea. :D)

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Quoting: bingusI'm on the south east coast of NSW, and its been like armageddon down here. Any help is gladly appreciated.

Stay safe over there!

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