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Latest Comments by LungDrago
Eat and destroy stars in Stellaris: Nemesis and become the endgame crisis
21 May 2021 at 9:55 am UTC

A bit late back to the party, sorry? There's a Paradox sale going on right now, tempting you to buy yet more DLC. Yay.

The issue with Stellaris isn't bugs as much as overall design shortcomings and lack of quality of life features. Let's go back to the earlier things I complained about in more detail:

  • Factions - they appear out of thin air a few years into the game and they reduce your economy a bit or a lot (it's a coin toss really). Period. You have limited and if I remember correctly pretty broken as in not functioning correctly tools to try and alleviate their effects a little bit, but it's a penalty that's never going away from the time it pops up and there's nothing you can do about it. I don't even remember if factions were ever satisfyingly implemented but they're definately very strange, barebones and in an obvious unfinished state for years now.

  • Pop jobs and overall planet management - it's ok, pretty fun actually. Lots of bobs and jigs to play around with. The issue is that it requires constant player attention, which comes in as a problem later in the game when you have dozens of planets to take care of - at that point, it's constant clicking, click click click to make the engine keep going, it's an annoyance that pops up periodically and gets in the way of you trying to get other things done. If you're distracted and fail to click in time, everything breaks down instantly on that planet. The game is probably fine enough in single player where you can pause time to click away, but in multiplayer it's a nightmare unless you enjoy the game getting paused constantly so people can click. Overall, the mid to late game experience feels unpolished and unfinished.

  • This ties in to sectors. Originally they used to be an automation system to alleviate the tediousness of managing large empires - you know, the problem Stellaris has. The old AI wasn't entirely optimal but functional. That stopped being the case when they introduced the job economy, ever since then I don't remember any automation being a thing - either they removed it entirely or the AI is so hopeless the tool is unusable.

    Quoting: Purple Library GuyAs to sectors, maybe it's because I'm a micromanager who assumes AI is stupid, but I've never noticed a real problem with them. They're a thing that means you need to hire another leader to boost output and reduce crime on a few worlds; if you start using features to automate stuff you deserve what you get.
    Now apparently there are people out there who like clicking the same thing forty times every single in-game year. I find it bizarre in a grand strategy game, these games aren't about Starcraft-level high APM godlike clicking skills. Regardless, with sectors you used to be able to switch star systems around between sectors to control which system gets which buff from a leader, switch sector capitols, name things, etc. none of those things were possible in the last version I played, they slowly removed all of that stuff. Sectors create automatically in a weird way you don't want, there's nothing you can do about it and that's all there is to it. Plop a leader in there and you're done. Replace leader if he's not immortal every now and then. Again, a barebones system that's obviously unfinished.

  • Ship design and customization - this is a more complicated topic to talk about. The quick version is that Stellaris works a bit differently. There's a rock-paper-scissors thing going on. That means that you need every ship technology and there is no personal choice involved in your ship designs. Just build optimally against your current opposition. It's not broken or obviously unfinished like many other features, it's just of questionable use to me - all it really does is lay down traps for the player to build unoptimally and make mistakes. It really would've been much easier and made more sense to simply build pre-made ships and upgrade those, Sins of a Solar Empire style, rather than this. It's what ultimately happens with this system anyway, except it needs more clicking to happen.


Again this is just a laundry list from way back when the economy of Stellaris was redone. That's years ago. Each DLC expansion introduced new stuff and new questionable or unfinished things that were then forgotten and neglected by the devs in pursuit of the new shiny DLC. As a result, the game is fun to play once or twice in a while when you're not aware of all the little things that bother you yet, but after that, it's kind of frustrating really. The best you can do is install mods. It takes ages to find and mod the game properly - there's lots of stuff to fix - and voila, the game IS fun once you set everything up! For a while, until the helpful devs release an update or DLC and everything breaks. Sigh.

Godot Engine needs more funding for post-4.0 development
21 May 2021 at 8:50 am UTC

What Godot needs besides funding is a time machine. There's so much stuff that the engine needs done :'(

It's your time to Wine with the 6.7 release out now
24 April 2021 at 10:57 am UTC

I'm honestly shocked you guys haven't run out of wine puns yet.

Valheim has become the next survival game hit on Steam
9 February 2021 at 8:57 am UTC Likes: 2

Easily one of the best survival games ever despite early access status. Surprisingly stable and with minimum amount of bugs, though there are some. Simple and clean design that hides clever new mechanics behind it. Despite the primitive low-poly graphics art style the game looks amazing and packs an especially impressive weather system that will have you shaking in your boots during storms, gazing upon Yggdrasil at night and just chilling peacefully during sunrise. There's of course room for improvement, but most of it has to do with adding various new kinds of content and features as what's already in there is solid for the most part. Perhaps most important of all, the game nails its Viking theme perfectly and oozes mead through every pore. I like it. :)

Eat and destroy stars in Stellaris: Nemesis and become the endgame crisis
5 February 2021 at 11:30 am UTC

Quoting: nepoThanks a lot! What a shame they focus on new expansions instead of improving (and fixing!) the base game and the old content first. I understand the business case here, but sadly this is not for me. The core seems broken by design.

Agreed. Starting from the 2.0 big update back in the day, Paradox have been steadily shaking things up and adding a boatload of new stuff, but never slowed down and polished what's already there. The game is hurting really bad because of it. AFAIK "features" like factions that pop up in your empire are still half-baked and just barely somewhat working, pop jobs and overall planet management is a micro nightmare that keeps growing on you larger and larger as the game goes on, sectors are simply put broken, ship design is still mostly a series of serial upgrades instead of giving you any real choice, etcetera etcetera etcetera. And those are issues that the game is carrying from the beforementioned big update, I haven't talked about the individual issues that came with later content.

Stellaris is a bizarre, monstrous amalgamation of expansions and DLCs that isn't holding up together at all. They kinda lowkey ruined the game, it took me a while to realize it though. The power of getting shiny new stuff is that strong, I suppose.

Viking open-world survival game Valheim enters Early Access
3 February 2021 at 11:37 pm UTC Likes: 1

Make sure to check out the GamingOnLinux community servers guys. :) The game is great so far.

Steamworks gets Denuvo Anti-Cheat, here's what Irdeto say about Linux support
20 January 2021 at 12:10 pm UTC

Quoting: ZlopezMost of the people doesn't bother with these things. You need to accept them to play the game, so you really don't have choice, if you want to play it. It's the same as with EULA, you can't really Disagree with it and still use the product.

Fascinating, we do have a choice, though. There is plenty of other products for us to use, it's not like we're forced to play games with shitty DRM and anticheat shenanigans. We could just move on to something else. That applies to us as in Linux gamers, so definately for Windows gamers as well. Strangely people seem drawn to the same shitty games like moths to a flame. Publishers would realize quickly that anticheat=bad if it made cuts into their revenue but gamers seem notoriously bad at voting with their wallets. Or just generally incapable of any more complex decision save for "game fun, me play" and "game not fun, me not play". It might've just killed them, but it is fun, so it is technically a good game :D

Steamworks gets Denuvo Anti-Cheat, here's what Irdeto say about Linux support
20 January 2021 at 9:44 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: damarrinFor someone who just wants to play an online game it’s irrelevant how the anti cheat is implemented and what it installs in their system as long as things continue working. If they’re not a cheater, they are happy they will have less of those to deal with.

It’s us Linux users who bring in other considerations like privacy and control over their own machines into the discussion, since these are among the reasons we use Linux in the first place. But we are t1 per cent. This discussion does not exist for the vast majority of people out there. It’s us who want to have our cake and eat it. And it’s not a jab or anything, I’m like this as well.

True. I've been vocal to my friends against Riot's anti-cheat for example, but despite how much I try to explain how dangerous and even nonsensical anticheat solutions like this are, they simply do not care. It could send nudes of them to 4chan for all they care, as long as it prevents cheating (which it doesn't, but makes you feel like it does so it's good enough I suppose). They lack the education to understand the issue in front of them and such education involes too much text they don't care to read.

Valve puts up Proton 5.13-4 to get Cyberpunk 2077 working on Linux for AMD GPUs
9 December 2020 at 11:45 pm UTC

Question - if I play Cyberpunk using a streaming service, can I transfer my save files once Nvidia gets its shit together?

Valve puts up Proton 5.13-4 to get Cyberpunk 2077 working on Linux for AMD GPUs
9 December 2020 at 11:38 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Leopard
Quoting: rustybroomhandleWondering what the specific missing features are in the Nvidia driver preventing this from working.

Amusingly, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla with vkd3d works on Nvidia but not AMD.

This extension is needed.

VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type

Currently only implemented on RADV.

Any at least a ballpark ETA on when can we expect Nvidia to catch up? I haven't really been interested in playing a day 0 release before so I have no experience or data on this.