Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, it greatly depends on where and how the dead appear. Can they be reasoned with? Frankly, any pre-civilization cave-man would probably drop to their knees and worship us as gods. Especially the fat people, who to them would probably appear as the apex of all humanity could create.

First, where are they all appearing? I'm assuming it's not 100 meters above Point Nemo in the pacific ocean. Are they returning to the closest point where they died? If so, sucks to be in Africa and the Middle East, but what else is new? Are they spawning out of static locations at a set rate? Seems kind of easy to just send a guided missile every thirty seconds or so at that spot and wait for the survivors to drown in a crater filled with a slurry of human body parts.

Assuming they're brainwashed, then we're just talking about a zombie apocalypse style horde, but made of frail, living people? Tear gas the lot to take the fight out of 'em, then send in the machine guns. Unless they're waging guerrilla warfare, modern militaries care not one whit for the struggles of untrained masses of rabble armed with melee weapons. They'd run out of bodies long before we'd run out of bullets.

Honestly, the greatest damage would not be their ability to attack us, but their ability to disrupt the fragile network of supply chains that keeps modern society fed and warm. Adding 1,500% greater resource strain overnight on food, water and basic survival necessities would see towns stripped bare of all consumer goods within days. Then, those outside of the reach of government held stockpiles would simply starve to death in the coming weeks.

So yeah, probably we'd see a critical global resource collapse, but the strongholds of modern civilization would survive, and eventually reclaim their territories. Not because the masses of dead humans are dangerous, but simply because they could get hungry.

First, do you have any sources of debt? Student loan, mortgage, credit cards?

If yes, pay them off now. Returns from the stock market aren't likely to be better than the compound interest on your debt.

If you still have savings after this step, what purpose is your savings serving?

Is your savings serving as a backup plan against emergencies?

Is your savings serving as a future deposit for investing in a house to exit the rental market?

If so, don't invest in the stock market. Expect your savings to be tied up in the market for years without seeing anything profit from it. You won't be able to withdraw your savings quickly should you need it urgently, and if you're counting it as a deposit, you might end up with less than you have now, pushing the benefits of gaining a real estate asset further into the future, and all the attendant lost investment potential that causes by continuing to rent instead of own your home.

Finally, assuming you're now in a situation where your excess income isn't being used for anything other than growing a savings account, you can consider investing. Put whatever you have in excess of your needs into a diversified investment fund, and consider focusing on dividend paying shares, reinvesting your returns in continuing to diversify your portfolio.

Any case, might check out Dredgers for something small, action-y rpg/roguelite style, or Moonlighter for something similar with a dash of recetter style shop management. Either might fit with that list well enough.

Thanks for the recommendations! I tried Moonlighter awhile ago, though it has far less "Captalism, ho!" than Recettear and is mainly about dungeon running with a side of light trade. Still a decent enough story, and fun in its own special way.

Not that keen on Roguelikes, the only real one I ever got into was ADOM back a few decades ago. I tried it again after Biskup added more polish, and it was a fun nostalgia trip, but also served to remind me why I prefer more modern game entries. There's fun to be had and great challenge in the system, but the repetitiveness of rerolling characters and the basic RNG procedural levels quickly lost their appeal over more bespoke handcrafted gameplay such as Fallout, Syrim or Tomb Raider when playing an adventure game.

I've got Caves of Qud and DoomRl for semi-complex RPGs, although Qud might be on the repetitive side for you (DoomRl games are less than 1 hour long, so repetition and trying to improve are much more reasonable). I've also got Hitman 2 for nice-looking and somewhat complex. The third game in that series has been announced, so everything might go on sale whenever that hits, and there are some free (early/easier) levels available for you to try if you want to get an idea what to expect.

Final Fantasy 14 is an MMO you might like, but it wasn't my style.

I gave DoomRl a try just now, but got splattered at 2nd level and didn't see any appeal in restarting a new game. Didn't really feel like downloading Caves of Qud for more of the same. My feelings about roguelikes were reinforced yet again.

I loved the Hitman games, especially their stealth and variety of mission success conditions. Always enjoyed a good stealth game, such as Dishonored, Hitman or Splinter Cell. Great suggestion! I might have to revisit those gems soon.

I don't do MMO games, both for their grind and their time-sink nature. I work full time and have two kids, so gaming's a hobby I pursue on the PC after work, cooking dinner, helping with homework, doing housework and cleaning chores. I used to play a few before I had kids and ran a top guild on the server, but those days are long gone. I got FFX as a nostalgia trip, remembering my youth when it first came out.

Horizon Zero Dawn (windows port) was released a couple of days ago.

Definitely on my radar. Didn't know it finally came to PC though, which is all kinds of awesome. Probably a great choice to fill the gap between now and Cyberpunk 2077.

The Rimworld & Factorio mentions make me think of Oxygen Not Included. Which is... like a physics & thermodynamics-based game about managing a colony on an asteroid in an ant farm-type perspective. It really is like Factorio + Rimworld in a lot of ways. There's a thread for the game on the forums, but most of it is really outdated. Thread was made when it was very first released in early access and OP hasn't been updated since then.

Find and make oxygen, find water, farm food, freak out since the water for your farm is actually 95 degrees celsius and it turns out the plants really don't like that, build a metal refinery that dumps massive amounts of heat used to smelt metal into a coolant fluid, make a steam turbine to extract the heat from that fluid preventing everything from melting and recovering some of the power spent, breach the surface of your asteroid, build an automatic meteor shower and regolith clearing system, send rockets into space to explore and gather rare materials. And so on. Complex, and it's unlikely you'll be able to easily master the game without some sort of external reference, but extremely fun.

I got this a while ago, though a lot has definitely changed since I played. I used to like using the water sieves that deleted heat and always output clean water at 40°C. I miss that feature, since it was central to my base heat management designs. That, along with the changes to the dupe job system made at the same time, kind of turned me off the game. Now steam turbines and ice makers are the only real heat reducing systems, with the other methods based on extremely limited resources. I had fun with the earlier builds though.

Obviously not Australian, or else you'd have Wrath as a magpie and Gluttony as a bin-chicken.

I mean, you could play D&D by text, totally. And if that's your preferred medium, don't let it stop you from pursuing that.

However, the game is honestly about the social interaction you get with the other players, at least for me. One of my favorite ways of describing D&D to outsiders is that it's a game of collaborative storytelling using dice to decide the random bits. It's not like a video game, with either a single-player experience moving through a static set-piece, or a competition against the other players. Your fellow players and GM are your allies in creating a story for all of your characters.

So if you're not able to smoothly interact with your fellow players, it will subtract some of the joy from the game. I would encourage you to consider seeking out a game in your preferred language just to try it out. You might be surprised how open and accepting your group is!

D&D has historically caught a lot of criticism from the far-right as being influenced by satanic forces and looked down on as being a game for social outcasts. Ironically, this has resulted in the game attracting and supporting a large variety of gender spectrums, religious groups, disabilities, races and peoples of colour, welcoming differences at the gaming table. Really, who cares if you've got slightly darker skin or speak with an accent when you're everything from an elven wizard slinging fireballs to a dwarf swinging a battleaxe?

Anyway, enough ranting. I hope you find a group you enjoy! Also, I highly recommend gaming regularly with the same people. My game group's been together for about seven years now, and people have come and gone, but we've made tons of great memories at the table in that time.

One of the players asked for a Knowledge roll to see if they could identify the great gnome Anne.

I told them she was a master Transmuter Wizard, renowned for her advances in spellcraft and discoveries. However, what was to be her greatest work ever ended in disaster, as during a complex transmutation ritual she inadvertently transformed herself into a massive stone monolith that crashed into the ocean, becoming a new feature among local sailors.

Alas, gnome Anne is an island.

I tried this at launch, then tried it again about a year ago for comparison.

It never really caught my interest because of the relatively strong emphasis on solo play. There's no tank, DPS or healer roles. Every character is their own island, and it means that you're spending a lot of time just mindlessly running from map point to map point without the incentive to form a cohesive group with other strangers.

I don't really enjoy that type of game. If I want a single player game, I can get that with better story, graphics and mechanics from other sources. The fact it's in a world populated with other players just doesn't really impact much on the core gameplay, at least in my experience. And the less said about PvP, the better.

I usually try to ask myself: Why is this character adventuring? Why are they risking life and limb against monsters and traps instead of settling down and opening a tavern?

Usually it's enough to flesh out an outline of a goal. One of my more memorable characters was adventuring because he planned to exploit his party members to protect himself against a summoning ritual he'd botched in the past, calling forth a demon hungering for his soul. Thus, his life was devoted to supporting and strengthening his team as much as possible so that, when the demon did track him down, he'd have several large meat-shields between it and himself, giving him enough time to run away if nothing else.