Bay 12 Games Forum

My vague memory of WoM was that the AI was really unpleasant to deal with, the graphics were indescript to the point of making the ancient MoM graphics look richly detailed, the worldmaker was kinda bad, and that the final version had an infinite gold bug. Overall, it was super-bland and weird, and now has me second-guessing my initial Thea-derived guarded optimism. Thea doesn't really have any opponent who has parity with the player (and indeed, relies heavily on simple decision-tree scripted events), so if a recurring shortcoming in remakes is "the AI isn't fun", setting a smaller team w/o experience writing 4x AI the task of making it is rather worrisome, sigh...

Well, I did like Starcrawlers a bit, regardless of its flaws, so I'm going to opt in and see if I can get a taste of Chimera.

Impressions: turn-based combat was a bit odd balance-wise, but it didn't help that the only full run of a level I did dropped an orange 2h sword in the first room and I just obliterated everything I faced off against. It's all cardinal direction movement, but with free gaze, so you can end up with the disorienting thing where you're facing diagonal to how you're moving. Itemization was not great - as the legendary drop in the first room indicated, it was way too random, but that may well be an artifact of it being a 1-level demo. That also applies to the general lack of variety WRT enemies. I'd broadly compare the itemization to StarCrawlers itemization, and not in a complementary way - items tended to be sidegrades more often than upgrades, and after 3 or 4 sidegrades, you might end up lower than where you started b/c you're juggling semi-random collocations of attributes. Still, that was definitely a result of there only being one level, so it's not fair to conclude that'll reflect the final product. The character leveling is wonky - no classes, just skill trees. Pick 6 at the start and boost those as you level. It's okay - feels less MMO-y than SC did, but it also feels a lot more generic.

Overall, I give it a hard "maybe". I really don't know. I loved StarCrawlers to bits, and there's some of the same charm, but those elements don't translate well. To fall back on the Dungeon Hack comparison, I played A TON of DH back in the day... but I don't have any desire to play it now even though I'd not mind playing through Eye of the Beholder one more time...

There was also Mutant League Football, which has been officiously remade as Mutant Football League.

* Robots strength is in their per-pop efficiency, countered by generally getting less pops.

You could also do this with robots getting fewer pops but each pop representing more entities, which would imply efficiency at the cost of flexibility. Each one would have a higher impact, but you'd have fewer to spread around and they'd take more time to shift b/tw jobs.

Okay, seriously got into it with a major for the first time in several patches. They're more passive and pacifistic than they used to be. Hopefully the forthcoming promised AI work in the next(ish?) patch will give them back their teeth.

It's more challenging than early game, yes. I've only played to completion on the lowest two settings, so it's possible the AI is far more clever on higher ones, but it is at least reasonably competent at supporting its flanks and isn't a pushover - but it's flawed and beatable. Again, it may not be so easy on higher levels. But you'll get stretched-out supported battle lines and attempts to cut you off, plus units which may have tech parity.

No, what you responded to was an expressed desire for static starts. That's not "a different kind of game" - it's an advanced start and/or a fixed map. Both of those are familiar to people who play 4x games even if only some 4x games offer them and it's quite misleading to attempt to portray it as belonging to a different genre. You can argue it would take the eXplore out of 4x, but given that Civ has offered the static map from the first game (and IIRC advanced scenarios from the second), it's absurd to declare static maps are incompatible with 4x games. Further, an enormous amount of Stellaris gameplay outside the early game consists of playing with full or mostly-full galaxies. Paradox could unquestionably add an option to use a static default occupied galaxy (or a randomized fully-settled-galaxy start option) without "completely chang[ing] what kind of game Stellaris is". "Mod it or quit" remains an unconvincing argument that requires us to fundamentally misunderstand what was being pined for above, as well as what is and is not 4x.