Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Greenbane on October 12, 2016, 08:06:52 pm

Does the expansion reduce any of the grind

There is no grind. If you are grinding you are playing it wrong. Port reports and a couple of hauls from the Salt Lions are all it takes to get yourself some nice stuff. But is is more of the same, though. Those that liked the base game will like Zubmariner. Those that didn't...

"Playing it wrong", heh, if that's a possibility in an open world game, then what's wrong is something with the design.

And yeah, the whole progression is ultimately superfluous, so there's technically no need to grind, do repetitive tasks and amass echoes. One could say getting most bigger ships was even counter-productive, given how you lost speed unless you bought bigger and bigger engines, and even then you'd be travelling at similar speeds as on the starting boat but consuming much more resources.

Too bad I actually wanted a Frigate, though. If only for the show of it, disregarding the fact the increased combat power provided next to no practical benefit, just like the dedicated cargo ship's increased storage. That was my choice, when the game was evidently telling me, "do the stories, forget about everything else". I guess I was expecting more than a glorified Choose Your Own Adventure book with an RNG and nice music.

Anyway, thanks for the information, and excuse my rant. It just gets me that Sunless Sea could've been so much more if the developers had shown some boldness.

Quote from: Greenbane on September 14, 2016, 09:22:51 am

Despite attempts to really hype up this game saying it's "a mixture of Star Control 2, Master of Orion, XCOM" (and FTL), there's precious little about any of those in it.

It appears to be mostly simplistic JRPG battles in space with some very light base-building and research mechanics.

Which is kind of fine on its own. It is a neat little distraction. No where near the caliber of FTL but what is?

For 15-20 dollars, one would expect something more robust.

Question, guys. Playing with the great HIP mod, but I'm not sure it's relevant.

I'm currently an Emir in the Marrakesh area, circa 810 AD, and in order to expedite feudalization, I swore fealty to the Spanish Sultan, just north of me. Thing is, the great Mali warlord to my south covets one of my provinces, and lately he's been declaring war on the Sultan to seize it.

If I were to have a non-aggression pact with the Mali tribal king, would it stop him from declaring war to get a piece of my direct realm (and indirectly the Sultan's) or have I become irrelevant and it's a matter between kings now? I had one as my current character's father, and there was no war until shortly after his death. Coincidence?

Problem is Mali shows up with 6k troops and a ton of archers (1k+) and nobody can seem to wear them down. The bulk of the Sultan's army defeated that stack once but later went south and got devastated by attrition, so the current situation is a mess, with my liege's and his allies' armies unable to coordinate and being constantly defeated piecemeal by the consolidated Mali force.

Meanwhile, my provinces are being sieged with impunity and my levy sources drained. If this keeps up, the Sultan's bound to lose the war and my province. My ultimate plan is to declare independence, but despite all these disruptions and civil wars, the Sultan always somehow manages to prioritize me and scrounge enough troops to put me down.

Is there any advantage to 64bit support beyond being able to allocate greater amounts of RAM?

I suppose multi-core CPU support is still a ways off.

If I really feel like nobody's taking advantage of my Reining, I'll switch to Winston or Roadhog.

In my case, the problem is less that nobody takes advantage of Reinhardt's shield, and more that I'm left pushing the payload alone while everyone is busy failing at chasing random kills.

Sometimes my team is so inept there have been occasions in which I ended up with gold or silver for eliminations while doing my job, staying near the objective without going out of my way to kill anyone. My allies were busy dying without even managing to disrupt the enemy.

Quote from: Greenbane on June 02, 2016, 07:51:22 am

But despite my raging against players, Blizzard should do something about it. There should be extra rewards for playing as tanks or supports, like XP bonuses and such. The truth is those classes aren't as fun to play as the other ones. I'm a fairly decent Reinhardt, but I often resent playing as him because it's obligatory when nobody else on the team will think about the team, and I have more fun playing other characters.

D. Va and Roadhog aren't fun to play? That's news to me! 

But yeah, I also fell in love with D. Va once I figured out how to play her properly. And Junkrat's my go-to offensive carry now; he feels so satisfying to play and his kit's excellent, even if I barely ever use his ult.

That's the thing. If you need to deadlift a team that's bad but still manageable, you absolutely have to play someone that has an active playstyle and can get kills. Rein doesn't work too well for the same reason as Bj or Widow, they all require a moderately well-coordinated team to take advantage of their strengths, and can't do too much alone. People say the same thing about Mei, but I've been experiencing the opposite, since she's so excellent (at least on certain maps) for dividing and disrupting the enemy enough that even a sack of five potatoes to clean them up.

Well, D.Va is more fun than Reinhardt, but she's less successful at holding ground and therefore has a tougher time say, moving a payload, without meaningful support. She's a flanking tank who has to exploit her mobility to survive. She can't just take it the way Reinhardt or Roadhog do.

As for Roadhog, well, I don't like his looks, and that's pretty much the reason I don't play as him. I recognize his value, but he just doesn't look cool to me. And I feel forced enough playing a tank I only sort-of like.

As for the fun of playing tanks/support in general, they're less fun to most people, which is evidenced by the common lack of tanks and supports in games. Most people want to play the cool ninja, the cool cowboy, the cool soldier.

I gotta say, the only thing I really want them to add, aside from more maps, is an audio cue when you hit someone. That ding from TF2 is just so damn satisfying to hear.

There's audio cues for kills and each headshot, as well visual indicators for hits (crosshair "spiking") with headshot recognition (red spike). Adding another audio cue for normal hits would be perhaps too much.

As for Widow, yeah. The fact her sniper rifle can automagically become an assault rifle is ludicrous. If anything, her automatic fire mode should have a slower rate of fire, much like Bastion's Recon gun. She must have some disadvantage.

As far as my own experience goes, my buddies haven't been around in the past few days, so I've had to play with a majority of randoms. Many don't give a damn about the objective, it's common to see teams devoid of tanks or supports (my own teams, of course), tanks not acting like tanks and chasing kills like dumbasses, etc.

But despite my raging against players, Blizzard should do something about it. There should be extra rewards for playing as tanks or supports, like XP bonuses and such. The truth is those classes aren't as fun to play as the other ones. I'm a fairly decent Reinhardt, but I often resent playing as him because it's obligatory when nobody else on the team will think about the team, and I have more fun playing other characters.

Still following this intently! Keeps getting better.

I'll add a question to the mix: why must all major civilizations readily speak the "common tongue"? Might be interesting to have different languages across the world. It seems like a bit of a waste to ponder and implement all these learning methods only to apply them to minor dialects. Well, unless those dialects aren't really minor, and thoroughly colour the variant of the common tongue a given nation speaks.

I've to say the experience definitely improves if you group up with competent people (ideally friends), and it also provides +20% XP. It needn't be five others, but the more the merrier as it reduces the randomness.

Going into Quick Play alone is a crap shoot and can lead to a lot of frustration. Whether you're good or bad, if your team just isn't playing well there's little a single player can do to remedy the situation.