Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: 3 on April 01, 2011, 05:18:21 pm

Makes me wonder how the game handles win conditions. If you killed your opponent's last unit with an unstable unit, would you still win? Sounds like the sort of thing that'd get in for the release and then get patched out...

I believe that the win condition is when you wipe all of your opponent's units at any point on the timeline...I suspect that prevents the situation you mention.

I've had my eye on this game a while...seems to have enormous potential, but I'm waiting to see if they polish it up some more.

KG

You lose when your base and units get destroyed at any point in time and you cannot prevent it. Maybe you send all your units to the enemy base and they get destroyed and then the enemy attacks your base and it gets destroyed. If you can cancel the order that sends your units to the enemy base you can prevent yourself from losing.

Yup, they never shot.
You can watch the units fire at the enemy in front of the timewave. Then you jump back before the timewave and the units are not there and never fires at them.

It's all about foresight and hindsight. I like how your base can be obliterated in the past and before the timewave arrives you have built an army and a chronoporter in the future. Then you send your units back in time and stop the base from being destroyed. Then your base will exist in the future and in the past. In between it is obliterated. The game is so confusing and so awesome.

Hacker Evolution vs. Uplink: Uplink seems more fun, Hacker-Evolution is a bit too hardcore for me to wrap my head around, at least, right now.

I tried both. Bought the pack mostly for Uplink. Here are my views of the games.

Uplink is like a roguelike. Procedurally generated missions and you customize your system configuration the way you want (like upgrading the gateway so you have more room for processors and memory). The missions aren't that varied, at least in the beginning when your rig isn't that powerful and you don't have very effective or discreet hacker software. The first missions are about stealing or destroying important files for rivaling companies. The later ones are about tracing rival hackers or editing criminal records for people. There are also story missions that are a bit more varied compared to the procedurally generated ones. It is a difficult game, and like a roguelike you'll have to retry over and over again until you have a decent strategy. If you don't look up a guide of course.

Hacker Evolution is like a puzzle, adventure and strategy game combined. The game is a series of missions that do not differ from playthrough to playthrough. Though you can use different strategies if you are good enough. The missions are linked through the players money collected and the upgrades to the rig. Also the trace level is carried over from mission to mission. I found this game much harder than Uplink because you'll need to do a lot of detective work to find the best approach on each mission. You have to find servers you can bounce through. The more servers you bounce through the more time you get to crack the target server. And you can only bounce through a server a limited amount of times. You have to find money on servers so you can transfer them over to you so you can upgrade your rig. Also you need money to lower your trace level. It is a difficult balancing act that need much planning. The game is so difficult in fact, that I got stuck on the first level after the tutorial. I had to check a walkthrough and I found out that I had missed a minor detail that completely turned the tides for me after I found out about it.

tl;dr The Games are very different. Uplink is procedurally generated hacker sandbox and feels like a roguelike. Hacker Evolution is a mission based puzzle/adventure/strategy game that requires major problem solving skills and detective work.

Oh, there you are, I didn't quite see you from this angle.

Quick question for anyone whose played Settlers 7:

When your settlers are working away, chopping things up and making things, do you see the production / stock levels on screen as part of the graphics? Or is it abstracted away like the last settlers (or the one before, I get them mixed up...)

Eg. if a lumberjack chops down 8 trees, do you see 8 logs outside his hut waiting to be moved on?

May sound wierd, but I can't stand games that don't show you at a glance whats going on!

You can zoom in and look at the lumberjacks when they work. They only chop down one tree at a time though. But they bring it to the warehouse and then you can watch the worker at the sawmill take the log and cut planks out of it. Then he brings the planks to the warehouse. I believe that if a woodcutter and a sawmill is part of the same complex they dont need to take the logs to the warehouses first. Most of the workplaces have very detailed animations that show how they work.

If you get tired of it, you can always www.unhearit.com.

Now that pie chart is clearly much larger.