Bay 12 Games Forum

I wasn't planning to keep the LMOE alone for the entire story, y'know 

Still, it seems folks are interested in the second idea more. Fine by me, I've been wanting to cover that one for a couple of years now.

Alright dudes, I'll be home in a few hours and I need to decide once and for all the kind of story I will attempt to write this month. I figure I might do better if I share my novel-in-progress with an audience...so what sort of thing might you folks be interested in reading?

Idea 1: Super plague wipes out humanity except for one dude. There are no zombies or vampires or any supernatural things to deal with. Instead, the story is about how the dude copes with a world of ever-present loneliness, degrading  equipment and infrastructure, and the slow onset of psychosis more than a decade after the world ended.

Idea 2: Cosmic horror of a sort. The world hasn't quite ended, but it's in a slow and steady decline after an event called the Fracture. Global temperatures are dropping, suicide rates have skyrocketed, the world's governments have joined forces but all they can do is barely keep things together. A group of companions tries to piece together exactly what happened and, more importantly, to see if anything can be done about it.

Those are the two stories I've done the most thinking and planning about.

Gave multiplayer a try against a buddy. His Frieza Clansman vs my Saiyan.

Round 1, timed out with me having more health remaining. He was in the middle of wailing on me at the time so this could have gone either way :V
Round 2, a very close victory for me, I was in the flashing-red stage when he finally got knocked out.
Round 3 I sorta dominated, still with loads of HP after I nailed him with an ultimate. He got some pretty good licks in though.

His character had more stamina than mine did, and maybe it regenned faster, because he was getting way more flashsteps off than I was. I think the only reason I was able to prevail in close combat at all was because I had good timing on the backhand attack, and managed to land several stamina-draining hits that left him open. He had mastered the throws though, very annoying

The battles were surprisingly stable despite our connection not being all that great. Only a couple of minor issues but no lagspikes on my end.

All in all, a lot of fun.

The ethics divergence is easily the least significant of the real problems, though. I can deal with pops being unhappy because I purged and they're xenos-loving traitors, I just resettle them onto a useless border world or purge them.

I've fixed the idiotic "the more powerful you are, the more your vassals hate you" thing, but the whole process of uplifting/integrating/&c. is just a total pain in the ass compared to killing everything. It's the same end result, only it takes far more time and resources. It's not like terraforming and gene-modding aren't things you can do that are just flatly more effective than getting subject pops and hoping that they've got the right tolerances or traits.

I say this because all I'm trying to do is get a save to the endgame to do some weapons testing against real threats, but even if you're a fanatic xenophile with the other species happiness trait you're still going to have to conquer some idiots, and being a xenos-lover like that just means that when you do it's harder to deal with them (since they're inevitably xenophobic/spiritualist/militarist jackasses that won't get along), since you can't just purge them or sit below your target warscore while you sloooooooowly kill their pops with orbital bombardment.

:I

Question: why not engage in wars of liberation? Replace the xenophobic militarist leaders of your enemies with ones that see your point of view, then become besties with them until they decide to join up with you. The pops won't necessarily change, but that's what propaganda and divergence-reducing stuff is for.

: "I'm no chef, but I can probably chop up vegetables without too much supervision."

Alright, here's a question. What happens if you enlighten a primitive civilization that lives in a system where you have a colony? Do you lose your colony? If so, what happens to the people and buildings on it?

I discovered that one of my systems had a bunch of bronze-age people living on a planet in it. They prefer arid climates while I go for alpine, so if I can integrate them into my kingdom I've got prime colonizers for planets that my own dudes won't touch. Even better, they share my ethics exactly so we'd probably get along almost perfectly. However, it will take a ludicrously long time to enlighten them plus another 30 years or so for them to go from Protectorate to full-fledged member, and if I'll lose a colony for all that time I'd almost rather not bother.

And so the Kingdom loses a THIRD science vessel+scientist to RNG. After failing a special project, everyone on the ship went insane and killed each other, destroying the ship in the process. Say good-bye to my nearly 4-star scientist who was going to examine a special homeworld soon.