Bay 12 Games Forum

Through the Ages came out recently and I have to say it is the best digital boardgame I have played so far. It's rare for me to choose to play a mobile game over gaming on my PC when I have the choice, but I've had it for 3 days and have played several matches and I'm still going back for more.

The user interface is fantastic and incredibly user friendly. As someone who has never played this boardgame in meatspace I found myself making mistakes often, but the UI helped me learn from them. I have often been reminded by the game that there were still specific actions I could take on my turn if I wanted to. For example there's a wonder card that gives you 1 free worker every turn if you activate it, but I would often forget to take it so the game would remind me I could still take that action if I wanted to when I tried to end my turn.

The tutorial is very well done, by the end of it I had a good understanding of how the game worked. Considering the physical game has a 4.17/5 complexity rating on boardgamegeek I think they did a great job teaching me the game.

If you have never heard of the game it is a euro game where you build your civilization and try to accrue the most culture points throughout the game to win. If you have played any of Sid Meier's Civilization games then you will be familiar with a lot of the concepts in the game. You can research techs to give you new units or buildings, or bonuses, build building that give you resources, victory points, or happiness, build wonders that do various things, build military units, declare war,  or colonize new lands, among other things. All of this is done through cards that you purchase with your civil action points in the case of civil cards, or by having left over military actions at the end of your turn in the case of military event cards.

I feel like the game has a good amount of replayability. There are 3 levels to the AI and so far I haven't bested the mid-tier AI. There are also many challenges to complete that often involve special rules. The game also has multiplayer (including asynchronous multiplayer) as well as pass and play. I haven't tried the multiplayer yet so I can't comment on it.

Through the Ages costs 10$, so it is fairly expensive compared to most mobile games, but well worth the money in my opinion. I feel like this game will become one of my favourite mobile games of all time. I am glad that there are mobile devs out there that are making quality games without any of the f2p trappings that are invading paid games. Take for example a new game called Iron Marines, the game is 6$ to buy, but it has an in game currency that you can buy with money or watch adds to gain. You can also get the currency through playing, I imagine it is a safe bet to guess the game is balanced in a way to make you want to spend money or watch adds to take away from the grind. I can't really fault mobile devs too much for adding that kind of garbage to their game since many consumers are unwilling to pay a fair price for a quality mobile game. I hope TTA and games like it do well so that we will see more like it in the future.

Blood Bowl 2 Legendary Edition came out yesterday.

It adds 8 new teams, mixed teams and a bunch of new options. The main attraction for me was the the new eternal solo league because I don't really enjoy playing the game in multiplayer.

The mixed teams let you chose from an assortment of team groupings, for example I made a team  that let me choose players from Amazons, Norse, Kislev Circus, and Lizardmen teams.

Unfortunately I have not had a great experience with the expansion so far, I have played 5 matches and 3 of them have ended in the game freezing or crashing. Looking at the tech support forums I see that others have been experiencing the same issues so hopefully Cyanide can come up with a fix soon because it is pretty much unplayable for me at this point.

Just a heads up to anyone who wants to use their XCOM2 characters in the DLC. You can load up the base game without the DLC through the launcher, export your characters, then go to where those were saved on your computer, for me it was documents/mygames/xcom2/xcomgame/characterpool/importable and then move them to the appropriate folder under XCOM2 War of the Chosen.

I was a bit worried at first when I booted up the game and my characters weren't there. I had mistakenly booted up vanilla xcom this morning before I had to leave to make a bunch of characters to play with later. I thought they were all gone before I figured it out

Stellaris is... wait... this isn't the Stellaris thread...

SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!

Ahem.

I just finished playing the Norsca campaign and it was probably the most fun I've had with the game yet. I think part of the appeal was that once you confederate the north your enemies are all south of you so you don't get overwhelmed when you're at war with everyone. I enjoyed their mixed roster of men and monsters. Even their throwaway units didn't seem like utter crap. My favourite unit would have to be the mammoth, stomping through Bretonian peasants was a gleeful experience.

Have they toned down the aggressive actions of enemy heroes? When I first played the game on release I was annoyed by how frequently they'd swarm me with heroes and spam abilities. It bugged me so much that I downloaded a mod to nix their ability to use offensive actions. But in my last playthrough without the mod it seemed very tolerable.

I had fun with the game, and I definitely felt that I got my money's worth out of it. I don't laugh out loud a lot when I'm solo gaming, even when something is genuinely funny but West of Loathing had me laughing now and then. The game lasted me about 12 hours, which is a good length for what it is, though I'd say I started skipping a lot of text in the last couple of hours. It ends in and abrupt and unsatisfying manner, but the journey was fun. The combat was pretty lousy but I was not playing the game for the combat. Finding secrets, solving stupid puzzles and exploring the zany West of Loathing world was the main attraction for me. Some puzzles lock you out of them if you fail, which was a bit of a bummer since the game didn't really feel like it warranted a second playthrough. I'd probably revisit it if they added some decent sized dlc.

I purchased the upgrade to unlock everything in this Little Planet of Mine because I was so intrigued by my initial 300 turn game. I played a bit of the freeform mode but I haven't really been able to grok the game yet. The game doesn't really explain much and you're left to figure out how to acquire a lot of the more advanced resources on your own. Which isn't really a bad thing, but it has stopped me from playing as much as I thought I would. I play mobile games irregularly and for short periods of time so I tend to get into games that don't have too much of a learning curve. Not that it seems overly complicated, it just seems like it will take some trial and error to suss out the resource system.

Another recent game I have tried is Demise of Nations. It is a free turn based strategy game with micro-transactions to unlock maps and some other cosmetic features (fancier custom avatars for example). You also have to use their currency to host (not to join) a multiplayer game. I think it costs 5 gold to host a game, but you start with 100 and you earn gold as a daily log in reward and for completing games. There is no cost to playing singleplayer. The thing I wasn't so pleased about is that it took my real first name as my username in the game and it would costs 250 gold to change it. It's pretty annoying that it used my real name instead of my google play games profile name. I don't use my real name for anything gaming related.

The game itself seems fairly interesting so far. However, I haven't completed a full completed a full game yet so I can't relate how it holds up long term. It is reminiscent to games like Civilization on PC but it focuses mostly on combat. There are some differences to the civ formula, for example you do not build cities, instead you capture neutral cities on the map to expand. Claiming more territory is as simple as walking your military units around the map. Diplomacy with the AI is also very simple, they offer alliances, they trade, ask for aid or threaten you not to war with their allies. Forging alliances with the AI seems rather easy, I was spammed with alliance invitations from my neighbours pretty early on. I was playing on one of the easier difficulties though, so that might have an effect on diplomacy. The combat is also similar to later hex based Civ games, you build units and run those units into the enemy units until they are dead. There seems to be a decent variety of units as well and they all have strengths and weaknesses (like mounted units are good against infantry and ranged units but vulnerable to spear units). There is also a weather system and units have different penalties associated with the weather (for example rain would affect your archers more than your spearmen). The game feels fairly aggressive early on, you start with enough resources to build a lot of units and you can use units you purchase the turn after you purchase them. There is also a tech tree but I haven't gotten far into it yet. I am not sure how tech works yet - I know some maps start in the Roman era, while others start in the modern era. What I do not know is if you can progress from ancient to modern tech, or if they are separate game modes with their own tech trees.

Maps seem overpriced to me, I have seen them range from 4-5$ (in Canadian dollars) for a map or 20$ (listed as 50% off 40$) for all of them (including access to modded maps people upload). I think you can purchase a random map generator as well (it is listed as a map, for 4$), but it is hard to judge how good or balanced that is since it is unofficial. The game comes with a map of ancient Europe and I also found a free map (as far as I can tell it is the only free map) of modern Europe on the store.  You can also pay for the maps with the in game currency, I have seen them range from 400-1000 gold. There is also an editor but it is only available for PCs, you can't edit them through the game on mobile. I have no idea how that system works yet.

The feature that attracted me to the game is the asynchronous multiplayer. I find it hard to game with most of my old gaming buddies due differences in schedules so that is a feature I value a lot in strategy games. The way turns work in the game is everyone takes their turn at the same time and the game resolves everything at the start of your next turn.

Microtransactions are by definition intrinsically bad?

Whose definition? Yours?

It certainly doesn't seem to be the definition of the vast majority of gamers considering many of the most played games out there are free and laden with microtransactions. But hey, feel free to wear your anti-dlc/microtranscation sandwich board and keep preaching while the rest of us enjoy some genuinely fun games.

Are any of the recent DLCs for EUIV considered "must haves" (I own all of them up until Mare Nostrum)?

There's a paradox sale on steam and I'm torn between buying HoI4 or catching up on EUIV dlcs that I don't own. I stopped buying EUIVs dlc when they seemed to be selling DLCs that added very little to the game for what seemed to be a rather ridiculous price. They've since jacked the prices up even more which has made buying them even less appealing. But there's a sale on now so maybe some of them are worthwhile?