Bay 12 Games Forum

So I picked up Time Break Chronicles in the latest steam sale. Short form, to crib what I put in a review, is it's like Siralim and Slay the Spire had a JRPG baby, that went on to get knocked up by Secret of Evermore's artistic direction and that popped out.

Node/path based decision making, JRPG style turn based fights largely hinging on your ability to mix and match stuff to break the enemy over your knee (though that's easier said than done with some of the bosses), town based metaprogression between individual runs, decently large (25, with 8 skills each, all of them with two levels of upgrades, and four potential relics/pieces of equipment that can vary pretty widely in effect) slate of characters with mostly-unique abilities already in game with more on the way (devteam's apparently aiming for an even hundo by the time they leave EA), aesthetics that are pretty campy, so on, so forth. Overall it has potential, least from the ten-ish hours I've sunk into playing already, which has unlocked/rescued all the available characters and beaten the last available boss once, but hasn't tried a second time in endless 1 because that last available boss is goddamn terrifying and just about party wiped me the first time I fought it.

To give an idea of what party construction looks like, my current main team consists of:

The MC you can't get rid of (but has three forms they can swap between more or less on the fly, and can borrow skills from other unlocked characters; basically, they're not a burden at all) that starts fights by resetting the turn progression of every enemy on the field (which anyone can do, but the MC can do once per fight for free, with an upgraded ability on their main form), then busts out a party boosting power ballad and spends most of the rest of the fight spewing poison and -poison resist on everything via a boss relic. I'm using them as support, but they can tank or DPS just fine.

The ranger you more or less start with that stacks up tons of poison (that, in addition to just damage, also slows enemies and makes them less dodge-y) on top of doing significant AOE damage and mildly bonkers single target. They also have a doggo that bites things just in general but also whenever she shoots something.

A post-apoc raider that spends 35% of the time uncontrollable, but sets everything on fire with molotovs, busts out a shotgun (hits entire front enemy line and reduces their turn progression), and occasionally opens up with an AK. Mostly, though, they just chainsaw things in the face repeatedly for huge damage after they set everything on fire.

A lizardman genetic experimentation I stuck a boss relic on that redirects most of their defensive stats into raw HP. It doesn't do huge damage, but it has respectable single target with some poison and mild AoE. Mostly it just sits in front and is a huge sack of health to tank hits with. Lately, I've also given them a relic that lets them get blitzed on whisky on top of making their attacks deal extra damage based on lizardcritter's (gigantic) max HP.

A medieval blacksmith that mostly just boosts up the ranger (or raider) a bit and lets them go hog wild. They're slow, but tanky enough and gives fairly significant damage boosts to my primary DPS, on top of dealing a bit of stun if necessary and being able to provide pinch defensive buffs.

And finally a plague doctor I'm trying for my main healer (I was using a priestess that gave one critter a 20% attribute boost and then spammed free healing spells the rest of a fight). They, uh. They infect my entire party (and eventually the enemy's) with what's apparently the black plague, then provides a party wide buff that massively reduces poison damage and causes them all to heal a percent of their max HP per stack of plague. Also got some nasty individual debuffs and a bit of clutch healing/status cleanse/revive going on.

They win fights by stacking fire and poison on everything and then hitting it until it dies. It's going pretty well

E: Oh, and everyone except the ranger who already has a doggo has a boss relic that gives them a pet giant spider that bites for poison damage (i.e. my aoe poison res debuff the MC is throwing around boosts their damage) and bites progressively harder the more they bite. It's probably not pleasant for an arachnophobe, but damn if it isn't effective.

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Retributive justice DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING POSITIVE FOR SOCIETY.

Horseshit. We punish plenty of things as retributive justice as a society.

Uh, doing something and doing it being anything positive are two different things. Like, I'm guessing this is getting caught up in an argument or something, but you and me both know there's plenty of shit society does commonly that just makes everyone involved fucking miserable to no benefit worth mention, if any at all.

The only arguement I've seen that retributive "justice" does fuckall helpful is the concept that without something, people are going to take things into their own hands. Other than that, literally everything I've seen that wasn't entirely discredited finds the shit is a net negative for everyone involved, from accused to victims to society. It makes worse criminals, generally does basically nothing for victims at best, and a weaker nation, just kinda' flat out. There's nothin' horseshit about saying it does nothing positive for society.

Air rubbed's probably like those air fryers they have running around these days. Rubbed with seasoning, cooked with post apocalyptic air fryer. Sounds fine to me, those things cook alright.

Bigger question would be what makes the rub, Qud ingredients get weird. Or the meat, for that matter. Occurs to me there should be a small chance on trying to eat something the food starts screaming and tries to escape.

E: Yeah... yeah. I'mma just go make a feature request on that one. Here's hoping

I mean, whoever owns the civ franchise more or less doesn't, I guess. Haven't played the newest ones to be able to say.

Indie/non-major developers are still putting out stuff as or more complicated than AC was, though. Even if the presence of that sort of thing has shrunk as a proportion of the market, the absolute numbers have either been pretty steady or expanded, so far as I've noticed.

I don't know of many kinds of games they don't still make these days (except friggin' ogre battle clones, damn everyone's collective eyes), really. What mainstream publishers don't put out smaller ones or hobby projects do.

I mean, yeah, here's hoping the plague doesn't actually kill you or cause any permanent damage.

By the numbers it's probably going to kill someone regular to the forum, if it hasn't already, and probably more or less cripple some, too, but... still. Y'don't want to see it happen

This is always an unpopular position, but I'm gonna raise it again anyway. If the US would just get with modern times and do their voting through a phone app, the results would have been tabulated and we would have known our next president 2 days ago.
We would also have had higher turnout, and less Corona spread.

And have disenfranchised somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of the population

2019 smartphone ownership stateside looks like it was about 81%. It's probably up now, but you'd still be locking a lot of people out. Something that could be done with regular cell phones would still cut out somewhere around one in 20 people. It's the old problem with getting the US up to modern times with a lot of things -- swathes of it are little better than a third world shithole, and are going to have trouble with infrastructure.

Having the option might not be the worst idea, though. I'd rather we just do automatic registration or somethin' (if you're a citizen of age you get the vote, flat out, no conditionals, no registration, no way to take it away or deny it -- you vote in jail, you vote on the streets, you vote overseas, you have citizenship you get the vote regardless of anything else) and make election day a bloody holiday already. On top of just mailing everyone we can reach a mail-in, postage paid, ballot. Etc., etc.

My comment wasn't about that stuff, though.  It was about somebody being snapped at for saying something critical of Biden, whether true or not.  I'm pretty sure Iduno is a Democrat-hating progressive like me, not a conservative troll?

I mean, at this point I'm not even sure, is the thing. I thought that, too, but a dem hating progressive would probably at least try to back up their shittalking, and this seems to the third time I can remember in recent-ish memory their reaction to being asked to bloody put up has been to go silent. They're certainly democrat hating, but what beyond that I don't bloody know anymore.

I'm personally pretty fucking sketch about folks equivocating trump and biden these days, though, for what it's worth. Disliking, even hating the dems is one thing, going that far is carrying water for the goddamn far-right.

Like, there is no wise choice.

Uh, yes, yes there is. One candidate has gotten a quarter million americans killed in just the last year. The other one hasn't!

Go with the one that hasn't lead more of the country's citizens to the grave in the last 10 months than the entire vietnam war. Shit ain't complicated.