I can't speak to the quality of the printed magazine, but whenever people wonder why I like the website so much, I have them watch this video for about three minutes:
I'll be spending some time this weekend EV training an Espeon and a Glaceon for my young niece in Pokemon Platinum. They're pink and blue which means they're brother and sister. And, before anyone tries to point out that Vaporeon is also blue, my niece wants to remind you that Vaporeon has a fishy tail, and because fishy tails go on mermaids, that means Vaporeon can't be a boy. So there.
I was hoping to wait until I could name them after the Gratchlings but she's getting antsy. Instead, I'm going with Bijou and Freon -- we'll just have to hope Gratch does the honorable thing and follows suit.
I'll be putting a bunch of time into Neverwinter, since it's a double AD weekend.
What happened with Devil May Cry?
As for me, an accidental war with The Green Offensive in Anno 2070 led me to settle a more defensible underwater plateau situated in the heart of my trade empire. It was powered by a hydrothermal power plant but, because I was distracted by all the attack hovercraft conducting guerrilla raids on my cargo liners, I never got around to installing the proper safety modules.
The resulting tsunami was apocalyptic. It originated in the dead center of my three most critical islands, annihilating everything in its path and throwing a million gallons of murky floodwater a kilometer inland. Katotown took it the best, with the water simply washing away the entire warehouse district where all the commercial goods were kept. I think the quay wall acted as a breaker so the tidal wave didn't penetrate so far past the shore.
Gratch Gardens is a wasteland. Not only did the tsunami scour its primary distribution facility and a half dozen farms from the map, it also critically damaged three offshore oil rigs so the ocean current carried a tide of toxic black crude with it. Even Wall-E couldn't survive there now.
I'd like to say I'm a skilled enough player to dig myself back out of this hole, but frankly it's hard to imagine. My people are starving, my economy is crippled, and any convoy trying to cross between islands is overrun by light skimmers. I think it's time to load whatever meager supplies I've got left onto my ark and put this graveyard at our stern.
Death is not the sentence my character would have sought. He's prepared to abide by the ruling, just as he would if the Legate had been found innocent, but he won't act as the executioner himself.
At noon, Grenus begins his defense of the Legate. He attempts no complicated legal arguments, but instead does his best to point out what he perceives to be flaws in the party's arguments:
1) The Legate can not be guilty of genocide, for he has not killed any dragonborn outside of the battlefield. He has sent dragonborn to be imprisoned, and bound them in such a manner where they could not use their natural abilities to fight back. "But who would not do this to their enemies? It's been done here, today, to the very man who is on trial! Or will you believe his arm simply fell off?"
The distinction is that while the Legate was targeting dragonborn for persecution because of their species, he has been targeted for prosecution because of his actions. We all had choices on how to act. He decided to go hammering spikes into the throats of innocent civilians; we engaged in the minimum level of force required to stop him and restore sovereignty to the free peoples of this land.
So was this misleading demo ever used again after E3? Was the same demo released to the public? Did all the marketing materials, advertising, screen shots, video previews, etc. reference back to this particular demo, or was this a one-off thing created for E3 then shelved? Asking because I honestly have no idea.
Without taking a stance on the merits of the lawsuit, I can say that yes, advertisements for Colonial Marines were using footage from the E3 demo rather than the actual game for weeks after the game's release. Here's an article about the UK's Advertising Standards Authority addressing the issue, and I personally saw my share of ads here in the US.
I'd love to help, but strange as it may sound, Symphony of the Night is one of the "Metroidvania" style games that I just cannot get into. I even retried it after getting deep into the Nintendo DS releases but something about it just doesn't hook me like other people.
Hopefully others are able to help, though. 74 posts since 2004? Yikes!
Quote from: Isgrimnur on May 04, 2013, 04:53:06 AM
Quote from: Autistic Angel on May 04, 2013, 02:03:04 AM
I *finally* found the ultra-rare component I need to build a single hydroelectric plant in Anno 2070. It's the best energy producer in the game, producing a vast amount electricity with minimal environmental impact, zero chance of disaster, and it slots into a space that cannot be used for any other purpose. I decided to build it in Gratch Gardens so I can tear down the solar plants and rededicate the space to new agriculture.
That's okay, that dam's going to be destroyed by Chinese hackers.
Boy, it better not be -- there might never be a replacement! I don't remember alwinic anion catalyst being this tough to acquire before. Either I've been getting profoundly unlucky with prototype development, or the Deep Ocean expansion dialed their frequency way back to increase the viability of the new hydrothermal power plants. I've got the technology to build one of those, but CeeKayvia has no tectonic vents for supporting one.
The tooltip also warns hydrothermal turbines can generate tsunamis. Given the CeeKayvians propensity for lighting their oil rigs on fire, I'm not sure I want them having access to potential doomsday weapons.
I *finally* found the ultra-rare component I need to build a single hydroelectric plant in Anno 2070. It's the best energy producer in the game, producing a vast amount electricity with minimal environmental impact, zero chance of disaster, and it slots into a space that cannot be used for any other purpose. I decided to build it in Gratch Gardens so I can tear down the solar plants and rededicate the space to new agriculture.
I've also started construction of the Eco monument which I set as the victory condition for this map. It's a big undertaking, requiring something like three hours to complete if there are no production stoppages, so I'm not certain if it'll be finished this weekend.
I've been playing some more Anno 2070, but it turns out all my plans for hydroelectric power are hopeless without some alwinic alion catalyst. It's one of those super-rare components you can't ever build, but have to earn through missions or find in sunken ruins. Thankfully, the highest tiers of Eco faction technology unlocks some really stupendous solar farms. They take up a ton of space, but you can drop them anywhere without fear of a meltdown.
In the meantime, I've been able to raise Gratch Gardens to gaia-like status with some weather control stations and ozone scrubbers, and added some nice corn farms for fueling servbots. CeeKayvia has also been expanded with lots of high-level mineral extractors and a couple reprocessing plants for manufacturing microchips from the submerged cities of the old world. One of the new Deep Ocean additions is an underwater receiving dock that takes up about 60% the space of a regular underwater warehouse -- they're really great for making the most of every plateau! Now if I can just convince the workers to stop lighting the oil rigs on fire....
My next step will probably be to start building the Eco faction monument. I'll probably need to settle a new island just to produce the necessary tools.
Short of having Elena wake up from an extremely tedious nightmare to realize the original vampires were a figment of her subconscious and will never be discussed again, segregating their terrible storyline into a different series is the best possible outcome. Long live The Originals, in a time slot far, far away!
Between the Stone Crows, the Mist Tribe, and assorted other factions we've encountered, it seems clear the Prepotency's talk of peace and reconstruction was propaganda to cover their violently racist doctrine and demand for complete capitulation from everyone they encountered. We've witnessed all manner of brutality from their troops, especially against dragonborn like Kriv, and we also know they put down any form of disagreement with military force. Any good they might have accomplished in the meantime, such as allegedly chasing the undead out of Tiam Krey, is secondary to the fact that they were fueling their conquest through the subjugation of innocent civilians.
Gratch got me back into Anno 2070, so I've been tooling around on a sandboxy map to explore the newer stuff introduced in the Deep Ocean expansion pack. Several of my islands have the elevated lakes necessary to build hydoelectric dams, so researching those blueprints has been my most recent goal.
We should probably spread the word among the townsfolk that we intend to put the Legate on trial for his war crimes so they can provide depositions to the prosecution or defense. The outcome won't have any legitimacy if the people feel their voices aren't being considered.
Of course, we should also leave someone in charge of oppositional research, ferreting out if anyone siding with the defense might have personally benefited from the Legate's rule. Associates of that trading gnome, for example, or collaborators who gained favor by exposing suspected dissidents to the Prepotency. They're all welcome to testify, but we'll want someone with a credible Streetwise score to investigate their backgrounds.
Otherwise, my character is ready to return to Cratertown, too.
Does Terraria really count though? Minecraft is a game about collecting materials from the environment, refining them, and building things with them. Terraria appears to be about digging around aimlessly in total blackness, dying to hazards you cannot see, and forever wondering whether iron tools would be better than stone tools because it isn't worth making them to find out.
That's what I learned from the Giant Bomb Quick Look, anyhow. And I hardly think someone as responsible and diligent as Brad Shoemaker would shortchange a game if it had anything to offer.
Did anyone find any info on Comstock's wife's past? In all her voxophones she seems to imply that she has a very dark past that Comstock has forgiven.
Spoiler for Hiden:
The "terrible past" that Lady Comstock alludes to throughout the game appears to be a big red herring. As far as I can tell, her worst sin was being exceptionally beautiful and happy to accept attention from many different suitors.
Comstock, however, was able to convince her that she was reveling in the biblical sins of pride and vanity. It was only through his infinite patience and forgiveness that she could be redeemed into a virtuous lady worthy of sharing his bed.
That's the reveal: the glorious forgiveness Lady Comstock frets over in those audio logs turns out to be, in fact, a lifetime of withering guilt piled on her by a man who claims to have the inside track on the fate of her immortal soul. She really is a true believer, right up until his "bastard child" mysteriously shows up.
Quote from: Gratch on April 10, 2013, 07:09:22 PM
Quote from: leo8877 on April 10, 2013, 07:03:15 PM
Spoiler for Hiden:
That last "wink" is when it fades to black though so you don't really know if she did continue to exist or did not. I think it could very well be interpreted that the fade to black means none of this came to pass and once he died they all vanished.
Spoiler for Hiden:
I thought she did wink out at the very end (the last piano note before the credit roll). Didn't she?
No. It's interesting how many people think they see that, and I don't mean that in a negative way at all. It's like the people who swear Bruce Willis exchanges words with the mother in The Sixth Sense, or who claim to have seen the contents of the box in Se7en. Those moments play up your anticipation so expertly that imagination overwrites memory.
(That totally happened to my memories of Se7en, by the way.)
You can see the ending in question, starting about 5:45, right here:
My personal take on the post-credit bit, by the way:
Spoiler for Hiden:
Upon returning to the river, Elizabeth explains to Dewitt that the only way to eliminate Comstock from every possible reality is to take away his choice. By drowning him at the instant he would have decided whether or not to accept the baptism, no version of Dewitt can possible choose to go through with it. The flip side of that coin is that he can never choose not to do it, so every version of Elizabeth winks out of existence.
Except that very last one.
I believe that Elizabeth, now fully in control of her powers, was able to create a single exception: one timeline in which her own father had not been baptized. This is who you are in that post-credit bit: the same Booker Dewitt you've been playing all along, but thrown forward into a reality formed by Elizabeth's fading wish.
Of course, you don't actually see Anna returned to her crib in those final seconds, so it's really just conjecture. I think it ties together all the moments in the game where she expresses her belief that her powers are a form of wish fulfillment and, sometimes, she's looking at alternate worlds but actively generating them with her desire. And in that river, she wanted to be with her father very much.
Just finished. Trying to wrap my brain around that ending...it isn't working too well. Looking forward to reading the spoilers in this thread.
It took me a couple hours myself, especially once I realized how far down the rabbit hole some of plot elements go. There were a few "Oh, *that* explains it!" moments.
I think it's impossible to understand the ending without discussing the beginning, so here is my understanding of the story in its entirety. The first thing you read inside the spoiler tag is a critical spoiler.
Spoiler for Hiden:
Following the massacre of Native Americans at the battle of Wounded Knee, a veteran named Booker DeWitt is besieged by his conscience and seeks absolution from a local preacher. He undergoes an anabaptism, being dunked completely underwater in a creek to signify his readiness to wash away all his sins, and rededicates his life to the gospel of the Lord.
As part of his spiritual rebirth, Booker DeWitt changes his name to Zachary Comstock.
Meanwhile, a brilliant physicist named Rosalind Lutece delves into the realm of quantum mechanics and begins successfully experimenting with particles that defy the normal laws of physics. The most obvious result is the invention of the "Lutece Field" which allows infinitely heavy objects to be suspended in mid-air. The United States congress commissions her to use her invention to levitate an entire city into the sky where it can serve as a roaming beacon for the American way of life. War hero and rising religious magnate Zachary Comstock is selected to be the leader of Columbia.
The Lutece Field, however, turns out to have several unexplored side-effects. First, it begins to thin the barrier between worlds, creating small momentary "tears" in specific areas that reveal visions of other times and places. Comstock mistakes this for divine communication and comes to believe the Archangel Gabriel is rewarding his devotion with the gift of prophecy.
Rosalind Lutece continues her experiments and comes to discover that they are, in fact, glimpses into the alternate timelines of parallel universes. She uses modulations in the field to begin trying to communicate with these alternate realities and makes contact with another version of herself. Or, almost: Robert Lutece is the same person, experimenting with the same technology in an different timeline where the difference of a single chromosome caused him to be born a man. The two Luteces combine their genius to vastly expand the scope of their work towards stabilizing doorways between dimensions.
Perhaps as a result of the Luteces' work, Comstock catches increasingly vivid peeks at timelines in which Columbia becomes a nation unto itself, raining righteous judgement down upon the surface of the earth. He becomes obsessed with fathering a child after realizing that the common element in every vision is that the future Columbia is lead by his daughter. His holy quest, however, is frustrated by the fact that prolonged experimentation with the Lutece field has rendered him completely sterile.
The Luteces' success at bringing Robert through the dimensional barrier to join Rosalind in Columbia provides Comstock with a new plan: if he cannot sire a child of his own, he'll take one from a version of himself in an alternate universe. Literally the daughter he never had.
Robert and Rosalind isolate a timeline in which Booker Dewitt backed out of the baptism, decided there were no fresh starts in life, and never took the name Comstock. He married instead, but when his wife died during childbirth, his depression fueled a gambling binge that left him deeply in debt. Robert crosses the threshold and brokers a deal to purchase Anna, Dewitt's daughter, in exchange for eliminating his gambling debts.
Dewitt agrees at first, but consumed once again by his guilt, he chases down Robert Lutece and confronts Comstock as they are taking Anna through the portal into Columbia. They struggle and the infant's pinky finger is severed by the closing rift.
Comstock renames the child Elizabeth and explains the sudden appearance of an heir by crafting an elaborate myth about his wife bringing her to term in a single week. This is effective at cementing his rule as one of divine lineage...except for the fact that his wife becomes less and less content to play along.
Bringing up Elizabeth presents its own challenges. Unbeknownst to Comstock, leaving a piece of herself in another world has granted the girl the ability to manipulate space-time tears at will. At first it's small things, such as changing the color of a book cover or transforming coffee into tea, but even as child, Elizabeth starts showing signs of being able to change reality at will. Comstock attempts to keep her powers in check by locking her in an immense tower where the Lutece Fields she generates can be constantly siphoned away until a more permanent solution can be found.
The city of Columbia formally secedes from the United States after Comstock responds to the Boxer Rebellion by annihilating Peking, China. In the years that follow, interdimensional rifts begin to appear in elsewhere in the city, causing technological breakthroughs to come at a haphazard rate as inventions from alternate worlds are reverse engineered by members of the populace. Jeremiah Fink perfects the assembly line using slave-wage labor ahead of Henry Ford. His brother becomes a shockingly prolific composer, producing hits like Cindi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" decades before their time. Plasmid and Big Daddy technology taken from Rapture are used to produce a secret police force called the Raven Society, mechanized workers called Handymen, and an enormous winged sentry called Songbird.
The silent conspiracy around Elizabeth's birth begins to unravel when Comstock's wife threatens to go public with her belief that the child is the result an affair. Comstock has her killed, pinning the murder on a house slave named Daisy Fitzroy, and decides to preemptively take down everyone else who knows the truth. This includes Cornelius Slate, an old army buddy who fought at Wounded Knee and becomes embittered by Comstock's constant self-aggrandizement. He plots to expose Elizabeth as Comstock's illegitimate child after dicovering Lady Comstock's diaries.
Slate, Fitzroy, Elizabeth, and Dewitt himself do not recognize Comstock as an alternate Dewitt because, as one of the audio logs explains, a lifetime of intense vision seeking in the Lutece Fields has aged him prematurely.
Comstock also tries to kill the Rosalind and Robert Lutece by sabotaging their interdimensional doorway, but rather than dying, the twins splinter and begin existing simultaneously in a multitude of possible realities. They examine the various probabilities and decide the best chance to set things right is to employ an unbaptised Booker Dewitt to rescue Elizabeth. Dewitt is yanked from his reality, scrambling his memories with a flurry of coexistant possibilities in the process, and left at the lighthouse beneath Columbia with instructions to bring the girl back to New York.
This is where the game begins.
Over the course of the campaign, Elizabeth uses her burgeoning abilities to make some pivotal changes to the timeline, revealing this is not the first time the twins brought Booker Dewitt to Columbia. During one other attempt, for example, Booker never encountered Elizabeth but instead fell in with the Vox Populi and died a martyr to their cause. One of the audio logs also *insinuates* that Songbird is guided by the slaved consciousness of an alternate Dewitt which would explain its single-minded protectiveness, but it's left ambiguous.
The bizarre side effects of her powers suggest that she's not entering another dimension, but rather collapsing two similar realities together in ways that are driving the citizenry mad as they try to reconcile conflicting memories.
In the final act of the game, Elizabeth is seized by Songbird and returned to the tower. When Dewitt tries to follow, he is pulled into the year 1984 by an aged and weary Elizabeth who grew up to be the great destroyer Comstock always envisioned. She reveals that he successfully broke her, shackled her powers, and she has spent a lifetime saving up enough to give him a clue on how to control Songbird.
Dewitt and Elizabeth destroy the Siphon, unleashing a massive wave stored quantum energy and fully restoring Elizabeth's powers. Now capable of weighing every potential outcome of every possibility, she creates a nexus point in the river where Dewitt -- presumably *every* Dewitt -- is drowned in the river. No baptism, no gambling, and all the possible Elizabeths wink out of existence.
Then that post-credit thing happens. At that point, your guess is as good as mine.
I was going to recommend that we have Smiler and one of the anti-Prepotency shardminds receiving asylum from the Stone Crows testify in the trial anyhow, so returning to Cratertown would be my character's vote.
No, everyone, pay more attention to me! What a bold, discerning maverick I am, forging against the tide of popular opinion to denigrate my betters! Anyone can score a game against contemporary standards, but only the most cunning of auteurs can transform a game review into a sweeping commentary on industry marketing by holding the finished product up against the fantastical expectations dreamed up while gorging on pre-release spoilers for the last three years. OVERHYPED ARGLE BARGLE!
Now get out of my way! I'm off to participate in a panel discussion about the philosophical themes in Bioshock Infinite! Obviously, every miserable failure of effective world-building and competent storytelling deserves a forty minute deconstruction of the inspirations drawn from Koyaanisqatsi. I just hope there'll be a good opportunity to connect phrases like "reductive verisimilitude" and "vomit waffles" in conversation so I can underscore the intelligence of my critique without losing any street cred. Someone stencil "Senior" onto the start of all my business cards!
Weapon upgrades? Come again? Durr, I though all the vending machines sold exactly the same thing so I just ignored them! Even the ones with totally different color schemes and sounds. Thank god my inability to comprehend basic gameplay elements has zero effect on my opinion or, apparently, my credibility!
Oh, what's this? "Extremely High Voltage!" Well, I don't need safety gloves, because I'm Homer Sim-
God, what a tectonic sack of burning trash this game is! I haven't looked through this thread yet, but I pity anyone who was either too stubborn or too dim-witted to suffer through this festering banana feces for more than a dozen hours.
First of all, who does Ken Levine think he is?!
Secondly, every goddamn gun in this game feels and behaves differently. Think the pistol and the hand cannon are basic palette swaps of one another? Nope: they're actually different weapons with distinctive handling, upgrades, and ammunition. This means every weapon in the game requires a subtly different skillset and, unlike a game Command & Conquer: Renegade, you're constantly forced to weigh the pros and cons of your arsenal. Awesome, thanks Sherlock! You can also only carry two guns at a time because your character is some kind spineless coward.
Booker Dewitt? More like Booker Deshit!
Then there's Columbia. Sweet Christ in sauce, where do I begin? My cousin went to Columbia. It's in New York, not the fucking clouds, and believe it or not the students there are able to make it to class without getting brassed up by the fuzz. What kind of scrimshaw moron would build a college in the sky when the ground is right here? I guess that's the kind of question you forget to ask when you're more concerned about making your setting artistically attractive rather than relevant to the plot.
Thirdly, plot? Who can tell? The pacing is over the place! One minute you're fighting for your life, and the next you've won a harrowing firefight and are left to explore the environment or head towards the next story point. If you're lucky, that is -- the enemies are constantly splitting up so one group can draw your fire while another tries to flank your position. Blunderballs! Oh, and you better try not to get killed because some notary actually thought it would be a good idea to penalize you for dying! I'm playing this game on Hard, and I swear to God: if I had a dime for every time I had to replay a section of the game, I wouldn't be nearly so thirsty.
The left mouse button controls the weapon in your right hand because that makes perfect sense. Oh, unless you're using an X-Box 360 controller, in which case it's the right trigger. These fucktarts really put the "irrational" in "Irrational Games!"
Secondly, I don't know who designed these levels, but I hope Jean-Paul LeBreton lost his job over this. Has anyone ever been more in love with making up new shit for every environment in the game? Who is going to take the time to notice the dropped balustrades in Soldier's Field lack the bronze casting and normal-mapped ornamentation present in the Lamb's Tower when they're being shot at, asshole! And don't even get me started on the technical flaws in this engine. One time, while Elizabeth was
Spoiler for Hiden:
singing,
she stepped in front of a
Spoiler for Hiden:
candle
and for a split-second the corona made it look like the light source was shining through her body. Z-buffer, much?
When Bioshock came out, everyone agreed it was so awesome that trying to make it into franchise would cheapen and degrade its impact. Then when Bioshock 2 came out, and everyone agreed that was incredibly awesome as well. But you know what literally nobody ever said? "Golly, I hope if they do a third game, they set it in a college in the sky in 1912 and make it one big escort mission with a brunette named Elizabeth!" This is, by definition, a sequel no one was clamoring for, and anyone conflummoxed enough to actually like it should cram it with walnuts.
Firstly, I would honestly rather ride shotgun with Harrison Ford behind the wheel than play one more minute of this so-called game. Dammit! For succeeding wildly at everything it sets out to do, and being an unconscionable failure at every thing else, Bioshock Infinite gets a ten out of ten, out of fifty.
I was thinking Adara could preside. The people of Scaleport might balk at the notion of an outsider running the trial, but I think once we explain how little interest kadnod's wife has had in the events of the campaign, they'll agree she would be the epitome of an impartial jurist.
My character still prefers the order of a trial for the Legate's brutality over more impromptu solutions, and doesn't trust him to follow through on any other deals he offers.
Are we playing again tonight, or is this the night Arkon was going to be away on his trip? I know Arnir is away next week....
The battery in the 3DS XL provides marginally better battery life than the regular 3DS, even with the larger screens. Just like the original, "Sleep Mode" means the unit is still constantly polling the local wireless bands for StreetPass and SpotPass content, as well as measuring vibrations for the internal pedometer. It drains the battery something fierce.
I always turn my 3DS completely off when I'm not using it. That makes a big difference.
The reason I like the Dancer is that her abilities effectively let you select a stance for your party. Facing off against lots of guys? Use the one that gives you free counter-attacks for every attack they do. One big guy with lots of defense? Perform the Attack Tango to maximize your damage output. It makes your whole group a lot more versatile, and she's no slouch in the direct damage department herself.
Quote from: Autistic Angel on February 19, 2013, 12:30:51 PM
I'll be amazed if this game couldn't be had for $30 within the next next four weeks. That isn't a commentary on the quality of the game, but with an average completion time of about 4-5 hours, Revengeance seems like the ideal game for near-immediate GameStop trade-ins and GameFly rentals. Retailers who stocked up on the promise of flashy trailers and a big name franchise are going to be slashing their prices pretty early, I bet.
-Autistic Angel
Looks like I was completely wrong, by the way. I think the $10-$15 savings you can find through Amazon is the most substantial deal I've seen on this game since release.
By comparison, Crysis 3 which launched the same day and has all the standard multiplayer hooks, can be had on any platform for half-price through Origin right now. I'm not surprised about that turnaround at all, but the fact that Revengeance hasn't deigned to join it -- yeah, that's kind of amazing to me.
I strongly considered this game during last week's B2G1 sale at Target, but ultimately decided against it due to middling reviews. The direction of posts like these make it all the more certain that I'll wait until it's $30 or less so I can at least shoot up the campaign.
Quote from: Gratch on February 17, 2013, 09:16:54 PM
7. Do characters have the ability to change classes, or will I be recruiting a huge pool of different class characters who each have a particular use? (EDIT: Found this video, which explains the class thing a bit. How expensive and/or rare are these seals that allow you to switch?)
As you unlock more areas of the map, you'll soon discover shops which carry a regular stock of Master Seals for upclassing and Second Seals for sideclassing. They're expensive relative to most other items, but well worth the cost considering the benefits they unlock.
Picked up Etrian Odyssey IV yesterday. I've always liked the idea of these games, but the crazy difficulty turned me off. Hoping the "Casual' option will help.
Who are you recruiting for your party?
In the demo, I used a Landsknecht for physical attacks, a Fortress for defense, a Dancer for offensive buffs, a Runemaster for magical attacks, and a medic for healing. Seemed like a solid group, at least for that early content.
I think it's too complex for my tastes anyways. Figuring out the relationships between all the buildings just gave me a headache, and I was very early on. Maybe I'll go back to it later, but I'm a little too brain dead to try and figure out something like that right now.
Anno 2070 makes the supply chains easier to follow than in previous games by showing you the refinement map right in the interface. Click on Tools, for example, and you'll see that you need coal and iron to feed the smelter that feeds the tool factory.
What the game does *not* tell you is that a single smelter running at full capacity will provide enough iron to sustain two tool factories, or that two basalt extractors are required to fuel a single construction module compressor. For reasons that escape me, the designers continue to believe that discovering these ratios through trial and error is an integral part of the franchise. It isn't much of a hassle, especially when learning the game on Easy where you can demolish buildings for a full refund and rearrange them as needed, but you can also take a glance at one of the production calculators to save a bit of time.
The game also does not tell you how many fisheries are required to feed 12,000 citizens, or how many communicators you'll need to be producing to keep them happy. This, I would agree, *is* a big part of the game, encouraging measured growth while you acquire new land and establish secure trade routes. There are plenty of supply calculators for that stuff too, though, and using them won't diminish the satisfaction of housing 10,000 content Tycoon Executives.
Important tip: You can speed up the game by holding down the '+' key on your number pad, or slow it down by holding the '-' button. I don't think the tutorials ever cover that, and they're *extremely* useful when you're waiting for a particular delivery or need to respond to four things at once!
Anno 2070 might not be for me. For starters, it isn't playing well with my system (3 CTD and one hard lock within an hour). I'm also having trouble figuring it out. On the second tutorial mission, it told me I needed to connect my depot to my production facilities with a road. I tried drawing a road every which way to link the two together, but it wouldn't recognize that I had done so.
I just played the first two campaign missions and I'm not certain which part that is. Is it possible you were drawing the road to your City Center instead of a Supply Depot? It wouldn't be hard to mistake one for the other, at least until you're accustomed to the stark line Anno games draw between population and industry.
Had a city builder itch but the latest SimCity looks like a disaster, so I picked up both Settlers 7 and Anno 2070.
I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on both games. They're both excellent, but couldn't possibly be more different from one another.
Settlers 7 is very goal-oriented. Your job is to win the game, and with several viable routes to choose from, your goal is drive down one of them as hard as you possibly can, hopefully while throwing up a few roadblocks in front of the other other players.
Anno 2070 is much more like SimCity: a robust economic simulation where you're free to play any way you see fit. In Continuous Mode, the primary gameplay mode, it defaults to having no victory objectives at all -- just build and expand and research for as long as you like. Or, once you're comfortable with the mechanics, you can create a game that's swarming with violent pirates and aggressive players to blast into submission.
I spent over a hundred hours in Anno 2070 finishing the campaign and several Continuous games under various objectives, and I didn't unlock half of the rewards in the persistent research tree. That was before Deep Ocean expanded the Tech faction even further -- it's an *enormous* game!
Quote from: Jimmy the Fish on March 15, 2013, 11:09:06 PM
But shouldn't there be at least some percentage of traffic that still takes the straight dirt road since it is the most direct patch? All traffic ends up completely ignoring the original path entirely which seems weird.
It's easy to miss due to the game's Depth of Field blurring, but if you look carefully down the dirt road you'll see that it's still bumper-to-bumper farther down. It's possible that new cars will take that route once it's been cleared. There's something to be said for the idea that drivers shouldn't be able to see that congestion and would choose the dirt road out of ignorance, but at this point I think excessively intelligent traffic would be a nice change of pace.
It starts with a fully congested dirt road leading straight to a convention center, and when the player adds a multi-lane avenue curving around to the same destination, the cars begin to realize the less direct route is faster and favor it instead.
Quote from: msduncan on March 15, 2013, 03:48:59 AM
...the city sizes are tiny for ZERO reason, and the sims having identities were absolute lies.
Actually, I feel like we finally know exactly why the city sizes are so small. Pathing problems and identity-free sims are strangling even minimally complex neighborhoods now. Can you imagine what would happen on a map five or six times as large? Every single fire engine in New York City simultaneously converging on the same unruly barbecue?
Some guy on YouTube named HalbyStarcraft (link) has been putting up a series of videos demonstrating various experiments, like getting a city up to about 500,000 residents without building any parks or mass transit options at all. I watched a couple last night. A few takeaways:
1) Sims reach maximum happiness, and therefore expand their homes to maximum density, by completing the following routine every day: get hired at the closest job, return to the closest home, shop at the closest store, and return to the closest home by nightfall. As long as those steps can be completed in each day, none of the other amenities matter.
2) If your city offers more jobs than their are sims to take them, commuters will be spawned from off the map to fill them. If traffic congestion keeps those commuters on your roads through the start of the next day when the job sites try to hire again, the region will automatically replicate a massive wave of new commuters to fill theoretically available jobs and choke the roads even further. *Never* have more jobs available than your local population can fill.
3) Avoid 4-way intersections at all costs. Traffic seems capable of routing through T-intersections, but a single 4-way stop along a heavily trafficked route can bring the entire transportation network down.
4) Streetcar stops can service a maximum of 300 sims. Streetcars themselves, however, have an infinite capacity, allowing you to place five or six streetcar stops right next to each other so that 1,800 people can ride to work in the same trolley.
Quote from: wonderpug on March 09, 2013, 10:13:35 PM
Definitely not there yet. And I'm a bit scared by what I've been reading recently about the game AI. Apparently the sim car pathfinding may be no more complex than "take shortest distance route," with no regard to street sizes or existing traffic.
Yeah, based on videos like this one (LINK), the pathfinding is shamefully broken. How can a game centered on the value of civil infrastructure ship with an AI that completely disregards congestion?
The new patch notes include a note about optimizing traffic for complex road sections. Does anyone know if fixes issues like this?
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