/vr/ - Retro Games

Which Civilization?

Later Civilization installments would eventually get around to adopting some elements from Alpha Centauri, like government civics.

Here's some things entirely unique to AC though:

- Storyline that ties directly into gameplay in several ways, whether you like it or not.
- Height values for tiles instead of just "hill" and "mountain". This played a crucial role in gameplay.
- Terraforming. Raising or lowering terrain. Ability to build and sink land bridges across water.
- Fungus.
- "Barbarian" faction responds to eco-damage instead of being entirely random. They also only spawn in fungus squares and move faster through them.
- Supply Crawlers.
- Sea bases.
- "Barbarian" faction capturable depending on certain values. One faction is designed entirely around this practice.
- Psi combat.

Overall, the game is a huge clusterfuck. It's well balanced, considering the amount of wild shit you'll encounter, but it's the easiest game to break and viciously rape in the entire Civ series.

>>607352

Yeah, I just skimmed through the post. I'd feel stupid now if I wasn't so arrogant. So instead, let's forget this ever happened.

>>611306

This. Dropping ten maxed out Bile Demons and just watching them let it rip in a narrow corridor. But really, everyone has to admit that DK2's approach was an improvement in terms of challenge. Now you have to rely on traps more and time your creature drops instead of just stomping everything to death until credits.

>>607172

It's rhetorical.

Posting Maia over War for the Overworld is weird.

>>607032

Ha.

How's this for a spiritual successor?

https://wftogame.com/

I tend to prefer DK1.

DK2 is objectively better -- a lot more balanced and challenging. However it's -- as you said -- much slower. Another huge minus is the lack of some cool creatures that were replaced by some really generic crap. I mean, where are the bipedal librarian dragons? Where are the beetles, spiders? Tentacles? Instead -- what? A fucking dark elf and rogue? That's some severe bullshit. A lot of the appeal of DK is in raising these quirky, unusual things, nobody wants a fucking "rogue".

The atmosphere is great in both games, but DK2 is just a bit more generic and that steps on my particular toes.

>>560023

Agreed. It seems that in their yearning to add a lot of features, they've forgot to do a good job of balancing them. It's not just crawlers. Unit like chopper has no business being in this game, especially since it's so stupidly cheap.

>>556452

rawr :3

>>556347

Well, that's uncalled for.

>>554086

I bear the burden of intellectual and overall character superiority.

>>553605

Some pretty compelling arguments here, so I'll address them all individually.

>Drones are pretty interesting
I think this is kind of subjective. Some people find generic Bolshevik-esque caricatures interesting, others think they're generic Boslhevik-esque caricatures.

>Svensgaard is an interesting concept.
I think this is kind of subjective. Some people find generic pirate caricatures interesting, others think they're generic pirate caricatures.

>Aki is cute
Well alright, I'll give you that. After all, the most important thing about an Alpha Centauri faction leader as a philosophical archetype is that she should be cute.

>Manifolds
They are interesting but that's not enough to mask everything else wrong with the expansion.

We talked about this several dozen times already. The new factions would be a lot more interesting as offshoots of already existing factions that happened sometime in the future after planetfall. They're not, so they're not only boring and pretty one-dimensional, but also retconning the story for no reason.

>>483526

Always count on being backstabbed. As soon as the enemy or a "friend" sees poorly guarded cities, they'll move in on you.

>>474442

Always remember to kill Yang first.

>>473659

I'm playing through Bioshock Infinite right now and it's pretty much exactly what I thought it would be. Entirely hamfisted, forced and yet strangely cynical. As if the writer was intentionally stooping down to the audience's level and intentionally choosing not to be subtle. It's condescending. The game is basically a big billboard so far. The fact that the themes explored are incredibly stale and likely chosen precisely to preach to the self-important choir doesn't help one bit.

It's like they took Bioshock and everything wrong with it and made it even worse.

I do prefer the Halo-esque gameplay to the wants-to-be-SS2-but-is-failing-miserably vibe of the original. They really fucked the pacing severely though, by forcing me to scavenge the battlefield like a hobo instead of making item pickups instantaneous like common sense would imply for a fast paced shooter. That's irrelevant to the topic at hand though and I don't want this to turn into a Bioshock thread.

>>473614

How about fiction that effectively reaches to a place that's not big or complex or even extraneous -- something very simple and dormant within everyone?

I find that best I've read/played/watched gives rise to something that's already there rather than necessarily introducing something new. Take The Positronic Man for example. At first glance, it seems like an exploration of something decidedly "out there" given the subject nature, but ends up making you examine things you already knew. Or rather, things you thought you already knew.

>>473535

Nobody's asking for critical examination of complex issues nor is that synonymous with good writing per se.

Just give clever people a pen. Grim Fandango does not revolve around any complex ideas. It's a story about a reluctant antihero on who finds himself in a quest for redemption. The narrative and even the setting itself supports that wholeheartedly, but unlike certain other stories, it's never pushed down your throat. The story establishes the idea of a "four year quest through the purgatory" right away and then circumstances align in a way that ends up being exactly that. That's incredibly powerful right there and yet it's so simple. It would end up cheesy and hamfisted under a less talented writer. The characterization is fantastic too and the characters established as comical archetypes like Lupe are never one-dimensional billboards saying "you should laugh now".

It's like someone said earlier in the thread -- how you tell the story is more important than the story itself. You don't need to beat the audience over the head or even communicate anything particularly heady, you just need that spark that makes your characters and their situations *alive*. If we could put down on paper the exact formula for this, a monkey would be able to do it. With that said, I'm pretty sure most AAA studios hire trained monkeys.

>>473417

Whenever I think it's all nostalgia, I hit up youtube and check out a few scenes. I always get floored.

I know it's just a few more years until I finally forget the puzzles and get a relatively fresh playthrough. It's already been a decade since my last playthrough though and I can't forget anything.

>>473392

Suck my cock.

>>473305

>Wadjet Eye Games

I've been meaning to check out their stuff for the longest time now but I keep putting it off and doing other things instead.

Do check out Waking Mars. The gameplay is not quite as deep or complex as I thought it would be but it's oddly addicting. The atmosphere is great too. Overall, damn good game.

This is all fine and well, but I just really want honest-to-good witty games like Grim Fandango and Bloodlines. Takes a special kind of person to write that kind of shit.

>>473080

You want to tell me you found something rivaling Mitsoda's wit in Bloodlines?

I find gaming in general is filled with humorless and even outright unintelligent people, both in development and the audience. Frankly, I don't even actively bother, so maybe something likable did crawl out of the underground.

Waking Mars was a recent surprise. Not because the writing was particularly mind shattering but because it served it's point, was understated and not actively bad. The game didn't try to be funny, dramatic or smart, the script was natural and the voice actors handled it with ease. I know it sounds like nothing much at all, but it's a rarity in video games.

>>473050
>I don't think so, because being worked just doubles the effective mineral burden for ecopurposes. No minerals, no burden.
So, how do worked farms and solar collectors cause more pollution than the unworked ones?

>Centauri preserves just reduce ecodamage in the forumlae somewhere, you don't HAVE to have blooms, IIRC.
You have to have blooms. From the forums:

>(b) the "clean mineral" limit can increase. Every fungal pop and every tree farm, hybrid forests, centauri preserve and temple of planet built after the first fungal pop increases the clean mineral limit.

>that means that tree farms and centauri preserves doesn't improve the clean mineral limit(except for terraforming with the tree farm) if they are built before the first fungal bloom of the base?

>That is correct.

I still don't even have an inkling what the fuck is going on, but there you have it, it's a part of the game. Somehow.

>What stuff? I'm curious, it always seemed like an almost perfectly designed game barring crawlers.

Here's a few off the top of my head.

Copters.

Poorly implemented height mechanics without clear visual indication of where energy gains increase, forcing you to inspect every tile individually. This is boring and long enough in single player and you're boring two people in multiplayer. I'm patient and understanding when it comes to min/maxing, but some people aren't.

Beginning of turn shenanigans. This was a problem in other Civ games too, where skipped alerts cannot be accessed later. They should have been pop-ups on the side of the screen like in Startopia.

The governor can't manage citizens properly. It's the only reason anyone would ever use the governor, but unfortunately, it doesn't account for population growth. So yes, avoiding drone riots is keeping a mental check of when the game mechanics cause drones to pop up, manually checking each base every turn for growth and switching citizens to doctors if necessary. This is tedious even in tiny maps.

>>472798

Yes, I knew all that, but your summary is not complete at all. Here's the key questions.

- Say you have a farm with a road over it. Say you're working it. Does the road now count as being "worked" even though it provides no yields?
- The necessity of a fungal bloom to make facilities like Centauri Preserve start making a difference. This makes zero sense and I didn't even know it was in the game. So they make no difference until your eco damage starts causes your first fungal bloom in your base limits. Riiight. So, after that happens, does removing that fungal bloom with your formers stop the preserve from working? It's not only vague but a bullshit mechanic in the first place.
- Why do boreholes outside of your city limits still cause warming near specific cities? When the game says "boreholes causes warming near Butthole Central", is this because:

1) The borehole is being worked by that city.
2) The square that turned arid is simply within city limits.
3) I swear I saw squares outside of city limits change because of boreholes and the game still said "square near Butthole Central changed". Is this simply a matter of proximity?

I don't really mind because Alpha Centauri is quite a gem in the rough filled with tons of unbalanced and poorly implemented bullshit. I love it regardless.

>>468697

Yes, that's why you build boreholes just outside of city limits. In my recent Huge playthrough, I had two big dedicated patches of boreholes that a magtube lead to. My own borders were littered with quite a few boreholes as well, but only in squares that no city borders occupied.

I studied that datalink entry quite closely and it still reads like the ramblings of a severely demented individual. I'll never make sense of it.

>>465853

bb i just buy the ascend

u smalltime

>>465562

... The quality of this thread would increase dramatically if we started namedropping philosophers?

I'm just fine using my own little head.