T w e n t y S i d e d
This Friday, Josh and I (and maybe a few other people) will be streaming Civilization 6. I don’t know if he’s going to play multiplayer, or just a straight game against the AI, but I’ll be there to comment and heckle as needed.
Just a reminder that Josh is the one that enjoys PvP and playing against Godlike AI, while I’m more of a “put the game on easy and stomp the AI” kind of player. As I improve at the game, rather than facing off against more difficult AI, I try to beat the same AI by increasingly larger amounts. I dunno. It works for me. Don’t judge.
At any rate, you’ll get to see the latest Civ game and listen to at least two very different perspectives on the series.
The stream is this Friday, October 21st, at 6pm Eastern time. There’s a timer below to count down to the event. Hope to see you there.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Looking forward to these one.Ive watched a bit of TotalBiscuits streams of the game,and so far I like it.It seems to be better than the V.
Check out ManyATrueNerd for more if you’re interested, he’s doing a play as well (preview copy), and he’s fun to listen to :)
I have the same philosophy about strategy game AI as you, though I will turn it up slightly as I get better. I hate losing to AI but I sure love stomping it. That’s even more true with friends in a versus AI co-op.
I’m fairly well down the middle. In some games I love the challenge of a God AI (preferably one that doesn’t cheat too much), but in other games I like to be overpowered and stomp them into the ground. Sometimes it can be the same game in both cases :)
Eh, I find that ridiculous AI can be interesting some of the time. Legendary Shogun 2 runs were interesting because the best character was the ninja because he could watch the settlements of the enemy, removing the fog of war and preventing them from getting their free stacks of units from high level difficulty.
This is age of empires 3 for me. I can usually crush 7 maxed out ai players in free for all.
I like playing the highest level of AI that is fair (doesn’t get mechanical benefits when it it putatively playing according to the same rules I am).
When it’s harder because it gets free stuff, I feel like I lost because the CPU player got free stuff. And typically that’s true.
I like to stomp the AI every once in a while but if I get really good at a game, I do like to turn up the difficulty just to see if I can do it. Otherwise, I don’t like dirty stinking cheating AI because then I feel like I should be cheating. :P For the 2 civ games I’ve played, I tended to keep it on the default AI and then see how much I can get ridiculously ahead of the timeline because nothing says “Historically Accurate” like defeating United States spearmen with my Roman tanks…
Personally I like the very high difficulty settings in 4Xs, but there’s a point at which AI cheating gets to be too much. You can generally turn the difficulty up to 6/8, and the AI will get a large boost to its production, but if you squint enough, it can still look like you’re playing a fair game. Turn the difficulty all the way up to max though, and it doesn’t just become harder, it becomes a fundamentally different game. Civ 5’s max difficulty AI starts with three cities instead of one. Endless Legend’s max difficulty AI takes nearly zero expansion penalties, spreading across the map like locusts. Pretty much every 4X gives the AI so much bonus production that its economy can never go negative and a warmonger AI will out-research a tech-focused human.
The AI no longer feels like they’re playing by the same rules, and you can’t defeat them by simply being better at managing resources. The situation is so asymetrical that winning strategies no longer feel, well, strategic, instead focusing on pressuring the AI’s areas of incompetence, or the chink in its +100% To Nearly Everything armour.
These games aren’t designed for whatever exploity nonsense you need to employ in order to beat a max difficulty AI, so I prefer to stick to max difficulty minus one, where the playtested, fun gameplay loops are still viable.
This is why I like the story from Red Alert 1, but skirmish games from Red Alert 2 or Generals. They have better AI, so it doesn’t need to cheat as much. :)
I still say Generals is the best C&C game, although RA3 was a hell of a lot of fun. ^_^
Generals was good (though the expansion introduced some balance issues), but it lacked the charm of RA2, and I found RA3 tried too hard to match 2’s tone. RA2’s music was also the best of the series.
I miss westwood.
Amen!
Amen
I think we can all agree on one thing, though…
C&C 4 can die in a napalm fire.
Oh god, the problems with 4.
“We don’t have enough of the MOBA market. Let’s take a franchise that doesn’t appeal to MOBA players and make it more like a MOBA by taking away the things that appeal to the core audience that has been built since the RTS genre was established. ”
“Good idea, but I don’t like that MOBA games are so balanced. The better player always wins. Let’s make one faction significantly better so that they always win unless the other players are dumb.”
I didn’t even get that far. Started the first mission in the GDI campaign on the easiest difficulty, which was an escort mission, and every time I attempted to do pretty much anything the AI would use the unit type that was best against what I randomly picked and the match was a constant stalemate.
Then again, that was years ago and I’ve gotten much better at games in general since then. I’d try it again, but that would involve reinstalling C&C 4.
Are you talking about warcraft?
Damn, I’ll be out of town that day and in an area without an internet connection.
I am totally on Shamus’s wavelength when it comes to playing against the computer. Higher levels stink of AI cheating, and on easy levels I can recover from my own stupidity. A game is supposed to be FUN, and that’s the way I have fun.
But I am much depressed by the apparent awesomeness of Civ 6. It looks a lot better than Civ 5 (which I thought deeply disappointing), but I’d have to buy a new laptop to play it, and I can’t afford to do that. That leaves me playing my Civ 4 mods (Rhye’s and Fall, and its spinoffs) on an old XP installation.
So I’ll be standing ten years in the past, watching with teary eyes as everyone else goes racing off into the future …
You could have fun playing stuff from twenty years in the past! Plus, it’s available on GOG[1] for less than a cheeseburger[2]!
[1] Plus the original!
[2] Apparently, there’s a 75% off sale right now!
Heh, thanks.
But if we’re going that far back, the one I really want is SimLife!
Master of Magic’s my choice.
I get bored if I have to easy a time against the AI, so I usually go max difficult on turn based strategy games. The RTS part of Total War is tricky for me though, so I play those one notch lower than max.
I’m not going to judge somebody that does it differently. I just find that I play the game longer if it makes me rage in frustration a few times before I get the hang of it.
Aughhhh, I’m really torn – I love watching your livestreams, BUT I’ve been looking forward to Civ 6 so much that I’ll probably be spending my whole day (after I get home from work) playing it : P
Curses, gotta make a first world decision : (
Why not do both?Put the game in a window,park it on the right bottom,turn the volume down,and then play the stream on the left.
Nobody should ever be shamed for playing a single player games on easy difficulty. The aim is to have fun, so it doesn’t matter how you do that.
Yeah, I’m planning on replaying Deus Ex on my vacation next week, on friggin’ easy or medium difficulty. I played it on one of the harder modes back in High School, and it took me like, two months worth of weekends to finish. :)
Oh, my god, the timer, I cannot … I … *stares blankly at seconds ticking down*
Not to talk about boring meatspace, but did you pick Pitt because you live near there? I went to school less than an hour out of the city and loved it.
Correct. I also live about an hour from Pittsburgh.
So now I’m wondering where you went to school. Most of the schools are right beside the city: Carnegie Mellon, Chatham, Duquesne, Robert Morris, etc. The only one I know of that’s “about an hour” away is Slippery Rock. (Grove City is more like 1.5 hours.)
Over the Ohio in Steubenville. Small, conservative Catholic school.
We used to come in to “civilization” in Robinson Town Center, or to check out Ikea. Man, I miss Ikea.
Kinda hate those ‘famous’ sandwiches Pitt has though, Permanie Brothers, is it?
Is the stream going to be available afterward? I( ask as this is probably the first stream I’d like to watch, but won’t be anywhere near my computer at the designated hour.
It’ll probably be on the SW YouTube channel like the rest of the streams and stuff. :P
I see that Rutskarn is not involved,so it will most likely be saved afterwards.
As for whether Josh will ever put it on youtube later,thats a different story.
Hey, I have a pretty good track record when it comes to that!
Good to know! Any idea on how long it takes to hit the Youtubes?
If you’re looking to add people who haven’t been on before, I’m the person who wrote the rather atrocious review for Beyond Earth’s expansion on The Escapist. :P
I can only really get into the flow state of play when I’m winning – a setback will often make me ragequit. (Even if I can recover from it, I mentally calculate whether it would be quicker to spend an hour rebuilding what I lost or going back to an earlier save.)
My main use for harder difficulty levels is to ruin the game for myself. When I’ve got too addicted to something, I start playing it on a level where the frustration exceeds the pleasure. (Not necessarily on purpose; it just sort of happens. If I’ve beaten it on Emperor difficulty, it feels weak to go back to an earlier difficulty.)
I think that’s called the Tetris Effect or something.
Isn’t that when Tetris takes over your brain and you start seeing everything in terms of Tetris shapes ?
I’m thinking of when you get to the higher speeds and then lose, and it seems like the game’s going in slo-mo when you start again because you’re used to those high speeds.
I don’t enjoy the easier difficulties less because I win too easily. I enjoy them less because my ego requires me to be able to tell myself, “I’m clearly a genius because I can win Master of Orion 2 on Impossible difficulty” and I can’t do that if I play it on “Hard” difficulty.
Sorry if this is answered somewhere else, but where will you be streaming it, and can I have a link please?