T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[Kofiman]

That's a fair point.. I was thinking of new scenarios, that is ones that nobody has seen before, but I can understand that point of view.

I also remember playing it with my siblings growing up via hotseat, so I know some kind of multiplayer is possible.

But if it's solved and too simple, well, that's a problem.

[abuzeus]

I hadn't heard of Factorio; I don't really pay attention to whatever's hot on Steam at the moment (FTL and Jamestown were exceptions.)  It looks like an open-sandbox type of game, which don't really appeal to me since yeah most things you can do are just a function of time invested.

Maybe what I wrote came out a bit wrong: While Factorio is generally pretty sandboxy, there is a defined winning condition (advancing through the tech tree and launching a rocket). People just choose to play past it. Speedrunning the rocket might be of interest to you - doing that involves a fair bit of planning, and it's short enough (current world record is just under three hours) to not be a total drag. I'm not quite convinced the overall genre is for you, but if you haven't settled on a new game to play, might as well give it a look. It's certainly a well-executed game.

[yuris125]

Pirates, FTL, and FF5 are all soft-real-time, you can pause as much as you want so real-time reaction speed isn't a factor.  I like to say they're turn-based with turns progressing as often as you want.

This is an interesting criterion; you would't consider They Are Billions a turn-based games, would you?

[T-hawk]

I'm not familiar with that. Is it an RTS like say Starcraft?

Just to be clear, I'm not calling the games I listed turn-based. I'm saying that strategically they can be treated as such. If you think you have strategic limits to what you can execute because of their real-time-ness, pause more often and you don't. I don't think that would hold for a classic RTS, and to put my finger on why, I think I'd say that the determining factor is if you're constrained by input speed, by APM. I've long wanted to play Starcraft at the speed of thought. If we ever get Neural Grafting and Mind-Machine Interface like SMAC says, that's the first thing I'm doing with it.

[yuris125]

I'm not familiar with that.  Is it an RTS like say Starcraft?

It's a single player RTS, where you fight zombies pre-placed on the map + waves which spawn outside the map. Its big selling point is the built-in pause, and the game is built with it in mind. You can build when paused, and if you make a mistake and delete a building placed during while paused, you get fully refunded when you delete it (only 50% refund once it actually starts building). You can set targets for your units when paused as well, pretty much anything. It makes sense to have a pause at the heart of a game which is not supposed to be have multiplayer (which I imagine wouldn't be easy to do when the game would have to sync thousands of zombies across all players - 'billions' is of course an exaggeration, but in an average playthrough at the highest difficulty you would kill abouit 35k zombies). It is an RTS at heart, and those who play at the highest level pretty much always play with no pause and often with a variant on top of that. But it being pausable does mean I can be ok at this game. Unlike Starcraft, where I don't find practising the mechanics and increasing the APM fun

Just to be clear, I'm not calling the games I listed turn-based.  I'm saying that strategically they can be treated as such.  If you think you have strategic limits to what you can execute because of their real-time-ness, pause more often and you don't.

Yeah that's exactly it - great point They Are Billions definitely is an RTS - but it is one suitable for TBS players who don't have particularly strong RTS mechanics - it can be played as a TBS too

[T-hawk]

Fine, you guys wanted HOMM, here's a HOMM writeup, we'll take it out to the Gaming Table.  http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=9329

[TheHumanHydra]

Thanks for the read, it was very edutaining!

[darrelljs]

As in my speed transcend report, I set up to finish the game on the same turn as discovering the last tech.  In my second-to-last base in production order, I ordered up any secret project, and upgraded a hovertank crawler to put 450 minerals into it plus added one other regular crawler.  In my last base, I also ordered up any project, and now upgraded four rover or hovertank crawlers to 400+ minerals each and added them all to the project too.  Finally, I set up my third-to-last base to build anything just in order to get a popup for the UI to jump into the production sequence at the right time.

My favorite trick in a game filled with great tricks !

Darrell

[Zherak_Khan]

Fascinating thread. Playing Hive is very interesting, with their unique take on drone management and high support, but their slow research makes getting blocked by cannot-choose techs really frustrating.

Have you tried rushing economic victories? I have tested a bunch of games in SMAX and I don't think there's that much difference. It's basically a rush to Planetary Economics plus banking some credits (generally just the minimum 1000 if you're fast), sort of like a toy version of the fastest transcendence problem.

[T-hawk]

I haven't tried that. Thing is that ends up being very dependent on the AIs, both conquering useful bases for yourself and getting some tech trades. And the economic victory is subjectively pretty arbitrary and unsatisfying, like I also found Civ 5 post-BNW cultural and diplomatic victories.