181–190 of 204 posts
I assume the circulating camera motion in the menu is still there. It annoyed me that the movement was jerky and didnt seem to use vigh precision math, but actually it had to do with the upscaling of the graphics which happens at the last stage of the rendering pipeline, iirc.
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OpenMW (for TESIII:Morrowind) is amazing . Strictly an improvement on the original. Far more stable—I finished the main campaign and several major side quest trees with a bunch of mods active and experienced zero crashes, which is unheard of with the original engine—and somewhat better-looking. Runs just about everywhere. It's great.
Does this run with Steam?
Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games. * Civilization 1, 2, and 3 had "stacks", but if you kill one unit in the stack, you kill ALL units in the stack. As such, "death balls" were incredibly fragile, one well placed attack kills the whole stack. * Command and Conquer has infantry, which get rolled over and instant-killed b…
Wasn't the grenade infranry pretty good against tanks in C&C? I remember building them en masse. Also, in StarCraft you could save groups, with 1-5 you had 60 units. I remember building masses of the same unit in these games.
There was never any sort of deathball in the same sense of SC2 protoss and massing a single unit was a good way to get stomped in mid to higher levels of play.
One thing i remember best about the original C&C is a gorgeous installer [1]! Being one of the first games that came on CD, I thought it is the standard of the things to come. Unfortunately, the future disappointed: every other game came with a boring windows installer. [1]: https://youtu.be/cioyLQ2O6yc
You download a thing, and click it to run it. No messing with a package manager or installer, no dependency hell, nothing but the software you wanted to run.
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Do you have a source for the 12-unit cap being a game shaping design decision?
There's some good analysis here: https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/526252-newbie-question-about-...
I'm familiar enough with SCBW to have played on ICCUP (albeit as a D player)
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FreeCiv has largely succeeded in making a "more fun" Civ2-like environment. They've backported some things from Civ4/5/6, like hex-maps, culture, and also changed some mechanics to better interact with these backported items (Democracy's "Deployed Troops" penalty now extends to your culture-zone, instead of cities/fortresses only, which makes sense). FreeCiv in general suffers from outdated UI-choices. QT-client solv…
> Is the use of arcane constraint-solvers part of the metagame? If deployed for free so that everyone can use them, is that fair? Mu. An experienced game designer should have the perspective here that this part of the game is just a tedious bore. 1. The computer can calculate the optimal placement of citizens in a fraction of a second, and a micromanaging human will never exceed the best results. He can only find the…
During war, gold is useful in Civ as it can instantly create units. But science is better in the long run (a heavy science build can get ironclad battleships by 0AD in game time)
The FreeCiv governor is a solver where you input your goals (maximize science vs maximize gold) and then the solver solves the optimal placement.
But it only works if the human gives it the right goals.
Even with a science focused build, a city in rapture will generate more science. But do you solve for rapture conditions? Or do you solve for science optimization?
Is there a key science that will increase happiness (temples, banks, colosseums?). Is so, maybe having a short term science focus for some +happiness is going to be overall faster.
What if one city has more gold buildings? Should this city use the same solver as the rest of your cities? Or do you want this one city to focus on gold and let the rest of your cities handle science?
If the solver fails to solve for your conditions (ex: no starvation is a common solve condition. But maybe my enemies are pillaging my farms and starvation is always going to happen now...) How does the solver react? Should it reduce starvation as much as possible? Or should it stop and point out the problem to me?
Maybe I can't rely on food supplies in that city and need to build caravans to import food from a nearby city. The governor doesn't have control of units, only of the city. Maybe I need gold in my other cities to buy caravans to send food to the starving city, while far away cities continue to focus on science.
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EDIT: It should be noted that the Governor can sometimes be unhelpful. For example, if you have two cities within a rare "whale" tile (whales are one of the best tiles in the game), only one of those cities can benefit.
The governor of the two cities will fight for the whale, meaning one city will randomly not get the whale.
In such "fighting" situations, you disable the governor, then manually choose which city gets to work on the whale-tile, and then turn the governor back on. The governor is only "locally optimal". It still requires the player to make globally optimal decisions (ie: a bad choice for city B means city A benefits more, and maybe you have multiplicative bonuses in city A (due to trade routes, buildings, specialists etc. etc.) who can benefit from the whale more than B ever could).
Choosing to make "city B" play suboptimally is a strategy, to make your overall civilization more powerful. The governor doesn't have such insight, and must be disabled entirely in these situations.
That's what makes "using" the governor so hard. Its "just" a locally-optimal solver.
I play this 3-4 times a week. It's like therapy for my brain. Simple, hypnotic, perfect. Tiberian Dawn, Skirmish 1v1, Me GDI against the CPU is my jam.
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There's some good analysis here: https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/526252-newbie-question-about-...
That speaks to it being a game shaping, but not being an intentional design decision. I'm familiar enough with SCBW to have played on ICCUP (albeit as a D player)
Starcraft / Starcraft BW is very unusual as far as early RTS systems go, capping at exactly 12 units. When all your peers allow for infinite selection, and then you come out with a design that only allows for 12-unit selections... its clearly an explicit design choice.
From there, we need to reverse-engineer the reasoning behind the design choice.
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I too was a D player on Starcraft:BW. So much training and effort and yet only got to the bottom ranks...