Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[beatbandito]

Yeah, seems like setting up either a short play session or dedicated server should be easy enough. All info is galaxy (sever) based, so if you start something offline and host it, anyone can interact. And if you do a play session with a friend whoever has the save can keep playing alone.



Hopefully the last update screenshot, as I've been obsessing a little too hard lately. The Boom Tube design evolved into it's ultimate form as a carrier and gunship. It's only at 50-60% of the maximum size for all systems upgrades, and limited in arms currently (based off turret availability still), but the goal is totally decked out in automated cannons and railguns with one or two full fighter squads to sit in place and decimate most enemies before they get in range.

The issue is, at this size and without barrier materials, even with the artifact warp upgrade it does not make sense to try exploring around mass signatures for wormholes and such and wait like 2 minutes for each jump. So that little chunk on the bottom of the tube is the first of potentially two "fighter" crafts that can be kept docked, while keeping room for the thrusters and even some cargo container space. With my current resources the tube is still my main ship, but eventually I'll do most of my play in the fighter and call in the big guy with AI if I run into anything too big to handle alone. Everything docked, the big one can already jump nearly a fully zoomed grid at a time, and that's with a lot of room left for warp drives, and only an exceptional grade upgrade for distance.

[Mongrel]

Due to both the game's design and the fact that "real-life physics just works like that, my dudes", The Boom Tube is a very common shape for ship design and even those who get fancy still very often end up with a ship much longer than it is tall or wide.

[beatbandito]

I was definitely limiting myself based off the area of an integrity field generator. Once I reached the point of nearly limitless trinium supplies I got better about placing them where they were needed and not worrying about unused space, instead of building a ship around them. But I'm no good at designing for design's sake. The new smaller craft has a few little armor spike legs trailing it, but in the main body I basically only want like a half-mass layer over space being used for systems. And since almost all systems are rectangular blocks only, and wont even function if one dimension is at half-mass, you basically end up with a giant block of systems no matter what, and have to cover it with layers of armor until suddenly you need to open it back up to add more gyros and engines to compensate for the weight. Plus, while I was planning more of a standard shuttle nose on the tube, having one giant slab of armor I can delete in one click to fly back inside where all the systems are lining the sides in one layer and can easily be replaced as needed is very nice.

I'm sure once I have avorion resource, or my fleet gets big enough I'm basically only making dedicated task ships instead of adding improvements, this will solve itself. But it is a bit of an annoyance. I was reading a lot of the news they've posted on the planned 2.0 update. Looks like that will solve a ton of the map and menu UI issues, hopefully they'll make it a little easier to modify placed blocks, too.

[Mongrel]

If you want to get into modded content and don't really care about making your own personal designs, there's thousands of ship designs in the Steam Workshop you can add to your ship library. A lot of them are designed for ease of rebuilding and many are modular. Loads of them are beautiful and highly functional (I still generally build my own, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I've also taken workshop mods and retrofitted them to match my designs somewhat if I'm being lazy or in a hurry - for example if I salvage a wreck, since the game's randomly-generated ship designs are still pretty shit).

My best tips for being able to reconfigure internals are to colour-code internal blocks in some colour you're not using decoratively (probably bright colours, unless you're a big fan of the Chris Foss school of starship decoration), and making heavy use of the type or colour selection tools.

A lot of experienced shipbuilders tend to start with a large shape covered with thin armour plate and fill it with coloured framework (very common in Workshop designs), which allows you to fill in in a ship's internals as needed.

The 2.0 update has me really excited to start a new game, so I'm mostly waiting on that. Overall the theme of 2.0 seems to be about making the game feel much more like you actually command a fleet of starships rather than playing a 4X game where you're doing complex commands (if any) through laborious interface commands. After 2.0 player ships should have much more individual personality thanks to the Captain revamp which is basically adding an entire package of more complex and adaptable ship AI.

It's really cool because they really did release a game which was kind of bare bones but is rock-solid in its implementation, so now that they're starting to work on giving things more personality and flavour, they're cracking open the vast amount of untapped design space they've set themselves up to have. I'm hoping for a "Factions" update as one of the next big things.

[beatbandito]

I actually had no idea about the color choice thing. But while looking for that (of course select by color is in the color menu instead of the select menu) I found the "view" options which made things easier again. The first big improvement to the build system was realizing that setting down to C on ship controls also broke what should have been a functional copy/paste control.

I have so little problem with mods I've been using them since before I found Swoks. Telling the player to look in the titanium-iron belt as the only instruction on a map with thousands of sectors is like a cruel joke. So I got the map mod, then the resource display, AutoAI, and No Independent Targeting Penalty. All of which looks like will be integrated into vanilla features in 2.0, which is nice. Also I realized independent targeting is pretty useless outside anti-fighter weapons, because the only ships I want to target for me are the ones too bulky to line up shots while being strafed, and hey, I can just pop out of those to let the AI take over and do full automatic fighting with stronger weapons anyway.

As far as using stock ships, I downloaded a couple copy how they rotate the corner pieces to get smooth shapes and edges, but I wouldn't use one as a standard. At this point improving the ship design is the game, basically, if I had a perfect design ready to be converted to avorion for the best possible medium-craft stats I would be bored to tears only focusing on building stations right now.

I've finished off the story bosses, and ran into two of the secret bosses by accident while I was doing it, giving me a little bit of Ogonite from salvage, before I actually gathered enough ships to activate the gate. The issue I'm still running into right now though is processing power. Either I'm a small quick craft that doesn't have enough processing power for good warp jumps, or I add enough processing power for 1-2 more upgrade slots, and now I'm a medium-large craft that loses most of the maneuverability. Since the mining ships could also easily be outfitted as warships with the number of processing slots for turret placements, and I plan on having the remaining 3 ships I need for the gate activation to be defensive fighters like my player ship, I'm considering turning The Boom Tube into just a warp ship with 10 warp drive upgrades that can get across the map, dock my ship, and haul it back to the destination. One thing I would love to see in 2.0 that I haven't seen mentioned is some kind of AI control to dock smaller ships to bigger ones before any jumps. Would take the last bit of manual control needed on the rest of the fleet, and letting me play the game like a single-ship pilot who gives command orders to a fleet, which is perfect for me.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, basically everyone thinks the independent targeting penalty is asinine, since really, you can only control one set of guns at a time, so having your point defence guns be penalized unless you manually aim them is just stupid. Thankfully the game designers now agree AND this also paves the way to fully automated gunnery being possible in the vanilla game if you want that (which is fine!). I still like to control the main guns on my flagship, but it's good to make that optional.

As for upgrades/processing power, I'm guilty of using hypercubes (which can actually be any rectangular shape). There's a workshop design that's nothing more than 10/20 nested framework cubes, which can be made manually either through glitching or editing a ship's file. If you incorporate those into your ship you can pack a LOT of stuff into a smaller space. It's sort of a borderline cheat, but I don't think it actually crosses the line because the mass of the blocks still exists and you're not creating something which bends the laws of physics - it's just a construction method which lets you increase internal density. They still need power, they still affect your manoeuvrability, etc.

Hypercubes do give you some real advantages though, mainly that you can upgrade smaller and mid-sized ships by changing the internals, rather than just building them larger (this was especially important to me because I build EXTREMELY ornate fancy-nancy, block-intensive ships, and changing their external size is a horrifically complex process). They're pretty crucial if you want to create functional ships which have elaborate shapes rather than just slabs or boom tubes. One more thing about those is you generally want to select and edit each hypercube nest as a group, rather than having variety within a given nested object. Otherwise it's too easy to forget what's what.

The way in which hypercubes push the edge the most is probably the way they let you concentrate more thruster power at the very edges of your ship, but even this you could do conventionally just in a very ugly way, possibly making your ship shaped more like a bone than a boom tube. Which reminds me that another thing I learned later rather than sooner is that thrusters (plus braking blocks) >>>>>>> gyros for manoeuvrability. Gyros are a bit of an easy trap because they take up a very low amount of space to give you a good effect, and they're useful in this way for big lumbering cargo or mining ships. But if you actually need combat flight capability, oodles of thrusters placed as far out as you can are a must. There are diminishing returns no matter what, but you can push them a bit further than you might guess, getting destroyer flight capabilities out of, say, a cruiser, or cruiser capabilities out of a battleship or carrier.

Also, if you get the purple/unique warp upgrade (forget which boss drops it... the Smuggler, I think?) that helps a lot, plus that boss is easy to farm, IIRC. And in the 2.0 expansion they're shortening the distances added by warp upgrades BUT are simultaneously streamlining and adding a lot more automation to the process of long warp jumps (basically you're just going to order the ship to go to the end destination), so that should improve the experience of long-distance travel enormously. With the unique hyperdrive I never had a ship with more than two slots dedicated to warp drives.

EDIT: Another trick for easy hyperspace travel which exists in the current game is to have a captain on your flagship, switch to any other ship you own, and then issue remote orders for your flagship to travel to a specific destination. You'll need to plot the path of travel on the starmap, but you won't have to manually make each jump or sit there for every sector load screen which saves you a lot of IRL time and boredom.

[beatbandito]

The issue is the mass, not the size. The Boom Tubes topped out at just over a mile long before I retired the design and it wasn't enough of an issue to start worrying about my mid-sized fighters (also saving space like that on iron inertia dampeners takes away basically the one thing I'm really waiting for in avorion). I'd just like to see the 8th and 9th upgrades open up more like 9k and 12k, instead of 12k and 19k. I'm getting over that with the x4 turret slot mod (had been using the more based turrets based on mass, but have gone full sicko mode to just finish the game without doing another full mining and upgrading cycle for an even stronger fleet) and this handy one that saves like 4 slots of secondary stuff you still want on even small ships. There's also a version with a wreckage highlighter that I like in theory, but it used the same shade of purple as neutral factions that makes seeing anything in a busy sector hell.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, you really need to be farming the unique upgrades hard to get your main ship/ships properly kitted out, which I find is kind of annoying if you want to play that aspect within vanilla restrictions.

For the little utility things that that mod combines, I actually didn't mind manually swapping out two or three in an upgrade "Flex" spot (usually defaulting to the scanner, because duh). Obviously just having a mod combine them is easier.

What I found way harder and more annoying was finding weapons which were good enough at all to scrap and blueprint to equip my ships so that they'd be able to push into deeper sectors - especially since the enemies just skyrocket in capabilities starting next to the barrier.

There's a mod (can't recall the name) which lets you scrap found turrets to improve the stats on existing ones, so you can spend a while improving a single turret to some pretty robust specs and then do the sac-for-blueprint option. It felt pretty fair and balanced because the returns were low and incremental (just shy of being an actual grind), but also based on the quality of sacrificed turrets, and also you could never change the basic underlying type of the turret. You COULD however add Automatic Targeting without a damage penalty, so I didn't need to add a separate mod just for that. Bonus!

So it was an excellent use of those exceptional/unique etc. grade turrets with crap stats, while you were still better off just selling the junk ones or mashing them together in the randomizer at a science station and then scrapping the results for your upgrade project. But you were still pushed to explore and loot, so as to get better material base turrets to start with, especially for mining/utility turrets.

I also liked that it still left you with some significant in-game constraints, as compared to the custom turret builder mods, which are pretty much just god mode turret design as long as you have the resources to build what you design (which is seldom the bottleneck for turrets).

EDIT: Ah, found it: Weapon Engineering

[Mongrel]

If I put the images in this thread, I'll drown it, so I just made an imgur gallery of most of the shit I made: https://imgur.com/a/V0iBfwk

There's a few more quick conversions I didn't finish, including an actual mining carrier (converted workshop design again, but a huge ship so loads of detail required - will have a pit bridge, like a Star Destroyer) to see how they play and if it was worth making an original-design one.

I also have a couple stations in a key chokepoint sector with a wormhole in it, which is great for trade, but the stations are just recoloured workshop stuff from a modular set which fit my fleet.

But that's basically my fleet. I think it's something like 3-4 frigates as the core (one was a semi-failed experiment with hangar bay containers, but the frigate is just too small to make that work), 15-ish corvettes, 2 freighters, 7 bulk miners (I went for mining over trade) and 5-6 assorted orphan utility ships (freighters, scouts, other frigates). Nothing really large other than the bulk utility ships, since my faction was really more of a corporation than a geographic entity.

As I mentioned, I had hit the barrier but then got bored, since I was investing massive amounts of time into making cool ships which didn't have much to actually do (since the unique missions were/are so few and bland) and the thought of making a fully dedicated military cruiser or destroyer as my new flagship just sort of exhausted me.

2.0 should pour in a lot more content though, so EXCITEMENT.

[Friday]

Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth is a wonderful but small game.

I imagine the design team had a conversation something like this when brainstorming what game to make next:

"What's your favorite game?"

"Oh, probably Symphony of the Night."

"Yeah SotN rules."

"I also love Ikaruga."

"Oh man Ikaruga. What a great game."

"I also love Deedlit. More than the other two."

[nosimpleway]

loop hero is a really good way to lose eight hours without realizing it as most of the internet has made clear over the last week, but i come here bearing important news beyond "idle-deck-builder-rogue-lite is good at wasting your time and you should play it probably?":

open the goddamn variables.ini file before you do anything else and change "game speed" from 60 to 120. you can go even higher/faster if you want, but the game desperately needs a 4x speed function and switching it functionally from 1x/2x to 2x/4x will make those eight vanishing hours even more full of lich-killing goodness.

Have I told you lately that Iove you?

wait hold on


That's an infinite loop. A few reloads to get a path where every tile could be surrounded by road lanterns, then surrounding all the tiles with road lanterns, and putting Ruins in the middle so I get various stuff for walking over them. Took a couple tries, and the successful attempt pictured took about two and a half hours of play to set up.

(The River and Thicket tiles were necessary to fight past Omicron and Sigma.)

Getting this to work is probably more satisfying than fighting the final boss, which I haven't done because I got distracted trying to find out if an infinite loop was possible or if it got hit with an obvious nerf somewhere like trying to top off Evasion does.

So thank you, Niku, for pointing out that it's possible to manually set the game to "fast enough that the graphics rendering kind of has trouble throwing all the little icons into your inventory" while I go do something else for a little while. I'll come back to this, upgrade all the buildings in camp, and come back for an actual game-ending run later.

Since taking that screenshot, uploading it, opening a Chrome tab, finding this page, and writing this post I've accumulated 6000 orbs. Game's currently at loop 400 or so.

[nosimpleway]

If you spawn a Battlefield next to the road, then enemies in nearby tiles can spawn ghosts when they die. Ghosts can themselves spawn ghosts when they're defeated, a wailing, counterattacking ball of ectoplasm called a Ghost of a Ghost. When I saw that there was a Ghost of a Ghost, then checked the ingame encyclopedia and saw that there was a blank spot immediately after it, I presumed that there was something along the lines of the Ghost of a Ghost of a Ghost.

This is indeed the case. It's called a Prime Matter, though.

"Hey I finished the ingame bestiary" isn't worth talking about, except that I'm pretty sure I got my first Prime Matter because it spawned from the Ghost of a Ghost that spawned from the Ghost that spawned from a Shattered Skeleton that was left over when I beat up a regular Skeleton that was, presumably, left over when a person died.

So it was, if you consider "ghost" an acceptable term for "corporeal undead", the ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a person.

[Niku]

ghost of a ghost of a ghost is what ended up killing a lot of my late game runs where i got too cocky

man i want a big meaty loop hero expansion to have more excuses to play it. i ran through all of the gimmicks i could think of by the end. one very dumb fun one is stacking enough mirrors to reflect all magic damage and then load up your entire map with lightning towers.

[mharr]

This is MTG Solitaire, essentially?

[nosimpleway]

I haven't seen GoaGoaG make more than one or two attacks before it gets flattened, but given its spawn circumstances I can totally see it popping up right as your hero gets too tired to swing at it before it can strike two or three times, then you roll badly on Fatalistic and get a bunch of 1-HP plinks before it lands its sixth attack, killing you instantly.

It's kind of a bullshit monster tbh

so naturally there's a cheevo tied directly to it

This is MTG Solitaire, essentially?

In that both games involve cards and bizarre alternate-dimension pseudo-medieval fantasy settings, I guess? But apart from that, no, not really.

The idea of the game is that the universe has been destroyed, and your guy is the only one who can remember things well enough to make them exist again. No one else can remember what the world used to be like, and even with his unique powers over reality most things still cease to exist once your character stops concentrating on them.

So he takes it upon himself to rebuild the world, using whatever little chunks of reality that continue to exist even when he's not looking at them that he can find on his journeys.

All that remains of the world is a path that goes in a circle, and you can remember things to put on the path for him to encounter. The gameplay is taking cards from a... well, "deck" isn't really the right word, since you never run out. Pool, I guess. and putting them on the map. Most tiles spawn resources used to rebuild in the macrogame -- stone and wood for building structures, metal for tools, food to eat, and so on. They also spawn monsters, because apparently the world setting was kind of a dangerous place even at the best of times. (Your guy is surprised to run into the first goblins, because they come from a tile you didn't place yourself -- they say they remembered themselves back into existence.)

Defeated monsters drop cards to place on the map, and equipment that helps you fight other monsters. All the monsters get stronger the more laps you complete in a single run, until eventually they outpace your equipment progression and kill you. Dying resets the world, so your next run starts with a new blank path. Back to the village you're building, decide how to spend those resources you found, and try again.

Eventually placing enough cards on the map spawns the boss, the lich that cast the world-ending spell that shattered the universe in the first place. But defeating him is just the end of the introduction chapter.

So... it's a one-player game with cards, but the gameplay would be unaltered if they were some other medium for placing structures on the map. And it doesn't have mana costs, or casting of effect spells, or anything else that would make it any more similar to MtG than "there are swords and monsters in the setting".

[beatbandito]

Pokémon Unite! Is "free to start" on switch, not even needing a Nintendo online subscription to play. For love of the gods keep your store settings locked if you have actual kids, but it's nothing you need to feel like spending money on other than fashioncore.

It's a moba. Main mode is 5v5 10 minutes, quick modes have some mechanic on each map and are 3v3 5min, haven't done ranked. It's just about the perfect amount of time, balanced so it's kind of hard to have time to get mad about how something is going. And outside challenge comoletion, loses aren't even a waste of time in terms of reward.

No items in-game, some stuff to manage on your poke, but not enough that I ever bother to look at the opponents' loadouts. Creep is basically jungle in lanes, on top of the jungle. You mainly pve for points and then "dunk" at towers with your points. Most of what you're carrying drops on death, also if you dunk with a full load it doubles the points, sometimes, I'm not totally sure on that.

There's a decent selection of pokes. Type match ups matter, but not more than levels or good skill use. They seem to give you the early win heroin, but even after like 20 matches I'm getting even shares of literal babies and better players on both teams. That said, it absolutely benefits from having someone you trust to easily dominate a lane early, but if Nintendo keeps giving it attention I think it will have enough of a regular player base to be a fun casual+ time sink.

UPDATE: guess how many times this has been updated at this point! Anyway yeah, turns out there's an unadvertised f2p mechanic where you can just buy the item upgrades for real money once you run out of the in-game currency to get them. So that does exist. I had not noticed it in game at all, learned about it in discord.

[nosimpleway]

man i want a big meaty loop hero expansion to have more excuses to play it.

Just got the last cheevo for it, so I guess unless I want to twiddle my thumbs to try to find the superbosses I guess I'm done.

When you run up against the final boss in runs after you beat him the first time, your PC asks him about all the other bosses up to that point, in order. "So what's the deal with the lich?" "Ah, Omicron..." "So what's the deal with the preistess?" "Ah yes, Sigma..." "How about that hunter with the black hole theme and the weird eyes huh" "Oh, that's Tau..."

In my head the last run you make should be "Tell me about Sigma again" "Ah yes, the incarnation of faith..." "SIGMA BALLS" and then you attack and dethrone god

[Thad]

"SIGMA BALLS"

Was that the last boss in Mega Man X8? I only finished it on Easy.

[Thad]

Enjoying Yakuza: Like a Dragon so far. I've never played any of the other games in the series (have a couple I've bought in bundles, thumb still can't handle button-mashing combat, maybe someday), but I appreciate the postmodern hook of explaining early on that the protagonist is a Dragon Quest fan and sees himself as a Dragon Quest protagonist.

[...]

But I appreciate playing with the DQ formula in a completely different setting.

Got to the job system. I am amused by the detail that, in place of the Alltrades Abbey, job assignments are handled by a clerk at the unemployment office.

It's still early days and I'm wondering if it plays out more like the job system in DQ7 or DQ9. I liked 7's better; the way I play is usually to stick with a job until I master it before moving on to the next one. DQ7's job system accommodates that play style nicely, whereas 9 isn't really meant to be played that way (I think I made it to the endgame without ever mastering a single class and, therefore, never changed anyone's class).

I appreciated the depth of DQ7's class system, but it was a lot less friendly than it could have been; the class tree is explained through a giant text dump, and doesn't include every class. I consider FFT to be pretty much the platonic ideal of a class system; I don't expect Y:LAD to be that friendly, but at least it's got graphics, which puts it above DQ7's text-based menu system.

[mharr]

A story about Skyrim. There are some background mods but most of this is just vanilla Skyrim interacting with itself as designed.

so I enter the temple, and my finance is there, and Lydia my housecarl, and some random NPCs the game thinks are my friends because I did fetch quests for them

One of the random NPCs is Lisbet. Atfter I did her fetch quest, I then did another quest in which I discovered Lisbet is secretly a cannibal and part of a demonic cult that worships the daedric prince of decay by kidnapping priests, sacrificing them, and then eating their corpses. Raw. I think the raw meat is the sticking point for me here honestly.

https://jupitermelichios.tumblr.com/pos ... rim-lately