Yeah, I was watching Potato McWhiskey and this is his take. They have metrics that show most people don’t actually finish a game and that indicates a pretty big flaw in game design.

One interesting thing the devs brought up was the ability to pivot from one civ to another based on new information. Like if you discover your continent is mostly plains and horses, then maybe your next iteration looks more like the Mongols, with bonuses to cavalry. If your early conquest didn’t go off, maybe you pivot to a more science or culture oriented civ.

I don’t hate these ideas, it just depends on how it actually feels in game.

It’s subjective. Easy builds can be super fun. Especially if you earned it by getting some gear. It’s also an accessibility issue. Not everyone is 25 years old with lightning reflexes (or, conversely, not everyone has 20 years of history with the genre).

Anyway, my point was only that if you’re bored with being OP, try something different. If you think you’re invincible but killing things is a slog, maybe shift your gear to be more offensive etc. The way these games work, difficulty is entirely up to you.

I enjoyed D3 and D4, I think they both do difficulty well (at this point, D3 was stupid at launch). In both there are now hundreds of fine grained tiers you can shift up or down to find the right difficulty for your gear/build/skill.

That said, holding down a button to win is more of a build issue unless you’re running embarrassingly low difficulty. There will always be easy builds and more challenging, technical, timing based builds. Finding a fun build is part of the fun of ARPGs.

So it’s not fully self hosted then? I can’t see how it would do that without registering you with their own service as a middle man. Seems like that kinda defeats the purpose.

Sorry, why would Jellyfin be different from Plex for exposing to the Internet? Dynamic DNS service / static IP and router port forwarding just like any other self hosted thing. It requires a user/pass to login as usual. VPN is nice but not required.

I’ve only used Jellyfin, what does Plex do better for the non-expert user?

I mean, fuck Elon and Tesla but if you’re spending money on a car you’re giving it to a bastard one way or another. The CEOs of Ford, BMW, et. al. might not be making asses of themselves on the global stage, but I’m sure they’re still horrible. Even used cars run on gas 99% of the time.

Because at some point after the first few million you turn into a dragon that must hoard wealth and the people that generate that wealth become a cost to minimize.

I got my account locked on BLU because I stopped seeding when my RAID went down. I was able to recover the data and get back up in about 24 hours but there was literally no recourse other than begging some random mod’s reddit account.

Always sad to see a tracker go down, but this place was a shit show.

I feel guilty about it, but I appreciate the monthly pass. I played EUIV for exactly one month, at a total cost of like $7 (got the base game for free at some point) with all the bells and whistles. It seemed like a good compromise because you’d have to pay it for years at this point to cover the DLC out right, but it is a disgusting level of rent seeking behavior.

Now it bothers me that I’d need to put another $7-$10 into the machine to access those saves, but not as much as if I’d throw down hundreds of dollars on it to own the content for a 10 year old game.

I have a few hundred, but 5500? Sheeeit. The game is definitely evergreen though.

Can’t wait for the expansion, 10/21. I’ve been putting off a new play through for it, and Wube always puts in so much polish (as the FFFs show).

Perfect headline.

Reason number one million capitalism sucks. We should be happy to turn over dangerous or menial jobs to machines but we can’t do that because without jobs our society views us as worthless.

Already happens on streaming, at least with TV. Watched a few episodes of House a while back and they changed the great Massive Attack theme to some generic sound-alike. Honestly put me off a rewatch more than some of the other parts of the show that didn’t age well.

You can, but it’s not a perfect solution. Mostly because the TVs interface is still designed around this app mentality.

I bought a Samsung TV recently and it’s never been on the internet, but I still have to go to a dead home screen where all of the ads would be just to switch inputs and half the buttons on the remote are for services I don’t want.

I think there are some exceptions. Like Kitfox publishing Dwarf Fortress. Taking weird little indies and giving them an art / usability budget to become more accessible and, in turn, make the OG devs a bunch of money. Nobody loses.

Seriously. I remember first getting into Deity and realizing it’s basically just exploiting intimate knowledge of how the AI works. The actual max difficulty is Prince, where the AI doesn’t get bonuses, and it’s so terrible at actually pursuing an agenda it’s not very challenging.

I am a bit hopeful that VII’s decoupling leaders and civs will force the AI to be a bit more generally good. At least make it so you don’t know exactly what sort of tactics to use from the first turn you meet it.