Caltrops - Michael Jackson's Moonwalker





	[quote name="Arbit"][quote name="fucking newbie"]PC gaming in all its glory, right? Spend forty hours finishing the job of developers and you have an acceptable product. Nevertheless, this is the only 4x out lately that doesn't turn everything to abstraction and gets even a quarter of this anti-bloating shit right. Not that anyone here has the time to polish the turd out of this thing, but the idea of putting the work in is less repulsive with Endless Space than with the only 4x to compare it to (Sword of the Stars). The inherent problems in SotS are design decisions of the sort that balloon into a huge number of bullshit things to micromanage per turn if you want to win, and modding would have to be extremely extensive to fix that unless the players were horrible little aspergers-suffering shut-ins (and I say that as a Paradox grand strat fan). Even if you have a hard-on for building the Siegfried Line in space, though, your trench war is all that SotS has to offer - no real chance of emergent storytelling, very little flavor, just fight these big, stupid 3d fights in this combat engine that's inferior to the skirmish mode in Homeworld 1 circa 1998. You want something better? FUCK YOU, PLEB. Endless space dispenses with all that in favor of streamlined combat that looks pretty. If it was more interesting due to real tactical or operational choices created by the combat orders system that'd be something - it does appear possible, at a first glance. Nice to know that indie/post-2010 4x design is still as shitty as it was ten years ago.[/quote] There's streamlined, and then there's virtually non-existent. It's totally hands off except for the cards, but the computer is totally retarded at the card game so there is an optimal choice you make automatically every time. If you want the card advantage you can't autocalc, and you end up watching boring battles with predetermined outcomes over and over again. Given how the AI likes to spam humungous fleets, you will have to watch them over and over again. Ship design, in theory, is a psychological game where you try to anticipate whether your opponent will deploy rock, paper, or scissors and you select your ships' defenses accordingly (he does the same for you) but the computer is trivially easy to dupe. And beams seem to be the optimal choice - missiles take too long to reach their targets and have a tendency to apply massive overkill to a single ship, and kinetics take too long to bring to bear. So you spam beams, with a missile and/or kinetic weapon in there so the AI wastes space on missile/kinetic defenses. Ground invasions = you park your ships in orbit until the ground invasion meter fills up and you win. The game doesn't need modding; it needs the entire combat system and military tech tree ripped out of the game and built from the ground up, preferably designed so the AI can have a fighting chance. [/quote]