terrycloth

Yesterday we played some Pathfinder, finally dealing with the troll tribe occupying the distressingly skull-themed dam.

( And for some reason making nice with the ogres we hate. )

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Yesterday we played a little Pathfinder, finishing up the battle and discovering why Teleport is a better 'run away' spell than Dimension Door.

( At least when you're in a fort with a ludicrously gigantic courtyard. )

It was a reeeeeally short session, about two and a half hours. x.x

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TLDR: The shiny is real. @.@

( First, there were technical difficulties... )

The game itself is kind of mesmerizing. I think I played 20 hours of it over the weekend? SOMEHOW. I didn't even think there *were* 20 hours in a weekend. The way the game goes is, you get these mechs, see, and you have pilots that drive the mechs, and then you go fight other mechs and vehicles and stuff in a series of missions, most of which are procedurally generated.

Someone compared it to XCom, and it's not a completely wrong comparison? It's sort of in the same genre, except that the doom hanging over you between missions is the threat of going bankrupt and having the loan sharks foreclose on your space ship.

The actual combat is sort of like XCom if you didn't have cover, and instead had to run around at top speed every round to make yourself harder to hit, but still end up facing close enough to 'towards your enemies' to be able to fire. And you can fire all your weapons every round. And instead of 'reloading', you have to take a round off every now and then to cool down before your mech overheats, because overheating damages the structure and you'll have to pay to fix it after the battle. And instead of waking up a 'pod' of enemies that immediately run for cover, you'll get within sensor range of them and then go into phased combat mode until the blips are close enough to actually see.

The biggest difference is probably that you don't have grenades. No AoE at all! D8

Interesting moments:
On a scripted mission: "Watch out for those vehicle blips, they're SRM carriers. Don't let them get close!"
Me: "Oh, some Strikers? Those aren't so bad." *accidentally lets one get close*
SRM carrier: *fires* *fires some more* *keeps firing* *OH MY GOD STOP FIRING ALREADY* *keeps firing some more* *fires the rest of its missiles*
Dekker: "That shot went internal!" ... yes. Yes it did. After stripping off every last shred of armor from every section except the head. HOW ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?

Later on, on a random mission... Dekker finally met his end. His mech was pretty beat up so I had him hiding behind a rock sensor-locking people for my mechs that weren't about to die. I'd just managed to blow both side torsos off an Orion and knock it down to kill the pilot (letting me salvage the whole thing) and all that was left was a single, beat-up Spider... which ran through my entire force to perch on top of the rock and shoot him.

He lived! This is where I should have had him eject. Instead, I had him run away and brace -- a spider's pitiful weapons shouldn't have been able to kill him. So... the spider did a Death From Above and managed to hit his center torso. RIP Dekker.

That was the last time I brought a Vindicator into combat. Those things are death traps.

*sigh* Later on I lost Medusa in basically the same way... she was really beat up and I had her try to hide instead of ejecting, and the enemies chased her down and blew up her mech. I don't think I like that getting your mech blown up automatically kills you -- it's not how it worked in the lore from anything I've seen. I mean, there's a reason you're in the head and not sitting right next to the reactor.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that if you have someone heavily damaged enough that you're having them go and hide, maaaybe you should have them just eject instead. Even though it means buying a new head for the mech. Heads are cheaper than torsos anyway.

Also, buy the game. It's fun. n.n

Saturday we played some Pathfinder, planning and then starting on a big assault.

( With some questionable tactics. )

We stopped there, figuring that the assault on the inner keep would have to wait since a bunch of people had to leave early.

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Yesterday we played some more Pathfinder, continuing our adventures around the small village up by the lake.

( We were trying to rest... )

And we stopped there, because it was getting late in the day to start another combat.

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I'm not really all that good at strategy games, but I still play them a lot...

Lately I've been playing tons of Stellaris, but the upcoming 2.0 patch is changing everything and I made a weird mistake in the last 1.9 game I was playing (my fanatic purifiers signed the galactic peace treaty because I needed some time to regroup, and somehow this worked -- I was forced to ban purging, but since I'm FP I can't not purge everyone, so the peacekeepers keep feeding me planets, whose populations get immediately wiped out). I can probably eventually win, but it feels dirty to abuse a bug like that.

So... I got the 'rise and fall' expansion for Civ 6 and played a couple of games. The first was on a small map, and I rushed swordmen and wiped out everyone else on my starting continent. It wasn't hard to take out the remaining two civilizations after eventually discovering them.

The second, I did a huge map with 'epic' pace, which actually worked well for a while -- one problem civ 6 tends to have is that you outrace the units and never actually get to use them before they're obsolete. I didn't have that problem!

I did run out of wonders to build and technologies to research in the 1800s, though, which meant the last two ages I was really scraping for 'era score'. I'd already *done* everything, and the 'era dedications' are ludicrously weak sources of points, so my empire fell into a dark age just as I was launching the colony to Mars to win the game. Apparently, winning during a dark age gives you an achievement, but how can you *not*?

City loyalty is the other big gimmick, and it mostly forces you to put effort into holding onto the cities you capture. Or, you can decide not to, and let four cities rebel in the middle of your enemy leaving a self-sustaining cluster of 'free cities' that constantly spawn endgame units and are hostile to everyone. Yeah, Egypt. Suck on that for a while.

Oh crap. I accidentally created ISIS, didn't I.

Yesterday we played Pathfinder again, dealing with the aftermath of murdering a city council member and his (murder cultist) employees.

( Do Not Pass Go )

I've rolled natural 1s on *so many* saving throws this campaign. If it's a standard critter I had to roll a 4 to save against the gaze attack.

But the guard did say that they'd come get me if I didn't report in to my parole officer, so maybe they'll find the statue?

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Today we had a kind of short session of the Pathfinder game. Shawn showed up late and had to leave early (with his girls), and so did Colin. And we spent a lot of the time shopping (actually, mostly not shopping per-se, but similar faffing about in town).

( Shopping! )

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We played some more Pathfinder this time, STILL not finishing the haunted house much to Tom's annoyance (people got hungry).

( So, after Elsie fell through the floor... )

Shawn: "We'd better stop here."
Tom: "But there's only two rooms left!"
Me: "And that door I can see on the map. And the other *half* of the map."
Tom: "Well.."

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Last Saturday we had another session of Pathfinder off-schedule, since it worked better with some peoples' schedules and was supposed to be all spooky.

( So we continued the investigation... )

Tom said afterwards that he'd planned to do the farm investigation during the session too, but half the people were already leaving for work or Halloween parties by the time we finished the asylum, so... guess not.

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