"Krevvie". Hit me with a friend request if you like; it'd be fun. I'm still very new at the faction/social side of the game.

I actually quite liked Empire, but it's got that gawky adolescence thing to it where they're trying some pretty major changes in the tried-and-true gameplay model and they don't quite have all the bugs ironed out. To pick one example, playing it now that they've ironed out the bugs… I mean, Total War games can have…

It's pretty sharp. It's a HoMM-style TBS on the metamap (except I don't think you get more cities?) but the zoom-in game is a pretty straightforward card game, not HoMMy tactical maps. Each card represents a character and has attack, defense and HP stats, with half of your pool randomly assigned to "fight" and half…

Is it ever silly. I signed on for a couple quick matches this morning and found it all pretty frustrating before I figured out what everyone was doing. Half of each side are light mechs now, and instead of sticking with the heavies or cautiously scouting ahead, they all go running off in a group to have their own…

I adored Stardew Valley, playing it steadily right up until I finished my first year…and now I can't bring myself to launch it. I dunno, I guess I got my money's worth out of it. It's a fun game and all, but once you've had enough, you've had enough.

Apologies, I misunderstood.

I have and I agree, plus of course Howard and Lovecraft were pen pals, etc. etc. etc. I was just pointing out that targeting Lovecraft for living in the headspace he most clearly displayed in his writing, that he is best known for, strikes me as a foolish thing to be outraged about.

Me too, very much. Did you read Explorminate's retrospective on it a month ago? I thought he made some great points. https://explorminate.net/20…

They still did much, much better than I expected them to at the outset.

Heh, best one yet.

I understand much better now; thank you for the clarification. I agree, there is something dreadfully reductive (and in this case, amusingly meta) about saying "fear of the Other is what those people do." It's always been a thing people do but it seems like the volume has been increasing lately. (In unrelated news,…

This is the first time I've really wanted a fourth option besides Failure, Fiasco and Secret Success. So far, the big three have been a surprisingly sturdy model, but here… I mean, it sounds like a legitimate fiasco, it failed at its own stated goals by any stretch of the imagination and the second season, at least,…

I'm sorry, I'm not tracking. Are you agreeing with me and saying Lovecraft suffered from this, or are you saying I'm doing that by having the same thought about Stephen King, another writer who specializes in fear and has perhaps-not-so-coincidentally made some utterly racist comments in his day?

I'm cheap enough that I still haven't picked it up, but I will someday; I love the genre too much. That said, I'm a bit nervous about it. Much of what you're saying here reminds me of how I felt about Endless Space, which looked great, sounded great, got a lot of good ink—and had little real depth, once you…

This is doubly disappointing to read because I experienced The Bourne Legacy as something of an oblique criticism of hero-wins optimism of the original trilogy: while our heroes work their hardest simply to stay alive, Pam Landy's heroic faxes have her facing felony charges on the TV screens behind them while the…

Making hay of Lovecraft's racism seems like it's missing the point to me, and not just because cultural standards were different then. The man effectively wrote about consuming, overwhelming fear of the unknown; why should anyone be surprised that he devoted no small part of his private thought life to the subject? …

Stellaris: at least there's one single solitary 4X TBS out there anywhere this year. *sigh*…

Late to the game, but someone around here pointed me to an interview with Schafer where he flat-out said that he designs his games with twice as many features as he ever puts in. I felt like I immediately grasped why I like his games better in theory than in practice, and that combined with the Spacebase DF-9 fiasco…

I was in my teens when I finally beat this and the ending utterly baffled me. I get your interpretation of it now, but at the time, switching gears like that left me mystified to the point of philosophical horror. "Wait… wait… what the hell… what—who the hell are these people and what have I been doing this whole…

Happy to! They took a great big page out of the World of Tanks playbook for this one. It doesn't have the tiers as such, but it does have skills you can grind, limited numbers of mech bays and interchangeable components, including the option to remove extra gear to add more AC/20 ammo (which, praise be.) It keeps a…