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Latest Comments by BTRE
Rolling dice and killing samurai, thoughts on Warbands: Bushido
11 February 2018 at 7:09 pm UTC

Quoting: 14The way you describe it, it sounds to me like they wanted to create a Memoir '44 game but needed to create a mechanic to make it indefinitely playable. (Memoir '44 is finite.) That mechanic turned out to be a grind. Bummer.

Side note: I really enjoy Memoir '44, even though you don't care about your units on a human level and you don't get to place your units either. The fun is defeating your opponent in the given scenario.

Yeah, I guess I would have been able to look past the shortcomings/lack of interesting units, if the scenarios were interesting. Most battles are like the screenshot I included, meaning that it's just a mass of opponents that rush towards you, usually from close quarters. There are a few maps with choke points, for instance, but they're few and far in between. I would have appreciated asymmetrical scenarios that made you play and plan different to break up the tedium.

Looking for ways to spice up your gaming? Here’s a few games with awesome mods
5 February 2018 at 5:38 pm UTC

Quoting: oldrocker99The Dominions series has always been very mod-friendly, and there are dozens of new nation mods, and rule-breaking mods, maps, and other things.

If you're hooked on TBS games, you cannot do better than Dominions 5. It makes CIV VI look a little simplistic in comparison. My most played game since 2011.
I played Dominions 4. It was alright but it didn't ever really 'click' with me. I never really felt the payoff for investing a lot of time into its high learning curve like I did with Dwarf Fortress or with some Paradox titles. And yeah, the Civ series in general are pretty simple experiences comparatively-speaking. Not that that's a bad thing, just different types of games.

Quoting: razing32Also you may want to throw the Shadowrun series in there. The Workshop is buzzing with mods and I noticed some were praised as complete campaigns in themselves
I've heard that as well! I haven't had the time to get back into the Shadowrun games though, and I wanted to focus mostly on stuff I've played "recently" and whose mods I've actually tried.

Hearts of Iron IV: Waking the Tiger gets a release date
30 January 2018 at 11:35 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: chepatiI'm boycotting all Paradox developed and published games until they start fixing long-standing issues with their games. Case in point, the Crusader Kings II UI can't be scaled up to 4K. Anything bigger than 1080p gets too hard on the eyes. Paradox is well aware of the issue but they couldn't care less about it. Instead they are churning out DLCs and charging pretty penny.

I know, there are mods. But this is broken UI that must be addressed by the developer. Players should not be at the mercy of modders to fix what the developer is too lazy to have not allowed in the first place.
Both Hearts of Iron 4 and Stellaris have UI scaling in their menu options (EU4 has it too, but must be done manually through settings.txt). So I wouldn't say that they're lazy or don't care. I can't tell you why it's not in CK2 but I can speculate that it may be due to the latter running older versions of their in-house engine and the development team for each of their titles being different. It definitely is something they should work on more and all their games should have.

Narrative-driven platformer 'Celeste' from the creators of TowerFall is confirmed for Linux
25 January 2018 at 6:13 pm UTC Likes: 2

This is one I'm definitely looking forward to trying out.
Quoting: scaineIt looks Meatboy hard. Throw-your-controller-across-the-room hard. Die-so-many-times-you-die-inside hard.

Genuinely not sure I'd enjoy it...
There's an "assist mode" that lets you change up the difficulty as much as you want, apparently. Make yourself invulnerable, have infinite stamina, skip sections, etc. No consequences to it, either, unless your ego doesn't allow you to accept the help :P

Starward Rogue: AuGMENTED expansion adds a lot more to discover and destroy, some thoughts
24 January 2018 at 9:38 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: robvvThis looks great and I'm picking up the DLC right now! I hope Arcen Games find themselves in a position to release new games in the future.
They're also working on AI War 2 following their kickstarter campaign. Should be out sometime in the next few months, I think, and it'll have Linux support from the beginning. It's good to see them recovering from their low point a while ago when they had to let go of most of their staff. I like the little twists they try to put in their games that set them apart from similar affairs.

The “Fall 2017” update for Civilization VI has finally made it to Linux
12 January 2018 at 11:31 pm UTC

Added a small update note to the article. The scenario now properly show up after a second, smaller patch.

Some reflections on radv, the first open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs
31 December 2017 at 7:08 pm UTC

Quoting: KohriasI actually run a very similar hardware setup, BTRE ;) And as you I had a nice performance boost in MadMax. I havent done much with emulators yet. Could you share some tips on how to setup a good emulator environment? To me it seems like there are a lot of programs you have to use together.
If you're looking for an all-in-one sort of solution, try retroarch. It's a frontend for libretro. You need to configure some paths for where it puts its files but other than that, you can keep it updated from the program itself and you can download the various emulator 'cores' (ported external emulators) and have a unified interface for them. You don't have to worry about configuring input devices or graphical backends for most things after that. Switching between, say, playstation and PC-98 games seamlessly is pretty cool.

I still use dolphin-git and ppsspp-git outside of retroarch, though, but that's mostly because I like to test the latest changes (like some of the vulkan improvements) and retroarch can be a little behind upstream. Maybe I'll write up a guide one day on GOL, but it's not too hard to figure out tbh. There's wikis and guides elsewhere that should help you.

Europa Universalis IV: Cradle of Civilization now available, here’s some thoughts
17 November 2017 at 7:03 am UTC

Quoting: razing32One question BTRE . Why do you put your links to the game at the bottom of your article as oppose to the top ?
I'm not sure what you mean. The store links? That's the way we do it for all the articles on GOL.

Europa Universalis IV: Cradle of Civilization now available, here’s some thoughts
16 November 2017 at 4:08 pm UTC

Quoting: LakortaDon't forget that cross platform multiplayer should now be fixed :D
Yeah, you're absolutely right about that! There's just so much they fixed and reworked that I forgot :P

Star Traders: Frontiers released into Early Access, here’s a few thoughts
16 November 2017 at 3:40 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: uoouAs I say, I've mentioned it to the devs so they're aware of it at least. If you could contact them and get an ETA for a fix that'd be nice. Lack of tooltips makes it significantly harder to play, especially since it's such a difficult game to learn to begin with.
Ah, so you told them. I was wondering if maybe I missed an obvious "known issues list" somewhere :)

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
QuoteSell low, buy high
If you're having cash flow difficulties in the game, I think I spotted your problem.
Space capitalism is very strange, dontcha know? Fixed that up.