I really love the Stellaris species portraits. They are diverse and imaginative and each has its own identity. I don't need animated 3D faces or long boxes of text for their lore - what I want is something that even at a quick glance makes the galaxy look full of alien life, and Stellaris does that really well.

Quoting: robvvThe only DLC for Stellaris that I require is not discounted. No surprise there!

I mean, me too, but it's a direct consequence - it is the one I need because the others were discounted and this was not (and it all comes from the fact it is the latest).

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Quoting: mao_dze_dun

Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääOne of the biggest challenges for seasoned Linux users is to place oneself in the shoes of a new comer that's also a Windows refugee. What is "simple, handy and easy" (*just a few commands on the terminal*) for us, might be a set of total deal breakers for a "normo" to start with

Had a friend back in the day, who didn't even like GUI. He was convinced everybody had to just learn to use the terminal (and obviously hated Windows). I once asked him: "What about some secretary in an office?", "Yes!!!". And meant it. I think a lot of people in the Linux community do not realize that " just one command" in the terminal is already too Mich for most people. And honestly - you can't be mad at somebody for not wanting to go out of his way when he doesn't have to.

Anyway - cool tool :D

And that type of person traumatizes the heck out of people, that think the command line is the antithesis of user-friendliness and refuses to use anything that resembles it.

Sometimes the terminal is just convenient - you type a simple(-ish) command without changing anything and it does what you want, instead of having to follow a byzantine list of instructions(1). Sometimes it requires very precise syntax that you need to learn, or has poor visualization so you aren't sure if you are doing it right. I use the terminal relatively very little, but I have it as an option.

There's people that really don't have the skills to use the terminal (and neither some complicated examples of GUI...). But there are also people that are technically savvy, that customize and tinker a lot, and are afraid of running a simple "cd /home/user/games && wine game.exe". Look, on twitch chat and discord people are typing complex text commands and invoking bots; it's not that different.

(1) Go to the settings menu, it is the 5th option from the left on the second row of the bar on top. Find an option called window properties, or maybe it is window settings in your version. Look for a radio button - explains what is a radio button, it is not a checkbox - saying x...

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Wow, this game looks really pretty. No chance I'll play it ever, but the looks of this game might be the first thing I don't hate about a racing game.

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Quoting: EhvisAlso, why is there a crash option in the settings? Which actually crashes when you click it.

It wants to deliver the most authentic early access experience, so if you think it is too polished you can adjust it to your liking. xD

(It's obviously for debugging - probably created for running a particular test, and just left there for now)

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Quoting: NezchanI generally haven't found following curators to be all that useful, tbh. Maybe I'm just not seeing the right way to utilize the feature?

Most of my gaming purchases are more related to reading GoL and talking to people, can't think of a single time a curator recommendation has influenced that.

I kind of like how it shows a section in the store only with games that were reviewed by sources I follow - GoL and a few blogs/channels specifically about strategy games. But yeah, it's all games I heard about somewhere - more of a filter than anything: "steam, show me only games that were covered by GoL" xD.

On the other hand, for articles like in this experiment, I would pretty much always see it first on the original location. I don't see Steam as a good aggregator.

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Quoting: 14Quite.

We must not be on the first mission then. Maybe the second.

EDIT: OK, my friend and I are trying to beat a conquest. I took a screenshot. The objective requires a large amount of food to conquer, which came as a surprise.

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Many of the conquest missions are quite hard, and might require multiple tries. Also, this is only the first mission for the Goat clan specifically - each other clan has their own first mission. So if you dislike this one, you could try with a different clan (each clan has a number of fixed missions, and gets a random path with missions for other clans - so at least you have a choice to not do missions you dislike from other clans).

To be honest, I really don't like the Yggdrasil mission either, or the Goat clan in general. But I do like conquests a lot, in part because they are quite challenging (but also, varied!). Conquests add a lot of replayability to the game, but if you are having trouble maybe you would prefer to play some normal skirmishes first (as a team, against some AIs) if you aren't tired of that already - I got the impression that you are new to the game, but don't want to assume.

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Quoting: Lolo01The price of DLC having cooled me down a bit, I'm back on Civilization V and all its extensions. But unfortunately, it frequently crashes on a recent processor.
I've logged over 500 hours on each of the last two Civs (and probably as many on the previous ones), and the way we're treated is disappointing.
At least, there is no difference between Windows and Linux users (except for multiplayer).

There are a few differences - Civ 5 is lacking in mod support. It didn't use to have mods at all, I think it was improved but still can't run some like the big community thingy. But on the flip side, on my PC it runs quite faster than on Windows (probably because it is limited by available RAM).

Can't say much for Civ 6, as it barely ran on Windows (back when I dual booted) and on Linux it's unplayable - not the game's fault, though, I'm quite below minimum specs and it is a wonder it runs at all. A wonder like Stonehenge - old, heavy, looks like it can fall apart at a moment's notice.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI've never tried this. My friends and I have been using Roll20 lately, often with Zoom or Jitsi on the side so we can see each other's faces bigger than tiny, and also because the conferencing part has been pretty glitchy.

So what does it do? Is it doing kind of the same stuff as roll20, or different, or just more? Does not being browser-based make it a significantly different experience? Is it more stable?

It is pretty much equivalent, but with slightly different features and interfaces - and most importantly, payment models. I'll talk about FG2 that was what I played a lot, I expect it to have improved a lot... but I actually had a long-lasting group that used both programs (regular DM liked FG more, other people DMed once in a while and liked roll20 better) so we compared them a lot. xD

Back in the days, roll20 was a lot more focused on being customizable while Fantasy Grounds was more about being "ready to play". Even without the subscriptions that allowed scripts, roll20 had more options with macros, and it was a lot easier to get started (but you had to do everything manually); but FG had a lot of official content and everything was pretty and pre-configured (which was great until you wanted to house rule something). Roll20 allowed you to search a library of public images, while FG had a smaller but more curated collection. They each improved in each other's area since then, though. In general, FG tries hard to be very polished and professional, and it makes a difference.

I think being in a browser makes roll20 easier to use if you are constantly alt-tabbing to different programs, webpages and stuff (as I often do while GMing...). I generally like fullscreen better, but RPGs for me required too much information for a single screen (even with a second monitor to open all the sheets and notes and chat and stff I often needed outside sources, pdfs, check the chat program, etc).

Regarding payments: roll20 is free for everyone, but the paid features are subscription only and it gets expensive in the long term. Fantasy Grounds is paid upfront, and requires either everyone to buy a copy (impractical - groups change, new people join, etc) or the GM to buy a very expensive ultimate license (still impractical - no one else can ever GM without going back to the purchase problem). In this aspect, roll20 lowers the barrier a lot for people to play, specially for simpler games where you don't need to get lost in macros and maps and stuff.

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Ooh, a giveaway! And it's for a neat game - I want to join!

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I played a fair bit in the old app - I used to dual boot for it, because on Wine it had a few annoying bugs. It is pretty nice, though I used to be more of roll20 fan, and it's great that it now has native support.

They have been working on a new version for quite some long time already, because their engine just didn't support many things they wanted to add, but they were constantly having problems. Glad they sorted it out with the crowdfunding and Unity.

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