What are you currently playing?

[BRickAstley]

I'm actually about to pick EU3 back up since i don't have something that can run EU4 at the moment. Hooray for Infamy!

[Sian]

Spending some time with EU4 again, and finally going to finish a campaign through to 1820 for once to get the Just a Little Patience achievement

Out of interest. Which Nation, aiming for anything specific except grinding your way to the end date?

[pindicator]

Spending some time with EU4 again, and finally going to finish a campaign through to 1820 for once to get the Just a Little Patience achievement

Out of interest. Which Nation, aiming for anything specific except grinding your way to the end date?

My initial goal was to do the Italian Ambition achievement, so I started a Tuscany game when the Common Sense DLC came out. Right now it's 1716 and I'm in a very strong position, eating up the HRE with France and the Commonwealth as allies (Hesse, Burgundy, Tunis and Hungary are all vassals but I'm just about done integrating Tunis).




Future goals I'm trying to pick up All Your Trade are Belong to Us (majority of trade power in English Channel, Genoa, and Venice trade nodes while getting > 300 ducats per month), so basically I'll be eating up the rest of the lowland countries and then invade Great Britain. Hopefully I can get the achievement without stabbing my ally France in the back, but it won't stop me if I do.

After that it would be nice to check off Full House (have 3 regular vassals and 2 marches), and possibly Market Control (trade leader in 7 types of goods), but I also don't have much of a presense outside of Europe so the trade ones may not be possible.

I'm actually about to pick EU3 back up since i don't have something that can run EU4 at the moment. Hooray for Infamy!

I don't know if I'll ever run a campaign to 1820 again on this machine. The years are considerably getting slower as I get into the 1700s!

[pindicator]

Well, the All Your Trade turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. Just by sieging up Great Britain I temporarily had control of the trade power in those provinces which was enough to get the achievement! Didn't have to core the provinces or even take the land in a peace deal.

[NobleHelium]

"Sorry mate, we gotta occupy your towns for a while for this achievement."

[Bobchillingworth]

Started playing Valkyria Chronicles. It's... interesting, I guess? The combat mechanics seem to heavily favor defense, since units have to move in real time during their action phase, and any enemy with a line of sight on them apparently gets to take endless pot-shots until they end their turns. Graphics are very impressive though.

[Fenn]

Valkyria Chronicles is pretty defensive at first, but without spoiling anything offence becomes much more powerful as you level up your classes. Interception fire on the PC release used to be tied to FPS, making it twice as intense at 60 FPS as it was designed - even then it was very beatable.

And yeah, it's a very pretty game. The art style helps a lot.

[El Grillo]

I enjoyed Valkyria Chronicles a lot, and the art style is lovely, but there are a couple of things that noticeably detract from the experience:

- EXP/gold are rewarded for low turn clears, with bonus weapons for killing enemy aces, making command points a very precious resource. Taking too long makes future maps harder and harder, which can cause some real headaches when elites start showing up.

- Spending additional CP on a unit grants additional actions, with a scaling movement penalty of -50% movement per additional CP. As a result, classes with high base movement (Scouts and Engineers) can cover far great distances than their heavier counterparts. Snipers and Lancers benefit even less from CP because they're limited by ammo, which is gained at a fixed rate of 1 per player phase.

The game loses a lot of the combined arms effect when the easiest way to beat the game with high scores is to spend heavily on level-ups and equipment for Scouts, deploy officers for the CP bonus but not use them, buff up Scouts (or honestly just Alicia) with Orders, and blitz the objectives, using the Edelweiss for cover/smoke.

I had much more fun with a variant playthrough where:
A) I couldn't use the same unit more than once per player phase,
B) I had to cycle through the entire squad before deploying the same unit on a map,
C) Orders are banned.

[Bobchillingworth]

Finishing up Shadowrun: Hong Kong tonight. It's more of the same from Dragonfall, which is to say excellent.

[Bobchillingworth]

Finally playing through Sleeping Dogs. Early game was brutally difficult, especially since the game unlocks free roaming within the first hour of gameplay but never warns you what areas to avoid unless you want a quick ass-kicking. It's really fun though once you upgrade your moves & health. Also neat how the levels encourage the player to get increasingly violent, mirroring the progressive degradation of the protagonist's psychological state. Sure, you could continue to non-lethally punch everyone out, but wouldn't it be so much more satisfying (and efficient!) to impale them on rusty meat hooks?


Driving system is excellent, gun play is surprisingly good, albeit sometimes requiring up to five different buttons with a controller. Melee combat is regrettably terrible at the start, but massively improves as you learn new combos. The narrative is fantastic, to the point where there have been numerous times I wished the game would stop breaking it up with action sequences.


Biggest complaint, aside from the awful start, is that some fairly vital information is obscured from the player. There are like 50 or so different vehicles you can purchase, and as best I can tell no information available about how well any of them handle. Clothing sets can provide some fairly significant bonuses, but nothing tells you which stores sell what pieces. You can occasionally find pistols in hidden locations while exploring Hong Kong between story missions, but they seemingly randomly disappear without warning from the protagonist's inventory (apparently the trigger is the game resetting variables during certain cutscenes, but again that's something a player will have to go online to learn about).