• An addendum to Rule 3 regarding fan-translated works of things such as Web Novels has been made. Please see here for details.
  • We've issued a clarification on our policy on AI-generated work.
  • Our mod selection process has completed. Please welcome our new moderators.
  • Due to issues with external spam filters, QQ is currently unable to send any mail to Microsoft E-mail addresses. This includes any account at live.com, hotmail.com or msn.com. Signing up to the forum with one of these addresses will result in your verification E-mail never arriving. For best results, please use a different E-mail provider for your QQ address.
  • For prospective new members, a word of warning: don't use common names like Dennis, Simon, or Kenny if you decide to create an account. Spammers have used them all before you and gotten those names flagged in the anti-spam databases. Your account registration will be rejected because of it.
  • Since it has happened MULTIPLE times now, I want to be very clear about this. You do not get to abandon an account and create a new one. You do not get to pass an account to someone else and create a new one. If you do so anyway, you will be banned for creating sockpuppets.
  • Due to the actions of particularly persistent spammers and trolls, we will be banning disposable email addresses from today onward.
  • The rules regarding NSFW links have been updated. See here for details.

Video Games General

Anyone else looking forward to Kiwami 3? I loved Yakuza 3 back in the day, Okinawa was such a cozy setting. Looking forward to experiencing it again.
 
Just starting out on the remake of FF Tactics that came out recently, does anyone have some beginner friendly tips to share?

I did a little looking around after finishing the second/third mission, saving the guy from the bandits, and I'm planning on grinding out the JP Up ability for my initial units because of how… different the game's mechanics are from the FF: Tactics Advanced games.
 
Velk said:
Just starting out on the remake of FF Tactics that came out recently, does anyone have some beginner friendly tips to share?

I did a little looking around after finishing the second/third mission, saving the guy from the bandits, and I'm planning on grinding out the JP Up ability for my initial units because of how… different the game's mechanics are from the FF: Tactics Advanced games.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
From what I understand, grinding is actually kind of a bad idea. Story battles don't scale but random encounters do so you can fuck yourself over by getting powerful random encounters and not having the equipment to match if you grind too much.
 
Velk said:
Just starting out on the remake of FF Tactics that came out recently, does anyone have some beginner friendly tips to share?

I did a little looking around after finishing the second/third mission, saving the guy from the bandits, and I'm planning on grinding out the JP Up ability for my initial units because of how… different the game's mechanics are from the FF: Tactics Advanced games.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Even if you do decide to start grinding, don't do that in the prologue. The more advanced jobs don't have any gear available to them then (unless they've changed things). You could use the various Equip [Weapon] skills to get around that but there's better options for that skill slot.

More generally, cultivate a thief. Theft is a great way to get gear before it's meant to be available to you. Get anyone who might be fighting knight-types Maintenance or whatever it might be called now, broken gear is horrible. Also, Mage Mashers are early game knives with silence on them and Thieves usually have good move ranges with a Move+ support skill. They mash mages real good. On the off chance Steal Heart happens to work for once you can get the enemy to at minimum spend a turn unconfusing the target bot. If you find you can't decide what secondary skill a given character should be using, just go with Squire's. They're useful for building JP if nothing else, though Ramza in particular gets some good Squire skills as the game continues.

Also most missions don't have any kind of round restriction, so do your best to run out the clock on downed enemies, job skills from crystals are job skills you don't have to put together JP for yourself. Very secondary to, y'know, winning but it helps. If the player-available Dark Knight class was pulled in from the WotL release, you'll need your prospective dark knight to crystalize 20 enemies anyway.
 
Melmar said:
From what I understand, grinding is actually kind of a bad idea. Story battles don't scale but random encounters do so you can fuck yourself over by getting powerful random encounters and not having the equipment to match if you grind too much.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm only planning to grind enough that my current dudes can afford the JP+ passive skill the Squire Job has, not try to out-level the game. That is very good advice, because I'm sure one of my Gamer-isms would have made me want to grind out a dozen of levels.

Anonnermus said:
Even if you do decide to start grinding, don't do that in the prologue. The more advanced jobs don't have any gear available to them then (unless they've changed things). You could use the various Equip [Weapon] skills to get around that but there's better options for that skill slot.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah, I noticed that my units had a list of things they were allowed to equip.

Anonnermus said:
More generally, cultivate a thief. Theft is a great way to get gear before it's meant to be available to you. Get anyone who might be fighting knight-types Maintenance or whatever it might be called now, broken gear is horrible. Also, Mage Mashers are early game knives with silence on them and Thieves usually have good move ranges with a Move+ support skill. They mash mages real good. On the off chance Steal Heart happens to work for once you can get the enemy to at minimum spend a turn unconfusing the target bot. If you find you can't decide what secondary skill a given character should be using, just go with Squire's. They're useful for building JP if nothing else, though Ramza in particular gets some good Squire skills as the game continues.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I would suppose that being able to learn all your skills without needing to find weapons to learn them from would make Thieves viable.

Anonnermus said:
Also most missions don't have any kind of round restriction, so do your best to run out the clock on downed enemies, job skills from crystals are job skills you don't have to put together JP for yourself. Very secondary to, y'know, winning but it helps. If the player-available Dark Knight class was pulled in from the WotL release, you'll need your prospective dark knight to crystalize 20 enemies anyway.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'll have to try that some time.
 
Lightbringer said:
Any game in which you build an arcology or any of those sci fi desigs?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

A few.

Surviving Mars has self contained bubble arcologies as the only place to have people living in them.

Dystopica is mostly a diorama creator but it's got plenty of massive buildings that can double as arcologies.

Per Aspera, another Martian colonization sim, has buildings that are sunk into crators that function essentially as an arcology.

On the more degen side, Free Cities is a free text based slavery game about running your own arcology. PregMod is getting updates to this day, and it's one of my favorites.

Sadly anything more complicated than that I wouldn't know of.
 

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCN76hZ6z1E
I came across this a few days ago and ever since then I've pondered if there are any other hyper-niche RPGs with endless procedural generation in unique and interesting ways.

Like, an unholy union of Dwarf Fortress and No Man's Sky. Where every planet is actually different and dense with content, even if scaled considering the madness of too much of everything.
 
Given it's on sale on Steam, anyone here have any experience with Total War Three Kingdoms?

Like, would it be worth the money on a sale, or should I not bother? I know CA abandoned it a good long time ago, but I still want to ask.
 
ShogunTrooper said:
Given it's on sale on Steam, anyone here have any experience with Total War Three Kingdoms?

Like, would it be worth the money on a sale, or should I not bother? I know CA abandoned it a good long time ago, but I still want to ask.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think people keep it alive with mods. Check on YouTube.
 
ShogunTrooper said:
Given it's on sale on Steam, anyone here have any experience with Total War Three Kingdoms?

Like, would it be worth the money on a sale, or should I not bother? I know CA abandoned it a good long time ago, but I still want to ask.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

TLDR: I had fun with it, but treat it like a graphically intense old Total War instead of a new one. Its worth it on sale, especially if you are a dynasty warriors fan. If not, I'd honestly give Pharoah Dynasties a look instead. Pharoah has all of the building and economic developements of Troy, with incredible varience depending on civilization, geography, and even between subfactions.

Three Kingdoms has probably the best city building of the entire series, with a focus on making a functional kingdom out of chaos. The battle system is fun, I do dislike the three generals / six units each system but the combat is fun enough not to be too much of a downside. The game does a wonderful job in making late game or professional units feel vastly superior to their early contemporaries, and even not playing in the Romance mode (where generals behave more like dynasty warriors heros), watching a general's armored cav mow down 180 peasants in a charge fires every dopamine cylinder I have.

Unit wise, units are organized into one of five colors matching the five wu xing elements, which helps determine what they are good against 'generally'. For example Archers are blue, representing water, so they are really good at taking down shock cavalry, which are red representing fire. They are still good to use against any unshielded unit or even ones with shit shields, but its a tendancy thing. Units will tend towards their colors specialty, but there are units that mix and match depending, and every faction has two to three unique units that are usually exemplars of their color or behave differently. For example, the brother of the emperior Liu Chong has a focus on crossbow units, so his unique unit is a yellow (normally the color of melee cavalry) colored Crossbow/Spear heavy infantry, with a unique formation to allow them to hold the line and still fire crossbows. Units are unlocked from the tech tree which every five or so turns you get another tech which has varying bonuses. Unless you are playing the Yellow Turbans, then they get a unique one.

Formations are in the game and there are a ton of them, often unlocked with items or with advanced unit types.

Campaign wise, every leader has a seperate resource, Lu Bu has Terror, THE DONG has oppression, with leaders separated into various groups that roughly decide how they play. There are warlords, governers, bandits and Yellow turbans that have different units and buildings entirely, as well as the Nanman tribes added in the last DLC. Food is a huge limiter on your city growth, but cities can get monstrously large, with city battles from Rome and Medieval returning with a vengeance.

Character wise, its all the characters from the hit novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The game has two modes, Romance and Records. Romance is more like Total Warhammer, where your generals have health bars and can duel each other like in Troy. Records is more a classical style, where charging your general wrong can get them killed rather quickly. Characters have opinions on each other which gives them bonuses while fighting with one another and maluses if they hate each other. You can spare the life of a general and they remember, and you might be able to poach them if they don't like their leader. Its honestly like Dynasty Warriors Pokemon, I'm there to collect Shang Xiang and make her have super kids with Lu Bu, or making Cao Cao marry Diao Chan, or make Zhou Tai, Peng De, and Guan Yu rip Zhao Yun in half. If you don't already care about the characters, they sort of fall flat since the game relies on their historical attitudes to push the narrative and if you don't care about them already aside from being in your faction the game doesn't strictly push a whole ton of character moments.

It does commit the cardinal sin of every Three Kingdoms based game in that it does not actually portray the Three Kingdoms. Instead once three factions get big enough, each forms their own unique kingdom and goes to war for the Emperor's seat.

I had a blast with it, but I'd treat it instead like Rome 2 or Medieval 2, its done and what you have is what you get. There isn't really a reason to play each character more than once outside of a specific few like Sun Ce or Lu Bu, and while the additional start dates help there is only so much you can do with certain characters, since they own roughly the same geographical location from start to about the end. For a lot of characters you will find yourself doing about the same shit every time, and fighting the same people every time. Late game armies do have varience, but not the usual kind like in say Medieval 2 or OG Rome.

Do not get the 8 princes DLC. Its the basegame with all the character removed for only 8 unique chucklefucks way after the three kingdoms period. All the same units, all the same shit. Its dissapointing.
 
Last edited:

View: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v8cJfkZvK6M

Note: Helldivers is not the only game that worked this way. Duplicated files is standard for a lot of the industry because the PS4 and Xbox One used HDDs, which were really slow and needed them. You'll find similar optimizations in older PC games... and older console games too, for that matter. On the HDDs and disc systems, seek times seriously slowed the game down to a crawl. This isn't the case with the newest HDDs in every case, but it can still be a problem especially if you turn off auto-defragmentation.

Remember: sometimes, legacy things do have purpose but in computing they need to be re-examined every few years. In this case, you can entirely blame the PS4 and Xbox One having such trash storage solutions for it not getting looked at sooner (they should have come out with SSD variants from the start and had the pro only come with an SSD).
 
Caught me by surprise too, when my Youtube notifications had the news.

I paused, and thought that corpo developers could do it, but chose not to for greedy and asinine reasons.
 
bryanfran36 said:
Caught me by surprise too, when my Youtube notifications had the news.

I paused, and thought that corpo developers could do it, but chose not to for greedy and asinine reasons.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Some of them probably could, but picture the hassle of maintaining 2 different branches of your game for people on older game consoles. Helldivers can get away with it easier because it really does just affect load times, but just imagine the stutters. Traversal stutters are already a bitch to fix, so imagine that but a thousand times worse.
 
vyor said:
Some of them probably could, but picture the hassle of maintaining 2 different branches of your game for people on older game consoles. Helldivers can get away with it easier because it really does just affect load times, but just imagine the stutters. Traversal stutters are already a bitch to fix, so imagine that but a thousand times worse.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Still, Activision should be put on the spot to deal with their unoptimised CODslop and it's 200GB install size.

The rest of the corpo hacks too.
 
bryanfran36 said:
Still, Activision should be put on the spot to deal with their unoptimised CODslop and it's 200GB install size.

The rest of the corpo hacks too.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Oh yeah no, they have no real excuse. Blops 6 is just really bad in more or less every single possible way. It doesn't even render properly on AMD GPUs, likely because they forgot to turn off the console detection feature so it reads the GPU as though it were a console and downgrades features.
 
Okay, took the plunge and bought Three Kingdoms, and, honestly? I haven't been able to put it down.

I might have barely any cultural exposure to that period, given I was never into Dynasty Warrios, meaning I know some of the big players like Dong Zhuo, Lu Bu, Guan Yu, and Cao Cao, but everything beyond that is Chinese to me. Literally.

On the other hand, that meant I didn't know who was who so, I just plunged in basically blind.

Well, after a few dozen turns into Liu Bei, my typical "Fuck about, get used to the UI, and figure out how shit works" run that I always do when I start a new Total War game, I downloaded some visual mods, like Make Them Unique, because I quickly realized that generic generals lived up to that label way too much and needed some variety, and started a Ma Teng Campaign. Now I'm 100+ turns in, managed to restore the Han Empire (there is a second Han Empire that still has the same flag and name, which is confusing as shit sometimes), with Liu Xie having taken the throne, and I now empathize with Late Rome more than ever:

I am fighting the Kingdom of Wu and Yuan Shu in the east, as well as some small remnants of Gongzun San's realm, with Gongzun being basically my personal Persia with how often we butt heads, I had the occasional Yellow Turban flare-up after I managed to exterminate them, but they have been in the border regions, where my armies already are, so they rarely survive, and, my very own Bleeding Ulcer: I am playing whack-a-barbarian in the south because the Nanman kept invading, taking over settlements that I want back, and attacking my southern vassals, and trying to negotiate with them, maybe get a peace treaty so I can catch my breath and build up some more forces, may as well be trying to bribe a wall to get out of the way because they all hate me, and marching armies through there is a pain because I get ambushed left and right, the jungle gives a debuff for my troops in battle, and I'm reasonably sure my movement range is reduced. Now I know how the Romans felt about Germany. And I will not rest until every last one of these bamboo-wearing savages is six feet under.

Surprisingly, the Bandit Queen Zheng Jiang is really chill with me. Early in the campaign I gave her money and food to leave me alone, so I could focus on The Dong and keep my northern border safe, then she asked me to kill her rival, that other bandit lord up north that she neighbors, and now she's sitting in the mountains, probably drinking wine and chomping on some steamed buns or whatever a woman that is buds with the Han Emperor gets up to, because she actually allied with me and then joined my Empire once I reformed the Han (which somehow didn't confederate her, she's just some sort of vassal that I can trade with, but somehow can't give orders), meaning she's just sitting there in the north, not doing anything, only giving a notification as to whether she likes or dislikes whatever I'm doing.

It gives me the mental image of Bandit Queen and the Emperor being drinking buddies or pen pals or something, because I have my eyes on her lands, I surround her on three sides, and she's not doing anything, so I don't feel the need to invade her, as all my armies are desperately needed elsewhere. So I leave her be, and occasionally toss some food her way.

Meanwhile, the Champion that is in Ma Teng's army at the start, Peng De? He became my personal Guan Yu. In the sense that I hurl him into duels and he just kills everything. I swear, that man never lost a fight, and I dread the day his satisfaction may get low enough because of something I overlooked, because he could probably murder whoever I send to stop him. I'm kinda curious to see where Lu Bu ended up after I wiped out Dong Zhuo's faction, so I can pit them against one another. I have no idea why that is. Maybe Make The Unique just makes him that strong, or I just get lucky in his opponents, but that man is a beast, and has been a fixture in Ma Teng's army ever since the war against Dong Zhuo started.

Speaking of which, Dong Min, Dong Zhuo's brother, is now one of my generals, as I managed to recruit him a few turns after I killed his faction, and I like to imagine he's having a bit of a redemption arc, or at least making amends for his brother, as he had taken over after The Dong died, and was an antagonist for a good portion of my campaign. Now he's down south fighting the Nanman in the name of his Emperor, and doing pretty well down there.

So, yeah, that's what I've been up to for the last few days. Fun stuff.
 
Last edited:
ShogunTrooper said:
Okay, took the plunge and bought Three Kingdoms, and, honestly? I haven't been able to put it down.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's one of the reasons why CA abandoning the game stings so much. Because frankly? Three Kingdoms is a good game.

Not without its flaws sure but it's just a solid game overall.
 
Piemanlives said:
It's one of the reasons why CA abandoning the game stings so much. Because frankly? Three Kingdoms is a good game.

Not without its flaws sure but it's just a solid game overall.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Having played Pharaoh Dynasties before (Not Warhammer, because that game is reaching prices comparable to Paradox games with all that DLC, and I don't have the cash for that), there are some features that are so convenient that it genuinely hurts that they are gone.

Unit-Swapping is one big example, where you can convert one Unit into a new one, usually meaning that you can turn your crappy Ji and Bow Militia into something that is actually worthwhile, or can immediately get started getting a newly-recruited officer's retinue up to speed, since they are usually not that great. Kinda miffed that I can't swap units from one retinue to another within the same army, but that is a minor quibble.

The retinues themselves are also a neat idea. Apart from the officers giving them unique buffs and abilities, meaning you put more care in who you put in charge of what, especially with the limit of 6 units, but there is also another neat feature: They make redeployment a whole lot easier.

Since you can dismiss them, and then, a turn later, re-assemble them at another settlement of your choice, you can pretty much teleport them from one place to the other end of China, which is way faster than trying to march it all across the map. It might be a little bit cheesy, since you are basically materializing a veteran army under a well-leveled commander on the other side of the country with fairly negligible cost (provided your economy is up to snuff), but it's balanced out by the troops having to replenish from basically nothing for two or three turns first. It's still faster and massively more convenient than walking them cross-country though.
 
ShogunTrooper said:
The retinues themselves are also a neat idea. Apart from the officers giving them unique buffs and abilities, meaning you put more care in who you put in charge of what, especially with the limit of 6 units, but there is also another neat feature: They make redeployment a whole lot easier.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Something else too is that when a general is dismissed, they take their retinue with them. And you can hire them with that retinue for an immediate boost to your army. As well, you can get lucky and get some other faction's unique units. I got lucky as Liu Chong once and was able to grab Zheng Jiang and her entire starting army after she got taken out by The Dong.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 13 (members: 0, guests: 13)
Back
Top