Syndicate is about as likely as any other Bullfrog game, which is to say not very. Unless EA get their heads out of their collective ass.
Blackthorne is a Blizzard game, so it depends on whether or not Activision have any say, I suppose. It did have a PC version, so I wouldn't rule it out.
Edit: Although, Starbreeze are apparently working on a new Syndicate, so we might see the old games in some form before that arrives. Probably not on GOG, though.
Cherrn on
All creature will die and all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai.
Hm. Until Monday, The Witcher 2 is $36 on D2D with a code. It says it's DRM-free, no refunds, and includes all the preorder bonuses from GoG- does that mean you get a copy on GoG, or...?
I'm pretty sure you have to buy games from GoG to download them there. GoG doesn't have a place to enter codes like Steam does for certain titles.
Once I've successfully assaulted a SAM site (I'd found a helicopter pilot and he'd informed me of their presence), do I have to somehow deactivate or destroy the SAM site itself? I haven't gone back to the airport yet to see if I can get flown around, but it seems wrong in the context of the realism in the game to just leave the equipment there fully operational.
TeeMan on
0
Options
Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
edited January 2011
No, you just have to hold it. If the enemy takes it back then you have to capture it again.
When you're getting ferried via chopper, zones under SAM protection will be highlighted. Fly into them and the chopper will quickly take damage and will be downed.
No, you just have to hold it. If the enemy takes it back then you have to capture it again.
Because it's not a town, can I even raise militia to defend it? I'll check it after work. It'd be good if I could because otherwise I've gotta station a few Mercs there until I take care of the town to the south, which I really don't want to do.
My militia in Drassen is kicking ass, btw. A fair few of them have been promoted from Green to Regular already with two successful skirmishes
You can train militia there as well, they'll look after it for you.
You can also do additional militia training to bring all your forces up to "blue" (which I think is the highest it'll go anyway), but naturally this takes more time.
EDIT: Man, between this and the X-Com thread, I'm reminded that they simply don't make games like this anymore. So much scope to the gameplay.
subedii on
0
Options
Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
edited January 2011
I wouldn't say "don't make" more than "big, expensive developers don't make." Heck, look at Bioware, from Baldur's Gate 2's enormous scope and complex gameplay (okay, more "incomprehensible" admittedly, but I place that on AD&D) to... whatever it is they're doing with DA2. ME1 to 2 for an even smaller timescale. I even read straight from one of the developers that the streamlining and simplification got them even more sales, which justified it all.
Imagine if everyone had that same mindset? Paradox would be churning out Starcraft clones right now. Thank god for niche and indie developers
Blockbuster games are just too goddamned expensive nowadays to risk alienating potential players with even the slightest bit of hindrance to instant gratification, which is a shame.
Thanks! I may end up splitting my 6 Mercs into two squads anyway. One to train militia at the SAM site and the other to bolster the existing militia in Drassen. I'm currently making a fair bit more money than I'm spending from that one mine, so it might be time to consolidate what I have before planning the next offensive
Again, this game is AWESOME! So many things to balance and think about. The engagement at the SAM site was great too, 6 Mercs against 12 enemies. I was lucky in that none of them had rifles (I had one), but they had grenades so bum-rushing even single enemies with a group was out of the question. Effective use of cover and some bravery on account of one of my medics won the day Just wish there was some good equipment to take from the place!
edit: In response to your last point Zxerol, I was the same when I first installed it. Trying to play it like Fallout Tactics, getting lost in the stats and menus... and getting goddamn frustrated. But now that I've put a good deal of time in studying the manual, making notes, making sound choices merc hire (besides just Marksmanship) and now it's clicking; it's all coming together
edit2: Also, the other merc hire place I've unlocked, M.E.R.C, has a freaking horrible selection of mercs but at rock-bottom prices. Maybe it's worth picking up a bunch on the cheap just to train militia? Sounds like I've got a spreadsheet to create
I wouldn't say "don't make" more than "big, expensive developers don't make." Heck, look at Bioware, from Baldur's Gate 2's enormous scope and complex gameplay (okay, more "incomprehensible" admittedly, but I place that on AD&D) to... whatever it is they're doing with DA2. ME1 to 2 for an even smaller timescale. I even read straight from one of the developers that the streamlining and simplification got them even more sales, which justified it all.
Imagine if everyone had that same mindset? Paradox would be churning out Starcraft clones right now. Thank god for niche and indie developers
Blockbuster games are just too goddamned expensive nowadays to risk alienating potential players with even the slightest bit of hindrance to instant gratification, which is a shame.
I was speaking more about tactical squad level strategy games like this.
The closest recent one is Frozen Synapse, and whilst that's fun, it's purely about the combat and nothing else.
The only other attempts at the genre these days aren't even indie as such, just the occasional mod project.
EDIT: Regarding mercenaries and such: I used to have a core 6 person squad and a couple of people roving around training up militia and other odd jobs. The M.E.R.C guys are indeed pretty bad. Personally I never used MERC, but from what I understand if you use them regularly they get a better selection of mercenaries to choose from over time.
subedii on
0
Options
KakodaimonosCode fondlerHelping the 1% get richerRegistered Userregular
I wouldn't say "don't make" more than "big, expensive developers don't make." Heck, look at Bioware, from Baldur's Gate 2's enormous scope and complex gameplay (okay, more "incomprehensible" admittedly, but I place that on AD&D) to... whatever it is they're doing with DA2. ME1 to 2 for an even smaller timescale. I even read straight from one of the developers that the streamlining and simplification got them even more sales, which justified it all.
Imagine if everyone had that same mindset? Paradox would be churning out Starcraft clones right now. Thank god for niche and indie developers
Blockbuster games are just too goddamned expensive nowadays to risk alienating potential players with even the slightest bit of hindrance to instant gratification, which is a shame.
I was speaking more about tactical squad level strategy games like this.
The closest recent one is Frozen Synapse, and whilst that's fun, it's purely about the combat and nothing else.
The only other attempts at the genre these days aren't even indie as such, just the occasional mod project.
EDIT: Regarding mercenaries and such: I used to have a core 6 person squad and a couple of people roving around training up militia and other odd jobs. The M.E.R.C guys are indeed pretty bad. Personally I never used MERC, but from what I understand if you use them regularly they get a better selection of mercenaries to choose from over time.
I'd usually use Ira and the other free mercs for training along with a couple of the MERC guys for repairing and maintenance.
Militia in Drassen and the adjacent SAM site are bolstered, attack on San Mona prepared, time to execute 8-)
I hope it's less difficult than Alma, got ripped to shreds constantly there!
I ended up recruiting 2 high INT guys from M.E.R.C as errand boys, with one who specialises in explosives and the other mechanical, so as errand boys and militia trainers, they should do pretty well! One of them has a massive lisp though, shitting me off already
I always loved the backstory and interplay between mercs in the JA games.
It makes the characters feel so much more real when you go into JA2 and find out that Speck got fed up with being called a nerd and decided to make his own merc agency. Or that Ivan finally got the recognition he deserved for being a stone cold badass.
While I was attempting my failure of an assault on Alma, Buns copped a few bullets and was thoroughly killed. I was surprised when Gunter, the husky German, professed his love for Buns with something along the lines of;
"Watching you kill was like watching a beautiful dance of death. Had you lived, I would have made you the happiest mercenary in the world"
While I was attempting my failure of an assault on Alma, Buns copped a few bullets and was thoroughly killed. I was surprised when Gunter, the husky German, professed his love for Buns with something along the lines of;
"Watching you kill was like watching a beautiful dance of death. Had you lived, I would have made you the happiest mercenary in the world"
You can also do additional militia training to bring all your forces up to "blue" (which I think is the highest it'll go anyway), but naturally this takes more time.
There's three levels of militia, actually - Green, Regular (Blue), and Veteran (Gold). You can only get them to veteran status by combat experience, but, as you mentioned, you can train them up to Veteran by just continuing to train militia in a fully staffed sector; for each point of militia that you don't add, you'll instead turn a green militiaman into a regular.
While I was attempting my failure of an assault on Alma, Buns copped a few bullets and was thoroughly killed. I was surprised when Gunter, the husky German, professed his love for Buns with something along the lines of;
"Watching you kill was like watching a beautiful dance of death. Had you lived, I would have made you the happiest mercenary in the world"
Alma is a real bitch. I usually so Drassen, then uh, the one to the west of Alma before hitting Alma.
Quick question; are you using the fan-made 1.13 patch? If you aren't, I'd recomend that you get it after your first play-through.
I'm running on 1.12 at the moment because yeah, as you said, everyone recommends it on the first run-through with 1.13 on subsequent plays.
I've headed West over to San Mona (thank GOD they have a store where I can offload some of my shit! Also, woohoo second rifle acquired, happy birthday Grunty) and staged a successful assault and repelled a sizable counter-attack on the west-most SAM site Thankfully I had 14 green militia recruited by the time the counter-attack came in so I didn't have to put my guys in the line of danger, but the goon with the shotgun sure knew how to put holes in the backs of his fellow soilders.
Now to sit and heal/repair equipment before staging an assault on the mine to the north Not sure what I'm going to do with the money once I liberate that mine, I really like the balance of my squad at the moment and am becoming a little attached to them, so I'm not looking to fire/hire.
Well as the game progresses, Bobby Ray's (the online store) tends to stock more stuff, so that's always something to spend on if you've got spare cash lying around. Also, as your mercenaries improve, they may start asking for more money as part of their contracts, but that's usually not too big a deal.
You'll probably have plenty of leftover money in the end.
Also, I don't know if you know this, but you can also craft your own attachments for your weapons. Things like barrel extenders, larger clips, stuff like that.
I can't remember any of the "recipes" but I'm sure they're on the net somewhere. You use things like spare pipes, duct tape and some other miscellaneous bits and bobs to make them.
Oh awesome! I was wondering what the hell the duct-tape was for, I just gave it to my mechanic and it's just been sitting there. I'll look it up in a bit
I always found it funny on Return to Zork that some of the characters act like puppets later in the game. It seems like they ran out of space to use video clips.
Is it wrong that even though I own Arcanum (I still have the box actually), I'm think about buying it again so that I can play it on my netbook without ripping the cd's and screwing around with all of that myself?
Recently I've been getting my space sim on with Space Rangers 2: Reboot.
Well I guess it's not really a space sim so much as it's a Life And Times Of Zhapod Beeblebrox sim.
But damn if shooting space pirates, extorting their space money and then killing them on my way to seduce the daughter of a president or something similar in a well done text adventure is not great fun.
Just now I got sent to jail for sixty days after I landed my burning wreck on a nearby planet to escape certain horrible death. Turns out I accidentally blew up a few passenger liners or something.
In short order I raised a champion cockroach for the races and was released early by the warden for becoming the best boxer in the prison.
Then I went and became a galactic super star by reenacting an ACDC concert on the planet of rock and roll.
...And maybe blew up a few more passenger liners.
What the hell? That sounds awesome.
The game's a little bit ... clunky, I think is the best word to use, there, but it's an overall blast to play.
I bought it on sale ($5? $10?) from Impulse many, many moons ago, and I definitely got my money's worth out of it and then some.
It plays from a turn-based top-down perspective (for the most part), but there are planetary combat missions which are RTSes (where you can posess a specific robot), prison stints and diplomatic exchanges that play out as text-adventures, and I think certain sections of the game actually play as top-down shooters, but it's been awhile so I can't remember perfectly.
There are scads of factions, and they all sell different quality equipment (e.g., Race 1 sells really cheap equipment that breaks down really fast, so you'll be spending a lot on maintenance, while Race 2 sells excessively expensive equipment that never breaks, and Race 3 makes the best lazerz, etc.).
All in all, B+, would play again.
Yep yep. The setting is a handful of comical species fighting off three factions of nominally evil robots who do those things you'd expect evil robots to do. Humans, googly eyed space vegans, not-actually-mustachioed serial law breakers who venerate piracy, large and stupid space fascists and the like all misunderstanding one another and generally bumbling about in the face of an extinction event. You play a space ranger, which basically means you're some guy who does whatever. Like if the Power Rangers all had space ships and no moral compass. And if there were fifty of them.
They kinda urge you to save the galaxy but you don't really need to unless it's on hard, harder or really god damned hard, in which case it's a zombie robot apocalypse scenario and you don't have a choice.
Also with the zombie robot apocalypse if you go around butchering all the other space rangers so they're too busy being dead to help in the war effort.
There is indeed a top down arena shooter mode where you take direct control of your ship. It's like someone crammed everything they thought was cool or funny into one game.
Only big problem with SR2 is that you have to keep a pretty good forward momentum thing going in terms of earning money and doing jobs and shit: jobs are non-repeatable and decent-value loot from enemies pretty rare, so if you're not careful you won't be able to repair your stuff and buy new equipment and all the other stuff to keep pace with the rest of the universe. Other than that and the questionableness of having combat take place on the system scale, though, pretty fun.
EDIT: Although if you're interested it's probably better to get SR2: Reboot through Steam instead since that includes some extra swag.
EDIT: Raptor: Call of the Shadows isn't part of the Apogee sale? Balls.
Ah, goody. I bought it off an Impulse sale about a year back for peanuts, but as I couldn't be bothered reading the manual I got my ass handed to me within 10 minutes twice in a row and gave up.
Posts
Also: Blackthorne?!
Blackthorne is a Blizzard game, so it depends on whether or not Activision have any say, I suppose. It did have a PC version, so I wouldn't rule it out.
Edit: Although, Starbreeze are apparently working on a new Syndicate, so we might see the old games in some form before that arrives. Probably not on GOG, though.
I'm pretty sure you have to buy games from GoG to download them there. GoG doesn't have a place to enter codes like Steam does for certain titles.
Once I've successfully assaulted a SAM site (I'd found a helicopter pilot and he'd informed me of their presence), do I have to somehow deactivate or destroy the SAM site itself? I haven't gone back to the airport yet to see if I can get flown around, but it seems wrong in the context of the realism in the game to just leave the equipment there fully operational.
Because it's not a town, can I even raise militia to defend it? I'll check it after work. It'd be good if I could because otherwise I've gotta station a few Mercs there until I take care of the town to the south, which I really don't want to do.
My militia in Drassen is kicking ass, btw. A fair few of them have been promoted from Green to Regular already with two successful skirmishes
You can also do additional militia training to bring all your forces up to "blue" (which I think is the highest it'll go anyway), but naturally this takes more time.
EDIT: Man, between this and the X-Com thread, I'm reminded that they simply don't make games like this anymore. So much scope to the gameplay.
Imagine if everyone had that same mindset? Paradox would be churning out Starcraft clones right now. Thank god for niche and indie developers
Blockbuster games are just too goddamned expensive nowadays to risk alienating potential players with even the slightest bit of hindrance to instant gratification, which is a shame.
Again, this game is AWESOME! So many things to balance and think about. The engagement at the SAM site was great too, 6 Mercs against 12 enemies. I was lucky in that none of them had rifles (I had one), but they had grenades so bum-rushing even single enemies with a group was out of the question. Effective use of cover and some bravery on account of one of my medics won the day
edit: In response to your last point Zxerol, I was the same when I first installed it. Trying to play it like Fallout Tactics, getting lost in the stats and menus... and getting goddamn frustrated. But now that I've put a good deal of time in studying the manual, making notes, making sound choices merc hire (besides just Marksmanship) and now it's clicking; it's all coming together
edit2: Also, the other merc hire place I've unlocked, M.E.R.C, has a freaking horrible selection of mercs but at rock-bottom prices. Maybe it's worth picking up a bunch on the cheap just to train militia? Sounds like I've got a spreadsheet to create
I was speaking more about tactical squad level strategy games like this.
The closest recent one is Frozen Synapse, and whilst that's fun, it's purely about the combat and nothing else.
The only other attempts at the genre these days aren't even indie as such, just the occasional mod project.
EDIT: Regarding mercenaries and such: I used to have a core 6 person squad and a couple of people roving around training up militia and other odd jobs. The M.E.R.C guys are indeed pretty bad. Personally I never used MERC, but from what I understand if you use them regularly they get a better selection of mercenaries to choose from over time.
I'd usually use Ira and the other free mercs for training along with a couple of the MERC guys for repairing and maintenance.
I ended up recruiting 2 high INT guys from M.E.R.C as errand boys, with one who specialises in explosives and the other mechanical, so as errand boys and militia trainers, they should do pretty well! One of them has a massive lisp though, shitting me off already
His legendary wisdom stat means you can turn him into Bruce Willis with a bit of effort.
It makes the characters feel so much more real when you go into JA2 and find out that Speck got fed up with being called a nerd and decided to make his own merc agency. Or that Ivan finally got the recognition he deserved for being a stone cold badass.
Or the disappearance of Mike.
"Watching you kill was like watching a beautiful dance of death. Had you lived, I would have made you the happiest mercenary in the world"
Pretty cool stuff considering it's otherwise completely unnecessary.
Alma is a real bitch. I usually so Drassen, then uh, the one to the west of Alma before hitting Alma.
Quick question; are you using the fan-made 1.13 patch? If you aren't, I'd recomend that you get it after your first play-through.
There's three levels of militia, actually - Green, Regular (Blue), and Veteran (Gold). You can only get them to veteran status by combat experience, but, as you mentioned, you can train them up to Veteran by just continuing to train militia in a fully staffed sector; for each point of militia that you don't add, you'll instead turn a green militiaman into a regular.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I'm running on 1.12 at the moment because yeah, as you said, everyone recommends it on the first run-through with 1.13 on subsequent plays.
I've headed West over to San Mona (thank GOD they have a store where I can offload some of my shit! Also, woohoo second rifle acquired, happy birthday Grunty) and staged a successful assault and repelled a sizable counter-attack on the west-most SAM site
Now to sit and heal/repair equipment before staging an assault on the mine to the north
You'll probably have plenty of leftover money in the end.
if not,
buy things for your guns.
I can't remember any of the "recipes" but I'm sure they're on the net somewhere. You use things like spare pipes, duct tape and some other miscellaneous bits and bobs to make them.
So... maybe.
At least the nature photo environments are still nice.
This weekend's deal is Apogee games:
This is from the Space Sims thread:
EDIT: Although if you're interested it's probably better to get SR2: Reboot through Steam instead since that includes some extra swag.
EDIT: Raptor: Call of the Shadows isn't part of the Apogee sale? Balls.