there’s a HORDE MODE???
I am immediately redownloading
it’s co-op and it’s only two levels
and it was in a dlc you might not have bought cause they were all multiplayer only
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Hordes of what? Zombies?
poor exploited favela kids, or new jersey mafia guys
alpha centauri remains, to date, the only actually good Civ game
which makes absolutely nothing having learned what made it good so depressing
I admit it’s been a long time since I played SMAC but what makes it better than Civ 4 exactly? I half remember it having a lot of the problems of its forerunner Civ 3 and any quality it had mostly stemming from having much better writing. The civ gameplay format works better and is more believable in the comparatively compressed time scale of terraforming a planet rather than the ridiculousness of ‘all of human history abstracted into unrecognizability’
Still, none of that has much to do with the mechanics, which I don’t recall being anything special compared to Civ 4 + expansions
AC has better hex-by-hex combat strategy which feeds into the whole “hostile world” thing, and you can heavily customize individual units. Civ 4 is my favorite too but it’s probably the least interested in, like, minor skirmishes out of the entire series, it’s very macro. AC is easily second best though and I could certainly see preferring it, it’s a much different game overall.
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A quick google to remind myself that yep, SMAC definitely had an infinite city spam problem.
TBQH I’m kind of torn between thinking civ 4 + expansions is best or civ 5 is best (of the sid meier 4x games) even if I loved AC for the plot.
My mind boggles that anyone could love that much micro in a game where you’d end up with >20 cities and hundreds of units to manage every turn.
also the AC interface has aged extremely badly – it’s hard to play without a numpad, it’s hard to get it to run windowed, the text isn’t really legible unless you can force it into a lower DPI or resolution than a modern display’s native configuration, and it’s just difficult to know what to look at unless you know the game pretty well; the aforementioned unit customization screen is daunting as hell if you didn’t play the game back in 2000, though you can ignore it and still do fine. night and day with 4 which has a totally sane early 3D engine that ran OK on first-gen intel macbook graphics for me back in 2006 and still feels natural on anything.
I still really hate 5, I actually like beyond earth a fair bit better than 5 – certainly more than the critical consensus – though it’s even more of a single-player game than ever. 6 offended my sensibilities way less than 5 at release but idk if I like it better than BE even.
i just got a modded xbox. i’ve been playing jet set radio future. i like to play it, it’s a dumb little video game that looks sexy and cool. i’m noticing that 6th-gen games lend themselves way better work/college lifestyles that are trying to be well-managed. i’m in this part in jsrf where i have to find two helicopters and spray paint them. i don’t know what i’m doing, i like it. i’m eating tortilla chips and drinking some purity organic. if i were playing grand theft auto: online or call of duty: infinite warfare i would be so stressed and unsatisfied by the time i decide go to bed.
i could be playing crimson tears, spikeout, or breakdown too. like, there’s no capitalism in my gaming experience. i work and then i play freely. i repeat. i’m playing a game that invites me to shove cops to the ground and off of buildings. the xbox was made in the usa (manufactured in mexico). um…
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yeah there was just way more interesting stuff going on w/ units and general map structure in SMAC. especially the map, considering the planet fights back, especially if you decide to have fun with boreholes.
city sprawl was a problem but it was also, like, based on the faction you were on? the differences in factions were actually huge and discrete and made major differences in how you played the game
i dunno, maybe if i revisit it i won’t be as enthusiastic about it. speaking of civ-likes, i randomly have the urge to play master of magic now.
edit: also one of the things that gets me about civ is that almost all upgrades are like minor +% upgrades that accumulate over time and it’s just like nothing feels likes like it makes anything distinct enough. BE was pretty bad about this
yeah, BE had plenty of issues, it isn’t really on par with the better titles, I pretty much only play it when I want to play AC but don’t want to fight with the interface / getting it displaying correctly / not having a numpad
I like how gold has such different uses in different installments. in 4 you could do really well “selling” techs to opponents once you had writing + currency, and then you basically just had to stay out of debt on your research and culture budget. this is gone from 6 but one of the neater things they’ve done is made buying new city tiles or units rather than waiting to produce them fairly affordable, so it’s something you’ll actually do a few times a game.
4’s default difficulty is also tough compared to others which I respect a lot
Venice in Civ 5 is kind of the most extreme difference in factions I’ve seen in any 4x: It can’t produce settlers but it can buy city states outright and treat them as puppets. Any cities won through battle can only be puppeted or razed. They have twice as many trade routes.
Like, nothing in SMAC comes close to that level of a faction’s mechanics changing how a game feels. (and again, I’m saying this as an avowed SMAC fan. I just like the way the later civs play, though only following the rule of ‘wait for the expansions to come out’)
if only AC weren’t in that no-man’s land of windows titles that are too late for dosbox but too early for relatively predictable 3d acceleration and windowing behaviour. thanks a lot, chris hecker!!!
Civ 5 is just soooooooo slow and the city states and the way religions and civics are handled are such an overcomplicated nuisance compared to 4. also I hate that the diplomacy is its own interface rather than just an overlay, takes me out of it. diplomacy is the best part of 4.
I played a ton of MoM as a kid. Most broken 4X game of all time? Like, you can hardly click the screen without accidentally making use of one overpowered mechanic or another that lets you steamroll the AI.
BTW, if you’re hankering for MoM, try the 1v1 scenario in the free demo: Play Master of Magic (demo) - Naclbox . It’s a much tighter and well-paced experience than the full game.
ooh, play Endless Legend if you haven’t. The factions have ridiculous rulesets and they interact really nicely. The narrative is great, too.
I agree that Civ is such a history grab-bag that I can’t get much out of the fantasy. It feels like pastiche rather than a coherent, ‘I guided my ancient city-state to the stars’. If I got a better fantasy out of it I’d probably enjoy it a lot more, but I’ve found space 4x’s, Total War, and Endless Legend to be much more interesting.
Never forget Emperor of the Fading suns, the not-Dune 4x with seats in the Imperial Government you can struggle to fill and systemic Church bans on field of research (with roaming Inquisitors to catch you in the act).
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Majora’s Mask feels kinda shoddy. The first “quest” of getting back the ocarina is jarringly bad for a Nintendo game, and the intro made it very clear this was a Nintendo game with the signature teaching cadence of the platforming section. The quest is designed to make you familiar with the city, but you’re on a timer and there’s really too much in the city to see in one cycle (which is the point of the game).
I caught the last kid in hide-and-seek seconds before the dawn reset, which was kind of thrilling.
The most important mechanic in the game, the Bomber’s Notebook (which sounds a lot more sinister now than it did the year before 9/11), seems like it can be completely missed, particularly by a player who ran out the timers on the hide-and-seek game one too many times. Even after getting it, it’s rather unrecognizable little icon in a corner of the menu that does not look particularly interactive. At least there’s an out-of-place sign in town that unexpectedly tutorializes the notebook, to hint at its importance.
It’s almost like they invented the most notable part of the game by accident and then stubbornly fought against treating it design-wise as anything more than a sideshow element in the newly developed Zelda Formula (thanks, Aonuma).
You can see them fix these parts in the 3DS remake. I watched a few people bounce off the original at that point so it was definitely needed.
I’m sure they were talking about how important it is to learn-by-failure with such an odd and consequential mechanic, but ‘repeat tutorial content’ is a bitter pill to swallow. Shadow of Mordor is also based on learn-by-dying and it has a lot of strange consideration for how death, advancing the ‘board’ of bosses, won’t get into a cycle of punishing failure.
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I suspect the intro quest was actually a late addition to the game. For one thing, the hide-and-seek game has its own timer (when there’s already the 3 day timer) that is based on the 6AM reset, which suggests they didn’t have time to figure out how to make an exception for that bit of game logic. For another, catching the kids is iffy with no obvious trick to it.
Also Nintendo design from the SNES era onward is almost strictly learn-by-success.
i dunno, i thought the tutorial was very reasonable if you took the time to read the text boxes, altho i will fully cop to never figuring out how to stop my cities from starving or rioting in the endgame
also yeah the micro spam is definitely a bit much but once i started basically setting guys to walk across the map or hold as garrisons it got more manageable
altho the pathfinding was quite shit and my units would often get stuck on terrain it seemed like
i definitely love the unit customizations and the massive futurist tech tree combined with the diplomacy of trading research and knowledge, it felt so much more real and… statesman-like than civ 4, where you are basically a petty dictator no matter the civ
i played on a touchpad without keyboard shortcuts :o
i def want to try playing a non-militaristic style, it always felt so useless and pointless to do so in civ but in SMAC i feel like i could really have fun being like, the gaians or something
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