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I forgot to write about this “RTS”, even though I played it a few days ago. I say “RTS” because, while the premise is the same, the complexity makes it closer to some simple (albeit very pretty) flash game. You control an army of seedlings colonizing a field of perfectly circular asteroids. You build trees on these asteroids and fight enemy seedlings.

Eufloria Screenshot

This is a pretty picture, but if you haven’t played Eufloria, there’s no way to know what it actually is.

The game is fun enough and usually relaxing, but the one thing it lacks is a rally point system. Still, in spite of this flaw, I managed to complete the first two worlds, leaving three more to clear. For now, I find the game just OK, so I won’t be aiming to clear it 100%. The campaign will suffice.

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No new game today, and nothing of importance with the games I’m currently playing.

Anomaly: Warzone Earth

I gave a shot with one of the extra game modes I unlocked during the campaign. Bagdad Mayhem is the actual reverse tower defense I was talking about when I started this game a few days ago. You get some starting cash and need to destroy wave after wave of spawning towers, surrounding a generator. Once the generator is destroyed, new towers spawn, tougher than before. I managed to get to wave 13, out of 18 in total, before I was destroyed.

Toki Tori

The story repeats itself. I tired the level I was stuck on again, and I solved it again. I can’t believe it wasn’t obvious the last time. I managed to solve a few more, but I haven’t completed the world this time, like I did yesterday. Still, I’m getting there.

Titan Attacks

Bah, I hate it. Five or six fresh attempts, but I got nowhere. There’s nothing to write about, really. The last zone is hard.

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I’ve completed the last few levels of this game’s campaign yesterday. As it turns out, after the second six missions in Tokyo, I had to return to Baghdad for two more missions before it was all done. I also unlocked several more units, but in the end, all I used for the last few missions was the shield generator, a tank, a dragon and two missile launchers. I simply seemed more effective to get as much damage as possible and use my commander unit as an extra decoy for when it’s needed.

Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Random Screenshot

It’s hard to capture a truly memorable moment in a game like this, so here’s just a regular pretty moment.

For now, though, I mark the game as “completed”.The last mission was hard, but I found the mission before that slightly harder, with more enemies and more need for my suit abilities to keep my army alive. Still, both were pretty tough to get through, even at the casual difficulty I played at. From what I can tell, there are achievements for beating all the missions on a higher difficulty, so I might have to revisit all of them eventually. There’s also extra game modes I can try out, as well as achievements linked to those modes.

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I decided to tackle another game in my steam backlog and Anomaly always sort of interested me. From what I understood, it was basically a tower defense game “in reverse”, meaning you control the line of mobs navigating between the enemy towers. My assumptions were pretty much spot on, but the game still managed to surprise me.

It’s fun, there’s no doubt about that. As someone who always preferred to just play through the campaign of an RTS and then leave the game, this one suits me perfectly. The plot is a classic. It involves an alien invasion and a platoon of badass soldiers saving the day. The story is OK, but nothing special.

Anomaly: Warzone Earth Screenshot

Anomaly is definitely an extremely good-looking game.

I played the game for quite a bit today, and managed to get to level 11. Based on the available achievements, I’m guessing I’m nearing the end of the campaign already, so It’s not a very long game. Still, for the amount of money I paid for it (discounted greatly), I thin it provides plenty of fun. There’s also a couple of extra modes to unlock, but I haven’t tried those yet. They might be fun, though.The gameplay is fun, though. You buy your units, upgrade them, put them in proper formations and then navigate through the streets, trying to find the best rout to kill the enemy towers with minimal losses on your side. Apart from giving orders to your units, you also control your character, their commander. He needs to walk around his troops, using the abilities of his powered suit to help out on the battlefield. You get four abilities, which unlock throughout the game. There’s a repair ability, a smoke screen, a decoy, and an air strike. You can’t spam the same ability multiple times, but you can use different abilities together, creating a strong combination. For instance, a decoy protected by a smoke screen will last much, much longer than on it’s own.

My army usually consists of a highly armored unit in front, followed by a shield generator and several high damage units. Now that I’ve unlocked the tank and the dragon, though, I might abandon the missile launchers completely. I’ll see how it goes.

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I decided to fail some more with state politics, so I played Croatia again, this time as Petar Krešimir. As usual, I failed big time, mostly because I have no idea how to play the game. It was time to put an end to this.

After some google-fu, I’ve found The Bible of Crusader Kings. A thread on Something Awful described the game basics from the perspective of an Irish duke. I followed the instructions there and, while I didn’t do as well as the author, I managed to unite Ireland, learn how to manage my kingdom and even do some sinister plotting. Eventually, I also conquered most of Wales, took part in a crusade and even started conquering Scotland. Since then, the thread has been archived and moved to the Let’s Play Archive.

Then a duchess in Burgundy somehow got herself a claim on Ulster and while I was struggling to chase her armies out of there, the rest of my kingdom rebelled and eventually caused me to rage quit. Still, for a first proper game, I didn’t do too bad, earning around 17k points.

Regarding the crusade, there was something that sort of made me laugh. There we all are, fighting these huge armies, strategically attacking and retreating at the right moments, with everyone contributing as much as they can, especially Croatia.

Crusader Kings II - Map Screenshot

Behold the might of Croatia!

Anyway, I’ll try some other character soon, or I might even try again with Ireland. The same thread I mentioned above also included a post with a list of a bunch of interesting people to play with, so I might try one of them. I’m not sure how to exactly write about my playthroughs, but I’ll try to figure something out.

Links

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The title says it all. Thanks to many a /vg/ grand strategy thread, I was extremely interested in this game. Since I’ve won it on reddit during the sale, I finally got the chance to try it out last night. After playing it for a couple of hours, I can say two things.

  1. I have no idea how to play it right.
  2. I loved every moment of not having any idea how to play it right.

Seriously, the complexity of the game makes it an extremely engaging and interesting experience. Since games where I can play as Croatia are rarer than shiny pokemon, I decided to try my luck as the Trpimirović dynasty. I manage to survive for a decade or two, but then the Holy Roman Empire asked me to join the war against Hungary. Most of the neighbouring regions of Hungary have gone independent, though, so I couldn’t go to war with them. I thought there was no danger, so I foolishly tried to conquer the Serbian regions. Since again, I had no idea what I was doing and I’ve converted my realm to a heretic variation of Catholicism, I decided to call for a holy war.

The outcome was horrible. Serbia and just about everyone else around me were just regular catholic, so pretty much the whole of Europe went to war with me. Suffice to say, I did not last long.

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This one is long overdue here.

Towns is a city building game with a large degree of freedom. You start with a group of people, or goblins, to be more precise, in the middle of the wilderness. Your job is to use these people to create a town and to make it as big, as specialized, as complex, as imaginative as you want it to be. Basically, there is no goal, just your imagination and wishes.

You need to take care of the food supply, gather resources, equip your villagers with armour and weapons, build them homes and workshops, organize defences against sieges, basically handle anything a flourishing little town in a fantasy world needs handled.

Towns - Early Game Screenshot

Your creativity is the only thing needed for beautifully looking towns.

It also just so happens that the place you’re building your town at is located above an extremely deep and extremely dangerous dungeon, so there’s that to. Of course, there are awesome rewards in that dungeon, so you need to also attract heroes to your town, so that they may explore it and fight it’s denizens.

Why do you do all of this? Because you like it, and for no other reason. This is a game for a very specific audience with very specific desires and on that note, it completely delivers. Once you also realize that it’s still very much in alpha and find out the ambitious plans of the developers, you will love it even more.

If you played Dwarf Fortress, you will probably like this game. If you wanted to play Dwarf Fortress, but couldn’t push through the learning curve, or didn’t feel like it, you will LOVE this game. Go get it, now! While you’re at it, be sure to stop by Sipsville on your way there. It’s a great little town with an extremely funny mayor. He’s also planning on building a fortress in the northern region, so if you’re ever near those parts, be sure to visit.

Related Links

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There was an insane sale offering many, many popular titles at extremely low prices on Amazon recently. They called it the “May Mayhem” and if you missed it, it sucks to be you.

Since I already mentioned I’m quite a broke person living in Croatia, I couldn’t really buy any of the games there.  I could, however, “buy” them. You see, there’s this thing called Amazon MechanicalTurk, which allows you to do simple micro jobs and get paid in Amazon Payments credit. The catch is, it only works with special MTurk Amazon Payments accounts which can’t be used to pay on line, only to add to your Amazon.com gift certificate balance.

This is what I did. I didn’t extensively work on MTurk because, basically, it would suck as a job and pay extremely little. What I did do is that every time I was waiting to do something else on line, I jumped to the site quickly and did a single well paid micro job like a 5 minute survey or something. In any case, I acquired some credit and used part of that to get Civilization V when it was on sale for $7.50. I played the game for 10 or so hours up to now, so I think I’m qualified to talk about it for a bit.

Is Civlization V better or worse than Civilization IV?

It’s… different. I feel they have improved on some aspects, but failed at other aspects. I love the new hex grid. It allows for more detail and more realistic presentation. I love the fact that there’s one unit per hex now. It allows for more tactics during war as well as peace, since positioning your civilizations defences properly helps you prepare better for surprise attacks by your enemies. I love the fact that you aren’t encouraged to place a road/railroad on each and every tile within your borders.

Civilization V - Map With Armies

The feature I absolutely love is the “one unit per tile” rule Civilization V introduced.

I don’t like how little “luxury” is in the game. You complete your spaceship? Oh, here’s a short in-game animation above your capital of your ship launching and that’s it. No CGI, no video, nothing. Built another wonder? Oh well, a picture will fade in the screen with the info text overlay above it. You won the game and would like to see the replay? Nope, here’s just a text log of what happened in the game.

Now, I haven’t gotten any DLC for it yet, so I don’t know if any of my issues were fixed, but even if they were, that only brings me to the last point. What’s up with this huge amount of DLC content? Why? Why does it have to be this way? Why can’t we get a game, and then expansions? I mean, I know why. The answer is simple. It brings in money. People buy it, and it’s good business. I just hate that it’s good business. I wish it weren’t.

So is it better than Civilization IV? No, definitely not. Is it worse? I’m not sure. It’s good enough and that’s all it is. I’m still going to play it every now and then, just not as often as I did with Civilization IV. Who knows, maybe Gods and Kings will make it all better again.

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing several things.

First of all, I’ve finished my master’s degree paper, which means I’m so close to my master’s degree in computer science, I can almost taste it. Right now, my mentor is reading it and soon he’ll tell me which parts I need to polish a bet. Once that is done, I will be sending it to print and will soon hold a presentation of the subject. Once that is out of the way, I will have earned my master’s degree. It took me seven years, but I’m finally there.

Another thing I did was getting ready for Diablo 3. Sadly, the store at which I preordered had some shipment issues with Blizzard, which means both me and a friend of mine are now forced to wait another two weeks before we can get the game. Luckily, I managed to get a guest pass for both me and him. Unluckily, the guest pass is for the Americas region only.

DOTA2

Thirdly, I’ve mostly been playing DOTA2. I got an invite for both myself and the above friend so we play a game or two every evening. He’s stuck in Germany right now and he barely speaks the language, so this game is his main source of entertainment. We both still pretty much suck at it, but the game is fun anyway. The community is very slightly better than League of Legends, but at least you can do more about it, via the report/commend system.

Valve has recently released the in-game store which offers mostly cosmetic bonuses and items. The fun part is, you can also get items by leveling up, which means there could be something great in store for you after every game. As of right now, all I have is a single treasure chest and a piece of gear for my Dragon Knight.

Diablo 3

As for Diablo 3, there has been controversy, but none of that bothers me really. Sure, there are some valid complaints about the game (and a whole heap of invalid ones), but those really don’t affect me, so I think I’ll greatly enjoy the full game once I finally get it. I already enjoyed the beta, as well as the Standard Edition to great extent.

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Played a bit of single player Sanctum today. I finished mine on day one, so I tried some mazes on the bridge map. The diagonal design was definitely the most efficient one out of those I tried. It gives good coverage, the penetrating turrets can still shoot in a line, and the bends are so plentiful that the fast mobs are pretty much just fodder. Of course, this means I completed that level. I also got an achievement or two. As for playing with friends, I wanted to do it tonight, but Steam decided it needs to redownload the entire game, so this means 3-4 hours away from it on my connection.

Sanctum - Optimal Bridge Layout

This is the optimal layout for the bridge map, courtesy of Google Search.