Well a new game of Deadlock, turn 43... managing my humans as they are exploring and explanding... upped the difficulty level to normal for this game, easy was just to well you know easy

as you can see the territory where the landing occured has changed into a busy place where science is conducted and the military is outfitted, for now only for defensive purpose. One of the races who also landed on this planet has already waved goodbye, bloodied and battered i might add, this probably has something to do with this other race who on various ocasions told me how good it is to have a chitin armor, or that thumbs really do nothing extra!

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2020/08/635d7f5ec57b0e3d33d4c1dd7e2cbb0ad3389f53.jpg - main landing 4000 inhabitants

This regions was prospected and colonized not for long. and serves well as a mining/growing vegetables outpost
the building left under is a succesfully upgraded farm as opposed to the one you see lying more to the center

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2020/08/8abb35bb44d0559a8959e06ead244d51f7e6fb31.jpg - 1st expansion 3000 inhabitants

this region has just been prospected and taken into the empire. As you can see, an alien building dominates its skyline. The building provides a boost to research and to culture. Research is a global value adding to your research pool but culture is local and very important to keeping your humans eager and willing to work

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2020/08/2b2718288dac9dc19295ed3cdb442dba23357c3a.jpg - 2d expansion 722 inhabitants

Last we have this territory on eye, visible on the minimap as the territory outlined in white. The alien structure will help in adding more science capabilities for our race and the abundant energy will help in sustaining the growth of our mighty empire. Most first level buildings don't need energy outside the research academy but upgraded ones will soon take a hefty toll on our grid

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2020/08/0d869610767c2318d1f32672a943bd44d02897bc.jpg - new colony sight

as you can see my colony placing was pretty carefull in the corner. To win this game i need to have 10 cities, i belief that means not owning 10 colonies but owning 10 colonies with a city center

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2020/08/50592dd02971e6ddea8426d38d4a935999630260.jpg

That's what I'm talking about. The game doesn't hung. Just the menu screens are invisible. You can easily check this by selecting campaign and hitting "Enter". The game will run, but it's impossible to change any options. Anyway I'm one of these unlucky people who experience very long loading times with the community patch. :( I'll have to wait for a remaster to replay the game unfortunately.

i had that with my previous ryzen 5 build, it took about 30 secs for loading a campaign.. with the new i5 i'm running life is good again .. always been an intel user so in that respect ...

the tiberium glow is present btw, just noticed it good in the 4th mission! Also noted some horizontal disturbances and the screen getting a touch darker while moving around, not sure if i need to change the renderer or leave it on auto

If this game were invented during the classical antiquity by a Roman citizen, then probably this might just be exactly how the Germanic tribes would be portrayed. Not because of how they actually looked back then, but simply as a way the Roman citizens would make fun of the people in those tribes.

But yeah, we can never expect any game to be 100% historically accurate when historians themselves are also susceptible to errors in their judgement. However, if someone were to invent a time machine capable of travelling far far far back in time, then we could observe as well as inquire the people from the eras directly.

that is something we can agree upon

Yep! *thumbs up*

just failed one of the campaigns btw in fog2, i'm still planning an empire playthrough with battles fought in fog II but my battle results are pretty disheartening

Oh dang! Didn't know you played the game! Do you often play the campaigns of FoG2 btw? I rarely play them to be honest, only the custom battles. As for the multiplayer, I've never played something so intimidating as FoG2's multiplayer. The fear of the other player having a better starting formation than you only adds to the pressure during the preliminary formation stage of the game haha.

Anyway, I'm just glad to find another user who plays FoG2. :)

What about:
Single player games that are not story driven? (This is actually how I like my RPGs.)
Multi player games that are story driven? (Some MMORPGs actually fall into this category, like the online Final Fantasy games (which were given main series numbers despite the fact that they really should have been treated as a spin-off series).)

just installed privateer again, in this game you are not really bound by a story though i reckon that at some point the story will interfere one way or another, the X branch seems to be all about that too, personally when i'm 4xing i don't care much for a story, i just want to build and prosper, create my own story so to speak wich luckely these last years have become easier and easier. I can't wait for the release of distant worlds 2 in that regard... but back to rpg's, my take usually is to be engulfed in some kind of adventure with set goals. The personal experience, building your character, exploring the world and learning its perks is much less of my interest while i would do it, to take a break from the story so to say or to explore a really neat feat but again in rpg's not really of my concern. A game such as battlebrothers is actually build around those values but since it is set with rigid demands on your team since you need to provide income and food, not to mention recruit a solid base of fighters and take care of their equipment you will actually feel less free to do what you want then with a solid open world such as skyrim i guess, or again privateer 2

Not so much with RPGs....I mainly play such games for story(and in the case of the sub genre ARPGs, combat as well), so not having much story and just stats in sucb genres can be a big "turn off" for me usually.

(I see games as an "escape" from the real world for a bit, and the world building helps immerse me in said escape)

In MMORPGs it depends.....often there is too much to do so I never see everything, or things change before I can see them.....so maybe less story in such games is what I like(hard to tell as I play so few of them atm).

I explicitly play turn based RPGs for the combat, as I prefer that style of combat to action combat. (Also, for character growth and, for those with lots of abilities, something I can experiment in.)

lol i have that against the ai, i enjoy the campaigns for the sense of goal they provide as well as the persistent army. That happens to be my favorite brand of game most of the time. Just start with newbies and end with gods of war. Anyway last game my mostly heavy foot, heavy shock cavalry ended up fighting a force twice in size in the mountains! had to give that one up. On the amount of play question so far its been very rare, its been only a couple of months now that i have the game and others on the bucket list deserved a playthrough too, honestly because of the difficulty level and the very custom battle/multiplayer nature of fog II i have avoided it up untill now. I was hoping the combination with empire would make it more my cup of tea. I got myself familiar with the concept in sengoku jiday in which i had some amazing battles but again combined with a very numeric campaign. I find the whistles and bells most grogs seem to gruel about most of the time enjoyable, if it would mean the game has a bigger scope then war, as fast as you can, with everything superoptimized...

so to round up, if you want to have a game sometime let me know, i do own fog on steam but i would be curious about pbemming a somewhat more experienced opponent... maybe in the end i will find myself diving into the multiplayer ring once again

That can always be "fixed/improved", see pic 1 and 2 and still under the requirements, below 500 Kb.

Anyway, Divine Divinity, so far so good.

1 - My new companion, so far he is still alive. I wonder why this map is smaller, why it isn't big as the default one
2 - Nothing without greed. Oh my, look all those keys, though I have enough lockpicks to rob every corner of the game :)