Haven't done one of these in awhile. What are you guys up to now?
Haven't done one of these in awhile. What's up, peeps?
On time as always, our monthly community post!
Spill it, boys. I know you can't stay away.
PopTop. Railroad Tycoon 2&3 and Tropico 1&2. They got bought by 2K, which eventually killed the studio. The Railroad Tycoon series is dead. Tropico is still around, but I'm not excited about the latest interation. Some of the guys tried to kickstart a new Railroad Tycoon but it didn't fund. Phil Steinmeyer was an underrated developer, though I believe he's retired today.
It's too bad it worked out that way. I think they could have been on the level with Paradox as far as strategy games are concerned, but focusing more on economic games, city builders, and the like. On Steinmeyer's blog he said he didn't think there was demand for heavier games anymore about mid 00s. That might have been true then, but so many games out now prove that wrong.
I waited for most of them to leave first. I do have a good crossbow tower setup, but the problem is that crossbows aren't effective against undead.
And it just gets worse. I tried to wait them out, but even when they left a few stayed behind, lurking in the treetops:
I knocked over one tree with a ballista, and those creatures left voluntarily. I took about thirty casualties clearing out the second tree.
A year later, the horde returns, and right now I'm ignoring them because there's lots of work inside the fortress that needs done, and I've got a decent tree farm up and going. I'm thinking it's time for Operation FTW, but I'll have to wait until they leave to set up it for the inevitable third return.
It's like that meme where it's the guy saying he just needs that one piece, and the piece is labeled "a billion dollars"
Yeah, mechanism is a lot more objective way to classify board games. We can argue all day about, say, what exactly a wargame is, but what games have hex grids, area control, and resource managements is a lot easier to agree on.
Not sure why it wasn't before, to be honest, but at some point that setting got changed.
Tip: If you have visitors wandering around your base, you can go under the knowledge task to see what all books they've read in their lifetime and what kind of books they are. That way, you can search for somewhat unusual types like novels, chronicles, cultural histories, biographies, autobiographies, dictionaries, dialogues, and etc.
I really wish this functionality was on the written objects screen. Right now you just have to go off of the title. This work, unfortunately, wasn't written in my fortress and we don't have a copy of it, either. That said, I do have a pair of autobiographies and some cultural histories.
What I would like to do is figure out a way to reliably make dwarves produce biographies. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how. The only requirement that I know of for a dwarf to produce a biography is knowledge of the biography topic, which can be obtained either from them reading a book on the subject (easy) to discovering it themselves (very, very hard and random). After that, I don't know if they have to be assigned to a library or not to actually produce the biography.
That sounds simple, but the thing is that dwarves are practically-minded. They seem to prefer to write manuals and guides about topics they know than novels, biographies, and etc. What if you had a dwarf that knew only of biographies and of no other topics, though? They might write one guide on the subject of writing biographies, but will they stop writing guides after that and start writing biographies?
The problem is, once you have a big library, dwarves tend to swarm it and learn about all the topics. It's hard to pick and dwarf that's "unpolluted," so to speak, and I suspect that if they've avoided the library that much, they'll be poor biographers anyway.
One idea I've had is the Dwarven Monastery. We take kids that just turned 18, which haven't had a chance to read books yet, and slap them in a private, sealed off room with writing materials, food, and drink. Toss in a bookshelf and make a tiny library only they can access. Assign them as a scholar, and throw down a book on biographies as inspiration. Then, see what happens.
Note that what kind of books your dwarves write has literally no gameplay impact. This is just for Armok and maybe internet points. Damn it, I want my dwarves to have quality literature!
I haven't made the 2 to 3 jump yet. I'm waiting for the war patch, which is coming decently quickly.
I'd say it depends on the length of the dialogue. If we're talking about 2-3 lines, then yeah, it should only be done on switching. If we're talking about a speech that lasts several pages, I would think that it should be clear from context clues who is speaking.
Anyway, don't get hung up on rules! Write how you want! Have a style!
I feel like I've seen paragraphs end with quotation marks and then pick back up with more quotation marks on the next paragraph in serious literature, so I'd say write how you want. That said, it is good to break up walls of dialogue every now and then to set the scene with small details like that.
Yeah, modded Minecraft is still a big deal. You can join us over at !moddedminecraft@sopuli.xyz if you want. The mod Create is a big deal right now, and rightfully so. It may well be the greatest of all time, as far as Minecraft mods go.
Edit: didn't mean to make this a comment reply instead of post reply, but it still counts
We've just found out about a relatively new indie game called Theocracy which the author @kaptainkook says is his personal homage to Civilization 2. On closer inspection I can also see some Civ 1, Sid Meier's Colonization and Master of Magic influences too as the game appears to be a fascinating...
Looks interesting. It has more of a fantasy-focus than its inspiration. Right now it's on sale on Steam, so it could be worth checking out.
On time as always, it's time to ask: What Have You Been Playing?
On time as always, our monthly "What Are You Playing?" post! Whatcha all doing, fellow blockheads?
From the creator of Brass and a couple other reasonably successful modpacks comes an entirely new experience: Rotary Skies!
You wake up and look at your floating rock of dirt. It seems so familiar, somehow, but then a massive meteor screams through the sky overhead. Welcome to Rotary Skies!
Rotary Skies is the authorized Rotarycraft-centered Skyblock modpack. The start seems similar enough, but as soon as you get steel, a whole world of engines, gearboxes, grinders, pumps, and centrifuges opens up!
Work through over eighty quests as you go from cobblestone generators to fusion reactors! The quests guide you but don’t hold your hand. They’ll tell you what you need to do next, but not exactly how. In Rotary Skies, the “how” is the fun part!
There is no sieving in this modpack! What are you, some kind of caveman? No, until our liquefaction machines and centrifuges are up and running, we hunt for ores in the nether, like men (or other strong, mighty genders)!
We also keep bees, and by “keep bees” I mean selectively-breed and genetically-modify bees in our quest for the uberbiene: the ultimate bee! We’ve also got trains and stuff, so that’s cool.
Eventually the day will come where we will obtain the elusive and mysterious Crystal, allowing us to escape from our Sky Island and into pocket dimensions of our own creation, full of resources and incredible creatures.
There's a pair of Beatles albums in this list. I don't mind "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" or "Revolution 9," but "Tomorrow Never Knows" on Revolver counts for me. Frankly, it's the worst Beatles song. I prefer the Daniel Johnston and Jad Fair cover of it on It's Spooky to the Beatles version. It's just that bad.
Yeah, it's hard to get people to care about stuff sometimes. Sometimes you just have to let it die.
This mod caught my eye. It's similar to a plugin that was on a server I used to play on. Nice to see it as a proper mod instead of a plugin. It's pretty configurable and could be a good addition to the right modpack.
Mostly just Minecraft out of the box. I feel that resource packs and certain performance mods like optifine could be accurately referred to as "vanilla with optifine" or "vanilla with such-and-such pack." Once you get into datapacks or Forge or Fabric or hacked clients, it's not vanilla.
Serverside, it's a little more dodgy. How many server plugins can you have before it's not vanilla?
That said, I don't think there's much reason to play Java Edition over Bedrock other than mods or wanting to play on older, pre-bedrock versions. Then again, I almost solely play modded anymore so I don't have a lot of vanilla Bedrock under my belt to compare the two.
Gotta love the projection. "They'll do to us what we did to the Indians!"
The trigger happy mergers probably helped me more than they hurt. At one point I dumped a spice company in the chaos and took the cash lead, letting me get a bargain on a rubber merger. It put me back into the game, but it wasn't enough to take the win.
I have played Bus at three. It's been awhile, so I can't say too much about it. That said, I do remember having fun at that count.
As far as expropriation, I felt confusion more than anything. It got better as the game went on, but it does take a moment to wrap your head around it. Still, I though it was an interesting mechanic.
2023 saw DoamCon return to Kansas City, so I made the drive to check it out. Here's my plays.
It's an authorized port, and it looks like most of the cart stuff has made it over.
We're changing the modded Minecraft landscape with the new Modrinth App, alongside several other major features we've been working on the past few months.
From Civ to Centauri and the Aztec to the Second American Civil War, everyone is asking: What have you been playing lately?