Video game thread

ANoobis
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Ghibelline Omnipotens
@Absol95  
This. In short, Activision Blizzard has a sexual harassment lawsuit, a class action lawsuit, a pay discrimination lawsuit, and an SEC investigation going.
Cyborg_pony
Liberty Belle - Sings the song of the unchained

@ANoobis  
They still never said who leaked those photos, and all they’ve really done is try to sweep people’s names under the rug and edit games especially in a ways other countries would like. Apparently the word “god” is a banned word in Diablo 2’s character creation.
 
Yes. That’ll solve the problems. It’s a “step in the right direction”. You know else would like the word “god” banned from a gothic horror game… along with the gothic horror aspects?
user7853
Liberty Belle - Sings the song of the unchained

@Cyborg_pony  
reminds me that in one fictional story about modern times discovering a medieval fantasy world where gods and demigods reside  
so the christians and monotheistic religions often complained about “why are you calling them demigods or gods, there is only one god, how can you be sure these entities are above our one and only god? how can you prove these things have lived for centuries?”  
“-then what should we call them instead?” “uhh i dunno” “-demigods it is then”
 
i will never understand the extent people go to censor shit in games of all places
Cyborg_pony
Liberty Belle - Sings the song of the unchained

@TeamBlueplant  
Because they like the control it gives them. Look at shit places like resetera. They hardly play games while complaining about then - then when a company bends over for them, they go on tangents about it not being enough and brag about not buying it.
Anonymous #8CDE
@Officer Hotpants  
@Cyborg_pony
 
Ever read a science fiction novel called This Perfect Day? It’s from the early 1970s, like a lot of overlooked sci-fi gems, and it goes into brutal detail about a hideous dystopian world ruled by the egomaniacal and psychopathic philosopher-king Wei Li Chun. He can be thought of as a sort of Maoist George Soros, only more open in his methods. Among other things, he is praised by all the planet’s schoolchildren in rhymes they must recite every day. It is 1984 plus Brave New World, and one of the themes explored is that, regardless of supposed ideology, power is a drug and controlling people is enormous fun.
EverfreeEmergencies
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Amateur-er Autist
I’ve haven’t had much reason for most of my wars in games, but Civ 6 AI running a settler through my territory to found a city on the other side is just insulting.
Officer Hotpants
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Double-0 Negative
@EverfreeEmergencies  
I know exactly what you mean, and it applies to a lot of games. I’m sitting here in my little corner not bothering anyone and there is an entire continent between us. What the FUCK are you doing founding a city on my coast inside my borders?
 
I like an AI that’s programmed to present a challenge. I do *not* like an AI that’s programmed to be a ceaselessly provocative, thoroughly untrustworthy shitbag. The Endless Space AI, for example. The diplomacy system might as well not even fucking exist in that one.
EverfreeEmergencies
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Amateur-er Autist
I always seem to get the First League precursor chain whenever I play Stellaris.  
@Officer Hotpants  
About the only AI bullshit I can’t tolerate is when their bonuses make it impossible to ‘starve them out’ by removing supplies or production centers. Sometimes I don’t want or can’t afford to conquer the whole empire, but not weakening them now would be dangerous.
IvanSatoru
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Angle-Considerer
Played OpenRA Red Alert yesterday. It took me about 50 minutes to beat the AI in an infantry-only match, all of the map and enemy units visible and game speed slowed down.
Officer Hotpants
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Chatty Kirin - A user who has reached a combined 1000 forum posts or comments.
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Moderator
Double-0 Negative
@EverfreeEmergencies  
Oh, I HATE that shit. It’s my only significant gripe with Emperor of the Fading Suns. The AI doesn’t need resources AT ALL. If they have the tech for a unit and the right city type to produce it, they can. Which makes it almost impossible to keep up with them on the very important front of spaceship construction in the early game, because they require a significant quantity of an extremely rare natural resource to produce a single jump core for, and most ships require multiple cores (the largest needs five). It also requires more than a dozen technologies to even get started producing the weakest ships. You speed up research by building more labs. And the city-building unit is expensive. And labs require significant funds to function. So the enemy is pumping out engineers for free and spamming labs that run for free to research the tech for spaceships which they then churn out for free. And those engineers notably require a fair bit of food to produce, which you’ll be struggling to produce a surplus of early on.
 
Speaking of food, it also means that their cities & units cannot starve regardless of whether you set food consumption on or off. I spent YEARS trying and failing to trigger outbreaks of plague on their worlds by wiping out their farm cities from space. I only learned of this AI cheating a few months ago. I’ve been playing it for a little over 20 years. You can maybe imagine how I felt that evening.
 
Fortunately the AI in EFS is borderline braindead. Which is why they gave it those cheats.
Napsack
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Glare Mare
@EverfreeEmergencies  
I think the precursor chains in that are somewhat related to your ethics, or at least it always seems that way when I play. If you’re playing a xenophile empire that might be the reason for that.
EverfreeEmergencies
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Amateur-er Autist
@Napsack  
Nope. Fanatic authoritarian militarists. Wanted to figure out how to use slaver guilds after 3.0 reworked pops again. Managed to get a couple of early vassals too, so I might go Imperial and switch out philosopher king for feudal society.
Anonymous #7A61
@IvanSatoru  
@Officer Hotpants  
Oddly, long ago I was on a mailing list pertaining to a certain software package written to be a training tool for US military officer candidates and only secondarily marketed as a game, as an afterthought. The author was a retired Marine officer who took up programming rather late in life. He came to the conclusion early on that, at least for a wargame AI that moves units around on the map, uses scouts, plans and carries out orders, and so on, it was easiest, from an implementation perspective, to write up multiple tactical plans in broad outline and have the AI select one early in the game, maybe switching to others based on information it could “see” on the battlefield as the game went on. At least for that category of games, it worked pretty well.
Officer Hotpants
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Moderator
Double-0 Negative
@Anonymous #7A61  
You’re talking about Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, right?
 
I think the tricky part comes in when it comes to coding non-hostile interaction with players. At least in a game where its default state is at least minimally hostile, anyway. Telling it how to kill or how to be nice is one thing. Telling it when, how and why to switch back and forth is likely quite another.
 
Plus there’s the issues of long-term planning & resource management. Coding a squad to fight is probably a lot easier than coding an empire to produce, equip, move and support an army of squads across multiple battlefields. To say nothing of doing so while also maintaining the internal balance of an empire and planning for what it wants to do 35 turns down the road. Which is why I’m fine with the AI getting some freebies. A free unit or two here and there, bonuses to resource income (not just FREE resources, or being freed from the need for them entirely), that kind of thing.
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