It's that time again. What demos you playing?
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Next Fest
It's that time again. What demos you playing?
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>Ratten Reich
Completely unplayable and broken. Not worth the download.
>Millennia
Shows promise, only 60 turn limit so kinda meh.
Gonna play Godsworn and Homeworld 3 tomorrow.
>Millennia
This is the one I'm most interested in. It's one of the ugliest 4x games I've seen, but it's throwing out some cool ideas. The way it does research, eras and policies or whatever they are means that playthroughs might feel pretty different. Resource chains are also always fun.
Also this is my current roster. That was only a surface level look at what's there though. I'll do a deeper dive after work.
Does stormgate have the campaign so I can see how bad it is?
Nope. Just online matches and I think coop matches. For some weird reason the coop matches have heroes, but competitive matches don't.
I dunno, it looked just like fantasy starcraft 2 to me. Some people might like it, but I've never enjoyed playing those types of RTS competitively, so I wouldn't know if it has legs or not. The factions are definitely ugly and soulless though. Try something creative with your 3 faction RTS like Universe at War did.
How is this thread the way that I found out there's a demo for Millennia out? Did they just not advertise this thing at all? I figured I'd at least hear about its dev diaries.
They advertised it so much. I've seen multiple content creators do promotional videos saying it's coming. I've seen paradox stream it. I've seen it in written form as well somewhere. Not sure if that was an email or steam post or what though. I think you just managed to dodge it all.
I guess I must have just been looking the other way then. I don't play Civ or watch Civ-related content, but I still get videos about it sometimes so I figured I would have heard at least something without going out of my way to find information.
>Marbozir
Haven't heard that name in many years, watching his LP's back in the day was how I learned HOI4. Thumbing through his channel just now, looks like he's really big on Civ-like hexshits these days, nothing wrong with that.
Yeah he mostly plays civ and xcom, but he sometimes tries other stuff.
I watched Marbozir play it a few days ago and he mentioned i would be in the next fest.
It shows you demos for wishlisted shit at the very top.
>Completely unplayable and broken
I don't know why some devs do that. Demos should show you the good stuff, not the earliest alpha build jank.
Played Millennia and the ideas are good but the combat is gawd awful trash.
What's bad about the combat?
The only gripe i have is NO SLAVERS
Nothing. Guess that anon didn't like no unit abilities, and archerc not being able to invalidate all other units because of hex targeting, otherwise it is all stat checks and pretty much refined version of civ4 stacks. Presentation is very underwhelming though, there really should be an option to disable pop out combat screen entirely.
I did a few turns of Millennia. I don't really know what's going on since I've never played Civ (just bought it) but it was enjoyable. I kind of want to play more but with a 60 turn limit and release date of TBA I really don't want to get too invested for them to announce a release in 2026 or some shit, I can use that effort diving into Civ ya know?
>Trash of Titans
Turn-based tactics with trash animals fighting rats. Great soundtrack
I found hexguardian good. Mashup of those expanding tower defenses and carcasonne tile fitting. Seems solid.
Downloaded bunch of shit, tomorrow ill see if any of those games are worth their salt.
Also anybody played "Renaissance Kingdom Wars" yet? Seems interesting, almost too good to be true
Field Tactics is multiplayer only and even with refreshing I couldn't find a lobby.
Breachway is an FTL clone which...is card and turn based rather than real time with pause. Didn't seem better than the original.
>Field Tactics is multiplayer only
There is a campaign mode with battles against AI.
The game is more or less chess. Interesting but i dont see any great potential here
>Renaissance Kingdom Wars
Combat seems servicable, fought two battles now.
Town building is kind of an amateur's attempt at BFME's build point bases.
Demo Crashed after the second battle so haven't gotten to test the empire aspect of the game yet.
Tried out the full 60 turns of Millennia. I actually like the graphics but that little battle screen that pops up is awful and honestly should just be removed. I didn't get into the resource management aspect much because barbarians and Aztecs were on my ass from the very start but I liked what I saw. I put everything into military and chose the raider ethos or whatever it's called. The raiders are definitely OP once you have zero upkeep. It's just a feedback loop of more military xp = more raiders. Just before the 60 turns were up I took out the Aztecs with a massive horde of them. I like the era concept but the eras felt a little fast for my taste but it looked like the eras would slow down as time went on. Overall it was fun.
I tried Stormgate, and it was awful.
I watched videos of Stormgate and it looked awful. Kinda weird that they have Warcraft 3 maps with neutrals, but no heroes to gain levels and items from those neutrals.
Fricking knew it!
I saw all their promo material, interviews, showcases ect and KNEW it would be DoA.
Not because what I saw looked bad, but because they didn't actually showed anyone anything and talked a lot without saying anything. #1 scam artist trick for when you have a product with no substance and try to sell as much copies on day 1 on hype alone, then go into hiding when the refund waves hit.
Playing Millennia now. I'm liking it so far. Also throat singing, so that's a almost always a good game for me.
Ok yeah more on this, I'm really liking how much there is to do each turn. It has a sort of mana system for the things you do. You can then use that mana to basically use abilities like spawning shit or spend it on your civ domains, which are kind of like an expanded form of traditions and ideologies from Civ 5. This is mad, at least from the early game stuff.
Homeworld 3
downloaded these, haven't played yet. kinda hate browsing games on steam
>demo
>7gb
Demos getting large is the reason why devs were hardly making any until recently. They were too big for gaming mag discs and not fun to download. Now that bandwidth speeds got so fast that even a hundred gigabytes is trivial, demos came back.
Demos are often the whole game with locked content, it's less work than adding another build just for the demo
>coffee in sumeria
am I supposed to believe this
wheat coffee
although they found tobacco and cocaine in some Egyptian mummies so who know
That was the Egyptologists' cigs and coke.
>dread dawn
Lmao, uninstall that shit ASAP.
Why? I wanted to try it out myself
It didn't even work for me when I tried it, it crashed constantly. Then after that, I noticed that it opens a secondary window behind the main one with some weird gif that doesn't go away when the game closes. It alters your pc power settings after installation/booting and leaves some executable in your temp folder even if you uninstall the game. I looked at the steam forums to see a ton of other people mentioning these things.
Great. That would explain why it felt like a scam game when I played it.
I did. in addition to the power setting shit there's also possibly a crypto miner? idk but it's not worth dealing with all that for a demo. luckily I read about this stuff before I ever launched it.
>in addition to the power setting shit there's also possibly a crypto miner?
Nah, this one is bullshit
Tech illiterate people just see crypto miners everywhere
Millennia and Solar Expanse. Yes, I know it's ESL slop but I'm so badly starved for space exploration and colonisation games after TI turned out to be shit.
Gonna try Godsworn and Symmetry once I get home
Just tried Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown. I was under the impression it'd be kind of like black and white 2 but all city builder. Instead it just kind of feels like a standard survival city builder. If there's anything about your alignment swinging changing how your city looks, I didn't see it in the couple of hours I played it. Pretty basic stuff.
Headquarters: World War II - I expected complete ww2 boomerslop from slytherine but the game is actually quite nice, demo promises Brit, USA and German campaigns each with 9 missions.
Its pretty standard turn based tactics but the units have some abilities (smoke grenades, scouting, suppressing tiles etc), it looks nice graphically and plays smoothly.
Here for example you can see my flamethrower squad clearing a building, after i suppressed enemy infantry with my scout car and unloaded the inf from truck right next to enemy infantry
And here is how the game looks normally, you can see guys in your squad, how many reaction shots they have, how many normal shots etc
The UI is very easy to read
And that concludes the first mission, it was fun, i recommend it to all ww2 grognards and turn based aficionados
Oh and there are customization options too, you can both lvl up your units and change their camo, interesting stuff. Too bad its about Normandy but shapes up to be quite interesting
This looks good. I already passed over this game and chose to ignore it. Thanks, anon, I'll give it a go.
This game looks so fricking weird at certain distances. Wasn't really a fan of the gameplay either.
THOUGHTS ON GODSWORN?
no sp/10, uninstalled the moment i saw it.
Is it only mp oriented?!!
The frick.
Are they going to introduce a single with good story? I like the presentation.
There was only multiplayer in the demo, campaign button was there but was greyed out. Maybe you can play skirmish if you do private lobby or w/e but i didn't bother finding out as it was huge turn off as is.
Nah on the steam page they wrote about a campaign which follows baltic pagans struggle against the crusaders, with optional co-op
Honestly the choice of baltic pagans was very surprising for me, people usually go with norse in that region
I played Godsworn vs AI and it was pretty neat, it looks and plays like fantasy age of empires/age of mythology. I'ok need to see the campaign to pass judgement, but it was not disappointing (unlike stormgate or global conflagration)
Age of Mythology + Warcraft 3 love child but sadly a bit ugly.
It looks great static but the animations are all very shit.
As a game it's fricking great. I love the resource nodes guarded by renegade crusaders and being rewarded with vills and gold like in AoE3 instead of rpg items as in WC3.
Music is good, voice acting can be decent to fricking ass depending on unit. Pathfinding is kinda awful and it's very easy to get units to ignore attack commands and just move into the enemies but that might get fixed.
How many factions in the demo and planned for the full game? I need at least 3 for me to be interested in an RTS.
>How many factions
1 and a half to be fair.
You pick a patron god who is also a hero unit and they change how the base civ works in a couple ways. The daggers guy has Javelineers and Wolves while the sword lady has Bowmen and Priestesses.
They also change research and god powers (that work based on Faith and cooldown unlike AoM's single use)
It's neat and I feel it might be a great one if the campaign is fun.
>1 and a half to be fair.
All interest lost.
One and a half in demo, they promise two factions on release with the crusaders being the ones to come, with each god getting unique units
I think I read somewhere that they are also thinking about some future third faction, but I can't find it so that might not be true
I take back my lack of interest. Gave it a try anyway and that's genuinely the best feeling RTS I've played in a long time. I forgot how appealing the early stages of warcraft 3 were when you're rolling around the map with a hero and a few units leveling up and expanding. I dig the worshiper system as well. It's nice having your workers just generate automatically and you assign them to stuff.
it's really just Spellforce 3. you ought to try that.
Already finished that. It's nothing like Spellforce. Those games are slow as shit with pretty weak RTS segments. Great games, but they in no way feel good as RTS games. This one feels like like a modern take on warcraft 3.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1416260/SpellForce_3_Versus_Edition/
Yeah I know what that is. It's not good. The RTS in spellforce has never been good.
takes a lot from Spellforce 3 which is a really novel and neat take on worker micro.
>What demos you playing?
https://vocaroo.com/1lc3NEUxB8cu
Tried "Zeta Laporis", needs some basic QoL improvements like for instance being able to order your units to movie via the minimap, but there seem to be a solid fundation for a fun game if he can fix the basic stuff like that.
>Whats_the_matter?_No_bitches?.png
Reminds me of an old Total Annihilation mod with the same concept, think it was called final frontier.
It is a bit different from your average vanilla TA/SupCom clones, as the builders don't pull resources from your resource pool, but it rather it is logistical transports moving resources around from mines and buildings so that the builders can start/continue building.
There is also a inverted build radius, so you can't build a solid wall of turrets for instance.
>Millennia
pretty neat but I feel like things progress too fast
>9-bit armies
inoffensive but seems to stutter a lot
>Stormgate
Awful, bland, mobile game like e-sport crap
>Godsworn
Pretty nice RTS compared to the above. Nothing great but also not as bad as Stormgate so probably this is why it looked good to me.
Time for another demo.
This time Crown Wars: The Black Prince
Seems like a medieval nuCOM-like, with 1 movement action 2 combat actions.
Characters/classes determine set of skills and equipment, unfortunately there are w*men in the game with ruins the immersion even more than fantasy elements
Good thing you can customize appearance of your soldiers, so you can make all male, or all female squads (if you are some sort of wierdo)
There is a lot of customization, weapons crafting, base upgrades etc
>unfortunately there are w*men in the game with ruins the immersion even more than fantasy elements
I have seen this being a complaint across the board for basically everyone who is the target audience, they could easily add a setting to add w*men be optional yet they won't do it, hence the game is doomed to failure
i seen this complain often in other similar games
>just add fricking toogle or slider(better) for percentage so if anyone want to play full men or women squad can do it
Thoughts on Homeworld?
Seems like more homeworld, though dogfights between fighters do seem to take a lot longer than in 1 or 2 (the fighters take such long turns and wait until they're super close to even try and fire). I play it for the story mostly, so it really hinges on that more than anything.
Controls are clunky and UI is shit. It doesnt feel good to play, like I'm fighting with the game at all times to get it to do what I want.
To be honest, that's how 1 and 2 felt to me but I still enjoyed their campaigns.
I feel like we're eating good this next fest. Look at the absolute state of the /vrpg/ next fest thread.
Ours would be even bigger if the TDgays and Cardgays posted about their games.
Reminds me, I got too tired before I got very far in the Breachway demo. Seemed promising. Also not strategy at all, but everyone needs to try this shit. It's just Stalker/Roadside Picnic in a car that you need to maintain. Such a cool idea.
It feels really cheap for not having player character model. No hands on the wheel look absolutely laughable, it was also really fricking sad to see kick prompt with no kick.
Agreed. I thought that was a bit weird. It's very immersive when it comes to the car, but then the character is nothing. I kind of prefer it that way with silent protagonists in 1st person games anyway, but I get it. I suspect the game was a small project that was just about driving through spooky areas and then got picked up by a publisher and expanded to include getting out of the car and crafting shit. I also enjoyed that the annoying voices after they chirp in for the 3rd time start getting auto filtered to your logbook. You can't have an immersive game with unfunny idiots talking at you like that constantly.
I've been looking forward to Pacific Drive for a long time but the demo killed it for me. Why is it a survival crafting game? Why do I have to hold down buttons instead of press them to do anything? Why are there cartoon characters talking in my ear the whole time if it's supposed to be scary? The car being an immortal object of immeasurable power totally removes the horror aspect, as there will never be any non-scripted scenario where I'm trapped without a car, and I was really looking for a kind of "if you're out of your car you're in danger" situation. Instead, if you're out of your car you're punching trees to repair your car.
I have a feeling it probably started off like that. But yeah I dunno, I wasn't expecting anything so I like it. It kind of reminds me of subnautica. I usually hate survival and crafting games, but if the setting and hook is interesting, they can be really fun. Normally it's punching trees and all that changes is the setting, but in subnautica the game is more about traveling the underwater world and the mechanics around that. And in this one all the survival aspects are purely about the car.
Also I get why they made you hold down keys. They are trying to replicate something spooky coming at you while you desperately try and get your car started and moving.
Well there is one /vrpg/ tier game ive been looking forward to playing this nextfest but the graphics are probably too shit for the babies at /vrpg/
As a man of /vrpg/, I am telling you to retract your words, sirrah!
I fricking love that series
Wulframite or Royalist? Call it.
Is this basically a sequel to Sea Dogs? Honestly funny that they're still using sid meier's pirates remake graphics in 2024
I think so, but had to drop the demo after 30 minutes
Camera swaying on the ship literally gave me motion sickness irl
This will be overwhelmingly positive on release in two weeks, I guarantee it.
Milennia needs region/faction specific units
I don't care if they are bland or basic just give me something
>OneProudBavarian conquers the map as the Aztecs but his primary unit are Raiders, that just look like vikings
agh
>Aztec raiders look like Aztecs
>German Spa- ahem, warriors look more like Germanic warriors than Gayreeks
>Tier III town militias don't look all black
>Settlers aren't universally WMBF couples unless you're playing Brazil or something
>unless youre playing brazil or something
gekekd
It's Call to Power remake
Nations back then were just names
If Millennia's civilization/faction choices actually didn't have any affect on gameplay and you choose your starting perk and additional aspects of your faction a la carte as you play through the turns the devs should have picked up on the implication that there would be nothing to differentiate the factions at all.. the only difference is the name you have and the names of the cities
Ironically faction specific graphics would have gone a long fricking way to fix that problem without stuffing nations themselves with faction bonuses if that was a conscious choice not to.
Millennia really is just more Civilization, but it's just a demo so they don't even have any flavor yet. And even once it has flavor I don't know if there'll be any point to it over Civilization. Is Old World really the only Civilization that tried to do something different than Civilization?
I don't think it will have flavour. I think that's the point. Everyone starts the same and ends up different. I don't know how you can't see the difference between it and Civ games though. The government/exploration/warfare/etc resource system is pretty different.
I'd take just visual differences at this point. There doesn't seem to be any difference between civs beyond the flag which I think will hurt them in the long run. It's hard, I really liked what I played of it, and the 2 playthroughs I did were really different from each other, so I'm not sure if the lack civ variety is going to bother me or not. I'd need to have a few full matches under my belt to know.
Stormgate
Did you rike it?
Yes, it's a more slower-paced starcraft-like with some new things
I think Vanguard looks generic but not Infernals.The brute looks like a nurgle unit from Warhammer 40k and I like it.
That's my problem with it. It's cribbing off of pretty well known IPs (general blizzard artstyle/warhammer) and doesn't have a visual style that is all its own.
Yeah the demons kind of remind me of Diablo 3 demons, and not in a good way.
But... Starcraft and Warhammer copied other IPs too? Like how Star Wars copied Dune.
>It's cribbing off of pretty well known IPs
I don't even think that is done well
no early midrange unit and Lancer turns into tanky assassin that dives into the backline when upgrade is researched
I still remember having nightmares when facing tanky healers in Guild Wars 1
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Dolyak_Master
I can't imagine someone enjoying fighting with systems rather than playing a video game unless your name is Thebausffs
there is also Tim Campell saying that RTS isn't fundamentally broken which I found borderline funny and probably him just trying to become a meme
?t=1142
I would say a video game being unplayable for most people fits the definition of fundamentally broken
it's like designing a train that moves so fast that no human could control it so you have to automate everything
but at that point you might as well walk by foot and be faster because you arrive in one piece
When you get to the point where automation is needed you either bake it in entirely (such as workers being uncontrollable and just going to gather and hide automatically) or you make the game simpler from the ground up.
Stargate is doing neither to help except for the pre-making of infernal units as an assistance to people who get too into the battle micro and forget to train more units at their base.
That should've been a mechanic for all factions.
It looks like ogre from WC2 with horns and red paint. Not to mention the cartoonish style makes it look stupid.
Maybe Stormgate would be better if it had more appealing graphics.
Apparently they've improved from the last beta, so who knows.
Blood for Prapor, and skulls for the skull throne.
Actually looks pretty good for /vst/ huh
Millennia feels like what Humankind should have been, somewhat basic presentation aside. That gameplay informs culture seems like the easiest idea to have in the world but Humankind went with turning everyone into clowns instead.
>Millennia feels like what Humankind should have been
Interesting way to put it. I hadn't thought of that. It is the same sort of concept of build your own civ. I think I like Millennia better, but then I thought Humanity was good until I played 2 matches through and realised it wasn't, so we'll see if the same happens.
Godsworn is literally Warcraft 3 - Slavic mythology edition
Global Conflation is CnC Generals - fantasy near future edition
Stormgate is Starcraft 2 - fantasy edition
Gimme some original, and unique strategy games
Sorry, you aren't getting anything like that.
Moduwar
Mycelium Guardians
>Mycelium Guardians
looks cool, any fellow fun guys try out the demo?
ignore anything that markets itself as an RTS, there solved your problem
>Godsworn is literally Warcraft 3 - Slavic mythology edition
It's AoM with Warcraft 3 heroes and AoE3 camps.
>Gimme some original, and unique strategy games
Give me a competent coder and enough money to feed us both for 3 years and I'll do it.
Tried Deep Among the Swarm. The gameplay is very simple and shallow (no pun intended), somewhat similar to Infested Planet or Creeper World. Not too shabby.
>No mention of Cataclismo
This is absolutely kino, i love it
What is it? Looks like a tower defense from your picture.
It's part tower defense, part RTS with ressources management, with the twist of building your defenses block by block
Sounds cool. Looks nice graphically as well. Sort of like a reverse Besiege.
>Cataclismo
dios mio... la torre de defensa......
>that feel when a wall holding half your army collapses
Gave this a shot. It's surprisingly fun and the demo's vibe reminded me a lot of Warcraft III in a good way.
Got suckered into a game called Esports Godfather. Surprisingly good.
>Esports Godfather.
how many korean rent boys do you own?
in the game, i mean.
Are there any games with simultaneous turns worth playing? I looked a little, but not that hard. The only ones I found were single character RPG type games.
I tried out the demo for Orc Warchief and man this shit is crusty as hell. The most glaring thing wrong with it is the voice acting is awful, like really really fricking bad. In fact it's super obvious that they're using some strange TTS program to make the voices for the very first cutscene of the game. It's kind of jarring because they're supposed to be Orcs but sound like average humans having an awkward conversation. It doesn't get much better when you get in-game, and the voices of the random orcs are clearly just the devs with a shitty voice-filter on them.
The actual gameplay is very simple, trivial even. Resource management is non-existent and every event is "Lose resources to gain happiness or gain resources to lose happiness", but it doesn't matter because it's so easy to get resources you never really have to worry. There is also a super simple battle mode that feels kind of tacked on too, which I'm assuming will fall into the "strategy" side of things. It might be cool in the future but as of right this second it's pretty bad.
To anyone interested I really wouldn't bother even trying the demo. There is basically nothing to it at the moment.
>It's kind of jarring because they're supposed to be Orcs but sound like average humans having an awkward conversation.
don't orcs usually just sound like average brits?
Only in Warhammer.
They don't even make them sound brutish or anything, it's just straight deadpan machine-talk.
straight up shovelware dev
I could tell this was either a scam game or weird thirdy trash from the screenshots.
shame that Homeworld 3 demo never got a open beta. The shitty that was the demo would have been detected long ago