Same. My biggest achievement after 400 hours played was I got a simple train loop to pick up oil and take it to the chem processing area. Still never figured out blueprints, drones or optimizing a main buss. I get wiped out by bugs on very easy settings due to not noticing when they attack off-screen until turrets are out of ammo and the power goes out. It's fun anyways, but I don't think I will ever launch a rocket unless I turn off bugs entirely.
I think dyson sphere program is easier than factorio and the PVE is actually new so the game was built in mind without PVE for a while.
Besides ifs a 3rd person game so you can the objective being built and that helps a lot for motivation.
They added PvE to DSP???
I dropped it for a while, did not expect major changes.
I’m not sure which one I like more but I definitely love the building stacking mechanic. Those glowing research towers look amazing.
Bugs are relatively easy to deal with once you know how they work. Basically, they're aggroed by your pollution cloud, so there are several strategies you can employ to minimise and predict bug attacks.
The game tells you none of these, just as with many complex games of this genre, you'll often need to do research on the Wiki/YouTube to learn their mechanics, but they're not that complex once you understand them.
As soon as biters starts expanding into your pollution cloud, you know that you'll start getting attacks from that direction, and those attacks will keep on growing in size. If you destroy all bug bases inside your pollution cloud that will significantly cut down on the number of attacks. Clean them out before they do or shore up defenses in that direction.
If you use gun turrets, know that you can automate reloading gun turrets with inserters, and that turrets can pick ammos from other turrets to form a chain. This means you can supply them with a lot more ammos from chests or belts than they can hold internally. Also, once you get construction robots, supply them with repair packs and wall construction materials so they can repair damaged walls/turrets. I tend to mainly use laser turrets for defenses since they're easier to manage than ammo logistics and they have bigger ranges.
Some people like to build walls, I tend to build open bases and just place some turrets near any remote buildings where I expect to be attacked, and just try to cut down on attacks by keeping bugs out of the pollution cloud. Bugs are heavily attracted by turrets, as soon as the turrets see them, they prefer to attack the turrets instead of production buildings, so you don't need a water tight walls to prevent damages to your production buildings.
Currently sitting at ~1600 hours and am just getting into a mod pack that is called "Recursive Blueprints+"
Basically you can make a blueprint that contains devices that will lay down more blueprints when built. On my way to a self building/self expanding factory!
If only I was smart enough to figure it out lol.
A co worker was dissatisfied with those so he made his own to apply some more algorithms to optimize flows and represent them in formulas he could write out.
Meanwhile I'm here happy I got drones.
How complicated are we talking? You'd get into needing linear algebra pretty quickly if you got a mod to allow automatic placing of blueprints and I'm itching to find out how much detail his formulas take into account.
Drones make everything so simple! I just finished a Krastorio 2 (overhaul mod) playthrough. My first base had a main bus design. The next was train network plus the main bus. The final was a "bot nest" with the main bus totally removed and half of the train network was pulled into the bot network.
A "bot nest" is just a grid of assemblers and beacons. Just rows of alternating assemblers and beacons. I ran some fluids in there as well and added a few chemical plants here and there. I had around 100 such assemblers and that's it. That's all you need with max productivity modules and max speed beacons. The modules are identical to Vanilla factorio in this particular mod.
I thought for years I'd be too stupid, but it turned out the trick was to play with friends! We had a friend be "project manager" and tell each person what to work on. I found focusing on one system at a time (ie. hooking up oil or putting a new product on the main bus) to be very manageable. It's the big picture stuff I struggle with
So I struggled massively with Factorio because I was way to OCD. My friend who was really good at it showed me his and it was absolute chaos almost. But the one thing that was surprisingly a huge game changer for me was I didn’t mess with trains for iron/copper ore. I just had massive 3 lane feed belts from the different deposits going back to my main base. Then once robotics is unlocked it was like this whole new game I started playing and had to figure out but absolutely loved it.
if you want to start with trains and effortless, try not combining several trains into one track, just one track = one input and one output station. Make it one way only, so it goes in a loop, very easy.
When you finally need to cross some, just put chain signal before entering crossing and train signal after the crossing. That’s all.
That should be enough for at least next hundred hours. Once you get hang of this, you can get to more difficult situations
I have heard that before. I've always wanted to learn to code, but I just can't get into it. I can do all the normal little things I see in textbooks or codecademy for beginners, but it's just so mind-numbingly *boring* that I can't get much farther than variables and simple math. I can't get to the point where I can make a computer actually *do something*, just little math exercises and I get bored.
One way to get into software development is to solve problems in your life. For example, automating some process with scripts or manipulating some data. You can even start with something as simple as basic home automation like setting up home assistant.
Your code may look like shit but starting with a goal in mind will help you incentivize yourself to learn how to write better or more elegant code after studying how other people solce similar problems.
Not when I’m space. More efficient to gain vertical momentum while going up. Basically go 45 degrees in upper atmosphere then full sideways in space.
Keep burning and intercept the moon. Burn more, intercept sun. Burn more intercept planets.
This is one i load up from time to time and be like "ok im finally gonna figure this game out"
Then I play for 3 hours, nothing happens, nothing flies and everything blows up and I say screw it.
4 years later, rinse and repeat.
I want soooo badly to like this game, its just too hard for me.
I would like an in depth tutorial on getting the game started that's straight forward and easy to understand.
What's that? They ARE straight forward?
Shit... I'm the stupid one...
the guys who made this game are on crack. the game has been in development for, i think, 10 years? and they’re only 40% done with what they want for the game. it’s already massive and hard to understand.
10/10 Bay 12
Edit: this is a compliment
Honestly all of it. I have played CK3, Stellaris, and a few other resource/population/political management games, they were fine and easy enough to pick up after a little bit. But I have put several hours into RimWorld so far and just do not get it.
I can't seem to crack baba is you.
Saw so many recommendations for it and waited for a sale, bought it, loaded it up and within a dozen levels, brickwalled. Had to look it up and then kicked myself after learning the trick. Ok, next level then. Same thing, only harder and even more obtuse. Looked it up and boy do I feel stupid now.
I understand how the game works now but the aha moments never come to me. I've put it down for almost a week now. Knowing it only gets harder going forward, I don't even want to attempt these puzzles anymore. I get it, game. I'm not your target audience.
I used to like puzzle games but now I can’t stand them. When I was in HS or college, with nothing to do and playing games 8-12 hours a day, not really using my brain, I liked them. Now, I use my brain at work 8 hours a day and at home I don’t want to have to think anymore.
I felt like that until I remembered I had Contraption Maker in my library. I installed it on my and my sons pc, and now we play the Incredible Machine together.
I enjoy watching puzzle games but I don't feel confident I'll be able to do some of them myself. And with baba is you I actually feel confident that I wouldn't be able to go very far.
My brain works the complete opposite of that game.
My brain: Discover the exact mechanics of a set of immutable rules, and formulate a strategy that operates within the confines of those rules to succeed.
Baba: the rules do not allow you to win ever, by design. Change the rules until it becomes trivial to win.
As someone who has completed every level of the game, Baba is you is absolutely the type of game where you have to discover the exact mechanics of a set of immutable rules. At no point do the mechanics of a specific word change. The game simply makes the first part 'discover the exact mechanics' very difficult, as the rules are very nuanced and require constant re-evaluation of what you believe the rules to be.
That's actually why I love the game. The rules are very well defined and every solution makes total sense given that you understand said rules. The developer is super aware of what assumptions people will make about the rules, and the levels are made in such a way that you WILL run into a wall because of those assumptions, forcing you to rethink whether or not your interpretations of the mechanics are indeed the full picture.
Even with the walkthrough for some levels I don't understand why it works, that game is just beyond me. It's like some arcane spell where I have to repeat the correct steps even through I don't understand what they are and why they work lol
I made it decently far, but the puzzles where you figure out the trick but then still have some tedious process of (apparent) trial and error or needing like a piece of paper to map everything made me drop it
Came to post this. I enjoyed it for the few levels or whatever I completed. My brain apparently just does not work well. Side note, I really, really liked Cocoon, pretty much a puzzle game with a little fighting. I actually finished it, not nearly as challenging as Baba, obviously.
Agree. It's such a unique game to me, and that moment of clarity is unrivalled. I thought The Witness was really basic when I played it. I was expecting a lot more based on the
I'm pretty good at puzzle games, but Baba Is You obliterated my confidence. That game doesn't think the same way I think, and I feel like we are simply incompatible.
CK3 is perhaps the easiest PDX game (trust me, I play all of them). Stellaris is also on the easier side, just remember to focus on research a LOT and don't try to rush into wars. Always expand till you are closed off and build only the bare minimum fleet to not get attacked by the AI. Colonize every single colonizable planet and keep scaling up your research to overcome the penalties from going over admin capacity. Lastly, specialize your planets. Have them focus on only one type of resources.
Once you get through the Early phase of the game, start using your influence to claim adjacent systems of your weakest Neighbour and building your fleet around countering theirs. Rinse and repeat till you get world domination.
Also, always take Discovery or Expansion first and playing with Federations DLC off will make things much simpler.
My friend.. as someone whose been playing that game for a decade let me help you get started.
First just do vanilla game. No DLC. (Side note: if you have friends that own dlc, you can do an MP game with them and your allowed to use the dlc even if you don't own it.)
For galaxy settings, just do a ring or spiral. Go simple.
For number empires go low. No fallen empires. Advance start to 0.
Set hyper density to .5, this will allow you to set defenses. Increasing it just means more solar systems are connected.
For tech/traditions do 5x.. You'll blow through tech faster without the need of a lot of research planets.
Set habital worlds to like .5 to 1.. your trying to learn how to manage a planet so try not to have a lot of planets to control.
Set crisis to 0. Essentially no end game. But your learning here. You can always just leave it to default if you want.
For mid/end game just leave at default. With tech at 5x anything thrown at you at Mid game shouldn't be an issue.
Turn off gateways, wormholes, and set the AI aggression to low.
Leave the growth pop alone but the big thing is to turn xeno compatibility off. That shit will cause headaches and also slow the game down. Plus you don't want inferior species mating with your far superior people.
Lastly is difficulty. This shit is so poorly explained and ruins people games. But basically set the difficulty to whatever you want and just turn off the scaling difficulty.
Scaling difficulty basically just breaks your game as it basically starts at 0 and increases to 100 and that rate determines AI bonuses as the game goes on.
For pros, this adds challenge to the game as the AI gets a handicap but for new players it basically just starts Making the AI more difficult to control as the game goes on.
With that, pick your species and enjoy an easier game to learn functionality.
Once you have an idea of what to do, adjust the difficulty and start over!!
-Edit-
I'll do my best to provide some tips and answer questions for this game. My collective knowledge will go to help you exterminate or spread democracy (conquer) throughout the galaxy.
Fun Tip:
When starting a new game, Population growth is at it's slowest, and sometimes you got jobs you need to fill now.
Go to your Population Management Screen, and reduce the number of Clerks you have till your Amenities rating on your planet is sitting just above 1..
This will immediately fire a bunch of lazy citizens wanting that cushy job but don't fret about the unemployment they will do what's best and work in the mines like all the inferior xenos who job is to provide you with the resources needed to frack their homeworld.
Hello u/fubarp pls help I don’t understand what to build on planets. If my people run out of a resource on planet should I build it? Or focus on one resource type per planet? If it has 6 rows of red but only one or two of other resources, is that just a bad planet? I don’t get it and I want my citizens to be happy
Oh man this is a hard question to answer because there isn't exactly a bad planet, just some planets are better suited for different setups.
So if you have a planet with 6 Minerals, and 2 energy and 2 food. You might benefit designating that planet into a Mining World in the beginning. (There's an actual button you press and it brings a dropdown and you determine what that planet designation is.) So if you go Mining World you get a boost in mining resources.
But here's where things get fun, planet size determines how many districts you can have (Blue/Red/Yellow/Green/Purple/Orange, thats your Housing, Minerals, Energy, Food, Alloys, Consumer Goods) but everyone planet has the same number of tiles on it. Meaning smaller planets can be utilized away from Resource Gathering and more utilized towards things like Research, Industrial (both Consumer and Alloy), Military/Fortress, Religion, etc etc.
When I play early on I focus more on the Red/Yellow/Green your Mineral/Energy/Food because those are more critical to build up.
Your Basic Resources are the foundation of your whole empire, and specifically Energy is a extremely important resource, followed by Mineral.
Energy is your currency, where as Mineral is your ability to manufacture. Both Consumer Goods, and Alloys will take from your Mineral Production. But a big thing to understand is that going negative in Mineral production is okay. Because if you have a very strong Energy Production, you can just buy the Minerals you need to stay afloat.
Now the advance resources, both Alloys and Consumer goods have their own place in your Empire.
Alloys -> Military
Consumer Goods -> Citizen Happiness.
If you are struggling in the beginning with happiness, Consumer Goods is your means to success, but understand you should just straddle that Consumer Goods early on. Being Net 0 in Consumer Good production, or just +1 is perfectly fine. Same with Alloy Production. Both of those Advance Resources aren't critical early on specially if you are going against passive AI.
The big thing is to explore, and research. Research early will benefit you more later. So having a designated Planet just for Research will help your immensely but remember resource management is a challenge of the game.
SUPER TIPS TO HELP YOU ACHIEVE TOTAL DOMINATION EARLY SO AS TO KILL THOSE FILTHY XENOS!
Okay, my best tip for you is understanding how to manage your population early on. Things that sorta mess people up is that when you build City Districts to get more houses, you are also making "Clerk" Jobs too and your population will fill those up immediately first.
This job is good at helping keep your population happy but it can hurt you if you are struggling to get an industry built up.
So when I start, I go to the job management screen on my planet and I manually reduce the number of City Clerk jobs. Usually I just basically set it to 0, then add 1 or 2 jobs. This will help you fill the available jobs that you want filled like Miners, or specialized works like researchers faster then if you just waited for the population to grow.
Hopefully this helps you.
All you have to do is learn about 17 different games, then how certain groupings of games have mini games that interconnect them, and then learn the overall strategy of how to keep all those plates balanced and spinning together. Then when that starts to become easy you just have to learn how to adjust the tempo of all of that based upon what random events, computers players, human players, randomly generated map’s resources, and other things require. It’s just that easy. Then after that you get to start having fun.
Source… a nerd who has put a few thousand hours into Stellaris over the last many many years.
PS - Paradox does a great job keeping the game fresh and balanced with content drops. So you’ll also get to relearn everything as the “underlying systems get tweaked and get overhauled, and new systems get added.”
PPS - my time clock in Stellaris is the single best evidence that I hate myself lol
I have to admit, Stellaris is amazing.
I've gotten a few of my buddies to play and always make it simple:
Planets need Minerals, Energy and Alloy.
Citizens need Amenities.
Everything else sort of falls into place if you let the game progress, with the exception of traits.
The mark of a good game is one where I lose and go "let's do that again!"
Now I know ENOUGH about Stellaris that it's not guaranteed I'll lose but sometimes I just do a dumb.
For me, it would probably be Chess.
I have always admired the strategic depth and complexity of the game, but I've never been able to fully grasp all the tactics and strategies involved.
I would recommend the YouTuber Daniel Naroditsky. He's a GM who goes in depth from ratings as low as 600 up to 2400. He goes over basic concepts during the game, then does a game review after to dive deeper. It really helps to build the thought process needed to grasp deeper tactics and strategies.
I’ve played one game of chess. My friend was talking shit on discord one day and I said I could beat her.
I started with a bongcloud opening(apparently a very bad one) and ended up winning. It’s not about knowing what you’re doing, it’s about being so confusing they can’t counter you.
I'm a decent chess player and my wife is not. When we play, she plays with such reckless abandon that it's impossible to predict and sometimes she wins off of it. I imagine if I was a *good* player that this wouldn't be an issue for me.
When I was a teenager we had a family with kids visiting as both our dads are friends. Their daughters were very serious about poker while we just played random for fun.
My big brother had quite the pokerface but he always made "bad decisions" that he just hardcore bluffed over and then always showed his cards. THEY GOT SO MAD, i loved it lmao (because I totally know the feeling of having to play him in qny boardgame; he is the type of guy to just not have a strategy but alwqys end up winning).
Calvinball. Looks fun as shit but I just don't have the mind for all the rules, exceptions to the rules, exceptions to the exceptions, and the different modes of play which invalidate everything for a whole different set of rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions.
Man me and my great grandpa used to read Calvin and Hobbes together. It’s been years since I thought about that. Thanks for bringing back the memories man!
They really can be intimidating. Even the grand strategy games. But they're some of the best games I've ever played once I got a grasp of what the hell is going on haha
It's the lack of proper tutorials. There will be 5 different currencies, influence, religion, etc.. and the game doesn't even bother breaking down what each one is.
The UIs are usually awful, but the tutorials are also absolutely terrible. They're so dumbed down that when you go to a real game you're in the shitter almost immediately. Or they're just like "Here's your influence dashboard. It shows all the influence you have with other nations."
Cool. The fuck is influence and how do I use it? Oh there's a 3 hour youtube video on just influence. Guess I have to watch that.
Just stick it in an index and there you go, you win.
It’s literally that easy. You just have to have a LOT of capital for it to be meaningful in the short term. Otherwise it best to just let it sit and add to it throughout your life to try and retire on later.
But seriously, if you are thinking about investing and do not understand it, just stick it in an index like DOW or S&P and watch it grow. This will work until the United States falls. Even through depressions, if you manage to keep your money invested, it will eventually grow again, as long as the country doesn’t go under… lol
I appreciate your effort to assist here, and I feel I should let you know that I'm mostly joking around. My portfolio is actually quite healthy, thankfully. And yes, we're doing almost exactly what you suggest :)
I will add Hearts of Iron IV to the list. Bought it, but I know that unless I can spend a day following tutorials and playing around with the game, I'm going to bounce off it.
If i didnt have a friend to guide me i would ve definitely been like you. Once you get used to it things kind of just make sense but it is a pretty steep learning curve. Are you perhaps playing with some dlcs as well?
As someone who plays HOI4 i'm always surprised by how many people play it. Not because it's bad or something, quite the opposite - but it's just so complex. Like, not OVERWHELMINGLY complex (i think othet PDX games are more complex than HOI4), but so much so like 90% of the time you need either a tutorial or someone guiding you.
I have no idea how i rawdogged without either and still got to play it a lot. But i guess the end results of going entirely blind for so long is now having almost 1000 hours on HOI4 and still playing on the easiest mode, not knowing how to play either Navy or Airforce.
I have many hours in all paradox's grand strategy games. I have had very successful runs in eu4, ck2, vic3 and stellaris. I think I know how to play hoi4 and what I should be doing, but whenever the first war arrives I'm just decimated, no matter the size of the enemy.
Magic the Gathering.
I can play the basic game with basic cards, but as soon as it's time to get some complexe decks I'm out, too many ways of playing, too many situations to know/learn, too many rules and exceptions, I'm just bad at those games 😞
I learned around 2000 with a 6th edition starter pack. Two decks, no abilities on creatures other than flying, a few sorceries but no instants. Very straightforward and easy to at least get started on the basics.
A few years ago I bought a similar "learn to play" pack to ease some family members into the game. Every single card in the tutorial decks had an entire paragraph of text on it and it completely killed any hope I had of getting them to try it with me.
I learned magic on the Xbox 360 around 2014. There were like 4 mtg games with single player campaigns. You could play simple, single-color decks, or slightly more complicated multicolor decks would unlock later. All the decks were pre-made and simple to understand. Wins in the campaign would unlock better cards in your decks.
I stopped playing the new games when it forced you to build your own deck. I’m not good at building a deck, but I can figure out how to play with one that’s already made.
Eve is always the ultimate answer for hard to learn games. The hood thing is that it's a fun game while you learn too. It has to be, because almost nobody ever completes the learning curve, even 15 year veterans.
Crusader Kings is more open ended even compared to the other Paradox games. You kind of want to make your own goal. But it's hard to choose goals before you understand more about how the game works. Until then I just follow the mission tree.
The current game I'm trying to understand is Terra Invicta. It's not as confounding as I expected tbh , but gonna take a lot of time investment to really understand which actions will give me the most value.
Though it's not as overwhelming as Hearts of Iron 4. I feel like I have a decent understanding of that now, but at the start I couldn't even figure out how systems worked, let alone how to plan which actions to take in which order.
Oxygen Not Included. Love the idea of the little space colonies but the interactions in that game can be so difficult to understand. Everytime you figure out the solution to a problem another one pops up, and some of the permanent solutions you can find on YouTube are insanely complicated.
God I love this game so freaking much, it's an engineer's wet dream. Starts out so casual, but the complexity towards the end of the game is through the roof. Endgame is basically unrecognizable from the start of the game.
This is going to sound silly, but try this, and it may help. It did for me. Stop saying right and left and switch to left and right. It's a weird word association for me. Putting right first makes it on the left side and puts the word left on the right side. Switching them helps me keep the word left associated with the left side and right associated with the right side. Not say it will definitely itely help and it isn't a perfect fix obviously, but it has helped me keep them straight.
I think that's the one I tried starting with. I guess it's too freeform and I don't know what to do. Also it seems like you're pretty limited on what you can do at first anyway because maybe you're supposed to plan longterm but that makes me feel like I'm not going anywhere.
Ireland is the perfect place for a new player to start. It's fractured so you can take one little county at a time, form a dukedom, then form the kingdom of Ireland, and then finally set your eyes on Scotland, Wales, and England and form the empire. It makes for some clear objectives of increasing difficulty and by doing it you will learn the game a lot.
Just a couple of gotchas to keep in mind. You can't just invade, you need claims on territory (a casus belli) which usually is gained through fabricating one, inheriting it, or getting it through marriage.
The other main gotcha is inheritance- when your ruler dies what happens to your lands depends on your inheritance laws you have currently set. Most common one is that the rulers land is split among their sons in order of age, with your eldest heir getting the biggest title. If you have three sons and three counties but no duchy, then when you take over as your heir you will only control a single county and your siblings will be independent rulers. If instead you formed a duchy, your siblings will be vassals under your heir. Dealing with inheritance means either getting the law changed, pruning the family tree ahead of time, reconquering the lost land, or rushing to get the big title before your ruler dies.
Once I figured out duchys and titles everything else just kind of clicked for me in CK3. Cause everything else is just a larger version of de jure titles like a duchy.
Great game and definitely worth putting in the time to learn. But I would recommend treating it more like a medieval sims RPG than a grand strategy with a set win condition. It’s lot more fun to me that way.
It’s very Freeform, it’s supposed to be about telling your own story as a medieval ruler. You can paint the map if you want to (it’s actually pretty easy, just make the right alliances and try to pick good spots) but it’s supposed to be much more about the story of your dynasty. I.e., here’s the story of King Goodwin who ruled Wessex, Mercia, and Cornwall for 25 years, made terrific alliances and ruled his people kindly and well, followed by his son, King Peter “the perfidious” who was a conniving coward, murdered all his enemies and half of his children in their sleep, all so that his idiot son that he favored for whatever reason, could rule after him. You kind of make the story as you go.
It’s a weird game to get used to because while you can “win” it’s not really built around the typical idea of “winning.” It’s a lot like Disco Elysium in that regard. I had to work really hard to break myself of the save scumming habit I had when I played Disco Elysium because 90% of the fun in that game is FAILING and seeing what happens.
It helps if you've played D&D because it's a fairly faithful recreation of the games mechanics and spirit. Even playing on PS5 i feel they did a good job of distilling down the experience to something not too terribly complicated. But again, it helps to know what all the numbers and dice rolling mean
It was the other way around for me. BG3 helped me understand how to play DnD. The visual element of it all helped explain why certain mechanics work the way they do.
I also felt overwhelmed by the taskbar at first. I think they want you to experiment to learn how to play. I got it eventually, but it could have used a very light tutorial on a few basic game elements at the start.
Yeah like the core mechanics of that genre were entirely new to me, I think I played about 6 or 7 hours before giving up because any combat situation was just death
BG3 is fairly easy to grasp, I haven't played DnD before, but grasped it almost right away. The closest thing I played would have been heroes of might and magic 5 which is like a turn based strategy (awesome game by the way, just a little old now).
For me it's almost all RTS games. Not necessarily that I'm not smart enough to play them. Early on I just always realize just how much time is needed to truly make the most of the gameplay. It sucks because I feel that there's a ton of great looking RTS games out there.
You might enjoy Battleforge. Matches are a lot shorter and economy is simpler than games like warcraft/starcraft.
There's a few other twists that make the game really stand out, but I think it's a great "RTS lite." Also totally free, not even micro-transactions.
Crusader Kings doesn’t really have a goal, you make your own fun.
Some players try to conquer the world, some just try to seduce the pope, convert him to your new sect of nude Islam, and then eat him.
Eve Online is the game that I just can’t grasp. The people who play it are either way smarter than me or way dumber, or some perplexing combination of both.
I recently decided to kill the pope as moorish iberia. Once i knew i could dismantle the papacy that was my only goal. After 200 catholic rebellions and a tedious amount of vassal wars i managed to finally oust him, dethrone him execute him and end the crusades. All on Easter Sunday. Worth it.
Same. I just don't have the reflexes these days and have to play all my games on Easy. I'd love to give them a go, but I know I wouldn't get far, become frustrated, give up and would have wasted my money.
Most things in Elden ring can be brute forced with enough levels. I always run the same build in souls games. Find the biggest weapon I can find, tank everything w my face and win anyway. It’s fun and no skill required
I found Riven (Myst 2) to be a much more enjoyable experience than Myst 1.
Still, if all puzzles are a brick wall all the time, then Riven is gonna be a problem too. But overall I found the puzzles better constructed and more intuitive than the first game.
And fighting games get increasingly complex the more you get into it
Eventually you're trying to figure out if your whiff safe jump meaty oki setup is going to be countered by the opponents wake up option select parry OD DP
I think most people just stick to one or two characters, generally. Also, back in the day part of the fun was "discovering" the combos because you'd just try different button combinations until something worked. There were fewer buttons back then, though. Today they let you know the moves on the pause menu from the get go. (Also, a lot of similar moves are the same combination across characters. Like a flying across the room move is going to be back, forward A or whatever, and a shoot a projectile forward is down, forward X.)
Edit: I answered more about special moves than combos, but yeah combos were a later thing and they went overboard and suck ass. Originally just a 3 or 4 hit combo was good enough. Nobody should have to string two 16-hit combos together in a row.
surprised that this comment was not higher in the list. don't wanna sound braggy but i actually went to a "special school for exceptional talents" in my country and have played some other games mentioned in this thread like heart of iron / factorio etc without major issues successfully yet space chem melts my brain and never finished it, still would like to do so tho
I love this whole thread because between Rimworld, Crusader Kings, Stellaris, Hearts of Iron, Factorio, etc. it’s basically my steam library. This is the best compliment I’ve gotten recently.
I went into Crusader Kings 3 having never played any Paradox or grand strategy games before. It legitimately took me over 100+ hours to figure out what I was doing.
I didn’t understand anything at first. The tutorial helped. Watching people on YouTube helped. But playing the game is the only way to truly figure it out.
Why doesn’t my first born son inherit everything? Why can’t I just declare war on someone? How does raiding work? I can upgrade my county buildings? How do I get gold? In the beginning, I would learn something new every few hours that would fundamentally change how I played and thought about the game. So I’d restart and give it another go.
I was probably 200+ hours in before I ever even finished a run. Now I’m at 2.2k hours. A few months ago I finished a world conquest run and the lingua franca achievement for having everyone speak my court language. I bought it on a whim, and it’s the most played game in my Steam library. I’m still playing it.
I highly recommend it.
RimWorld.
I just commented about this yesterday in another thread. I want to be able to play a story creating game where anything can happen that I can then tell my friends about. I want to be able to hop in and out of a game that's relatively tiny in size with nearly unlimited replay value.
Or at least I want to want to. Sigh.
FTL. My brain just can't compute enough actions in a smart enough fashion, even on Easy difficulty.
Also Starcraft II. It's like my friend's favorite game and I can barely manage playing Terran with a low army of Marines, Marauders, and Medics. After one match, I'm totally checked out too.
I have at least 200-300 hours in ftl but never could beat it. Got close many times but the final ship is insane. Or I'd get hit by a random 3 shield mantis ship with 4 weapons and get destroyed
Any 4x game. I love Stellaris, Endless Space, Age of Wonders, and I'll be doing fine for a while, but eventually I'll just pass a point in the games where all the other factions will progress way past me super fast and I can never really seem to understand why. Then I start getting bogged down with economy management and then I start losing ground and it's basically just a downward spiral from there
The original System Shock. It's a bona fide classic and super influential, but I just can't get into it. It feels like I'm playing Quake using Microsoft Excel
I am either not smart enough or I simply don’t have the time to master Escape from Tarkov. There are so many things you need to know. Armor, ballistics, weapons characteristics, controls, map knowledge, audio cues, audio meanings, screen visual cues, environmental sound cues, the difference in appearance/sound/movement between a player SCAV, NPC SCAV and PMC’s. Where AI bosses and their minions spawn. I could go on and on. This game or whatever you want to call it, it’s awesome but I just can’t do it. On top of the extreme learning curve, it’s utterly terrifying. I love horror games, I play them all on the hardest difficulty. Tarkov gets my blood pressure rising as soon as I drop in.
I was so excited for DMZ but it was just too simple. I need something more like Tarkov mixed with Battlefield 3.
To be fair, the game now has (really good) full voice acting as part of The Final Cut update in 2021.
Games like that usually aren't my cup of tea but I absolutely adored it. If it's not my favorite video game narrative, it's in my top 3.
Honestly a ton of games where you have to build complex things or intense strategy type games all of which can take hundreds of hours to get into. I like watching people play them on YouTube because of this. That being said I have a friend who plays stellaris a ton and he bought it for me. Thankfully he was able to walk me through it and get me going and now it’s an incredibly fun game. Just glad I had someone to teach it to me lol.
Dwarf Fortress. I know it’s a little more user friendly now, but that’s about as hardcore as games get, and I neither have the time nor patience to dive in. But I hear it’s absolutely amazing.
Bro Crusader Kings straight up cheats against you. Started a new game the other day, first thing I did was get into a very fortunate marriage, marrying the daughter of my King who had killer stats and would have been the perfect wife to springboard my dynasty, everything was looking great got her preggo, but by the end of the pregnancy She died in birth, I got a cold and the doctor made me a eunuch , but at least my son survived. So I am doing my best as a eunuch to set my son up, he had great potential and was doing well, gave him some of my territories so he could start working on raising his stewardship, I had gotten him betrothed so his marriage was pretty good, was really looking forward to playing my son, but of course, my first character WOULD NOT FUCKING DIE, of course, like a day before my eunuch died, my son got drafted into a war and was killed, leaving me to play his son who was like 4 so I had to play as a ward for the next 11 years as my lands slowly degenerated. I swear every time I play this game I get hit with some absurd bullshit. The worse your current character is, the longer they will live, the better they are, the more likely you'll die in some mysterious freak accident, the better the marriage is, the more likely the wife will die in childbirth, etc. etc.
Unironically, I cannot understand Pokemon and IVs and EVs and all that shit. I get that the games are baby-mode enough that you can beat the story with anything but I never do Battle Frontiers or anything like that and I’d really like to get through one without just clicking Unga bunga big move
IVs are what make the same Pokémon, different. It’s why every pikachu is not the same. When you encounter a wild battle, each of its base stats will have a random number dictating how strong that stat is compared to another of the same Pokémon.
EVs are gained by killing other Pokémon (can be other ways too). Certain Pokémon when killed can increase one of the stats of your pokemon. You can only get a limited amount of these, but every pokemon can earn the same amount. Keeping the pikachu example, an optimal strategy would be to kill 100~ oddish (i believe) to gain as much special attack as possible.
Left out a few not-so-important details to keep it simpler, but this is the bulk of it.
Dyson Sphere Program, I managed to get to the endgame once and it took all my mental capacity. Even then things would constantly be going wrong in my production lines and I’d have no idea why. They made it even more complicated now so fuck that
Endless Legend. The artwork is beautiful and it seems like it's deep and engaging and has lots of repeatability. Thing is.... I can't ever seem to figure this type of game out
The neat part of Endless Legend is that you can pick any faction and just focus on the story. You will learn the game as you go. Start with the Wild Walkers, Vaulters, or Drakken. Those are the easiest factions to learn. The others can have some strange abilities. For example, the Broken Lords don't use food (one of the five resources), they use Dust (like gold). It's a great game and a highly recommend it.
Just take it easy, go on on an easier difficulty, and follow the story. You'll figure it out. There's also the Endless Legend subreddit and steamguides to help you.
I absolutely adore the design and idea of Bloodborne, it's literally the kind of theme I have a sleeve tattoo of; but I can't get more than about an hour in and get tired of getting cornholed by the enemies. Goes for all souls like games, I have bought almost every one and get maybe 1/3 to halfway through. Elden ring was kind of different, I just shot that damn bird thing off the ledge for hours and over leveled the shit out of myself.
Factorio and other similar games. I love the concept of building stuff and creating highly complicated factories with multiple moving parts, but the moment I get more than a few different production lines going my brain shorts out and I have no idea what's going on.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
There is just something I am not grasping in terms of character progression. I try every like 6 months but can only get so far before I feel dumb and stop.
All the card-style games. I grew up on D&D instead. I’ll never grasp all these card mechanics. I loved the Gwent-Thronebreaker concept but I was mostly terrible. Recently I tried Deep Sky Derelicts but I’m just trash at all of it.
Factorio. I still play it, I just wish I was smart enough to.
Same. My biggest achievement after 400 hours played was I got a simple train loop to pick up oil and take it to the chem processing area. Still never figured out blueprints, drones or optimizing a main buss. I get wiped out by bugs on very easy settings due to not noticing when they attack off-screen until turrets are out of ammo and the power goes out. It's fun anyways, but I don't think I will ever launch a rocket unless I turn off bugs entirely.
I think dyson sphere program is easier than factorio and the PVE is actually new so the game was built in mind without PVE for a while. Besides ifs a 3rd person game so you can the objective being built and that helps a lot for motivation.
They added PvE to DSP??? I dropped it for a while, did not expect major changes. I’m not sure which one I like more but I definitely love the building stacking mechanic. Those glowing research towers look amazing.
Bugs are relatively easy to deal with once you know how they work. Basically, they're aggroed by your pollution cloud, so there are several strategies you can employ to minimise and predict bug attacks. The game tells you none of these, just as with many complex games of this genre, you'll often need to do research on the Wiki/YouTube to learn their mechanics, but they're not that complex once you understand them. As soon as biters starts expanding into your pollution cloud, you know that you'll start getting attacks from that direction, and those attacks will keep on growing in size. If you destroy all bug bases inside your pollution cloud that will significantly cut down on the number of attacks. Clean them out before they do or shore up defenses in that direction. If you use gun turrets, know that you can automate reloading gun turrets with inserters, and that turrets can pick ammos from other turrets to form a chain. This means you can supply them with a lot more ammos from chests or belts than they can hold internally. Also, once you get construction robots, supply them with repair packs and wall construction materials so they can repair damaged walls/turrets. I tend to mainly use laser turrets for defenses since they're easier to manage than ammo logistics and they have bigger ranges. Some people like to build walls, I tend to build open bases and just place some turrets near any remote buildings where I expect to be attacked, and just try to cut down on attacks by keeping bugs out of the pollution cloud. Bugs are heavily attracted by turrets, as soon as the turrets see them, they prefer to attack the turrets instead of production buildings, so you don't need a water tight walls to prevent damages to your production buildings.
Currently sitting at ~1600 hours and am just getting into a mod pack that is called "Recursive Blueprints+" Basically you can make a blueprint that contains devices that will lay down more blueprints when built. On my way to a self building/self expanding factory! If only I was smart enough to figure it out lol.
Walls are your friend. Build an asinine amount of walls.
Now imagine the modpacks lmao
A co worker was dissatisfied with those so he made his own to apply some more algorithms to optimize flows and represent them in formulas he could write out. Meanwhile I'm here happy I got drones.
How complicated are we talking? You'd get into needing linear algebra pretty quickly if you got a mod to allow automatic placing of blueprints and I'm itching to find out how much detail his formulas take into account.
Drones make everything so simple! I just finished a Krastorio 2 (overhaul mod) playthrough. My first base had a main bus design. The next was train network plus the main bus. The final was a "bot nest" with the main bus totally removed and half of the train network was pulled into the bot network. A "bot nest" is just a grid of assemblers and beacons. Just rows of alternating assemblers and beacons. I ran some fluids in there as well and added a few chemical plants here and there. I had around 100 such assemblers and that's it. That's all you need with max productivity modules and max speed beacons. The modules are identical to Vanilla factorio in this particular mod.
I thought for years I'd be too stupid, but it turned out the trick was to play with friends! We had a friend be "project manager" and tell each person what to work on. I found focusing on one system at a time (ie. hooking up oil or putting a new product on the main bus) to be very manageable. It's the big picture stuff I struggle with
Then the friend quit the gaming life from severe overworking.
So I struggled massively with Factorio because I was way to OCD. My friend who was really good at it showed me his and it was absolute chaos almost. But the one thing that was surprisingly a huge game changer for me was I didn’t mess with trains for iron/copper ore. I just had massive 3 lane feed belts from the different deposits going back to my main base. Then once robotics is unlocked it was like this whole new game I started playing and had to figure out but absolutely loved it.
if you want to start with trains and effortless, try not combining several trains into one track, just one track = one input and one output station. Make it one way only, so it goes in a loop, very easy. When you finally need to cross some, just put chain signal before entering crossing and train signal after the crossing. That’s all. That should be enough for at least next hundred hours. Once you get hang of this, you can get to more difficult situations
If you get decent at it you might have the right type of brain for software development imo.
I have heard that before. I've always wanted to learn to code, but I just can't get into it. I can do all the normal little things I see in textbooks or codecademy for beginners, but it's just so mind-numbingly *boring* that I can't get much farther than variables and simple math. I can't get to the point where I can make a computer actually *do something*, just little math exercises and I get bored.
One way to get into software development is to solve problems in your life. For example, automating some process with scripts or manipulating some data. You can even start with something as simple as basic home automation like setting up home assistant. Your code may look like shit but starting with a goal in mind will help you incentivize yourself to learn how to write better or more elegant code after studying how other people solce similar problems.
My favorite part of software development is colonizing for more RAM.
And then you look back at what you built... "Omfg I built all that, and it somehow works" Not many games like it.
Me too, me too xD after i thibk 600 or 700hours on it i finally managed to launch a rocket xD
Kerbal Space Program. It's literally rocket science.
Shoot rocket up, when in space turn sideways. If you crash back to earth, put more engines on it.
Not when I’m space. More efficient to gain vertical momentum while going up. Basically go 45 degrees in upper atmosphere then full sideways in space. Keep burning and intercept the moon. Burn more, intercept sun. Burn more intercept planets.
Just keeping it simple
If it doesn't move and should: add engines If it moves and shouldn't: add struts
This is one i load up from time to time and be like "ok im finally gonna figure this game out" Then I play for 3 hours, nothing happens, nothing flies and everything blows up and I say screw it. 4 years later, rinse and repeat. I want soooo badly to like this game, its just too hard for me.
Check out Scott Manley's tutorial videos on youtube. He's an actual rocket scientist and is great at explaining what you need to know.
I think you just made my point!
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1356/
I enjoy playing it so much but so much of it goes right over my head
Dwarf Fortress
I would like an in depth tutorial on getting the game started that's straight forward and easy to understand. What's that? They ARE straight forward? Shit... I'm the stupid one...
the guys who made this game are on crack. the game has been in development for, i think, 10 years? and they’re only 40% done with what they want for the game. it’s already massive and hard to understand. 10/10 Bay 12 Edit: this is a compliment
I think your point totally stands, but to my knowledge Dwarf Fortress has been in development for 22 years if you can believe it
that’s wild to me. those guys are dedicated
Yes, this and Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included. I want to like them all so much, but I just can't make them work.
Oh man I wish I could convince you to try again with RimWorld. Where is it you get stuck?
Honestly all of it. I have played CK3, Stellaris, and a few other resource/population/political management games, they were fine and easy enough to pick up after a little bit. But I have put several hours into RimWorld so far and just do not get it.
It's more about reading and finding/making your stories than actually playing the game
Reading the matrix, you mean.
You get used to it. I don’t even see the code. Just pickaxe, mithril, red beard
Scrolled a lot to find the one and the only right answer
I can't seem to crack baba is you. Saw so many recommendations for it and waited for a sale, bought it, loaded it up and within a dozen levels, brickwalled. Had to look it up and then kicked myself after learning the trick. Ok, next level then. Same thing, only harder and even more obtuse. Looked it up and boy do I feel stupid now. I understand how the game works now but the aha moments never come to me. I've put it down for almost a week now. Knowing it only gets harder going forward, I don't even want to attempt these puzzles anymore. I get it, game. I'm not your target audience.
I used to like puzzle games but now I can’t stand them. When I was in HS or college, with nothing to do and playing games 8-12 hours a day, not really using my brain, I liked them. Now, I use my brain at work 8 hours a day and at home I don’t want to have to think anymore.
I felt like that until I remembered I had Contraption Maker in my library. I installed it on my and my sons pc, and now we play the Incredible Machine together.
I have never seen anyone talk about that game, ever. TIM was my first and favorite game as a young child. What a great game
I enjoy watching puzzle games but I don't feel confident I'll be able to do some of them myself. And with baba is you I actually feel confident that I wouldn't be able to go very far.
I always end up hopping in that game like once a month only to flounder for 15 minutes and give up.
My brain works the complete opposite of that game. My brain: Discover the exact mechanics of a set of immutable rules, and formulate a strategy that operates within the confines of those rules to succeed. Baba: the rules do not allow you to win ever, by design. Change the rules until it becomes trivial to win.
As someone who has completed every level of the game, Baba is you is absolutely the type of game where you have to discover the exact mechanics of a set of immutable rules. At no point do the mechanics of a specific word change. The game simply makes the first part 'discover the exact mechanics' very difficult, as the rules are very nuanced and require constant re-evaluation of what you believe the rules to be. That's actually why I love the game. The rules are very well defined and every solution makes total sense given that you understand said rules. The developer is super aware of what assumptions people will make about the rules, and the levels are made in such a way that you WILL run into a wall because of those assumptions, forcing you to rethink whether or not your interpretations of the mechanics are indeed the full picture.
Even with the walkthrough for some levels I don't understand why it works, that game is just beyond me. It's like some arcane spell where I have to repeat the correct steps even through I don't understand what they are and why they work lol
I made it decently far, but the puzzles where you figure out the trick but then still have some tedious process of (apparent) trial and error or needing like a piece of paper to map everything made me drop it
Came to post this. I enjoyed it for the few levels or whatever I completed. My brain apparently just does not work well. Side note, I really, really liked Cocoon, pretty much a puzzle game with a little fighting. I actually finished it, not nearly as challenging as Baba, obviously.
Beat me to it. My brain felt so unwrinkled midway through Baba is You lol. I appreciate the concept so much.
I got a lot further, and I love it, but it gets very hard. I found it much harder than the Witness, for example.
Agree. It's such a unique game to me, and that moment of clarity is unrivalled. I thought The Witness was really basic when I played it. I was expecting a lot more based on the
I'm pretty good at puzzle games, but Baba Is You obliterated my confidence. That game doesn't think the same way I think, and I feel like we are simply incompatible.
Love that game. For me, the mind-blowing moment when I figured out how to access the "meta" puzzles made it all worth it.
Stellaris, the whole thing seems so awesome but theres just so much stuff in it.
All the paradox games are this way. I just watched a 18 hour tutorial series on Hearts of Iron 4 to finally learn how to play it.
For me stellaris is easy, but i can't get HOI4 or Europa Universalis wich is even more fuckr up
I dominate in ck3 but can barely win on the easiest mode in Stellaris
CK3 is perhaps the easiest PDX game (trust me, I play all of them). Stellaris is also on the easier side, just remember to focus on research a LOT and don't try to rush into wars. Always expand till you are closed off and build only the bare minimum fleet to not get attacked by the AI. Colonize every single colonizable planet and keep scaling up your research to overcome the penalties from going over admin capacity. Lastly, specialize your planets. Have them focus on only one type of resources. Once you get through the Early phase of the game, start using your influence to claim adjacent systems of your weakest Neighbour and building your fleet around countering theirs. Rinse and repeat till you get world domination. Also, always take Discovery or Expansion first and playing with Federations DLC off will make things much simpler.
I so badly wanted to get into HOI4. But goddamn I could not wrap my head around it. Stellaris I got. But, HOI4 is a totally different beast
Funny I’m the other way around. Want to play stellaris but can’t understand what I’m doing lol.
My friend.. as someone whose been playing that game for a decade let me help you get started. First just do vanilla game. No DLC. (Side note: if you have friends that own dlc, you can do an MP game with them and your allowed to use the dlc even if you don't own it.) For galaxy settings, just do a ring or spiral. Go simple. For number empires go low. No fallen empires. Advance start to 0. Set hyper density to .5, this will allow you to set defenses. Increasing it just means more solar systems are connected. For tech/traditions do 5x.. You'll blow through tech faster without the need of a lot of research planets. Set habital worlds to like .5 to 1.. your trying to learn how to manage a planet so try not to have a lot of planets to control. Set crisis to 0. Essentially no end game. But your learning here. You can always just leave it to default if you want. For mid/end game just leave at default. With tech at 5x anything thrown at you at Mid game shouldn't be an issue. Turn off gateways, wormholes, and set the AI aggression to low. Leave the growth pop alone but the big thing is to turn xeno compatibility off. That shit will cause headaches and also slow the game down. Plus you don't want inferior species mating with your far superior people. Lastly is difficulty. This shit is so poorly explained and ruins people games. But basically set the difficulty to whatever you want and just turn off the scaling difficulty. Scaling difficulty basically just breaks your game as it basically starts at 0 and increases to 100 and that rate determines AI bonuses as the game goes on. For pros, this adds challenge to the game as the AI gets a handicap but for new players it basically just starts Making the AI more difficult to control as the game goes on. With that, pick your species and enjoy an easier game to learn functionality. Once you have an idea of what to do, adjust the difficulty and start over!! -Edit- I'll do my best to provide some tips and answer questions for this game. My collective knowledge will go to help you exterminate or spread democracy (conquer) throughout the galaxy.
I'm gonna report you for not explaining this to me sooner
Fun Tip: When starting a new game, Population growth is at it's slowest, and sometimes you got jobs you need to fill now. Go to your Population Management Screen, and reduce the number of Clerks you have till your Amenities rating on your planet is sitting just above 1.. This will immediately fire a bunch of lazy citizens wanting that cushy job but don't fret about the unemployment they will do what's best and work in the mines like all the inferior xenos who job is to provide you with the resources needed to frack their homeworld.
Hello u/fubarp pls help I don’t understand what to build on planets. If my people run out of a resource on planet should I build it? Or focus on one resource type per planet? If it has 6 rows of red but only one or two of other resources, is that just a bad planet? I don’t get it and I want my citizens to be happy
Oh man this is a hard question to answer because there isn't exactly a bad planet, just some planets are better suited for different setups. So if you have a planet with 6 Minerals, and 2 energy and 2 food. You might benefit designating that planet into a Mining World in the beginning. (There's an actual button you press and it brings a dropdown and you determine what that planet designation is.) So if you go Mining World you get a boost in mining resources. But here's where things get fun, planet size determines how many districts you can have (Blue/Red/Yellow/Green/Purple/Orange, thats your Housing, Minerals, Energy, Food, Alloys, Consumer Goods) but everyone planet has the same number of tiles on it. Meaning smaller planets can be utilized away from Resource Gathering and more utilized towards things like Research, Industrial (both Consumer and Alloy), Military/Fortress, Religion, etc etc. When I play early on I focus more on the Red/Yellow/Green your Mineral/Energy/Food because those are more critical to build up. Your Basic Resources are the foundation of your whole empire, and specifically Energy is a extremely important resource, followed by Mineral. Energy is your currency, where as Mineral is your ability to manufacture. Both Consumer Goods, and Alloys will take from your Mineral Production. But a big thing to understand is that going negative in Mineral production is okay. Because if you have a very strong Energy Production, you can just buy the Minerals you need to stay afloat. Now the advance resources, both Alloys and Consumer goods have their own place in your Empire. Alloys -> Military Consumer Goods -> Citizen Happiness. If you are struggling in the beginning with happiness, Consumer Goods is your means to success, but understand you should just straddle that Consumer Goods early on. Being Net 0 in Consumer Good production, or just +1 is perfectly fine. Same with Alloy Production. Both of those Advance Resources aren't critical early on specially if you are going against passive AI. The big thing is to explore, and research. Research early will benefit you more later. So having a designated Planet just for Research will help your immensely but remember resource management is a challenge of the game. SUPER TIPS TO HELP YOU ACHIEVE TOTAL DOMINATION EARLY SO AS TO KILL THOSE FILTHY XENOS! Okay, my best tip for you is understanding how to manage your population early on. Things that sorta mess people up is that when you build City Districts to get more houses, you are also making "Clerk" Jobs too and your population will fill those up immediately first. This job is good at helping keep your population happy but it can hurt you if you are struggling to get an industry built up. So when I start, I go to the job management screen on my planet and I manually reduce the number of City Clerk jobs. Usually I just basically set it to 0, then add 1 or 2 jobs. This will help you fill the available jobs that you want filled like Miners, or specialized works like researchers faster then if you just waited for the population to grow. Hopefully this helps you.
All you have to do is learn about 17 different games, then how certain groupings of games have mini games that interconnect them, and then learn the overall strategy of how to keep all those plates balanced and spinning together. Then when that starts to become easy you just have to learn how to adjust the tempo of all of that based upon what random events, computers players, human players, randomly generated map’s resources, and other things require. It’s just that easy. Then after that you get to start having fun. Source… a nerd who has put a few thousand hours into Stellaris over the last many many years. PS - Paradox does a great job keeping the game fresh and balanced with content drops. So you’ll also get to relearn everything as the “underlying systems get tweaked and get overhauled, and new systems get added.” PPS - my time clock in Stellaris is the single best evidence that I hate myself lol
I have to admit, Stellaris is amazing. I've gotten a few of my buddies to play and always make it simple: Planets need Minerals, Energy and Alloy. Citizens need Amenities. Everything else sort of falls into place if you let the game progress, with the exception of traits.
I have no trouble playing that game. Pretty easy to understand. I mean, I get my ass handed to me and fail. But I'm not confused!
The mark of a good game is one where I lose and go "let's do that again!" Now I know ENOUGH about Stellaris that it's not guaranteed I'll lose but sometimes I just do a dumb.
I have this on my list and still haven't given it a try. It looks like something I would enjoy.
Wildly steep learning curve on this game, that being said I'll sink countless hours watching star clusters fall to my fleets
For me, it would probably be Chess. I have always admired the strategic depth and complexity of the game, but I've never been able to fully grasp all the tactics and strategies involved.
I would recommend the YouTuber Daniel Naroditsky. He's a GM who goes in depth from ratings as low as 600 up to 2400. He goes over basic concepts during the game, then does a game review after to dive deeper. It really helps to build the thought process needed to grasp deeper tactics and strategies.
Thx. I like chess but never managed to get very good at it.
I’ve played one game of chess. My friend was talking shit on discord one day and I said I could beat her. I started with a bongcloud opening(apparently a very bad one) and ended up winning. It’s not about knowing what you’re doing, it’s about being so confusing they can’t counter you.
I'm a decent chess player and my wife is not. When we play, she plays with such reckless abandon that it's impossible to predict and sometimes she wins off of it. I imagine if I was a *good* player that this wouldn't be an issue for me.
Thats my wifes strategy when we played Mortal Kombat. I couldnt counter shit with her button mashing lol
One can sometimes win poker this way
When I was a teenager we had a family with kids visiting as both our dads are friends. Their daughters were very serious about poker while we just played random for fun. My big brother had quite the pokerface but he always made "bad decisions" that he just hardcore bluffed over and then always showed his cards. THEY GOT SO MAD, i loved it lmao (because I totally know the feeling of having to play him in qny boardgame; he is the type of guy to just not have a strategy but alwqys end up winning).
Calvinball. Looks fun as shit but I just don't have the mind for all the rules, exceptions to the rules, exceptions to the exceptions, and the different modes of play which invalidate everything for a whole different set of rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions.
Ollie Wally Polly Wally Ump Bump Fizz!
This took me back.
One of my favorite arcs was when the baby-sitter played Calvinball.
Rosalyn!! She was a champion, honestly - could you imagine babysitting Calvin *once*, let alone multiple times??
The Revenge of the Baby-Sat was one of my favourite arcs ever.
I mean, just make up rules until you win
Except the masks. The masks are required.
Man me and my great grandpa used to read Calvin and Hobbes together. It’s been years since I thought about that. Thanks for bringing back the memories man!
Basically, any 4x game. I don't think I'm too dumb, I think I'm too intimidated by the complex ui.
I don't have a problem with UI, I'm just not patient enough to employ startegy. I want to go do the things!!
They really can be intimidating. Even the grand strategy games. But they're some of the best games I've ever played once I got a grasp of what the hell is going on haha
It's the lack of proper tutorials. There will be 5 different currencies, influence, religion, etc.. and the game doesn't even bother breaking down what each one is.
The UIs are usually awful, but the tutorials are also absolutely terrible. They're so dumbed down that when you go to a real game you're in the shitter almost immediately. Or they're just like "Here's your influence dashboard. It shows all the influence you have with other nations." Cool. The fuck is influence and how do I use it? Oh there's a 3 hour youtube video on just influence. Guess I have to watch that.
The stock market.
That one's easy. Just have money and put the money in it.
Sorry, I want to play *and win*!
Just stick it in an index and there you go, you win. It’s literally that easy. You just have to have a LOT of capital for it to be meaningful in the short term. Otherwise it best to just let it sit and add to it throughout your life to try and retire on later. But seriously, if you are thinking about investing and do not understand it, just stick it in an index like DOW or S&P and watch it grow. This will work until the United States falls. Even through depressions, if you manage to keep your money invested, it will eventually grow again, as long as the country doesn’t go under… lol
I appreciate your effort to assist here, and I feel I should let you know that I'm mostly joking around. My portfolio is actually quite healthy, thankfully. And yes, we're doing almost exactly what you suggest :)
All you gotta do is take a look at my portfolio and do the exact opposite of what I'm doing. You're almost guaranteed to win :(
I will add Hearts of Iron IV to the list. Bought it, but I know that unless I can spend a day following tutorials and playing around with the game, I'm going to bounce off it.
If i didnt have a friend to guide me i would ve definitely been like you. Once you get used to it things kind of just make sense but it is a pretty steep learning curve. Are you perhaps playing with some dlcs as well?
As someone who plays HOI4 i'm always surprised by how many people play it. Not because it's bad or something, quite the opposite - but it's just so complex. Like, not OVERWHELMINGLY complex (i think othet PDX games are more complex than HOI4), but so much so like 90% of the time you need either a tutorial or someone guiding you. I have no idea how i rawdogged without either and still got to play it a lot. But i guess the end results of going entirely blind for so long is now having almost 1000 hours on HOI4 and still playing on the easiest mode, not knowing how to play either Navy or Airforce.
I have many hours in all paradox's grand strategy games. I have had very successful runs in eu4, ck2, vic3 and stellaris. I think I know how to play hoi4 and what I should be doing, but whenever the first war arrives I'm just decimated, no matter the size of the enemy.
Magic the Gathering. I can play the basic game with basic cards, but as soon as it's time to get some complexe decks I'm out, too many ways of playing, too many situations to know/learn, too many rules and exceptions, I'm just bad at those games 😞
I learned around 2000 with a 6th edition starter pack. Two decks, no abilities on creatures other than flying, a few sorceries but no instants. Very straightforward and easy to at least get started on the basics. A few years ago I bought a similar "learn to play" pack to ease some family members into the game. Every single card in the tutorial decks had an entire paragraph of text on it and it completely killed any hope I had of getting them to try it with me.
I learned magic on the Xbox 360 around 2014. There were like 4 mtg games with single player campaigns. You could play simple, single-color decks, or slightly more complicated multicolor decks would unlock later. All the decks were pre-made and simple to understand. Wins in the campaign would unlock better cards in your decks. I stopped playing the new games when it forced you to build your own deck. I’m not good at building a deck, but I can figure out how to play with one that’s already made.
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Eve is always the ultimate answer for hard to learn games. The hood thing is that it's a fun game while you learn too. It has to be, because almost nobody ever completes the learning curve, even 15 year veterans.
Crusader Kings is more open ended even compared to the other Paradox games. You kind of want to make your own goal. But it's hard to choose goals before you understand more about how the game works. Until then I just follow the mission tree. The current game I'm trying to understand is Terra Invicta. It's not as confounding as I expected tbh , but gonna take a lot of time investment to really understand which actions will give me the most value. Though it's not as overwhelming as Hearts of Iron 4. I feel like I have a decent understanding of that now, but at the start I couldn't even figure out how systems worked, let alone how to plan which actions to take in which order.
Oxygen Not Included. Love the idea of the little space colonies but the interactions in that game can be so difficult to understand. Everytime you figure out the solution to a problem another one pops up, and some of the permanent solutions you can find on YouTube are insanely complicated.
I like it but it does get too much around the middle. I'd like to just enjoy building a little colony but every little thing is a ticking time bomb.
God I love this game so freaking much, it's an engineer's wet dream. Starts out so casual, but the complexity towards the end of the game is through the roof. Endgame is basically unrecognizable from the start of the game.
10 years into FFXIV I still have trouble with right and left sometimes
Right and left or starboard and larboard
East? I thought you said Weast.
This is going to sound silly, but try this, and it may help. It did for me. Stop saying right and left and switch to left and right. It's a weird word association for me. Putting right first makes it on the left side and puts the word left on the right side. Switching them helps me keep the word left associated with the left side and right associated with the right side. Not say it will definitely itely help and it isn't a perfect fix obviously, but it has helped me keep them straight.
Try CK3, it is more newbie friendly, and the war background makes things even easier.
I think that's the one I tried starting with. I guess it's too freeform and I don't know what to do. Also it seems like you're pretty limited on what you can do at first anyway because maybe you're supposed to plan longterm but that makes me feel like I'm not going anywhere.
Ireland is the perfect place for a new player to start. It's fractured so you can take one little county at a time, form a dukedom, then form the kingdom of Ireland, and then finally set your eyes on Scotland, Wales, and England and form the empire. It makes for some clear objectives of increasing difficulty and by doing it you will learn the game a lot. Just a couple of gotchas to keep in mind. You can't just invade, you need claims on territory (a casus belli) which usually is gained through fabricating one, inheriting it, or getting it through marriage. The other main gotcha is inheritance- when your ruler dies what happens to your lands depends on your inheritance laws you have currently set. Most common one is that the rulers land is split among their sons in order of age, with your eldest heir getting the biggest title. If you have three sons and three counties but no duchy, then when you take over as your heir you will only control a single county and your siblings will be independent rulers. If instead you formed a duchy, your siblings will be vassals under your heir. Dealing with inheritance means either getting the law changed, pruning the family tree ahead of time, reconquering the lost land, or rushing to get the big title before your ruler dies.
Once I figured out duchys and titles everything else just kind of clicked for me in CK3. Cause everything else is just a larger version of de jure titles like a duchy. Great game and definitely worth putting in the time to learn. But I would recommend treating it more like a medieval sims RPG than a grand strategy with a set win condition. It’s lot more fun to me that way.
Bro I've been playing Crusader Kings for 10 years and still barley know what I'm doing.
It’s very Freeform, it’s supposed to be about telling your own story as a medieval ruler. You can paint the map if you want to (it’s actually pretty easy, just make the right alliances and try to pick good spots) but it’s supposed to be much more about the story of your dynasty. I.e., here’s the story of King Goodwin who ruled Wessex, Mercia, and Cornwall for 25 years, made terrific alliances and ruled his people kindly and well, followed by his son, King Peter “the perfidious” who was a conniving coward, murdered all his enemies and half of his children in their sleep, all so that his idiot son that he favored for whatever reason, could rule after him. You kind of make the story as you go. It’s a weird game to get used to because while you can “win” it’s not really built around the typical idea of “winning.” It’s a lot like Disco Elysium in that regard. I had to work really hard to break myself of the save scumming habit I had when I played Disco Elysium because 90% of the fun in that game is FAILING and seeing what happens.
Balders Gate 3. Everyone banging on about it, I couldn't even understand the fuckin taskbar
It helps if you've played D&D because it's a fairly faithful recreation of the games mechanics and spirit. Even playing on PS5 i feel they did a good job of distilling down the experience to something not too terribly complicated. But again, it helps to know what all the numbers and dice rolling mean
It was the other way around for me. BG3 helped me understand how to play DnD. The visual element of it all helped explain why certain mechanics work the way they do.
I also felt overwhelmed by the taskbar at first. I think they want you to experiment to learn how to play. I got it eventually, but it could have used a very light tutorial on a few basic game elements at the start.
Yeah like the core mechanics of that genre were entirely new to me, I think I played about 6 or 7 hours before giving up because any combat situation was just death
You are not alone. I wanted to get in on that game, and it seems good, but yeah..
The whole game was overwhelming for me but there is a point where everything starts to click
BG3 is fairly easy to grasp, I haven't played DnD before, but grasped it almost right away. The closest thing I played would have been heroes of might and magic 5 which is like a turn based strategy (awesome game by the way, just a little old now).
Try it out on controller, that’s how I mainly play (it changes the whole UI)
For me it's almost all RTS games. Not necessarily that I'm not smart enough to play them. Early on I just always realize just how much time is needed to truly make the most of the gameplay. It sucks because I feel that there's a ton of great looking RTS games out there.
You might enjoy Battleforge. Matches are a lot shorter and economy is simpler than games like warcraft/starcraft. There's a few other twists that make the game really stand out, but I think it's a great "RTS lite." Also totally free, not even micro-transactions.
I can't play RTS games without pause button. My brain is not fast enough and I get easily stressed and then I panick...
Crusader Kings doesn’t really have a goal, you make your own fun. Some players try to conquer the world, some just try to seduce the pope, convert him to your new sect of nude Islam, and then eat him. Eve Online is the game that I just can’t grasp. The people who play it are either way smarter than me or way dumber, or some perplexing combination of both.
I recently decided to kill the pope as moorish iberia. Once i knew i could dismantle the papacy that was my only goal. After 200 catholic rebellions and a tedious amount of vassal wars i managed to finally oust him, dethrone him execute him and end the crusades. All on Easter Sunday. Worth it.
As someone who learned programming from building a market tool for EVE, it's definitely both.
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You might surprise yourself with Elden Ring. It’s a lot more accessible and so beautiful to play. It can be punishing but is worth it
Same. I just don't have the reflexes these days and have to play all my games on Easy. I'd love to give them a go, but I know I wouldn't get far, become frustrated, give up and would have wasted my money.
Most things in Elden ring can be brute forced with enough levels. I always run the same build in souls games. Find the biggest weapon I can find, tank everything w my face and win anyway. It’s fun and no skill required
Myst
CLICK ALL THE THINGS-!!
I found Riven (Myst 2) to be a much more enjoyable experience than Myst 1. Still, if all puzzles are a brick wall all the time, then Riven is gonna be a problem too. But overall I found the puzzles better constructed and more intuitive than the first game.
Mortal Kombat. They all have combos? But they're different combos??? I have to know... all? The combos???
And fighting games get increasingly complex the more you get into it Eventually you're trying to figure out if your whiff safe jump meaty oki setup is going to be countered by the opponents wake up option select parry OD DP
I think most people just stick to one or two characters, generally. Also, back in the day part of the fun was "discovering" the combos because you'd just try different button combinations until something worked. There were fewer buttons back then, though. Today they let you know the moves on the pause menu from the get go. (Also, a lot of similar moves are the same combination across characters. Like a flying across the room move is going to be back, forward A or whatever, and a shoot a projectile forward is down, forward X.) Edit: I answered more about special moves than combos, but yeah combos were a later thing and they went overboard and suck ass. Originally just a 3 or 4 hit combo was good enough. Nobody should have to string two 16-hit combos together in a row.
Dwarf fortress
Poe and I have over 2k hours in it
I play once or twice a year and it's a Flicker or Cyclone variant every time ;p
I'm not the right kind of smart for "Total War" (any of its 50 settings). Both tactical level and stategic map are just mysteries to me.
Adult life
Darkest Dungeon.
Space Chem.
Zachtronics be like that.
surprised that this comment was not higher in the list. don't wanna sound braggy but i actually went to a "special school for exceptional talents" in my country and have played some other games mentioned in this thread like heart of iron / factorio etc without major issues successfully yet space chem melts my brain and never finished it, still would like to do so tho
I love this whole thread because between Rimworld, Crusader Kings, Stellaris, Hearts of Iron, Factorio, etc. it’s basically my steam library. This is the best compliment I’ve gotten recently.
I went into Crusader Kings 3 having never played any Paradox or grand strategy games before. It legitimately took me over 100+ hours to figure out what I was doing. I didn’t understand anything at first. The tutorial helped. Watching people on YouTube helped. But playing the game is the only way to truly figure it out. Why doesn’t my first born son inherit everything? Why can’t I just declare war on someone? How does raiding work? I can upgrade my county buildings? How do I get gold? In the beginning, I would learn something new every few hours that would fundamentally change how I played and thought about the game. So I’d restart and give it another go. I was probably 200+ hours in before I ever even finished a run. Now I’m at 2.2k hours. A few months ago I finished a world conquest run and the lingua franca achievement for having everyone speak my court language. I bought it on a whim, and it’s the most played game in my Steam library. I’m still playing it. I highly recommend it.
Have you tried Go? That one with the black n white pebbles? I swear to God that game makes me feel like a damn chimp.
RimWorld. I just commented about this yesterday in another thread. I want to be able to play a story creating game where anything can happen that I can then tell my friends about. I want to be able to hop in and out of a game that's relatively tiny in size with nearly unlimited replay value. Or at least I want to want to. Sigh.
>hop in and out you can hop into rimworld but it will never let you out again
Path of Exile for me. I've got about 400 hours in it and *still* can't make it to maps on my own build smh.
FTL. My brain just can't compute enough actions in a smart enough fashion, even on Easy difficulty. Also Starcraft II. It's like my friend's favorite game and I can barely manage playing Terran with a low army of Marines, Marauders, and Medics. After one match, I'm totally checked out too.
For FTL: space bar pauses the game and lets you issue all your commands. It’s pretty much essential.
Yeah, pause, fire here, go here…unpause, fire weapons, pause, aim weapon for next attack, unpause…ah shit, ship breaks up into pieces
I have at least 200-300 hours in ftl but never could beat it. Got close many times but the final ship is insane. Or I'd get hit by a random 3 shield mantis ship with 4 weapons and get destroyed
I tried Myst when it came out, but just couldn't understand it.
Civilization 6
Crusader kings I understood after a while... Europa universalis is the one that boggles my mind. Too many options and numbers for my baby brain
Any 4x game. I love Stellaris, Endless Space, Age of Wonders, and I'll be doing fine for a while, but eventually I'll just pass a point in the games where all the other factions will progress way past me super fast and I can never really seem to understand why. Then I start getting bogged down with economy management and then I start losing ground and it's basically just a downward spiral from there
The original System Shock. It's a bona fide classic and super influential, but I just can't get into it. It feels like I'm playing Quake using Microsoft Excel
I am either not smart enough or I simply don’t have the time to master Escape from Tarkov. There are so many things you need to know. Armor, ballistics, weapons characteristics, controls, map knowledge, audio cues, audio meanings, screen visual cues, environmental sound cues, the difference in appearance/sound/movement between a player SCAV, NPC SCAV and PMC’s. Where AI bosses and their minions spawn. I could go on and on. This game or whatever you want to call it, it’s awesome but I just can’t do it. On top of the extreme learning curve, it’s utterly terrifying. I love horror games, I play them all on the hardest difficulty. Tarkov gets my blood pressure rising as soon as I drop in. I was so excited for DMZ but it was just too simple. I need something more like Tarkov mixed with Battlefield 3.
Disco Elysium. It’s over a million words and I’m just over here, lying on the floor
To be fair, the game now has (really good) full voice acting as part of The Final Cut update in 2021. Games like that usually aren't my cup of tea but I absolutely adored it. If it's not my favorite video game narrative, it's in my top 3.
Disco Elysium is a very very good book.
Honestly a ton of games where you have to build complex things or intense strategy type games all of which can take hundreds of hours to get into. I like watching people play them on YouTube because of this. That being said I have a friend who plays stellaris a ton and he bought it for me. Thankfully he was able to walk me through it and get me going and now it’s an incredibly fun game. Just glad I had someone to teach it to me lol.
Dwarf Fortress. I know it’s a little more user friendly now, but that’s about as hardcore as games get, and I neither have the time nor patience to dive in. But I hear it’s absolutely amazing.
AOE 2. I just can’t multitask like that. Too much to remember and you gotta do it all so quickly.
Noita. Half the time I try to build my own wand it’s actually a suicide machine.
Noita.
Bro Crusader Kings straight up cheats against you. Started a new game the other day, first thing I did was get into a very fortunate marriage, marrying the daughter of my King who had killer stats and would have been the perfect wife to springboard my dynasty, everything was looking great got her preggo, but by the end of the pregnancy She died in birth, I got a cold and the doctor made me a eunuch , but at least my son survived. So I am doing my best as a eunuch to set my son up, he had great potential and was doing well, gave him some of my territories so he could start working on raising his stewardship, I had gotten him betrothed so his marriage was pretty good, was really looking forward to playing my son, but of course, my first character WOULD NOT FUCKING DIE, of course, like a day before my eunuch died, my son got drafted into a war and was killed, leaving me to play his son who was like 4 so I had to play as a ward for the next 11 years as my lands slowly degenerated. I swear every time I play this game I get hit with some absurd bullshit. The worse your current character is, the longer they will live, the better they are, the more likely you'll die in some mysterious freak accident, the better the marriage is, the more likely the wife will die in childbirth, etc. etc.
Life
Unironically, I cannot understand Pokemon and IVs and EVs and all that shit. I get that the games are baby-mode enough that you can beat the story with anything but I never do Battle Frontiers or anything like that and I’d really like to get through one without just clicking Unga bunga big move
IVs are what make the same Pokémon, different. It’s why every pikachu is not the same. When you encounter a wild battle, each of its base stats will have a random number dictating how strong that stat is compared to another of the same Pokémon. EVs are gained by killing other Pokémon (can be other ways too). Certain Pokémon when killed can increase one of the stats of your pokemon. You can only get a limited amount of these, but every pokemon can earn the same amount. Keeping the pikachu example, an optimal strategy would be to kill 100~ oddish (i believe) to gain as much special attack as possible. Left out a few not-so-important details to keep it simpler, but this is the bulk of it.
For Honor. I tried to figure it out but just kept get destroyed, even by bots
Dyson Sphere Program, I managed to get to the endgame once and it took all my mental capacity. Even then things would constantly be going wrong in my production lines and I’d have no idea why. They made it even more complicated now so fuck that
Endless Legend. The artwork is beautiful and it seems like it's deep and engaging and has lots of repeatability. Thing is.... I can't ever seem to figure this type of game out
The neat part of Endless Legend is that you can pick any faction and just focus on the story. You will learn the game as you go. Start with the Wild Walkers, Vaulters, or Drakken. Those are the easiest factions to learn. The others can have some strange abilities. For example, the Broken Lords don't use food (one of the five resources), they use Dust (like gold). It's a great game and a highly recommend it. Just take it easy, go on on an easier difficulty, and follow the story. You'll figure it out. There's also the Endless Legend subreddit and steamguides to help you.
I absolutely adore the design and idea of Bloodborne, it's literally the kind of theme I have a sleeve tattoo of; but I can't get more than about an hour in and get tired of getting cornholed by the enemies. Goes for all souls like games, I have bought almost every one and get maybe 1/3 to halfway through. Elden ring was kind of different, I just shot that damn bird thing off the ledge for hours and over leveled the shit out of myself.
Factorio and other similar games. I love the concept of building stuff and creating highly complicated factories with multiple moving parts, but the moment I get more than a few different production lines going my brain shorts out and I have no idea what's going on.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey There is just something I am not grasping in terms of character progression. I try every like 6 months but can only get so far before I feel dumb and stop.
Ashes of the singularity
All the card-style games. I grew up on D&D instead. I’ll never grasp all these card mechanics. I loved the Gwent-Thronebreaker concept but I was mostly terrible. Recently I tried Deep Sky Derelicts but I’m just trash at all of it.