The Official Martin Hash Video Game Thread

[SuburbanFarmer]

Currently back in WoW with the Legion expac. I like Overwatch, love the Fallout series, civ series, Supreme Commander (1 not 2, supreme commander 2 is an abomination) and perhaps my favorite game of all time is Freelancer. Played and enjoyed mass effect series, played Dragon Age Origins, Helldivers, Medieval 2 Total War... Yeah I've gamed a lot.

If you liked Freelancer, you probably love Eve Online. Extreme addiction warning though.

[Cid]

Yeah, I've heard. Wife wouldn't approve. Freelancer had a good single player campaign with great voice acting.

[Okeefenokee]

I'm watching farm simulator videos. Might get it.

[SuburbanFarmer]

It's weird how much satisfaction you can get from doing a simple thing well, even in a video game. FS is all about finding the most efficient way to manage a large operation. It's very zen.

[adwinistrator]

I'm watching farm simulator videos. Might get it.

It's weird how much satisfaction you can get from doing a simple thing well, even in a video game. FS is all about finding the most efficient way to manage a large operation. It's very zen.

I keeps it old school!

[Okeefenokee]

The forest.

[KerningChameleon]

We've already had Deus Ex and Fallout mentioned, so instead I'm just going to gush a lot about a little Czech (I believe) indie game with a ton of depth that I heartily recommend to every video game enthusiast on this board: Factorio.

The set-up is dead simple: you are a lone astronaut marooned on a hostile alien world. Your ultimate objective is to build a space-capable rocket and load a satellite onto to (presumably it has an SOS beacon or something, I dunno, the game wins when you launch). The good news is you don't have to KSP fiddle with it to get the launch just right. The bad news is the world is completely undeveloped, the only indigenous lifeforms being Starship Trooper-esque giant bugs, so you need to build it all from scratch. To build a rocket, you must first invent modern logistics.

You start humbly enough: gets some iron, copper, coal, and stone ore, set up some furnaces, and smelt some iron and copper plates. This is all directly coal powered, which is slow and wasteful as hell, so your first objective is to get an electrical grid set up: build waters pumps, boilers to heat the water, and steam engines to convert the hot water (will be steam in next update) into electricity. This all requires you to start building dedicated factories and conveyor belts to move all this crap around.

After that, you've hit the limits of the base tech tree, so you start needing to set up labs and logistic trains to feed the labs. Turning copper wires and iron cogs and circuit boards and such into "science packs" is a little goofy, but it makes for a decent stand-in for "basic human society consumption". All the while, your factory is generating more and more pollution, which irritates the locals and forces them to start attacking your factory, so now you ALSO need to invest time and resources into an automated military structure as well: turrets to fend of attacks, bullets for the turrets to fire, walls to help stall the aliens, etc. This requires more power, which requires more resources, which run out so you need to expand and set up systems to mine new spots, which require protection from aliens, and on and on...

Anyway, the reason this is so cool to me is it really communicates, entirely through gameplay, the importance and intricacies of logistics, resource management, and defense. For example, oil is rather useless as a fuel source in game because coal is so plentiful, but you still need ever more of it because by the time you get it online, you need it to make the endgame stuff required to build that rocket. And other things.

Like, say you want to convert from coal-powered steam to solar power to reduce your pollution footprint and piss the aliens off less often? Well, that requires plastic for the solar panels, and batteries for the accumulators so your factory can run at night, and batteries need sulfuric acid... which needs sulfur... which is made from petrol gas. Want to build robots to build things for you from blueprints, like more energy generators? That needs plastic for the nice circuit boards, and heavy oil for the lubricant to make the electric motors they require. And the oil wells of course run out, so you need to keep expanding to find more to fuel your economy.

The point is, the game does a dynamite job of illustrating how essential fossil fuels are to modern mankind, while at the same time showing how that dependence is damaging to our long-term survival. While ALSO showing how hard transitioning to alternative energy generation is, and how it still relies on those fossil fuels to happen at all. And while the videos on the site and this big stupid post make it seem intimidating, it does an excellent job of easing you into each rung on the ladder.

I'd say the game is the best Logistics 101 Crash Course you could ask for these days. And hey, the upcoming February update will finally be adding nuclear power generation to the game, so that's exciting.

It's $20 on Steam, and the devs said it will never go on sale, so if it looks interesting you don't have to wait for a Steam/GOG sale if you want to pull the trigger on it. I certainly don't regret my purchase. They've got a demo available that also acts an a bare basics tutorial, if you want try before you buy. Also, it's apparently really mod friendly, if that's your bag baby. Damn, Eastern Europeans are making great games these days.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Agreed that Eastern Europe is a surprising new hub for hit games - nobody saw that one coming..

I bounced off of Factorio hard the first time. Months later, I enjoyed it for a few hours, but still not all-in. I'll give it another shot at some point.

[Okeefenokee]

[Speaker to Animals]

Okay.

Computer arrived. Downloaded Starmade, but got sucked back into KSP.