u/GovernorGeneralPraji

35. Lifelong video game enjoyer. My favorites are Morrowind, New Vegas, and Star Wars Empire at War, just for some reference.

This weekend I tried digging into my Steam backlog and tried a couple games I’ve had “on the shelf” for about a year. Expedition 33 and Atomic Heart.

On paper, I felt like I should have enjoyed both. AH gave me huge pre-war Fallout vibes (big fan of that franchise), but I just couldn’t get into either the story or the combat. I put a few hours into it and the combat just feels so… survival mode? Like you’re always one hit away from dying. That coupled with the 1950s Russian setting with a protagonist who talks like a 21st century American which completely broke my verisimilitude made me hate booting it up each time I tried to play.

I tried E33 tonight after hearing how much hype the game got. Typically I love RPGs, but the combat in this one is killing me. The dodge/parry QuickTime events are ruining it for me. It seems like the story could be interesting, but the combat feels like Pokémon with a reaction system that doesn’t actually telegraph when you’re supposed to react. And yeah I know… “practice and get good”, but I really don’t want to have to grind for hours, nor do I have the time. (Full time job, wife, and two kids.) I was hoping for another BG3, not whatever this is.

But then that all has me thinking, I’m I turning into that old guy who only likes playing his favorite familiar games? Looking at my library, the only “modern” games I have a ton of playtime in are RDR2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come Deliverance. Everything else is all from the early 2000s, and all I really want to do is go back and play all my old favorites, the games I’ve played dozens or hundreds of times before.

Kinda having an age crisis here. Is this it? Am I just too impatient to learn new games at this point?

Does that resonate with anyone else?

Edit: wow, I did not expect this to blow up overnight. This community is awesome. Thank you guys!

I feel like every time I try to play them (which admittedly isn’t often), I start out with a dozen ships spread over the whole territory and then immediately get hit by four different neighbors once a cycle.

I know, I know… wolf pack frigates, Altor, Admiral Syn. I understand the combat, but I feel like I’m missing something when it comes to resource optimization with them.

I can’t build enough ships to fortify my border when 4/5ths of my planets are border worlds. If I focus on economy at first, the NR or the Hutts or Zsinj roll over the three frigate defense on any of my worlds.

I consider myself quite good at this game, but what am I missing?

The community poll was overwhelmingly in favor of this change. We only had a single vote to keep things as they were.

Hopefully this will allow us to continue to weed out the bots. Everyone, please keep sleuthing and reporting. If an image has been “stolen”, it’s 100% now a reportable offense.

Hey, all.

I’m sure most of you have noticed a huge uptick in bot posts lately. With our relatively recent surge in membership, it was inevitable. It’s not unique to us, it’s happening all over Reddit to middling sized subs. Well, it’s time to talk about how we realign the sub’s rules to deal with this influx of spam content.

Most of you know that I’m the type of mod who really only likes implementing rules if they’re necessary, but I’m considering adding a new one. We’ve never had a rule against posting pictures of random burgers you’ve found online. It’s kinda how we got started when we had less than 100 people here. But lately a huge swath of new posts are accounts posting pictures that they didn’t take, which, again, we don’t currently have a rule against.

A lot of the time, you can’t really tell if it’s a bot account or not. I’m not somebody with bot paranoia, so I’m not scrolling through someone’s account for 10 minutes to figure out if they’re human or not. Sometimes it’s obvious, and they get a smack with the banhammer. Kudos and special thanks to those of you who do the whole reverse image search thing and find where images originally come from. That actually helps me out quite a bit.

A LOT of the accounts I investigate as spam link to a Reddit account that mostly posts NSFW content with an inevitable link to an Only Fans account, and you guys are on the ball with reporting those. As much as I personally disapprove of that type of behavior, I can’t ban people simply for engaging in the world’s oldest profession.

What all of those account types do though is post images they didn’t take. As much as I personally roll my eyes at how seriously people take the concept of “stolen images”, it’s time to address it. I’m from the days of the old internet where people would share to whatever forum they were on whatever they found online that looked cool. These days, first hand attributability is in.

So that brings us to the prospect of a new rule. Should we only allow pictures that people have taken themselves? I don’t care if you made it yourself, ordered it at McDonald’s, or creepily took a picture of a stranger’s plate at your favorite bar, only firsthand submissions would be allowed. This wouldn’t apply to stuff like memes, art, videos, etc.; just the normal burger pics that are 99% of what gets posted here. I have a poll attached to this post, please vote. I don’t want to change the sub unless the majority of you guys are in agreement.

Bot accounts will continue to be banned. Thanks again for those of you who do the detective work for me. I have a full time job, kids, a wife who occasionally wants my attention, a DnD campaign I write and DM for, and have recently started painting Warhammer minis, so… not exactly a lot of free time on my end 😆

I’m also implementing a new rule about AI images. I’m not banning them. I know it goes against the Reddit hivemind, but I think stuff like that can be a lot of fun. New rule is that any AI image has to be tagged as AI and openly presented as AI art. No “best burger I ever ate” posts that’s obviously GPT.

I think that’s all. Keep grilling and thanks for continuing to be a great community 🫡

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