u/kolejack2293

I know grim dawn gets constant praise here but still.

When I play other APRGs, I often get bored relatively quickly and get a sudden urge to quit. For Grim Dawn, I will have no problem playing for 5, 6 hours straight.

I think part of it is the map design. Randomized maps come with this overwhelming feeling that any turn can be the 'wrong' turn and you will have to backtrack a while. You never truly feel like you're going the right way, because there is no possible way to know if you're going the right way. It adds to this sense of dullness and lack of curiosity when going through the maps.

With grim dawn, there is a sense of purpose to every single location. You don't get truly lost often, and if you do, there is usually something unique to find wherever you go. The stress of getting lost or having to backtrack or the feeling of placelessness isn't really there.

The big downside of course is doing the campaign again on alts. You've seen it all before. But that isn't really too different on, say, PoE2s campaign, where the maps are mostly the same, just with different paths.

Its the 1480s and in my relatively poor country in the middle east I have pretty much every special building available to me in all my cities. Universities, warehouses, counting houses, chancery, entrepot, royal court/palace, libraries, temples, hospitals etc.

Every single special building that has been unlocked, I have been able to purchase for all 7 of my cities/towns, without much of a hitch.

It shouldn't feel this way. It should feel like these buildings should be so expensive that the average nation only builds them in their biggest cities, with the specific purpose that they will benefit you over the long run, not just spamming them in every town in the nation. A university should be like 5,000 gold. It should be a big project that you put a lot of effort into completing. You should usually have to go into debt over it. Most nations shouldn't have them, and those that do should get a big benefit from them.

Anyways, idk how this should work for balancing. But it just frustrates me how much of the games special buildings mean next to nothing in terms of achieving them. You unlock the tech, and you can usually just spam them over the span of a year or two, then you wait until the next tech unlocks. Its just such boring gameplay. Give us more big, costly things to try and purchase please!

Come on, I know this subreddit is like 80% google earth addicts. We all have that one city that we're thousands of miles away from but we know every neighborhood in it from looking at it on google earth.

Just had a 30k army with 2,600 mercenaries and 2,500 prof troops wiped out by 4,000 turkish horsemen. They lost 600 men.

Historically this is just comically bad. Steppe nomads were great warriors, but they were not 15x times stronger per-men than other soldiers. The reason some steppe nomad empires rose so rapidly was predominantly due to armies being inexperienced dealing with them, and also due to uniquely brilliant generals. By the 1300s, everybody was familiar with steppe nomad armies. And not every single steppe nomad army was led by some kind of brilliant Temur/Genghis level genius.

I am referring to sandbox mode where you can adjust what you want. I set the staff pay, thirst/hunger requirements, refunds etc all to max difficulty. The game is still very, very easy, even when I design my park kinda bad.

Baseline costs are just... not very high. You can very consistently make a solid profit from even small rides, without any real hiccup. The most expensive coaster in the game is 70k if i remember correctly, something you can hit super quickly.

I think the sandbox mode should add a slider for baseline costs (how much it costs to build stuff), ride operational costs, and supplies for stores. Just something to make profit margins slimmer for players who like the economic challenge of the game. I mean, they added all of this stuff to the game which is supposed to provide an economic dynamism, but then it feels like none of it matters because you very quickly zoom upwards economically.

This is mostly a problem between my wife and our kids (19M, 18F). My wife has a weird habit of saying things sometimes which just aren't true based on... idk what. Maybe a misunderstanding of something she read, or just vibes. But it can be immensely frustrating when she says something that you KNOW is wrong, and you can easily prove it, and she gets defensive about it. It's often stuff related to history, science, geography etc.

Some examples:

She said that the american revolution happened during the medieval era. Her brother corrected her very calmly and she VERY adamantly started saying no, it was the medieval era. As if she was sure of it, despite her not knowing much about history.

She made a comment saying that bengali people were hindu. When she was corrected that most bengalis are muslim, she insisted, no, its a hindu country.

She said "ibuprofen causes liver problems" offhand and my son said she was probably thinking tylenol and that ibuprofen causes stomach and kidney issues. Once again, she became adamant it was ibuprofen, not tylenol, despite him showing her evidence.

My son mentioned that an avenue is the border between red hook and carroll gardens in brooklyn, and she started saying that thats impossible because those two neighborhoods aren't close to each other. My son and daughter and nephew all told her, yes, they border each other, and she got upset and started saying about how shes lived in brooklyn all her life and so she knows better. She refused to even look at the google maps he showed her.

Its weird, because she is generally not an irrational or unintelligent woman at all. But if you try to 'correct' her on anything, even something slight, she can never just say "oh really? didnt know that" or "let me look that up". She HAS to defend her position. It's like some weird pride thing for her that she cannot be wrong. She gets quite visibly upset over this.

The thing is, she isn't like that as much with me. I don't push it when she says something wrong, but if I do, she doesn't have as much of a reaction (although just to be clear, she has gotten mad at me before too). But with others its like she immediately has a knee jerk defensive reaction to being corrected on anything. As if being corrected on something is some kind of grand insult. But people correct each other all the time, and people don't take it personally. If they genuinely think their position is correct, they might calmly argue it, or just look it up. They don't immediately go into some defensive stance on something they don't know. Not knowing something is not some horrible thing.

Its especially bad with our son, and her brother, and to a lesser extent, our daughter. They get into constant arguments with her over this type of stuff. My son and her brother seem to bait her over this, which is frustrating. I have talked to our son about this and he puts his foot down and says that eventually she will just learn to stop being 'weird' about this if she is proven wrong enough. I told him, just stop, but to an extent I agree. It is uncomfortable to let her say something that is just blatantly false. Its double uncomfortable when she says it in response to something you said.

Its especially weird considering she is quite literally a renowned child psychologist. She is considered an expert in her field. She is highly familiar with academia and what is fact vs fiction. Like, you would think she would recognize her own behavior here as abnormal.

Why does she do this? This has been an issue for our entire marriage. It doesn't bother me TOO much, but its beginning to cause rifts with others in our family. She already sees a therapist.

TL;DR - - wife keeps on saying things that are false and gets unreasonably defensive when people correct her. Idk what to do anymore, its causing constant arguments in our family.

I absolutely cant stand how common it is for ARPGs to have a 'campaign' which is so easy that it feels like its playing with cheat codes. I don't want to play something brain-dead for 20-40 hours before I get to any kind of even-slightly engaging gameplay.

D3 had this done correctly. You could adjust the difficulty along many different tiers. If you want to just fly through everything, you can. Or you can raise the difficulty and make it feel like more of a real game, but with better rewards.

I find it quite annoying how little food matters in this game (and EU5, but thats a different story). Entire nations made their fortunes based on food, yet in-game it might as well be a non-factor right from the start. Here are some changes I propose, which I think are simple enough that they can be easily grasped, and also shouldn't be computationally difficult to do, but should have a large impact on the game.

1. food consumption in general needs to be higher. Widespread moderate malnutrition was the norm in every nation in 1836. Even a century later, in the most developed nations, malnutrition was still common in the lower classes, just less severe. Various levels of malnutrition should affect mortality rates and, to an extent, throughput. People cant work as well when they're malnourished. A healthy population is a population that can work better.

2. food prices should be 'combined' to give one singular food price with a range from -50% all the way to 300%, instead of the typical price range. This should replace the malnutrition mechanic. A country like, say, Persia, should start at maybe 80%, whereas UK should be 40% (idk rly, just giving estimates). It should be quite difficult to get this down, but should steadily happen as food production techniques improve. By 1900, the UK should be closer to 0%. For an undeveloped country, anything above 120% should be enough to induce population decline (say, -0.2%). Anything above 200% is a famine, with large-scale population decline. At 200%, you're looking at -5%. By 250%, its -15%. It should scale exponentially. It should also be practically impossible to get too far above 200% outside of the most rare, extreme circumstances.

3. Amount of arable land vs population should play a bigger role in how much farms are able to produce. Even if you have no built farm buildings, if you have 1 million people farming 200 arable land, they should be producing a large surplus, and this surplus should be adjusted by equipment. Having machinery shouldn't just give a flat agricultural boost, it should give an extra boost dependent on how much 'free arable land' you have. So with no boosts, having 70% free land might give a 25% throughput bonus. With certain boosts (tools etc), you can get up to a 100% throughput bonus. This represents the transition of large-scale agricultural output from densely populated regions to less densely populated regions. The midwest, ukraine, argentina etc should all be producing absurd amounts of food that they export to industrialized nations. It should be a huge money maker for them.

Obviously we can make it more complex, but the game already slogs and I think the above changes are reasonably simple enough. Just a few modifiers here and there.

Specifically more sprawling 'epic' dungeons rather than just zooming through them at max speed. Lots of different paths to take. It should get harder the further you go. The end should be maybe the equivalent of a difficult heroic raiding boss.

I also think quest chains should be intrinsically linked to this concept, and finishing those quest chains should give a few pieces of mythic gear (and i guess a big shiny mount too). Every week will be a new set of quests in the chain which will add a new unique challenge (and of course, you should be able to help people finish previous quests to catch up without too much hassle). I think this can somewhat prevent people from just speedrunning the entire thing all at once. It should truly feel like a fun epic weekly adventure, without a real 'rush'. Of course, some will min-max and speedrun it regardless. But not all content has to be made with them in mind. This is predominantly made in mind for a group of guildies who want to have fun and challenge themselves.

I don't think this should be a replacement for m+ or mythic raiding in terms of top tier endgame rewards. The quest chains should give mythic gear, but not like, super BIS trinkets. Even if you don't need the gear, getting the badges from the quests/dungeon would be useful, but in general this shouldn't feel like content players feel like they have to do to be competitive.

Basically I want the amazing parts of BRD without the clunky parts of classic. Updated to modern WoWs sensibilities.

Crime shouldn't be a total non-issue when happiness is above 100%. Like literally, in my city of 2,000, there is effectively zero crime just because I give some bare minimums. I can basically remove all my guards and only active them once happiness dips below 100% (which hasnt happened in a while). It just feels weird, like they removed a very fun and dynamic part of the game for any player who wants to create a city that isn't a hellhole.

Crime should be linked to happiness primarily in terms of crime causing dips in happiness when it goes out of control. But every city above a certain threshold should require a very basic system to combat crime. Basic, cheap prisons/gallows/guard posts that should be available from the start, and can be upgraded. Crime waves can happen as events. Criminality should be affected by unemployment, lack of housing, lack of education, low happiness, and especially lack of guards. But even if you have all of these things taken care of, some level of crime should still happen. Crime shouldn't just magically disappear. If you have a utopian society with no guards or punishment, crime can still spiral out of control and ruin that society. You should always have a default, baseline level of guards to take care of crime.

I understand it is not intended to be something where you unlock the whole tech tree, but the labor cost of tech just feels overwhelming. It also just feels unrealistic. Why do I have 300 people working in... laboratories in my small town of 2,000?

It should still be difficult to get tech, but it shouldn't feel like you have 'technology factories' employing hundreds or thousands of people.

My idea is that there should instead be a way to train a much smaller amount of professionals through education to work in libraries. Make schools unlocked from the start, make kids go there, and they all have a small chance of becoming a 'professional' which can then be employed at a library building (or other buildings). Better tech for education increases the rate at which they become professionals, as well as their average skill. You can send individuals away to universities in other cities to become professionals, at a cost, and of course you can build universities yourself (which can also take in outsiders at a cost). A town of 1,000 people should have maybe 20-40 professionals, with varying degrees of skill. You can also build an 'office' which increases the productivity of certain buildings depending on how many professionals you have. So an office employing 10 professionals can increase the productivity of 5 buildings, evened out depending on how many workers they have. I am sure there's other ideas out there for buildings that might require a professional workforce.

Here's the catch. Kids can also work. You don't have to send them to school, and early on, its often a better idea to focus a higher ratio of them on working. You choose how much you want to emphasize education over having those extra workers.

Just to be clear, I am a triage healing fanatic. I literally only healed consistently during Cata and kinda hated healing in pretty much every other expansion (outside of being forced to off-spec heal, which happens more often than I like lol). I love having to truly strategize and plan my healing for long periods of time, and I hate the twitchy whack-a-mole feeling of healing as it is today. It also made it far more important for everyone else to mitigate damage, as any damage you took was something we had to nurse you back to health from (at the cost of others), not just quickly spam a heal onto you to get you from 30% to 100% instantly.

But I genuinely cant tell what the playerbase actually wants here. People mock blizz for promising less spiky healing every expansion and then not fulfilling that promise, and triage healing is often brought up, but is this something people actually want to go back to? It's just hard to tell. If most healers want this, how come blizzard hasn't implemented it since Cata?

I know you want to build housing near your job centers to make sure people aren't commuting too far (although I kinda wish this wasn't as big a deal it was in every city builder... people used to walk far distances). But its kinda difficult to truly know which areas need housing and which don't. Obviously you can simply look at job numbers and try to figure it out yourself by doing some quick math, but... is there an easier way? Am I missing some little figure on a map mode somewhere?

I always try to create a somewhat balanced game, but I like to mess with the settings a lot (including with mods). On my most recent game, I boosted science massively (5x libraries/labs), but also made my unhappiness much worse, and increased lawlessness. Basically had a super-genius, highly productive, but very unhappy criminalistic population. I had a constant stream of public executions.

I did another run where I massively increased my production of all items, but could not make any food. Everything had to be imported, just like a irl city. I suddenly had to manage wayyyyy too much financial stuff and ended up quitting though.

I did a run recently with the birth rate set much higher. Did not turn out well, as before I knew it, the majority of my working age population were parents instead of workers.

I am kind of confused as to why this is happening. There is just straight up no crime in my settlement whatsoever. 900 people, two different ethnic groups both forming around 50% (one is at 88% happiness, other 230%).

But like... zero crime. I have not seen a single person in my stockades. Nothing is happening.

I have 5 guard posts throughout the city at crowded areas. Still, nothing at all.