Reseñas recientes de Ranamar

Of the recent Civilization competitors (because the Civilization franchise seems to have been declining) this one has two major virtues:
1. It has relatively simple stacks, which means that you don't get the Civ5+ traffic jam and also you don't get dropped into a time-consuming minigame when combat happens.
2. It has an interesting set of potential fantasy options for the timeline.

(2) might be mixed, though, depending on how much you want to have a chance to drop into Iliad-land (age of heroes), the search for el dorado (age of discovery) or a magitech steampunk victorian era.

Also, the supply-chain stuff looks confusing at first glance, but it turns out to be relatively straightforward to manage. On the other hand, there are 7 strategic currencies and a whole bunch of resources to juggle to keep your cities growing.

If I have a complaint, it's that you are able to (regardless if it's a good idea) skip about half the techs while forging ahead, and it's sometimes hard to know what techs are going to matter. (There are admittedly also still a couple odd balance bits: Paper is cheaper to import than wood, for example, and the pirates chaos event spawns a ton of absurdly powerful ships, especially for the era that you should just buy them off with the diplomacy currency.)

I had a sudden urge to try this out a second time when I remembered I had it because I saw a "let's play some bits of X4" video series that was fun. I remembered I bounced off of it at some point, but I had no idea that I'd gotten 5 hours in at the time! I bounced off it again, and the main conclusion I have was that I am not good at space sim flight.

However, there are also some janky things that just make the game a little more unpleasant than it feels like it needs to be:
* I sometimes saw lead indicators on enemy ships, and sometimes on friendly ships, but I couldn't spot them when I actually wanted them except for once. I have no clue what triggers them existing or not.
* I had a fun time with the first Terran mission once, where the lead indicators worked and I actually got a kill, but then I screwed up and got killed ... and discovered that not saving except in stations is no ♥♥♥♥ really not saving except in stations and I needed to completely restart because I had never saved!
* I know this is a thing in these games, but the Mark I Eyeball is often superior to the scanners, especially at game start, and this just feels backwards to me.

I'm sure the game is fine and was groundbreaking when it was released, but it's just kinda clunky, especially today.

When I saw the cover art, I knew I had to buy it. The fox dressed in a way that calls back to my favorite series of games was perfect. I started playing the game, and I was charmed by the manual page collection and the exploration, as well. I absolutely love the aesthetics.

Unfortunately, the combat ruins it. The half-life of time in a play session for me enjoying it is about 30 minutes... and once I'm frustrated, I perform worse, so the only thing I can do at that point is quit or turn on no-fail mode. It's neat that there's a no-fail mode, but I really didn't expect to want to use it, and I'm not happy that I did.

I'm sure there are people who will enjoy this. Apparently, it plays a lot like Dark Souls. There's a reason I never have and never intend to play any game like that, so I feel a little suckered.

When I got this game, I didn't play anything else for two weeks. It's that good. After those two weeks, I put it away for awhile because it was affecting my life, but, now that the initial excitement has worn off, I come back and play a mission or two every couple days, and that seems pretty healthy. Missions tend to be 30-60 minutes long, which is about the right amount of time for sitting down to play a strategy game for some time, and they are neatly subdivided if you don't get shot up too much.

Some of the reviews, especially negative ones, complain about turn pace and mission load times. The pacing is an artistic choice (and there are guides for how to change it), and I got used to it. It seems right, now. The loading times are not that different from HBS's Shadowrun games. You can get up and get a sandwich while waiting for the level to load, so it's fair to get impatient, but I don't think it's something to sink the game.

The other thing I've seen in some of the negative reviews is complaints that the endgame obsoletes non-assault mechs. To be completely honest, this has been true of every computer mechwarrior game, and this game does it better than I've seen before. It doesn't cost more to maintain assault mechs, so there's no balance on cost... which usually doesn't matter anyway beause bigger mechs have always let you take bigger missions, anyway. On the other hand, the initiative system almost entirely solves the issue of larger mechs being categorically better.

I want to go into the initiative system extra here because it's probably the most unique part, as turn-based terrain-oriented tactical games go. In short, light mechs move before medium mechs, which move before heavy mechs, which move before assault mechs. This means that, with some clever maneuvering, a lighter force can defeat a heavier force by acting before opponents can respond, but it's also a more demanding way to fight, because margins tend to be thinner. Mediums have about 75% of the HP and fitting room of heavies, but it's enough to bring them down if you are careful. (Despite being 2/3 the weight, there are some background efficiencies which allow mediums to make better use of their total weight.) Heavies don't have a lot more central armor than mediums, which makes them relatively more glass cannons. The gap is, unfortunately, slightly larger between heavy and assault mechs, with heavy mechs having closer to 65% than 75% of the fitting room of an assault mech and the high-end assault mechs having a similarly large difference in HP, but it is still entirely doable to take them down with superior tactics. (For reasons which are not explained in-game at all, assault mechs gain a massive amount of fitting room by being 25% slower than heavy mechs, and this reduced mobility is palpable if you get in a bad situation.) This is also slightly compounded by two storyline gifts, both of which are one-of-a-kind assault mechs (where the technology to produce them has been lost) with extra fitting room.

Where this kinda falls apart, however, is that assault mechs end up being as powerful as two medium mechs strapped together, and you aren't allowed to bring extra mechs if you bring lighter mechs. I still run a medium mech in my lance as a flanker, and I deeply appreciate the opportunities provied its superior mobility and improved initiative, but it's definitely not something where more would be better. Light mechs have the same problem but worse: You have twice the fitting room to work with on most medium mechs compared to light mechs, so there is not enough firepower attached to the faster chassis to provide a threat even if you produce advantageous tactical situations.

Overall, however, the fact that lighter mechs get progressively obsolete doesn't seem unreasonable to me. This is, at its heart, a tactical RPG, and that means you're going to have progressively better gear drop. Heavier mechs are not dissimilar from getting a heavier set of armor, and if it comes with new drawbacks, well, one wil always have to learn to manage the trade-offs. Skirmish (which is to say, not the campaign) is balanced on cost, so unless the budget is set so high that everyone brings the heaviest everything, there's room to move the balance closer there.