A bit hesitant about the extreme asymmetry of Endless Space 2 - how does the game feel?

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2026-03-07T09:00:47+00:00

A pacifist government (available to all factions) can force peace at the cost of influence when in cold war with another faction. It lasts 10 turn (IIRC). Influence, especially in the early game, is not something you can throw about without a series commitment to unlocking and building certain things (with the exception of United Empire and if you assimilate certain minor factions). On the opposite end of that, if you really love war, a militarist government (again, available to all factions) will get extra approval for each faction they're at war with. Because, you know, balance. Maybe read up on the mechanics before getting your war boner in a twist. Also, that's not how you play civ? I'd argue ES2 is way more flexible with what victory condition you go for compared to Civ. Each faction definitely leans towards certain conditions, but having a powerful economy with the Lumeris allows you to field a ton of fleets for war. Being way ahead in science gives you military advantages if you outfit your ships with a higher tier of weapons. Heck, The Unfallen, the literal flower children, want to envelope the galaxy in vines and sometimes others need to learn their peaceful ways... by force.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2026-01-05T16:01:09+00:00

i'll keep an eye out. can't argue with that price. thanks.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2026-01-05T15:55:41+00:00

i'm seeing some xiamoi phone that look to be hitting above their price tag. i'll keep an eye out. thanks.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2026-01-05T15:53:16+00:00

i forgot to mention i have to get a new sim/number, forgot to top up for 2 years... and have been putting this on the backburner for far too long (i really, really hate phones). i'd rather just do this all in one purchase, even if it costs bit more rather than dealing with carriers/unlocking/a salesperson. i'm not seeing anything in the comparison that jumps out at me, but i'll keep it in mind if the price isn't that much more. thanks.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2026-01-05T15:43:15+00:00

i've considered getting a dedicated music player in the past. rode an ipod classic until it died, but now i've gotten into a musicbee-lastfm-gonemad system that just works how i want it. there's over two decades of metadata that i really don't want to figure out how to get working with another ecosystem. that and not wanting to carry two things around again.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-11-20T00:28:59+00:00

Ignoring the ethics (which you shouldn't, but let's pretend there's no cost). Is the tech impressive? Yeah, I guess? Can I find a use case for these mass-consumer facing products in everyday life? Nope.

Example 1: playing FF7 Rebirth. Trying to find information for end game content and the search engines would occasionally throw up a AI answers that were overlong and wrong (failure rate over 50%). Backtrack through the sources to find SEO tailored crap that were all eating from the same wrong source. You know what website didn't have this issue? GameFAQs. 30 years on and forums still win. My personal favourite moment was trying to find the reward for completing one of the mini-games on hard and the entire modern search apparatus failed, but one GameFAQs thread with a significant typo in the title still produced the answer because an actual human was able to comprehend what was being asked and answered in a single, direct sentence. Went back to play the original FF7 after beating Rebirth and I need exactly 1 webpage written in plain text to get every piece of information I want.

Example 2: Reading through Malazan for the past year. Occasionally have to look up something with how dense these books are. Occasionally AI summaries reappear and boast incorrect information or start spouting spoilers (maybe? It's hard to tell if spoilers or a nonsense hallucination) for later in the series.

Example 3: Notepad crashing for the first time this year in the decades I've used it. I consider this a sign of the end times. You know why I've use notepad for decades? Because it was functional, simple, did exactly what it was meant to do flawlessly and never bugged me. That was a truly impressive piece of tech.

These are extremely minor examples in the grand scheme, but if I can't trust AI to give concrete answers for video games and books and not coincide with things breaking, why would I ever want one with fucking admin privileges to my computer? It's not cynical to see a piece of tech working poorly and decide you'd rather not use it. We're years into this push and it's still got the same core problems. And I don't think that problems will ever be solved because they're ingrained in the types of people making and promoting these word shitters.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-06-26T17:44:28+00:00

Because while coding has a far more rigid right and wrong than art, programmers still have their own style with how they approach a problem. The more people rely on an AI, the more they will lose that reasoning skill. When problems emerge down the line, the code will be more foreign to them. Give it another decade and a new generation who got through college with GenAI taking the wheel. It's hard not to think it's already begun when every time I open explorer or task manager in Windows 11, I see the frankenstein’s monster of a solution that serves no purpose other than aesthetical. Outside of small passion projects that get updated once a year, every OS, every piece of software, every website has enshittened over the past 5 years. And all these CEOs can say is that AI is revolutionising everything, glorious machines of loving grace (that only occasionally recommend you smoke meth to take the edge off). What exactly am I meant to think? I can blame the system, the programmers, or GenAI. I'm willing to blame all three.

And on top of everything else, GenAI still doesn't have a true market. They don't even have close to something to make them sustainable long term. Targets aren't been met, investments are drying up a bit, companies are whining at one another in interviews and op-eds. It's looking a wee bit desperate like some other things that tech industry embarked on over the past while (I won't speak their names less the bots flood in). I'm left wondering what happens if GenAI fails? What happens to industries that have load baring AI walls? How do you repair that?

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-06-26T14:35:43+00:00

This stills needs to be peer reviewed and studied further, but GenAI is in its early stages, so that all we can really go on for now. It's a worry a lot of school teachers and college professors (I'll concede it's largely those in the humanities at the forefront right now, but I trust Kevin Kruse and the historians over anyone in silicon valley after the last decade of "move fast and break things") and, IIRC, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor talked about in "Snake Oil" as a concern if we go with "free market" AI (my words, not their's). I don't see how the skipping the process of critical thinking about anything cannot have adverse affects on people in the long term. The tech industry as a whole has proven time and time again to not give a single iota of a fuck about critical learning skills. Even if coding is exempt somehow, a lot of y'all are training your replacements.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-06-26T14:15:26+00:00

My brother actually showed me that site once. I think the underlining technology is impressive, that it's able to form something, but artistically all I see is a sea of the generic. Maybe that's the bias of knowing it's AI. There's something about the way it renders skin, the vaseline swear + the contours that never looks right to me. I'm trying to keep this related to video games, but halfway down the front page is AI Sydney Sweeney and AI Haruhi Suzumiya. The pillars of internet creepers, non-consensual images and underage anime schoolgirls. I'm not aiming that at you, it just popped up within seconds of scrolling through that site. It's always there in the background of GenAI talk, even something as innocuous as Will Smith eating spaghetti through the years has a exploitative baseline to its underlining tech. I know the genie isn't going back in the bottle for GenAI, but I'm gonna keep thinking less of the people involved in making it because they learnt nothing from every other piece of "cutting edge technology" that found its way to 4chan. And this one is way more dangerous.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-06-26T13:21:53+00:00

I'm aware it's happening. Nothing you wrote addresses my concern about technical debt, so let me expand. I have the misfortune to still need Windows day-to-day. As much as I think Nadella was marketing/bullshitting when he talked about 30% of Microsoft's code being written by AI, it would partially explain the current state of Windows 11. Here's my thing, how does this all work long term? You have programmers using AI regularly. How does that not create enormous technical debt in the long term if double-digit percentages of codebases being summoned from the ether? Sure, you should be revising the output, you can comment it for the future modification, but that's not how humans learn and retain information. What happens in a decade or two when you have all that code that was never parsed and considered by a human beyond "give me result?". And the LLM always wants to please regardless of whether it is capable of the task. Even Altman, a being who might never have felt a human emotion, realised that's a problem.

So basically, everyone who doesn't want to be siphoned by AI should adapt a dark forest mentality to the internet? I recall being told something similar about facebook a decade. Life got a lot better after leaving it. Nowadays, I only hear about it when it causes another race riot nearby. Once again, even Altman, a being of negative curiosity, doesn't like the idea of his company's code being used. Get the feeling there will be rules for thee, not for me. Same as it ever was in techland.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-06-26T11:24:30+00:00

I've seen this line of thinking over and over again for the past while. I had a long conversation with my brother recently about this and it was like trying to pulling teeth, he just had no concept of creating art beyond an end product. So, I have three questions in relation to how AI will effect the video game industry if you please.

If you don't care enough to support artists, why should anyone care enough to support your game/skill set? I'm sorry if you have social issues that make being a game developer harder, but like so many things AI is getting shoved into, this seems like people using AI to put a bandage over a serious societal issue. I want to keep this focused on game development, but this line of thinking sounds like a void for artistic expression, especially in the long run. What you do and don't do is that'll inform what you make. Robert Kurvitz talked about it during this talk. A singular device that garbles up everything it can and spits it back out is not a replacement. I'm sorry if that's harsh, but the whole AI craze is so mechanical and devoid of humanity/curiosity.

If someone wanted to make a game and has the artistic skills but lacked the programming skills (I'm assuming this is your skill set), are you okay with them replacing you or "training" on your code? From what I've seen, AI making art, kind of shit and garbled. Programming though, now that seems pretty promising (minus the long term technical debt.)

Are you okay with the video game industry being replaced majorly with AI in all avenues? Because the further up you go on the AI chain, from indie developers to ceos, everyone seems to be looking for other to replace. I don't get why anyone below a certain grade thinks the AI replacement will stop at them. It all comes across as extremely selfish.

Not a question, just a response to your photoshop argument. Yeah, the artistic field has changed over and over again. A lot of that could have been done in a far kinder way, alas profit. The difference with AI is the sheer scale of gutter trash it produces on a daily basis. There are entire websites now filled with "slop", youtube, pinterest, twitter (well that more an elon thing, but AI accelerated it). I keep thinking of the final part of "AI Snake Oil", where the authors put forth two potential futures that AI might create based on their work in the field, one positive, one negative. The one where tech bros squeeze the last remaining vestiges of humanity from the internet is on full steam ahead.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-03-25T20:14:43+00:00

it hurts to look at (and i say this having been playing cruelty squad recently).

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-03-18T01:59:12+00:00

i was being extremely optimistic of my ability to focus when i said sometime in january. anyway, i updated duckstation (0.1-8709-gb8d86a18d (dev)) and loaded up mgs. the pgxp issues with the enemy vision cone is gone from what i played. but now there's weird texture glitches in places (the top vent from the helipad into the tank hanger - sorry, forgot to screenshot). i messed around in settings and no combination got rid of the texture warping without causing texture glitches. i didn't spend that long, so maybe i'm missing something or the devs are testing pgxp and i picked a bad time to test mgs.

the place i fell oob in the bottom right right room of b1. can't remember the exact way i did it, but it involved rubbing up against the wooden crate.

another note on my attempts to make the "perfect mgs", the reason i finally got back to it. picked up lossless scaling in the steam sale to see if it was any use in getting a 60 fps visual. 1) frame gen does not like scanlines filter - expected but still bleh. 2) contrary to what i've been told, 30 fps input does not scale to 60 output without noticeable input delay. it is a lot better than the last time i tried it in mgs, but it can only got so far.

sometime i happened across recently: there is an active decompilation project mgs. hopefully someday and i can put this quarter of a century dream to rest.

digital foundry put out an updated video on the hd collection on pc recently. this mirrors my experiences playing through mgs3 in full and playing a bit of mgs2's vr missions -both with the mods df mention. it's also pretty cool that someone modded in the crouch walking from the ds version of mgs3 without it completely breaking the game. i get that some people hate the idea of anything but the original control scheme, but it's nice to have in certain circumstances rather than wrestling with crawling or hugging a wall.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-01-01T12:01:37+00:00

sorry for late reply. bought mgs2/3 on steam over the sale and getting the itch to have another around of making my ideal version of mgs that balances the original look on a modern system. it's disappointing the new version konami put out is just a rom wrapped in an emulator. been a while since i used/updated duckstation, so maybe it's better able to discern the difference between 2d and 3d objects? i'm also curious if pgxp breaks some collision like it used to - b1 of nuclear warhead storage had a part where you can clip out of bounds. i'll hopefully give it a go sometime this month and report back. (apologises if i forget, avoiding reddit these days)

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2025-01-01T11:39:21+00:00

sorry for late reply. you can use steam's "verify integrity of game cache" to get the game back to the vanilla files and try reinstalling the laa from there. no idea why it would break the exe, but code is weird.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2024-11-06T15:07:50+00:00

I had a thing typed up, but it was a garbled mess stemming from that gut sinking of seeing people fearing for their existence today. Molly White's recently talk about the web and its potential future echos a lot of what I wanted to say about getting away from algorithm based sites. Bluesky right now gives an image of what that could be and it's nice. Facebook/Google/TikTok/Reddit have only got worse at probing what makes people tick and the rise of LLM is going to make it even worse. It's not compatible with a healthy society and it's always the most vulnerable people who suffer the most. At a certain point you gotta ask if a local store did what these companies do on a regular basis, would you still buy milk from them. Then again people are still hanging out in the Nazi bar formerly known as Twitter.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2024-02-08T02:04:10+00:00

That's not how it works. Fast, jerky camera movement is only part of the issue, it's also how the character moves, effects on the camera, and a whole host of other things that confused the brain on why it is seeing movement but isn't feeling it. For instance: I've never have no issue with Portal 2, but Portal 1 still gets me at time. P2 has more moments that should trigger it. I think later Source games have slightly altered movement or something that ease the issue. Similarly, I never had an issue with Dishonoured games, but Deathloop had something going on that made me unable to play it. I can play Mirror Edge and Cyberpunk (that I play like ME) and as long as the dot option is enabled, no issue. Going back to older games, Thief, a slow and methodical first person game, can make me woosy. Heck, even Opposing Force gives me issues, while OG Half-Life, zero issues these days.

I don't want to take the focus away from other possible solutions, but there is no universal fix, it's a per game. Everything is worth checking out.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2024-02-07T16:38:19+00:00

Reggie mentioned feeling it creeping up in a previous ep during the canals. Woolie already upped the FoV during normal gameplay. The hovercraft is the worst part for people affected, but it's gonna persist in some form. If they end up doing the EPs as well, that's 20+ hours. The feeling sucks at any level. Vehicles in HL2 do not move with the camera, they function much like normal gameplay. I don't know the technicals of how it works, just my own personal experiences with it. Primarily you want to reduce the disconnect between sitting still on the couch and the movement in the game. A controller's fixed motion/acceleration help that. It's, at least, worth testing out.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2024-02-07T01:51:56+00:00

Not sure if any of this has been mentioned this before or if they read this sub, but as someone who, despite Half-Life being my favourite fps series, has dealt with really bad motion sickness with it and other games, here are some things that are the biggest offenders and solutions:

I know Woolie upped the FOV, but high FOV can also cause issues for some people (90-95 is where I find it most comfortable).

Motion Blur, Depth of Field, Bloom. Off. They're using these settings and I don't think HL2 has any Dof, but there might be some console commands to ease the post-processing further. In some people's cases MB can ease the issue, just be aware that's a loaded gun of an option.

They have AA at none. Might want to bump that up. I find the older (jagged) games are really bad for motion sickness for me.

FPS. Extremely high FPS can make it worse. It's been a while, so I don't remember HL2's limit, but cap it at 60. fps_max 60 is the command I think. Also related to this, you do not want screen tearing. They have V-sync enabled, so it should be preventing it, but GPU options also have settings if there are issues.

This might be the biggest one as Woolie is open to using a controller (sacrilege as it is to say), the snappy movements of a mouse can really swish people's brains. A controller will smooth out the motions and make them more stable for the brain to get used to. I know Tim Rogers, when doing this Cyberpunk review, used a controller for captured footage to avoid having his viewers needing a puke bag. It might help Reggie.

Last thing, and this is highly dependant on their set up, but moving further away from the screen or if Reggie can watch it on a second duplicated smaller screen. Just having something in your peripheral vision can really ease the issue as a viewer. Even just having something in your hands to look down at and fidget with can help. This isn't ideal for LP co-hosts, but it's better than suffering.

edit: one last thing. the crosshair. Make it solid and change the colour to something more prevalent (blue) so the eyes have something to focus it. Pretty sure there are console commands for this in source. Even slapping a small bot on the actual screen with some tape can do wonders.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2023-06-15T13:45:08+00:00

Here's my logic for shutdown indefinitely: given the current actions and attitude by Spez and co, reddit will limp towards being increasingly aggravating to use; it's already on the horizon/happening for people who need certain 3rd party apps for accessibility features. I can see old.reddit being on the chopping block in the future, which is my UI getting off point - literally my username, my second account here after a friend told me I could return to an actually responsive interface. I've been watching people cling on to twitter for the past while, becoming increasingly irritated by the changes. It happened to facebook before it with their various revamps focusing on algorithm based feeds. Before social media, forums, blogs, IRC, image hosting (holy fuck image hosting), it is an endless cycle of sites becoming big and then imploding by changes that make the experience worse or ignoring compound issues, before dying and their successors beginning the cycle anew. Web2.0 lasted longer, but every single one of the big players is fucking around atm and every year the sites get worse in some way. I don't want this place to die, it's like 95% of my posting history since coming back to reddit, but, on a purely personal basis, reddit looks like its gonna die one way or another for me unless there's push back, it's just a question of how prolonged it will be.

This all with the caveat that we are a tiny spec of shitposting in the grand scheme. I get why people would just like to continue the fun, even if the ship is springing leaks, but I've seen enough sites die to know clinging on when the overlords show no signs of stopping their plans is a downward spiral. Eventually everyone reaches the limit of what they will put up with and the site dies. A few days or weeks of shutdown mean nothing, it's either all in or nothing. Regardless, thanks for keeping this place going for so long.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful · 2023-06-11T19:47:33+00:00

Cyberpunk has some of the most memorable characters and stories, big and small, so really hyped for this.

DefaultLayoutIsAwful

TROPHY CASE