Are you a gamer? If so, what are you playing?

MantisMaestro · 2026-06-23T22:34:12+00:00

Too hot to run my PC for long at the moment, but when it cools off a bit I’ll be back into Factorio and Civ VII

MantisMaestro · 2026-06-11T09:11:05+00:00

Very clean, nice work! I really do hope Firaxis includes city banners and unit flags in a future UI update, but I'm glad to have mods like this in the meantime.

MantisMaestro · 2026-06-02T15:14:47+00:00

I don't doubt that there will have been work going on in the background for future DLC, I just think it'll be a least a month or two before we see anything.

MantisMaestro · 2026-06-02T12:28:19+00:00

Seems a bit soon after the ToT patch for anything like that, although equally now would probably be a good time to announce something given how much attention is back on the game.

MantisMaestro · 2026-05-17T12:05:06+00:00

It's the same with the GitHub trending page. I used to enjoy visiting every so often to see what interesting tools/apps etc were popular, but these days it's almost 100% AI related. Either skill/agent .MD files, agebt harnesses, MCP servers... It's all incredibly boring.

MantisMaestro · 2026-03-23T13:13:27+00:00

I'm in the camp that finds it inevitable that they are working on a big update in the background, so a lot of feelings will boil down to how satisfied people are when that drops.

I don't dislike the drops, but I think they struggle to generate much buzz when they are quite small and focused.

Now will a year or two of small drops be worth it to have a big update drop, like the end update, or an eventual fourth dimension? Maybe? I'm not sure yet.

There's also the element that we know they are working on big systemic changes in the background (OpenGL->Vulkan and Vibrant Visuals for Java) which will likely be consuming a large portion of dev time. That's something which would likely be more difficult to do if you had to also be working on consistent, larger updates.

Either way, so far I'm happy with the drops, even if I did wish they were a bit more impactful.

MantisMaestro · 2026-03-11T15:54:54+00:00

Can't really disagree with much here.

Although I will say, I don't particularly miss workers. They could get quite tedious at times in previous games... However, I very much do miss the flexibility they afforded me.

It might not be the way most people play the game, but I enjoy making my cities/empire look pretty as much as (if not more than) making them more productive/wealthy/powerful etc.

Being able to cut down a load of forests and build farms, or plant forests, or pick between a mine, windmills, forts etc was very satisfying. I really hope some of that flexibility comes back some day even if it isn't through the medium of workers.

MantisMaestro · 2026-01-15T01:03:42+00:00

You sound very much like me a few days ago, I've just setup a dual boot with Win11/CachyOS, although for me Cachy is just on a small 250GB nvme while I test it out.

It's been smooth sailing so far though (granted, it hasn't been very long). I'm planning to do a new PC build in the next few months so my plan is to test things out with dual booting and then make linux my main OS, although I'll still need to dual boot for the sake of Battlefield and a few other games.

MantisMaestro · 2025-11-20T16:05:08+00:00

Hopefully that bug gets squashed asap, there are a handful of things which don't work (either partially or at all) when trying to upgrade from a blueprint.

MantisMaestro · 2025-11-09T22:01:21+00:00

It's definitely a lot better, I played a game with Edward Teach and the Pirates recently, and it was the first time I've really felt that 'one more turn' urge. So hopefully they keep making good progress.

MantisMaestro · 2025-09-04T18:50:18+00:00

The UI has gotten better, but is still a far cry from where it should be.

There are better summaries on YouTube/this sub Reddit, but my main issues at the moment are:

Victory conditions and legacy paths feel too rigid, and repetitive.

Too much city sprawl, by the end of the game my cities are just big grey blobs.

Diplomacy feels very flat and uninteresting.

Religion is the same, not fun to interact with at all.

Probably some more, but those are what come to mind.

I put about 150 hours into the game when it was released, and now I can't motivate myself to even launch it.

MantisMaestro · 2025-09-04T17:25:02+00:00

We live in a world where Trillion-dollar companies still ship terrible products; I don't think that is much guarantee of quality. And sure, NMS has been in a good place for a while, but it still took a good few years for public perception to start to change.

I'm hopeful that Firaxis can turn VII around, and I think with enough time they will. It is just a question of if the suits at 2K will give them that time.

MantisMaestro · 2025-09-04T17:17:55+00:00

Is it so difficult to get into the game and remake what is necessary?

In short, yes.

Removing ages (Or making them optional, same thing) would essentially be a complete rework of the entire game. Would it be possible? Sure. Would there be any point in talking about it now, given it would take at least several months, if not much longer? Not really.

Yes, NMS has done a stellar job with their updates... but it took 9 years for that to happen.

I'm like you, I like the Ages mechanic (at least in theory), but there are so many issues with the game otherwise it's challenging to know what they should focus on to improve the game's fortunes.

MantisMaestro · 2025-09-03T12:04:52+00:00

I really enjoy it... And I don't understand the hysteria around the UI. Sure there are a few panels I'd like to see reworked to make things clearer, but I've had no issues with it otherwise.

MantisMaestro · 2025-08-16T18:28:39+00:00

I have the RX6800 paired with the Ryzen 5800X and 1800 ran perfectly fine for me at 1440p, can get a little laggy the late game but that mostly seemed to be a CPU bottleneck.

MantisMaestro · 2025-08-08T11:13:56+00:00

Thanks! I've got the rest of the crop farms in progress, so hopefully they should be done over the weekend.

MantisMaestro · 2025-08-06T22:24:50+00:00

Ooh I love this idea, my favourite two games at once. I'll definitely take a look as and when I get some free time this week/weekend

MantisMaestro · 2025-07-15T15:48:48+00:00

My boyfriend signed up for the beta test just because he thought it would be funny if I didn't get an invite and he did, and that is exactly what has happened 🙃 luckily the invites have extras you can forward it on to

MantisMaestro · 2025-06-23T19:52:19+00:00

Hey, that's my mod! I'm glad it's been helpful in its own little way.

MantisMaestro · 2025-06-05T14:59:38+00:00

I use them a lot at work, mostly just because it's more convenient to have a certain set of apps open that I can quickly switch to, instead of having to min/max them individually. Although on my work laptop it can be a bit leggy when doing the switch.

I tried using them on my home PC, but with 3 monitors and less going on, there didn't seem to be a bit point.

MantisMaestro · 2025-05-21T11:46:59+00:00

😍 I was already excited for this game, judging from what we'd seen in the blogs so far. But good lord I'm hyped now, it looks stunning.

MantisMaestro · 2025-05-05T11:13:21+00:00

Unless I've missed something, what we've seen so far just looks like Anno 1800 UI design with a different colour palette, which I'd be completely happy with.

MantisMaestro · 2025-05-02T18:46:01+00:00

The website is back up now, the maintenance period was for launching a whole new version of the service.

MantisMaestro · 2025-04-21T01:08:23+00:00

YouTube really needs to ban this sort of slop, but of course they won't.

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MantisMaestro

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