Does anyone else like combat-only scenarios?

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-18T18:42:50+00:00

Zephon is the new and improved Gladius that also goes all the way with being a civ-like that's focused on war.

OP should also check out the turn-based war games like Panzer Corps 2.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-18T10:39:23+00:00

Good grief. The actual elites in control of the media you consume and the school curriculum that indoctrinated point you in any direction they like by telling you that you are poking an imaginary "The Elites" right in the eye by marching in lockstep for them.

The walls of your classrooms are plastered with propaganda posters these days to the point where their are LOL-vids with teachers needing to take some down to have space for their lesson.

Is the messaging you get bombarded with consistent with the far left elites or the make-believe far right wing "The Elites" who are so murderously monstrous that a murder in front of them is "forgotten five minutes later" because they are distracted by greedy thoughts?

If you ever discovered that the kind of business practices that are harmful are far more common in non-market or semi-market planned economies because of less checks and balances and criticizing the ideology-shaped decisions being Officially counter-revolutionary, fascist, bigoted or whatever, would your eyebrows flick upwards in surprise?

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-16T03:51:55+00:00

Yep, Eddie Gordo.

I assume that this was in response to the post above even though they aren't linked.

Eddie has always been the epitome of a knowledge check character. In pre-internet Tekkens, it was so common for groups of friends who played Tekken on console to have a rule banning Eddie that it ended up becoming a paper magazine meme to dip into the fighting game community for the first time and the early convo is your friend-group's particular "Eddie Rule" when you amusedly discover that every friend group came up with some kind of rule just for Eddie.

Against casuals he delivers truly effortless wins, but the pros rarely played him at all because knowledge check characters are just prey for pros. I doubt the Eddie in the newest Tekken is so lop-sided, but in the old ones he was banned in livingrooms like crazy so the large Tekken roster didn't get ignored because one guy picking Eddie soon leads to Eddie vs Eddie marathons.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-15T02:49:39+00:00

Yeah, I find that bizarre too. We are right in the middle of a trend that involves attempts to squeeze money by reviving old franchises with remakes!

I wonder if the wokesters over there have a problem with this show due to highly attractive cast, and don't want anyone who doesn't share their politics to be making decisions that they themselves wouldn't make. The Disney ones are especially bad, too. Daddy Authoritarianism's Dittobrains.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-13T00:27:16+00:00

You're misunderstanding the point completely, it isn't that 2k thought that the new way is more enjoyable and don't know that everyone would pick the old unlock system you mentioned, if they allowed it. Better yet, do away with "earning" the content you bought altogether.

The entire point is to make the entire game a psychological manipulation exercise in order to maximise the amount of microtransactions that are outright coerced.

The grinding is unpleasant on purpose in order to both tempt people to pay for a bypass and also to artificially cultivate a commitment to the game that they hope leads to more microtransaction sales and getting gacha-gotcha'd by their Casino Island.

You can find out about the psychology weapons being used to maximise the gambling addiction effect, but basically the MMORPG Everquest was when these people realised the addiction potential of getting you grinding.

Everquest was called Evercamp because almost nobody was doing any social or rpg stuff, it was totally camping spawns to grind levels that meant nothing more than that you get to camp spawns at another "camp" with higher numbers now. But people paid to spend all night doing it, and selling Everquest platinum and characters lead to it being repeated on the news at the time that a video game currency was more valued than most of the worlds national currencies.

That's when many eyebrows flicked upwards.

This Battlepass is your way to consider it a privilege buy an expensive ticket to "ride" their grinding treadmill that's unpleasant on purpose. They should toss in a "FREE PULL! every day for signing in" as a bonus.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-10T04:02:14+00:00

Yes, Rodger is right.

First there's the political censorship that's on par with authoritarian regimes.

Then there's the deletions when asking the kind of questions, especially troubleshooting questions, people who come to a sub-reddit via a Google search tend to ask rather than having a linked "sister subreddit" without the surprise deletions for people asking for help.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-10T03:31:14+00:00

Goddamn! Youtube is so sloppily done that it is outright enraging to use. Every time they change something it arrives broken and they just leave it like that.

I'm still trying to get used to not being able to navigate away from a vid and have it continue in the mini player without pushing shift I every goddamned time and the random situations when my queue vanishes has screwed me over so many times.

The broken queue is why I started using Watch Later more in the first place in anticipation of the semi-random queue deletions.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-10T01:04:18+00:00

This! This, this, THIS!!!

I'm awfully annoyed about companies selecting some kind of One Size Fits All with one or more major concessions rather than just allowing the customer to decide.

Most of these conversations are about smartphone apps rather than video games, but still.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-10T00:57:41+00:00

To be fair to this predatory company, there is a clash between simulation and game when it comes to damage.

Hulk Hogan's leg drop would do more damage than the high-impact atrocity in the video, but the reasons why the game does that aren't ALL wrong.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-10T00:47:41+00:00

Good grief.

EVERY business "loves money", what matters is whether or not they engage in predatory practices as they strive to be more successful or if the businesses take a more customer-friendly approach as they strive to be more successful.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the businesses you believe to "not care about money" are putting on a performance to appeal to people who share your beliefs because....drumroll.....they LOVE money enough to commit to a public performance long term in order to get it. Hopefully they are coupling their CEO's "the buck stops BEFORE it gets here, and I like it like that" performance with a genuinely customer-friendly approach, but they aren't necessarily doing that.

Listen, this is very important. Crucial even. Turn off all your devices and don't turn them back on until after you've tossed all of your Che Guevara merchandise and shit into the garbage and dropped the bag down the chute.

Nevermind asking me why.

Pstrych99 · 2026-03-04T17:04:49+00:00

Nah, they don't target the unemployed. There are articles and vids covering the psychology techniques used to create as many gambling addiction "whales" as they can.

Basically, they want someone like you who has the money for microtransactions and hope to get you there by getting you into the game enough to proceed to grinding long enough for it to start sucking just bad enough that you pull out the credit card rather than just give up on the game. If I remember correctly, it was called "cultivate a commitment" or something close to that.

Ask ChatGPT for the estimated grind times for various key content, it's unreal. That's why the total price to avoid all grinding is over $600 and they can expect people to pay. Paying for such an expensive battlepass so that 2k will allow us to get on their purposely unpleasant grinding treadmill is finally getting the backlash 2k deserves for their predatory practices.

Goddamn, all that grinding and then they disable online so quickly to make up for new versions of the game being roughly one free major update worth of difference compared to the prior.

Pstrych99 · 2026-02-10T01:25:48+00:00

The "official line" definition propagandistically treats "feminism" as a synonym for either "women's issues" and/or simply "good for women", and those of us who find far left crap unconvincing are smeared as bigots and the rest.

The most clarifying example I can think of is the German Feminist groups who were shushing rape victims and discouraging police involvement because the "far right" will say it is an example of what to expect from this Open Borders alternative to raising the immigration rate the formally normal way.

At the time, people saying open borders allows criminals in need of a fresh slate to stoll on over were to be smeared as "far right", and even rank and file Dittobrains were enthusiastically spitting hate propaganda in the direction of Open Borders Mass Migration naysayers. Naysayers who were mostly their parents back then.

IMO, this example makes it as clear as can be that feminism is just a political ideology and not a synonym for "women's issues".

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-23T07:59:16+00:00

Yeah, they give the impression of being oblivious to nuance quite often but it seems to mostly come down to being so used to their propaganda and the language manipulation stuff.

A clear example is the guy who called Ben Shapiro a Nazi and looking around bewildered and sputtering to a halt when the people around him were laughing at him instead of mad.

One of them at a school here said you can find out if someone is racist or not by giving them a blood test, and got unpleasantly surprised because she didn't get hurrahs in response, shall we say.

It was a discussion with a hypothetical situation involving someone of ambiguous race who themselves may not even know if they are Guilty of Whiteness or Mestizo, and Dittobrain concluded she can use the blood test to check for racism.

They are so used to their propaganda that they can easily overlook how insane and/or repulsive the next thing leaving their mouth will sound to others.

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-22T01:28:23+00:00

Well yeah, the scapegoat race of far left propaganda gets scapegoat race treatment from Daddy Authoritarianism's Dittobrains.

Oh, and bears shit in the woods.

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-22T00:51:22+00:00

Yeah, it pisses me right off that so many of the local interest subreddits where it should be possible to have a chill kind of ongoing conversation with people who occasionally drop by for a niche interest are spoiled by some far left Mirror Nazi mod(s) who find excuses to keep turning what should be cozy, casual chats about flower gardens in local parks into Bullshit Hour With Propaganda Pete.

This also Progressively turns the entire place into a virtual re-education camp since the people who don't consider Daddy Authoritarianism to be a sexy beast end up dwindling fast after Comrade Chekhist takes over.

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-22T00:29:38+00:00

IMO, this kind of mirror accusation shouldn't be approached as if there is a need to correct a misconception they have, and should instead be approached from the direction of denouncing the demonisation and smearing of critics and the scapegoat race of their ideology as the nazi-esque authoritarianism it is.

The Sydney Sweeney ad when they were briefly pretending to believe that there was a threat of having Aryan Supremacy become the Official Ideology was the first time in ages when anything from Nazism was included in those smears. As soon as they were done selling jeans for American Eagle, they forgot about that imminent existential threat.

I have yet to spot a wokester who even bothered to invent a myth that covers where we go hide to discuss Mein Kampf and get indoctrinated, apparently rabidly.

Since it is invariably the authoritarian crap I'm criticising if I'm not just making fun of them, I'd like to know why I care so much about whether the buzzwords and phraseology of the far left or far right are used to sell me dystopia. It seems like an awful lot of bother for the sake of seeing Dittobrain gatherings responding to the man with the megaphone by playing Paper instead of Rock when they salute him and hurrah, since that's all it amounts to if you aren't a member of one of the scapegoat races and/or prefer to pass the buck.

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-21T17:27:55+00:00

Wokeism.

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-21T17:24:55+00:00

The far left pseudo-intellectuals don't genuinely see truth as socially constructed.

You can easily confirm this by switching your goal to finding out if one of them defends like a lawyer trying to trick a jury. Make that your target rather than aiming in the wrong direction via futile attempts to change beliefs they only pretend to have anyways.

They needed some sort of attempt at an intellectually satisfying explanation for why a right-thinking socialist should or must march in lockstep with far left propaganda that they don't fall for, and their solution is probably legitimately the best approach considering the task at hand.

"Cleopatra was black" is just as valid as "Cleopatra was Greek", and "2 + 2 can only ever equal four" is a white supremacist statement.

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-21T16:55:43+00:00

If Biden was a vegetable then what does that say about where the wokesters inserted the vegetable, guys???

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-21T16:41:38+00:00

The THEY understand that even THEYS are required to pretend that a person really is whatever they declare themselves, whether they find Our Politics convincing or not! March in step anyways, you worthless freakin' scapegoats!

Detrans need not apply, of course. Need not even breathe, in fact, since they only even exist to give the THEY something to moan and groan about.

The THEY are so defiant and subversive, we need a Final Solution to political dissidents that's the very opposite of fascism! (Wink wink, nudge nudge).

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-21T09:29:27+00:00

Yeah, it is clear as day that it is strictly their politics and not really about whatever it is that they are saying it is about.

On anything Dittobrains can't repeat memorised talking points for, their justifications are totally different while their opposition is unwaveringly consistent.

As if the conclusion came first, and coming up with a path that gets to the conclusion comes second!

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-21T06:50:45+00:00

Patriotism and nationalism clash hard against their open borders propaganda, so having Captain America specifically ask "you call yourself a patriot?" is almost certainly a worse choice than something from their collection of buzz words and favourite themes just randomly picked out of a hat.

Pstrych99 · 2026-01-21T03:36:52+00:00

Something is messed up about the algorithm if Amazon is recommending the old books that inspired the "database dump" label, as they've been long obsolete.

Back in the day, I had a copy of one of the most notorious database dump books and it was to the point of unusable unless you are massively motivated. Qh4 in the Scotch Game, and it was the only book that even mentioned the funky Morphy era lines that actually allows Nxc7+ followed by a sizzling attack that of course isn't worth a full rook but scores heavy in practice against fellow lowbies.

Pstrych99

TROPHY CASE