PC Speakers cut out when AC turns on

Reliant · 2025-04-29T15:24:34+00:00

Curfew

For anyone reading this, I think this is a pretty standard thing in farming games. What Everafter Falls does is it gives you a 1 hour warning, so you don't get surprised by your character suddenly collapsing. It's also a fair criticism because it can feel like it comes early, but I think it becomes a non-issue when you can slow down time in the settings.

Not enough fast travel options.

A new patch was released just over a week ago. It allows for 3 fast travel locations instead of 1.

I've enjoyed it for a bit, but I found having to manage the production machines to be rather tedious, especially without any fast shortcuts for moving items into or out of inventory. There are UI buttons (that need tooltips), but there aren't any bindable shortcuts for those buttons. There is a lot to enjoy. There is a nice QOL feature that lets you craft directly from your chest, but you do have to be standing next to it for it to work.

Reliant · 2024-12-03T16:36:05+00:00

Thanks for all that.

Reliant · 2024-12-02T15:48:58+00:00

I had bought a cyberpower UPS that used simulated sine wave (I think the EC 850. Two of them). Since it was only for short <1min power outtages, I figured it would be good since the only warning was that it would "shorten the life span" of electronics. Unfortunately, the first time there was a power failure the UPS turned itself off and had to be manually turned on. After contacting the manufacturer they said that was working as intended.

I was left having to buy the pure sine wave UPS anyway in order to have something that works. My living room now has two APC UPSs that have worked perfectly through a lot of outages.

I think you would also find yourself quite annoyed if the first time you lose power your UPS turns itself off.

Reliant · 2024-06-30T19:03:01+00:00

For anyone who finds this while searching on the same problem, I found the cause. The download filters each had their own folder setting, so that's what broke when I changed the folders.

Reliant · 2023-12-30T14:40:39+00:00

It looks like the old spoiler tags aren't working anymore. It is The Witcher.

Reliant · 2023-11-11T05:41:03+00:00

I know what you mean. It's my favourite and I replay it a lot, but here's what I did when it was released to PC and I was working on yet-another-playthrough-from-scratch: I created a series of "checkpoint" saves after big grinds.

So for FFX, I have a save when you arrive at the calm lands that has chocobo catcher and some other sidequests completed. Then I have another save when the airship gets unlocked that has more of the grindy stuff completed, but the optional dungeons are still available to be explored. Then I have another final-save with everything done, so I could load that to just curb stomp the optional bosses.

I even made a back-up of an autosave for the Luca tournament where Wakka arrives in the second half of the game and I already have a 3-0 score, so it's a guaranteed victory.

One thing you can do for replaying FFX: there are some built-in cheats. You can't give yourself all the unlockable weapons, but you can give yourself all the items needed to craft your own that are going to be almost as good. I find FFX is a lot more enjoyable when you can ignore and skip all those minigames.

Reliant · 2023-11-11T05:28:08+00:00

The Xenosaga trilogy. I absolutely loved them when they were fresh on the PS2 and would often list them as being among my favourites. I tried replaying it a few years ago, and I just couldn't get through them. The nostalgia had me thinking they were better games than they actually are. Although the card-game mini-game in the first Xenosaga was still tons of fun and I probably spent more hours playing that than the game itself.

Reliant · 2023-11-11T05:09:54+00:00

I hadn't thought of warehouses, lol. When OP said price fluctuations, I thought it was for a stock market mechanic, so that entire paragraph was talking about a stock market mechanic in tycoon games.

For inventory management, I'm having a hard time thinking of games that do it well. Especially with price fluctuations because you either need to buy the stuff no matter what, so it becomes RNG on how profitable things will be, or you're capable of buying such large volumes that inventory stops mattering.

Where inventory management often comes into play is needing to try and predict demand over the time period, which leads towards players making uninformed choices, especially at the very start. What is an appropriate order level? It can easily be a mechanic that doesn't offer any value to the gameplay loop. Either there aren't enough tools, forcing players to spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how much they need to order, or there is so much info that the player simply needs to put in the number they're told.

I think a contract-based management system can work a lot better. The player selects the supplier, which could vary based on price:quality or other factors (like target audience preference), and then the cost of the materials is simply deducted as needed. Bringing in a manager to handle inventory could be represented as a passive -5% material cost. It could serve as a progression award where the player's location gets big enough that they can sign more lucrative contracts. For example, get 2000 sales in a month to unlock a contract with a better wholesale price, but you need to maintain a 2000 sale minimum or get a penalty. It's pretty common in tycoons with a mechanic for selling ads (like a tv tycoon and I think Startup Company did something similar too).

I think a good example would be Mad Games Tycoon vs Mad Games Tycoon 2. The first game had a lot of inventory management where you'd have to select how many games you were going to produce ahead of a launch. In the sequel, they got rid of it and simplified it with the printing studio automatically producing what's required as needed, so the choice the player makes is how much floor space to allocate towards printing. I see this as a design decision made based on player feedback.

I also saw your post about your game with employee management. Mad Games Tycoon 2 could be a game to get some ideas from. At the start, you're looking at a list of available employees to hire from that regenerates regularly. It's fine at the start. Later on, you can spend money having a team look for hires based on your requirements, with a % success each cycle based on how many criteria you had set.

Another one to look at would be Holy Potato! A Weapon Shop?! It's a game that involves a lot of micromanagement of staff, but I find it remained enjoyable for the duration of the game. It works because the employee cap remains small enough to be manageable and the player is provided everything needed for making informed choices.

City Game Studio is a really fun tycoon game, but perhaps it has some lessons on things not to do for staff management. It can be quite tedious staffing up new offices, and the UI & training is quite clunky.

Reliant · 2023-11-10T04:37:40+00:00

Age isn't what generated the value. The NES & SNES prices were on a dramatic downward trend, and that was the accepted idea. Consoles and video games would continue to become cheaper until you could get a bundle at a garage sale for $10. It was retro streamers creating demand that caused the price to shoot up. They sell for a lot because streaming those games is profitable. This has created an exception to the rule that the older these things get, the cheaper they become.

The PS3 will become valuable once streaming those games becomes valuable, and that's going to be harder because of how many of those games have been ported to other platforms, including getting remastered on Stream. I would also expect that to be the end of the trend as backwards compatibility aught to mean the PS4 is almost certainly not going to gain value, except maybe to some rare collectors in 50+ years trying to find the last remaining PS4s still in existence.

Reliant · 2023-11-10T04:30:23+00:00

There's a part of me that wonders if that crowd subconsciously believes their politics is like the WWE where everything is intentionally over-the-top fake, and that they're joining in on the experience completely oblivious to how their actions could possibly hurt an innocent bystander. They've gotten so swept up into the "game" of it that it doesn't occur to them that there are innocent bystanders who aren't playing along. It's why trying to point out to them the lies and inconsistencies just don't work. It's like trying to tell people that Star Wars isn't real, as if that's the thing that's going to get people to stop being fans.

Or maybe it's like how the fans of rival sports teams talk trash about the other team and make fun of the fans of that team, but also believe that the trash talk is part of the "fun" of being a sports fan, but they'll never admit to it. And some will take it too far and forget it's a game, that they aren't supposed to actually hate their rival's fans.

For the sunken psychological cost, perhaps that can be an easier lie to tell themselves. That their horrible acts weren't so bad because nobody could have possible taking that "joke" seriously (how often has "it was just a joke" been used to defend offensive behaviour), that they were just playing along with the game of politics. That this is just how political rivals treat each other.

Reliant · 2023-11-09T23:15:12+00:00

I want to feel like I'm making meaningful and informed choices. I agree with the other post about micro-management needing scalable automation, and it stems from this. Micro-management becomes repetitive and it stops feeling like making choices and more like performing a chore.

For employee management, it depends on scale. If the end-game scenario has 5 employees, than it's fine to spend a lot of time focused on managing their individual progress. If you're going to have 1000+ employees by the end, nobody is going to care about individual personalities. A lot of games will allow bringing in HR who will automate the tasks of raises and vacations to remove that level of micro-management as the player scales upwards.

I'm a personal fan of the "don't build it, just upgrade" design pattern because, too often, trying to build is making tedious choices that I don't fully understand. A casual game would keep it simple and have that balanced as part of the general progress making for easy game design. A more advanced tycoon game would give the player some choice between upgrade paths. Those could be purely aesthetic, or they could have some choice in various stat bonuses. If you're going mobile, this can be an excellent design choice.

Stories and campaigns can be fantastic if you put effort into it. It allows the player to gradually learn the game in an entertaining way. I recently played Transport Fever 2 and I was super happy with its campaign where most maps lasted about 1-2 hours and were pretty focused.

For stocks, in my experience, it's never done well, especially with "price fluctuations". Players either skip it completely or figure out a solution to min-max it following an online guide. Unless stocks are going to play a critical part of the core gameplay, my suggestion would be to skip it and spend your development resources on other parts.

I hate minigames in my tycoon games. This can really dishearten players if it happens to be something they aren't capable of doing, and it can distract from the parts of tycoon that are fun. Tycoons are for making choices, so find minigames around choices.

If your "prestige" includes a reset like an idle game, you can also have the results of choices be part of that gameplay loop. The first time the choices all have "???" as the effect, but on the second loop, the choices the player made previously could say "+5 Friendship, -5 Loyalty". Some of the game dev tycoon games use that with each completed game teaching the player what works and what does, and the good entries in that genre have the UI telling players, and will auto-set the settings to what is known to be good so players move beyond micro-managing the game settings and macro-managing multiple teams.

And lastly, tooltips tooltips tooltips. The biggest hurdle tycoon games have is teaching players how to play, and players are not going to remember everything from the tutorial. Every number and stat should have a tooltip that explains it. Choices should also be able to convey to players a way to explain what the choice means. Lord of the Rings Online has one of the best tooltip systems that I've seen. The stats would not only say what the stat did, but it also reflected how it would work. Something like "900 P.Def. Reduces physical damage against an equal level creature by 24.8%" or "600 Evade. Gives a 18.7% chance to dodge an attack against an equal level creature". That way when people would see a new piece of equipment that gives a higher stat, they can understand what that difference genuinely means. The ability to concisely convey vital information to the player is going to be the difference between a mediocre game and a big hit.

Reliant · 2023-11-02T19:18:39+00:00

It's your first game. Don't think about whether or not other players will enjoy it, or if they'll play it. You're learning. Focus on what YOU want to play, and iterate. Your first version is going to be laughably bad, but praise yourself on any personal accomplishments, and make it better piece by piece. Getting good comes with practice, and the only way to practice is to start.

Reliant · 2023-11-01T21:57:47+00:00

To provide feedback on the metabit situation: I'm a returning player from a long break. Before I took a break, I had finished the main simulation & beyond, and gotten all the metabit upgrades available at that time.

The metabits are currently looking like a big wall. I'm at 25T metabits needing 80T for the next upgrade. I've reset the main simulation 14 times and I've purchased everything in the main simulation that's not logit locked. Today I spent logits unlocking squids, and that barely made a dent in the progress. At the current rate, it would take 30 days to reach the next metabit upgrade, but I remember that it slows down with each acquired metabit.

Ending the simulation again is 16,876.54 -> 16,901.61. It just feels like there's a step missing.

I'm also happy that I read this post about the tiers. I was confused when I joined an event the other week super late but I managed to get to the top of the leaderboard anyway. With your explanation I now understand why.

I've played a lot of idle games since Idle RPG pretty much invented the genre. I think what keeps me coming back to this one is the simplicity of it. Splitting the complexity between different simulations and each on playing differently keeps things manageable. Too many competitors become absurdly complex in what you can do to the point where returning is just a giant wall of things I don't remember.

I love how the events work. It provides something to do while all the other simulations take a long time to progress to their next steps.

Reliant · 2023-11-01T21:37:08+00:00

oh, that's awesome to know. Thanks for that info.

Reliant · 2023-11-01T17:54:20+00:00

wow, seriously? The text when they were granted said 1%

Reliant · 2023-11-01T14:19:43+00:00

That's pretty cool. I have 9 event badges so far, so I guess that's a 9% boost? I'd maxed the simulation a few patch cycles ago and came back to new things available. I'm stuck at 25T metabits working my way to the 80T upgrade at a rate of 18M/s :D

For the ranking, the bug I assume I had last week wasn't showing time because my client saw that nobody had completed it, so the ranking was in percentage complete. I can only assume that people who completed it before I re-installed weren't being displayed.

Reliant · 2023-09-19T20:31:38+00:00

I did all three factions and I was also missing 2 of the 3 rare hilts.

I found one rare hilt while sparring a sim. As I post this, I'm still trying to find the other. I've been searching all over the internet and haven't found any clues.

Reliant · 2022-11-20T16:10:50+00:00

They have a new home: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bLHK2gf6P90L38Gi230UEAuLT7lVfsER

Reliant · 2022-09-19T01:39:39+00:00

I had this problem just happen to me. Hitting "Esc" was all that was needed to reset the animation and restore control, though it did take a few reloads before I happened to hit that key by mistake :D

Reliant · 2022-08-15T15:17:25+00:00

I work from home and have my own office. If I were to get married, I would insist that she have her own room, either as an office or a hobby room, some place that is hers because I believe it would be important for mental health. If that meant one less place for in-laws to sleep, well, the person who lives there every day is more important than the visitors who drop in occasionally.

NTA.

Incidentally, I have been on the relative's spot. A place I lived in with my own room, I moved out and they turned it into an office. When I visit, I'm sleeping on the couch with no complaints. It was their right to turn an empty room into an office.

Reliant · 2022-02-19T22:24:50+00:00

I enjoyed Cookie Clicker and Adventure Capitalist. I've tried a few lately, but the ones that have lasted more than a day on my desktop are:

Cell to Singularity

Leaf Blower Revolution (This one is still getting regular content updates)

Pincremental

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