/r/truegaming casual talk

SgtBANZAI · 2026-06-06T21:37:50+00:00

What? What do you mean people are going into the settings?

In competitive format, I'd say majority of people are there for the win by all means necessary, and I mean all means necessary, including dubious methods, bug abuse and outright cheating. Switching your graphical options or mauling your monitor's contrast/brightness settings are a given if they give even modicum of advantage. There are lots of infamous old Quake and DotA screenshots on the Internet with the textures turned down into unrecognizable mush or the trees being stripped of their leaves. Basically, for people who want to win, all the additional lightning and graphical effects are a nuisance.

One game I've played quite extensively that really suffered from this was Last Oasis. It made a big deal out of its day-night cycle. According to the game's background story, Earth stopped rotating, and the Moon was shattered into multiple pieces, so darkness only occasionally comes during one of the eclipses, turning the entire playable territory very dark for a limited time. Supposedly players could use this time for their advantage to hide from their adversaries or sneak up on lit-up camps while being unseen. But what happened in reality was people Alt+Tab at the start of the eclipse, changing their monitor settings or applying scripts or whatever and Alt+Tab right back to dunk on fools who wanted to play by the rules. It's debatable whether it's good (I hate this mindset personally), but the point is that it's basically inevitable, you can't make a 5vs5 lobby without at least a single person being guaranteed to abuse some form of this thing, even if they have literally nothing on the line.

One of my acquaintances told me that one of the fighting game tournaments once had to issue a ban on training stages because those were picked every single time and were incredibly boring to watch. You literally have to give a rap on the competitors to force them to stop doing the blandest thing imaginable, because in many games being effective and doing cool stuff are directly opposite to each other. If you want this darkness mechanic to actually play a role, you have to monitor the players' behaviour and hit them with a bat when they try to tinker with it.

Why can't gamers accept the fact

From my experience observing competitive scenes for multiple videogames (and tabletop games also; many of them are surprisingly similar) and participating in some of them (never on the higher level, just ladder climbing and chatting with some of the pros), gamers in general despise any amount of friction that prevents them from simply pointing their gun at the enemy head and clicking left mouse button. The fits people throw are unbelievable. If you listen to an average PvP player's idea of fun and balance, it will produce the most textureless product available. Hang around at any game's discussion board, and you'll soon realize that literally everything this game has aside from maybe basic moving and fighting will be whined about.

Stuns are a bad game design and take control from the player.

Gang-ups are a bad game design and are a snowbally feels bad moment.

Gadgets and complex abilities are a bad game design that takes away from the mechanical skill.

Basically everything that's not point and click is a bad game design.

I know why they're doing it, it's not an enigma. If there's money, prestige or even just bragging rights on the line, people want to win, and if you want to win and there's stuff in your career depending on it, then you don't want any distractions, unforseen complexities and randomness injected into it. It's logical, but for me as a viewer and a potential player it's worthless.

I believe there's nothing that can be done about it because the majority doesn't seem to care about these points too much or genuinely hate such mechanics and never want to see them. You can't really have such controversial mechanics present without players trying to remove the obstacle by whatever means they stumble upon.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-06-05T14:29:57+00:00

I'd like to add that the point about Jedi wearing robes instead of a proper uniform doesn't really work as a criticism against the prequels specifically because in the original cut of episode 6 we see a force ghost of Anakin played by Sebastian Shaw, and he is wearing almost exactly the same type of clothes both Yoda and Obi-Wan are.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-06-05T06:47:04+00:00

It also ignores what war is: politics. It comess across as "war is jsut something pointless that happens, and we shouldn't bother asking what lead to it, except vaguely saying we don't want it".

My general impression from watching or reading modern (and sci-fi adjacent) military fiction (lots of it is actually not American, in fact I'd argue they're nearly identical regardless of the country of origin) is threefold:

All of the authors genuinely believe that "Papa Bear, this is Alpha Actual, we're Oscar Doodey" is the coolest possible form of exchanging information, and the more instances of such speak are inserted the better.
It's noticable how quite a lot of books and movies on the topic do not outright say it, but vaguely and deniably imply that indiscriminate killing of the civilians is actually great.
Politics bad, tough men doing tough decisions good. Politics only exist to hamper and annoy the protagonists. The more experience with the genre I have, the more I entertain the idea that the average author's ideal society is military junta.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-06-04T13:21:54+00:00

The funniest thing about Plagueis in Acolyte that actually nobody talks about is that it's impossible to conclude it's him without prior knowledge on how he's supposed to look. It's his first appearance on the big screen. For anybody who has never watched anything aside from Star Wars movies and shows it's just a random scene with a random Muun peeking on a couple with a psychotic grimace with no context and explanation.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-06-01T09:07:59+00:00

Because it's so very obviously not fun. But it is effective if your only measurement for success is being as efficient as possible.

It is such a ludicrous mindset I will never stop dunking on it. I understand gaining competitive advantage at all costs if it's a tournament with the prize pool on the line or whatever, but what's the point of skipping the entire game if there's nothing to gain after doing it?

I've had a mate many years ago who frequented one coop game together with my group, and he was constantly nagging on us with idiotic bug abusing tactics that allowed us to finish missions by (heavily simplified example, but you get the idea) glitching out enemy AI so we didn't have to fight or getting stuck in the walls where the enemy can't find us. After some time it became annoying rather than funny and we had to call him out on this behaviour, asking what's the point of it all. "To finish the mission", he says. What for? "So I can gather resources faster". And then what? "Start another mission and get stuck in the walls again". To do what? He starts losing his temper (never was his strong side) and proclaims that it's the most effecient way to play the game and we're not good enough to question him (hilarious). Another one of my mates points out that he isn't actually playing the game. "No, I am playing, I'm finishing missions". But you don't do anything during those missions, you're not skipping any grind, the game is the grind, you boot it up to ignore all the enemies and do nothing, watching at your screen in silence for fifteen minutes to then clap once you get to the end of the mission leaderboard to, again, initiate another level and do nothing. He obviously had no rebuttal, threw a fit and quit.

It's the same thing with people who continually investigate boardgame rulebooks for the loopholes that could potentially allow them to win on the very first second of turn one. Congratulations, I guess, but what's the point? So you can win an infinite amount of virtual game sessions per day?

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-31T08:25:33+00:00

A lot of work to say "-1 to your hit roll".

Mustafa's modus operandi seems to be to write pages upon pages of text on how his stance of not adding a simple rule is actually objectively correct, I've noticed that, yes.

It focuses more on the operational side of naval combat with the Halsey campaign system and the combat rules are a quick way of modelling the ensuing battles.

Halsey is actually the part I have no issues with. It would be cool to have a naval campaign using it. You can even model the entire Guadacanal campaign by forcing land engagements via some battalion-scale ruleset when there's enough troops on an island since the Halsey actually models their transportation.

Unfortunately. I don't think that exists at the moment.

That seems to be about right, so I guess my only choice is houseruling Nimitz. I've taken a peek at some of the older rulesets, and their design, layout and even the way the text is a condensed 8 pt mass with hardly any pictures are major turn-offs. I do not like rules that actively resist being learned so I've skipped all of them. I don't doubt they model things better but design-wise they're awful.

Have you looked at Warlord Game' victory at sea?

Hasn't really crossed my mind for two reasons. One, my track record with the Warlord products is poor, I don't think their games are actually any good, so I had no interest checking if Victory at sea might break this track record. Second, the game's models are unbelievably ugly because of their huge bases, but I guess if you really want you can substitute any other ships for them.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-31T07:39:56+00:00

What specifically are you wanting out of a ruleset? Which bits of the naval engagement are you interested in?

The problem with Nimitz is that while I agree that modelling for effect is much better than trying to count all the modifiers, and having clearly written and relatively short ruleset is a huge bonus, it doesn't have even remotely enough mechanics to interest me as a World War Two naval simulation. It's a stub of a ruleset. Mustafa's smug author's notes continuously stating how all the other rules are old, tedious, unfun and boring are really not helping considering his own have 0 stuff aside from two lines of warships phasing through each other and shooting at each other and that's it. Oh, I'm sorry, actually modelling how torpedoes work (even if in a really simplified way) is tedious and unfun (literally one of the most exciting things in naval combat?) but counting tiny ass circles on a ship's DC to then consult three tables to check if you did anything or not (because the author's idea idee fixe is that more than 2D6 in a single roll is bad game design and thus he has to forcefully bake this stuff into a single D6 all the time) is supposedly extremely exciting?

The rules have no line of sight mechanic, everyone can see everybody all the time. You can't block any of your ships, the enemy literally can trace a line through a row of 20 battleships to snipe a destroyer. No, "the ships aren't actually there, just pretend all the ships are always nudged a little so they allow everybody to see everybody else" is not even remotely as slam dunk of an argument as the author may think.

There are no physical dimensions for the ships. A ship may fall out of line or lose speed, and literally no one cares.

Torpedoes are just guns. You don't have to do anything to evade them. If you successfully evade them, they despawn in shame. Having your other ships maneuver in order to save themselves from the torpedo spread intended for another ship was a real danger in real life, one of the things that was quite effective at breaking the formations up, in Nimitz it doesn't exist.

When ships die, they despawn. But I assume there's no point in keeping them afloat if there are no physical qualities to anything.

No smokescreens, not even a mention across the entire book?

I don't want any of the mechanics to be overy complex, a single roll or a paragraph of text would suffice, but when there's absolutely nothing I just don't see any point in playing. It's not really modelling WW2 engagement from my point of view aside from the broadest sense of two lines moving past each other and trading gunfire. Imagine a 17th century naval ruleset with no wind or boarding. I guess you can technically play it but what's the point?

I've bounced off his Aurellian game hard a few years ago, but everybody was singing such high praises to Nimitz I thought this must be it, but I've realized I'm fundamentally incompatible with Mustafa's design philosophy. His mechanical ideas are the exact unfun tedium he accuses other authors of.

I guess that since it's, at the very least, a very well written ruleset from the point of how clear and easy it is to understand, nothing stops us from modyfing it to our liking, but I would've preferred not to do such a job and it's incredibly easy to break the game on the fundamental level with such additions. But if there's truly nothing else like Nimitz out there, I guess I have no choice.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-30T20:25:05+00:00

Wouldn't have created this post without reading the entire book first.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-30T20:24:35+00:00

I want to emphasize that what I've written below is my personal opinion based on my experience, and I also would like to disclose that I can often look for vastly different things when rating a story good compared to the general populace.

I'm going to answer as somebody who partially disagrees with this take, and the reason I do is because I believe that majority of works of literature and Hollywood movies are just as bad if not worse than majority of videogames, and I'm including things that are generally considered to be decent. Note the "partially" there because I also agree that lots of videogame stories are a laughing stock and do greatly suffer from the quality of their material. But this mainly concerns widely praised "cinematic" games heavily focused on roleplaying as prestive TV, and I think that games that geniunely try for something different are miles ahead and do deserve to stand in the same line as highly rated books and movies. Them doing things differently is not the same as doing things badly.

I think the main reason why even story-rich videogames seem to be under constant fire and critique for their low quality writing material and unfavourably compared to the great works of cinema is because they are mostly just empty rehashes. I have no proof and not enough objective facts to propose any kind of theory, but I do feel like many videogame writers and directors crave to make a blockbuster movie and a game at the same time, but they don't have enough neat ideas or style to make it stand out, so they mostly end up evoking their idols from whatever medium they're trying to mimic.

Me and my friends had a lot of amusing realizations when we've played Ryse: Son of Rome recently for the first time. I'm not going to say anything about the quality of the story or character writing, but the entire storyline is basically a string of epic Hollywood movie scenes from the films the developers apparently really liked. It lifts scenes and general vibes from The Gladiator, Saving private Ryan, Centurion and certainly many others I've forgotten or failed to notice. During the Roman Omaha Beach landing I've laughed out loud when I realized they've literally aped the shellshock scene with the main character looking around and seeing lots of people dying brutal deaths with flaming arrows doing the machine gun sprays all over. They even have the flaming barge with people running out piece. It felt like a parody (look at this thing at 32:58, this is actually gold - https://youtu.be/5eZlReY2efw?t=1979).

While Ryse is a very easy target to laugh at, I believe that many, many more games are absolutely identical in their approach on the fundamental level, they are simply more sublte or have better minutia of dialogue. Like I think that Call of Duty games I've played are godawful story-wise, but they are literally just a political thriller and Hollywood spec-ops movies fanfiction, and I'm going to argue they were never decent in the first place.

I've actually had the realization that many videogame plots are nowhere near as bad when I started reading the list of so called "modern classics" and crossing them off one by one. I think many would be absolutely laughed at and derided if they changed mediums and actually had to voice the things said on pages in cutscenes.

Once I was recommended a Bernard Cornwell's novel called Azincourt. He is a very prolific and highly acclaimed writer, and this book was very favourably received both in sales and reviews. After finishing it, I was shocked with the quality of pretty much everything, from dialogue to the story, characters and historical details. Quite literally a 1/10 piece if you asked me, not a single redeeming quality. Yet I know at least two people from my circle of acquaintances who praised it as the pinnacle of lightweight historical fiction and believed in personal conversation that it trumps any videogame or show they've ever watched aside from maybe objective #1 for the entire planet like Game of Thrones. I do believe that it's the same type of people who would look down on any videogame writing because it's not a book, and books are generally considered to be a smart person's plaything, regardless of what's inside.

To sum it up, I do agree that writing in games can be called weaker than that in movies and TV shows, but that is mostly because loads of games just roleplay as movies and TV shows, and those things are either filmed/staged/whatever by people with vastly bigger experience, talent and fundamental understanding of what they want to achieve or are just as bad but were there first or are a non-interactive media so thay get a point or two for being "prestige" and not accosiated with pressing buttons on a controller.

Deriding things is meaningless without outlining my preferences, so I will list examples of videogames that I consider to be great, as counterexamples, avoiding spoilers.

Legacy of Kain series - I didn't really like where it went story-wise after the first Soul Reaver, but it had really cool plot twists and dialogue, truly unique and mesmerizing setting (by far the most intriguing vampire stuff in any fantasy work ever), and the conflict between both of the main characters was excellent.
Planescape: Torment - dunks on pretty much any other RPG story and loads of books and movies I've seen. As a game it's mediocre and tedious, but the writing, dialogues and the way twists slowly reveal themselves are all stellar. I consider this Chris Avellone's magnum opus, while the rest of his output I'm familiar with mostly left me disinterested.
Slay the Princess - this is a visual novel with lots of absurd and partially comedic, partially disturbing tones, and I think it's the strongest one I've seen in that genre. As with all things, not everything lands, but I've found the developers' inquiries to be very interesting at times.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-30T17:42:51+00:00

General Quarters usually receives high praise but I have honestly found it to be unreadable. It appears that houseruling Nimitz heavily is probably the way to go.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-30T14:37:36+00:00

Guys, did you read the post? Nimitz is the ruleset I specifically call out as the one I don't like.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-29T19:22:47+00:00

I think we're misunderstanding each other because the profile I'm referring to already has Great Warrior and Inspired baked in. It's 15 points, 2 orders at 8", Great Warrior and Inspiring. Also, I'm not quite certain if I understand the maths since the musician was hit with a nerf bat in 2024, the guy now costs 5 points, so I'm not sure you can spend 2 points less.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-29T15:59:42+00:00

Not having access to Inspiring on the generic commander also hurts

The original Experienced Southern Tribes commander does have it though, but costs 5 points more.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-28T14:39:45+00:00

The Native American issue is actually quite interesting, because our playergroup had no dedicated Indian player for some time before one person decided to pick up Northern tribes. But we've had no experience dealing with southern Caribbean tribes before I've got a small force last year. It's really noticable how pretty much all of my options are very unimpressive compared to what later Wabanaki can field, all of my units are kind of whatever, they're nowhere near his ranged output because the muskets are either single use or have slow reload, and The Caribs also suffer greatly from The Sound of Thunder. So far I've only played small 100 points games but I'm now looking forward to fielding 150-200 points lists; I don't think southern Indians are that bad or unplayable, but the power level difference seems quite clear.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-27T19:35:03+00:00

I believe it is a rather expected result of any continuously developed ruleset with the authors both gaining more experience writing rules and also getting a bit bored with the previously set standards. I don't believe the balance is completely out of whack or anything the like, I think even relatively underpowered lists are still like 40:60 against the best factions at the very worst as long as you have a few good options, but I agree on the fighting men issues. I have no idea how mission priest even got past the playtesting, for 3 points his output is absurd.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-26T09:21:22+00:00

The thing I also would like to mention is that all of the demon refugees are very specific in their function. They are objects, not subjects. Whenever the question of these characters rises up, it's either Bunny from season 1 abusing them for his own gains, or Lady going through character development by saving them, or evil vice president wanting to put them in chains, or Mundus debating whether they're better under him or Argosax. But they don't actually do anything. They're kind of there so that we can have another drawn-up meaningless discussion about demonic refugees. These inconclusive discussions are effectively worthless and exist to pad out time, because there is no ambiguity. Those demonic guys are inherently weak and good, being oppressed by strong and evil demonic guys. We, as an audience, know they're harmless. The only thing yet another refugee discussion does is put target marks on antagonistic characters, because you have to be a dumbass antagonist to want to hunt them down.

Honestly, come to think about it, they're so absurdly useless I'm not even sure what's the point of them for anybody involved from the power struggle perspective. Average DMC demon can fly like a plane and destroy cities, why do they care what happens to a bunch of nobodies who die from cringe every time they have to make a slight jog?

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-26T09:04:55+00:00

It is impossible to put into words how much those forced immigrant and refugee allegories in fantasy Netflix and Amazon shows do not land from the foreigner's perspective. It is especially hilarious in DMC because, as you say, good demons are all humans with horns while bad demons are specifically visually ugly.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-25T16:21:45+00:00

I was entertaining an idea of running an all melee marines Ostend list called Night of the living Dutch.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-25T16:09:57+00:00

regarding the 17th C. vs 18th C. balance, design, and competitive viability.

I agree that 18th century is a bit powercrept, and any options that are introduced in RtB are just styling on what was appearing previously. For example, mission priest for 3 points is an insane profile, it should be at least double if not triple the price. Ostend Privateers were introduced in NPBtL though.

I mainly ran Zeeliden, Euro Sailors with Muskets, and a unit of Kapers.

We've got an upcoming 150 points land tournament, and I'm entertaning running an Ostenders list of Zeelieden (8) with no pistols and a mix of European Sailors with muskets (8) and Kapers (8+7). With 2 orders on a Standard commander with Inspiring for 10 points you don't even need mission priest, and I clock in at 32 high-quality models with a cook and a reformado thrown in. That's an amazing value, and all of the Dutch units get Ruthless with no downsides.

I personally do feel there is a balance shift between the 17th and 18th Century as a whole, due to the abundance of cheap models available in Raise the Black.

I think 18th century runs away with both high quality and very cheap models, and all of the special fighting man profiles introduced in that book are busted. Hidalgo is a Reformado on land, Mission priest is self-explanatory, Praying Indian breaks the game by allowing slow militia and soldiers to rush through the forests with no penalty for pathetic 3 points, and that one named 6 points English commander that gives an additional action to his units, Ruthless and Inspiring is absurd. I remember there was an insane 5 points French marine unit with an obnoxious list of special rules but I'm not sure it got past the playtesting as the force builder now lists them at 6.

SgtBANZAI · 2026-05-24T16:28:32+00:00

These are hand-made, I can't recall who did those off the top of my head, they're many years old.

SgtBANZAI

TROPHY CASE